[NYTr] Engaging Hamas and Hizballah: Ali Abunimah

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Electronic Intifada - 29 October 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9066.shtml

Engaging Hamas and Hizballah

By Ali Abunimah

Nothing could be easier in the present atmosphere than to accuse
anyone who calls for recognition of and dialogue with Hamas,
Hizballah and other Islamist movements of being closet supporters of
reactionary "extremism" or naive fellow travelers of "terrorists."
This tactic is not surprising coming from neoconservatives and
Zionists. What is novel is to see it expressed in supposedly
progressive quarters.

Arun Kundnani has written about a "new breed of liberal" whose
outlook "regards Muslims as uniquely problematic and in need of
forceful integration into what it views as the inherently superior
values of the West." The target of these former leftists, Kundnani
argues, "is not so much Islamism as the appeasing attitudes they
detect among [other] liberals." [1]

Such views are now creeping into the Palestinian solidarity
movement. MADRE, an "international women's human rights
organization," presents one example. In the wake of the Hamas
election victory and takeover of Gaza from US- and Israeli-backed
Fatah warlords, MADRE declared that the challenge for Palestine
solidarity activists is "how do we support the people of Palestine
without endorsing the Hamas leadership?" Calling for what it terms
"strategic solidarity" as opposed to "reflexive solidarity," MADRE
defines Hamas as a "repressive" movement "driven by militarism and
nationalism," which "aims to institutionalize reactionary ideas
about gender and sexuality," while using "religion as a smokescreen
to pursue its agenda." [2] Similarly strident and dismissive claims
have been made by a Washington-based pro-Palestinian advocacy group.[3]

Some of these attitudes may arise from confusion, but there may also
be an effort to scare us off from attempting to understand Hamas in
Palestine and Hizballah in Lebanon outside any paradigm except a
"clash of civilizations" that pits allegedly universal and superior
Western liberal values against what is represented as medieval
oriental barbarity.

It is essential to note that the Islamist movements under
consideration, although they may identify themselves as being part
of the umma (the global community of Muslims) are heterogenous; each
emerged in a particular context. Their ideologies and positions are
moving targets -- changing over time as a result of fierce and
ongoing internal debates and their encounters with external
influences. These points may seem obvious as they apply to an
analysis of any social or political movement, but they have to be
restated here because of the constant effort to portray all Islamist
movements as being, inflexible, rooted in unchanging and ancient
views of the world, and indistinguishable from the most exotic,
marginal and unrepresentative "jihadi" groups.

Hamas and Hizballah emerged in the context of brutal Israeli
invasions and military occupations. Their popular support and
legitimacy have increased as they demonstrated their ability to
present a credible veto on the unrestrained exercise of Israeli
power where state actors, international bodies, the peace process
industry and secular nationalist resistance movements notably
failed.

As their influence has grown, both movements have steadily tempered
their universalist Islamist rhetoric and adopted the language and
imagery of classical national liberation struggles albeit with an
Islamist identity. A political path that was pioneered by Hizballah
of recasting its Islamist identity and goals within the constraints
imposed by pluralist national politics is now being trodden by
Hamas. [4]

Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that Hamas inflexibly seeks the
complete conquest of Palestine and the expulsion of all Jews (aka
"the destruction of Israel"), the movement has moved over time to
explicitly endorse a generation-long truce with Israel and
unspecified future political arrangements that will be the outcome
of negotiations. [5] Hamas leaders have been able to justify this
shift within the Islamist concept of a hudna, but have also
explicitly modeled their approach on that of other modern national
liberation movements in Ireland, South Africa and Vietnam. [6]

The much condemned use of violence by Hamas and Hizballah --
particularly suicide bombings -- had more in common with other
nationalist movements facing foreign occupation, than deriving from
any "Islamist" ideology, as University of Chicago political
scientist Robert Pape demonstrated in his book Dying to Win.
Hizballah has focused its military strategy on countering Israeli
military might, retaliating against Israeli civilian areas only in
response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians (as we saw in the
July 2006 war). Hamas unilaterally suspended its notorious campaign
of suicide attacks on Israeli civilians more than two years ago,
again following the pattern of other groups like the IRA that sought
to enter a political process. Hamas maintains this suspension
despite escalating Israeli attacks and collective punishment against
Palestinian civilians.

