Palestine: Hamas and whats to come

BewareTheFriendlyStranger

pioneers of the groove
dark days ahead, indeed :mad:

Now that Hamas is in the government, the Israelis have gone totally ape shit. The weak, corrupt Palestinian Authority that they've been undermining forerver has been ousted and replaced by the popular, organised Hamas faction.

Now instead of adopting a wait and see stance, they're going to try to freeze Hamas out, with sanctions and assassinations on a valid, legitimate government , destabilizing the area even more.

The dream of a Palestinian state never seemed to be in so much danger.
 
D

droid

Guest
I imagine this is exactly what was in mind when the Israeli secret services were supporting the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the eventual founding of Hamas, both as miltary competition for the PLO/PLFP etc, and as an attempt to discredit the political and civil movements in Palestine and continue the extreme rejectionist policies of the US and Israel.

there's a very interesting and unexplained incident. Yassin was arrested in 1983 by the Israelis. On search of his home, they found a large cache of weapons. This would have been a fairly explosive event, but for unexplained reasons, a year later Yassin was quietly released from prison. He said at the time that the guns were being stockpiled not to fight the Israeli occupation authorities, but to fight other Palestinian factions.

That and other incidents gave rise to -- a number of diplomats and intelligence people who I interviewed, saying that there was plenty of reason to think that the Israelis were fostering the growth of Hamas. And, of course, Yasser Arafat himself, in a famous quote to a newspaper reporter a number of years ago, explicitly described Hamas as, quote, “a creature of Israel.” And he said that he discussed this with Yitzhak Rabin during their Oslo process. And Rabin told Arafat that it was “a fatal error” for the Israelis to have encouraged the growth of Hamas. The theory of it, of course, was that Hamas would be a force against Palestinian nationalism. And I think it's clear that it ended up, to a shocking degree, backfiring against overall Israeli policy.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/26/151252
 
D

droid

Guest
BewareTheFriendlyStranger said:
The dream of a Palestinian state never seemed to be in so much danger.

As Edward Said has pointed out, the only real hope for an end to the occupation is not a political or military one, but for the Palestinians to assert their moral superiority, engage opinion on a global level, and organise large scale civil and non-violent protest. I'm not challenging the rights of an occupied people to resist (as enshrined by International law), but the fact is that acts of barbarity and terror against Israeli civilians do nothing for the Palestinian cause, and gives Israel license to continue her crimes with impunity...
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
droid said:
As Edward Said has pointed out, the only real hope for an end to the occupation is not a political or military one, but for the Palestinians to assert their moral superiority, engage opinion on a global level, and organise large scale civil and non-violent protest....

It's a great pipe-dream, but Middle-Eastern history is not too fond of non-violent protest. I blame it one that massive best-seller called Ye Olde Testament and it's even more successful sequels and offshoots, and the fact that it's hot and arid and uncomofrtable for most of the year.

A shame there was no author to put a fatwa on, leave that to poor Salman Rushdie!
 
D

droid

Guest
Buick6 said:
It's a great pipe-dream, but Middle-Eastern history is not too fond of non-violent protest. I blame it one that massive best-seller called Ye Olde Testament and it's even more successful sequels and offshoots, and the fact that it's hot and arid and uncomofrtable for most of the year.

A shame there was no author to put a fatwa on, leave that to poor Salman Rushdie!

I blame it on a history of decades of violent repression, crude intervention, support for dictatorships, and specifically in the case of Israel, deliberate and careful elimination of secular and political resistance in favour of extremists so as to justify continued rejection of the national rights of Palestinians.

Thats not to say that the tribal/religious aspects of mid-east conflict arent a factor.
 
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