The man Hamas has designated to be the prime minister of the Palestinian
Bantustan statelet, Ismail Haniyeh, gave an interview to the
Washington Post and
Newsweek which was published in my
local paper--the Boston Globe--today,
February 26. When asked, "Do you recognize Israel's right to exist?" --a
question to which Hamas has in the past answered with a clear "No"--Haniyeh
gave an answer which reminds me of Peter's three disavowals of Jesus, each
marked by the crowing of a cock:
"The answer is to let Israel say it will
recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, release the prisoners,
and recognize the rights of the refugees to return to Israel. Hamas will have
a position if this occurs. "
This means that Hamas will NEVER have a position on the central moral question
of the conflict--the moral question Zionism must bury under a mudslide of
obfuscation and lies and confusion if it is to maintain the minimum of world
wide public legitimacy required to avoid the fate of the world's other
notoriously racist regime, apartheid South Africa, after that regime lost such
legitimacy.
Ismail Haniyeh has not even been installed officially as the prime minister
yet, and already the "cock has crowed once." I suspect it will become a
familiar sound.
Why won't Hamas tell the world why there should not be a Jewish state in
Palestine? I believe the explanation is that Hamas does not like the answer.
Why should there not be a Jewish state in Palestine? The answer is: because
such a state, which defines itself as one in which the sovereign authority is
the "Jewish people" rather than all its citizens, is necessarily based on
discrimination and ethnic cleansing against an entire ethnic group--non-Jewish
Palestinians. The only morally consistent and coherent answer to this question
that can gain the respect of the world's public, is to say that there should
be full and genuine equality under the law for all those who live in
Palestine, regardless of ethnicity or religious persuasion.
But Hamas, despite language in its
Covenant that speaks of
human rights and tolerance of other religions (similar to language in the
Israeli
Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, which speaks
of "complete equality of social and political rights" for non-Jews),
apparently cannot uphold the principle of full and genuine equality and at the
same time advocate the key part of its Covenant which says that:
"It is the duty of the followers of other
religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region... "
Hamas leaders are as averse to embracing the principle of genuine
equality for all as are the Zionist leaders of Israel averse to upholding
their rhetoric about equality for non-Jews. Each movement is far more
concerned about limiting sovereignty to either "the Jewish people" or to
"Islam." Unable to give a morally coherent reason why there should not be a
Jewish state in Palestine, and knowing that its actual reason (to make
Palestine an Islamic state) is indefensible in the eyes of a world public
which understands that millions of Jews consider Palestine/Israel their home
because they were born there and now live there, Hamas simply disavows its
past denial of Israel's right to exist, and offers coy evasions when asked the
question. In doing so Hamas gives away the entire shop of moral legitimacy to
the Zionists.
This Is No Surprise
The tactics of Hamas and Zionist leaders are determined by their mirror-image
ethno-centric strategic outlooks. From the tactics, one can infer the actual
strategy, even when official rhetoric disguises it. Hamas and Zionist leaders,
in practice, do not define the enemy as those who enforce racist inequality
against non-Jews, or anti-Semitic laws against Jews. These are the tactics
that would flow from a strategy of aiming for full and genuine equality for
all people living in Palestine/Israel. Rather, Hamas and the Zionist leaders
say the enemy is "Jews living in Palestine/Israel" or "non-Jewish
Palestinians" respectively. Thus Israel uses its billion dollar U.S. supplied
military to carry out unprovoked attacks on Palestinians (bulldozing down
their homes and even killing children in refugee camps), while Hamas uses
sticks of dynamite and suicide bombers to kill
random Israelis at bus stops
and restaurants in Tel Aviv. These are the tactics that flow from a strategy
of forcing either Jewish or Islamic sovereignty on everybody and eliminating
those who disagree.
From the fact that Hamas tactics equated "resistance to Zionism" with killing
random Israeli civilians (instead of IDF forces and civilians who attack
Palestinians) one could have inferred that Hamas's strategy was never to
abolish a Jewish state in Israel because, if it had been, then Hamas would
have embraced genuine and full equality, not the sovereignty of Islam. Hamas's
decision to target random Israeli civilians made it clear that, when in power,
and when forced to choose between, on the one hand, the "sovereignty of
Islam," which cannot successfully challenge the legitimacy of its ideological
twin (the "sovereignty of the Jewish people") versus, on the other hand,
choosing the principle of equality for all, which can successfully challenge
the racism underlying the Jewish state principle, Hamas would choose the
former.
It is thus not at all surprising that Hamas won't tell the world why there
should not be a Jewish state in Palestine. And since they won't do this, it is
not surprising that they have embraced the left-Zionist definition of the
goal: a "Palestinian state along the 1967 borders," in other words a Bantustan
Palestinian statelet in 22% of Palestine, next to, broken into disconnected
pieces by, and dominated by a Jewish
state from which 80% of the non-Jews were driven out, dispossessed of all
their property, never allowed to return and never compensated for their
property, and in which the remainder of non-Jews are denied the rights of
first class citizenship.
At this point, one might object that Hamas is not betraying its former
denunciation of Israel's right to exist, but just pursuing that goal in a more
realistic way by demanding the right of Palestinian refugees to return to
Israel. But this is a naive point of view, as naive as it would have been for
the African National Congress during the years of apartheid in South Africa to
have stopped exposing the wrongness and racism of apartheid and to have
instead adopted a strategy of reforming apartheid. It is true that Zionists
would have a hard time maintaining Israel as a Jewish state if it granted all
the refugees their right of return, but this is irrelevant in practice because
the Zionists are never going to grant the right of return as long as they are
in power, and their power derives from--more than anything else--world wide
legitimacy for the right of a Jewish state to exist in Palestine: the very
thing that Hamas once refuted, albeit in a morally inconsistent and therefore
less persuasive way, and now apparently will no longer directly refute at all,
preferring coy evasion.
Some people say that talk about "international working class solidarity" is
old-fashioned and outdated, but the 180 degree turnaround by Hamas shows what
happens when the concept of the international working class is jettisoned.
When the concept of ordinary people (
i.e.
working class people, regardless of their ethnic group or religion) being the
rightful sovereign authority is abandoned, contrary notions fill the vacuum,
like sovereignty of the Jewish people or of Islam. Divisive, racist views fill
the vacuum, pushed by elites who understand that their power rests on
divide-and-rule. To really win, to succeed in abolishing racist regimes like
the Israeli Jewish state, we need to embrace the simple idea that ordinary
people, as equals regardless of ethnicity or religious persuasion, and in
friendship and solidarity, should rule. This is a powerful, uniting idea with
which we can win.