Both movements are renowned for providing access to health, housing,
jobs and income to the poorest segments of the communities from
which they draw support. Anti-Islamist liberals understand this
appeal, which is why a few have supported the US, Israeli and EU
sanctions against Hamas in Gaza to prevent it from providing for its
people, while boosting support for Mahmoud Abbas' Ramallah regime in
the hope that it can buy back support and credibility.

Yet the trump card of anti-Islamist liberals remains the claim that
Islamist movements like Hamas are uniquely oppressive to women,
sticking to rigid ideologies which prescribe for them a subordinate
role. Here their positions, if not their prescriptions, coincide
with that of the Bush administration which cynically claimed that
its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with all their catastrophic
consequences were partly motivated out of a fervor to "free" the
women of the region. (Ironically, as journalist Susan Faludi has
noted, these claims were made while the "War on Terror" was
simultaneously used by American conservatives as a cover to reassert
a more virulent patriarchy at home). [7]

The claim that Hamas should be opposed (while "strategic solidarity"
should presumably be extended to other Palestinian factions more
amenable to a so-called Western agenda) is based on a caricature of
the movement's changing gender ideologies and practices and ignores
the achievements of the Islamist women's movement in Palestine.

Spectacular examples of the courageous and radical role Islamist
women have played came last year when mass nonviolent actions by
Palestinian women prevented Israeli air raids and extrajudicial
executions in Gaza. [8] But this is only the visible tip of the
iceberg.

As the work of Birzeit University professor Islah Jad has
demonstrated, the Islamist women's movement has played a major role
in transforming Hamas' ideology about women, placing its demands at
the center of internal debates, and in mobilizing women within Hamas
and in society at large to play greater political and economic roles
(sixty percent of students at Gaza's Islamic University, for
example, are female).

Islamist women have challenged Western feminist discourses that they
deemed irrelevant to their circumstances and needs. They have
contended with contradictions in Islamist thinking about the role of
women that mirrored the unresolved contradictions that had long
plagued the declining secular nationalist movement. At the same
time, these Islamist women activists engaged positively with many of
the claims made by secular feminists, incorporating them into an
ever-changing Islamist nationalist discourse. [9]

Islamist women have emerged as an important factor in Palestinian
political life partly as a result of the demobilization of the
secular nationalist women's movement as it became depoliticized,
"NGOized," professionalized, and detached from its grassroots. [10]

"There are traditions here that say that a woman should take a
secondary role -- that she should be at the back," said Jamila
Shanti, one of Hamas' elected female members of the Palestinian
Legislative Council, "But that is not Islam." Speaking after the
January 2006 election, but before the EU, US and Israeli effort to
destroy the Hamas government took hold, Shanti added, "Hamas will
scrap many of these traditions. You will find women going out and
participating." [11] Thus, the work of Islamist women, especially
within Hamas, deserves to recognized, respected and engaged, not
rendered invisible.

This is where we have to look beyond caricatures and consider that
for many of their adherents Islamist movements are attractive
because they offer the hope of alternative forms of social
organization that put the human being and the community, rather than
the market and the consumer at the center of life.

In poor countries, neoliberal capitalism, extolled by Western aid
donors and their organs such as the IMF and the World Bank as being
the corollary of democracy, has meant in practice unaccountable
oligarchy, the demolition of social welfare systems, public
education, subsidies for basic necessities, and the flourishing of
crony privatization on an epic scale. In many places, Islamist
movements have attempted to fill the void.

Hamas' changing views on a long-term truce with Israel, on forms of
resistance, and the role of women in society are examples of how an
Islamist movement -- like any other social movement -- responds to
the real circumstances of the society of which it is part.

The dialogues that once instransigent colonial rulers and their
foreign backers opened with the African National Congress (ANC) in
South Africa, and Sinn Fein and the IRA in Northern Ireland -- that
led eventually to peaceful transformations of those societies -- are
the appropriate model for how to engage with movements like Hamas
and Hizballah today. Some argue that these cases offer no precedent
because Irish nationalists and the ANC were always part of a
unifying Christian, Western tradition. That is how they may be
viewed in hindsight, but like Islamists, they too were once the
objects of a dehumanizing civilizational discourse that cast them as
irredeemably inferior, alien and beyond inclusion, thus justifying
colonial control.

And like the leaders of those movements before, Hamas and Hizballah
have been reaching out, attempting to craft messages that can begin
to close the seemingly unbridgeable gaps, paying careful attention
to their own constituencies as well as their potential
interlocutors. In Hamas' case these invitations came in a remarkable
series of op-eds by its leaders published in English-language
newspapers since January 2006 including The Washington Post, The New
York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian. [12] European
and American governments have responded that any dialogue must be
conditioned on Hamas first accepting all of Israel's demands, while
Israel continues to have a free hand.

Israel and its backers routinely dismiss Hamas' overtures as
insincere. They wave about the 1988 Hamas Charter -- which as
current scholarship shows has little relevance or influence on
actual Hamas policies and thinking -- as an excuse never to talk.
Israel's propagandists used the same tactic for years with the PLO
Charter (or "covenant" as they insisted on calling it). The
increasing influence of mainstream Islamists also terrifies the
existing establishments in the Palestinian Authority and other Arab
states, who in desperation to preserve their power, have joined the
chorus of fear-mongering and repression and some have forged more or
less open alliances with Israel.

When broader conflict looms, fueled by the ideology of the clash of
civilizations, and the American president drops casual, smirking
references to World War III, a new approach is urgently needed. The
European governments, for example, that speak to Hamas in secret,
but collude with the brutal sanctions against Gaza, out of fear of
the United States, should break with their harmful and misguided
policies. They should openly defy Washington and Tel Aviv and engage
with Islamist movements in Lebanon and Palestine and more broadly,
on equal terms.

Since this change is unlikely in the short term, and the dangers are
great, it is the role of progressives to support anti-colonial
liberation movements without imposing their own agendas, to push for
equal dialogue, to listen carefully to what Islamist movements are
saying, and to expose and resist the efforts to demonize and
dehumanize entire societies in preparation for new wars.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One
Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
(Metropolitan Books, 2006).


Endnotes

[1] Arun Kundnani, "How liberals lost their anti-racism," 3 October
2007, Institute for Race Relations.
(http://www.irr.org.uk/2007/october/ha000008.html).

[2] "Palestine in the Age of Hamas: The Challenge of Progressive
Solidarity," MADRE press release, 11 July 2007
(http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0711-02.htm)

[3] See Osamah Khalil, "The politics of fear," The Electronic
Intifada, 8 October 2007.
(http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9028.shtml)

[4] See: Azzam Tamimi, Hamas A History from Within (Olive Branch
Press, 2007); Khaled Hroub, Hamas: A Beginner's Guide, (Pluto Press,
2006); Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice,
(Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000); Shaul Mishal and Avraham
Sela, The Palestinian Hamas, (Columbia University Press, 2000).

[5] See in particular Tamimi, Chapter 7.

[6] See Ahmed Yousef, "Pause for Peace," The New York Times, 1
November 2006; and Khaled Meshaal, "We shall never recognize ... a
Zionist state on our soil," Los Angeles Times, 1 February 2006.

[7] Speaking about her new book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy
in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 2007) on Democracy Now!, 4
October 2007
(http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/04/1355237).

[8] See "One woman killed, 16 injured in Israeli siege on Gaza
mosque," The Electronic Intifada, 3 November 2006
(http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5935.shtml) and Rami
Almeghari, "Necessity is the Mother of Inventive Nonviolent
Resistance," 21 November 2006, The Electronic Intifada
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6077.shtml).

[9] See Islah Jad, "Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist women
of Hamas," in Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (editor), On Shifting Ground:
Muslim Women in the Global Era, (The Feminist Press at the City
University of New York, 2005).

[10] See Islah Jad, "NGOs: between buzzwords and social movements,"
in Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4-5, August 2007.

[11] Alan Johnston, "Women ponder future under Hamas," BBC, 3 March
2006. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4767634.stm).

[12] In addition to items cited in endnote [6] also see: Mousa Abu
Marzook, "What Hamas Is Seeking," The Washington Post, 31 January
2006; Abu Marzook, "Hamas' stand," Los Angeles Times, 10 July 2007;
Abu Marzook, "Hamas is ready to talk: We welcome the call for
dialogue, and reject insincere demands for an undemocratic boycott,"
The Guardian, 16 August 2007; Ahmed Yousef, "What Hamas Wants," The
New York Times, 20 June 2007; Yousef, "Engage With Hamas; We Earned
Our Support," The New York Times, 20 June 2007.