Date: July 7th 2009

Hamas' choice: Recognition or resistance in the age of Obama

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
6 July 2009

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10647.shtml

In a major policy speech on 25 June 2009, Khaled Meshal,
the head of Hamas' political bureau, tried to do what may
be impossible: present the Islamist Palestinian resistance
organization as a willing partner in a US-led peace
process, while holding on to his movement's political
principles and base. [1]

This is the dilemma that every Palestinian leadership, and
perhaps almost every liberation movement, has eventually
had to confront. It is a choice, as political scientist
Tamim Barghouti has pointed out, between recognition and
legitimacy.[2] According to Barghouti, the old-guard
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership, when
confronted with the same dilemma, chose recognition and
forfeited its legitimacy, opening the way for Hamas to
emerge. Now it is the turn of Hamas: the price demanded by
the US and its allies for Hamas to be taken as an
interlocutor is the abandonment of the very principles on
which the movement built its mass support.

Meshal's nearly hour-long "address to the Palestinian
people and the world" was billed as a response to the
speeches of US President Barack Obama in Cairo and Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in June.

In his Cairo speech, Obama called for Americans and
Muslims to engage in a "sustained effort to listen to each
other; to learn from each other; to respect one another;
and to seek common ground." If he is serious about that,
he -- and others -- should pay close attention to what
Hamas is saying to domestic, regional and international
audiences. Meshal's goals -- very much in tension -- were
to show that his movement is ready to do business with the
US, set out political red lines, reassure the movement's
supporters and Palestinians generally and deal with
internal Palestinian divisions.

To begin with, the speech sought to present Hamas as a
nationalist movement whose Islamism fits within a
mainstream Palestinian consensus. Meshal used an
explicitly ecumenical message to counter Netanyahu's
exclusivist Jewish claims to the land of Palestine.
According to Meshal, Palestinians' roots stretched back
thousands of years "in this blessed land of prophets and
messages, of [Muhammad's] night ascension, of Muslim and
Christian holy sites -- al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the
Rock, the Nativity Church and the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre."

More generally, he sought to portray Muslims as
representing the very values Westerners claim to cherish
most and dissociate Hamas from lurid and false comparisons
to such groups as the Taliban. "We [Muslims] are the ones
who introduced the world and humanity to science,
civilization, culture and lofty humanitarian values,"
Meshal declared, "values such as justice, freedom,
equality, compassion and tolerance, and the values of
interaction between civilizations and not a confrontation
between them."

Meshal welcomed a "change of tone" from President Obama
but emphasized repeatedly that only a change of policy
would matter. He nevertheless claimed the new tone as the
fruit of the "stubborn steadfastness of the people of the
region, while resisting in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and
Afghanistan." Such resistance, according to Meshal,
frustrated the former US President George W. Bush
administration's plans for regional domination, prompting
American voters to seek a different path to extricate
their country from mounting crises and quagmires.

He chided regional leaders who had "marketed and promoted"
Bush's policies. "Had the people of the region listened to
them," Meshal said, "the policy of Bush and the
neoconservatives might have succeeded and the region's
situation would be worse than imaginable." Meshal voiced
the widespread skepticism and perhaps hopes that Obama's
promises amounted to more than the similar words about
Palestine heard from the Bush Administration.

Responding to Obama's recital of history, Meshal did not
seek to deny the Nazi Holocaust but to appropriate it. He
took Obama to task for dwelling in detail on the
"suffering of the Jews and their holocaust in Europe,
while ignoring our present suffering and Israel's
holocaust against our Palestinian people that has been
continuing for decades."

Meshal emphasized that even though Palestinians have heard
only words, they were prepared to judge the US by its
actions, which would have to "begin with reconstruction of
Gaza and the lifting of the blockade, lifting the
oppression and security pressure in the West Bank, and
allowing Palestinian reconciliation to take its course
without external pressures or interference."

The "only thing" that can convince Palestinians, Arabs and
Muslims, Meshal stated, "is genuine American and
international will and efforts to end the occupation and
lift the oppression from our people, to allow them to
exercise their right to self-determination and the
fulfillment of their national rights." When the Obama
administration makes such an initiative, Meshal said,
"then we and all our people's forces will be ready to
cooperate with it and with any international effort in
that direction."

Obama's "new language toward Hamas," Meshal underlined,
"is the first step in the right direction towards direct
dialogue without conditions." And that is the crux of the
matter. Dealing with Hamas, Meshal said, must be based on
the recognition of its democratic mandate and not via the
imposition of arbitrary conditions such as those of the
Quartet which call on the movement to recognize Israel,
abandon violence and commit by previously signed
agreements.

Meshal reasserted Hamas' political red lines while
maintaining a sense of flexibility. In particular, Meshal:

*Rejected the Palestinian state envisaged by the Israeli
leader as a "deformed entity, a large prison for detention
and suffering, and not the national home a great people
deserves."

*Rejected Israel's demand to be recognized as a "Jewish
state" -- and warned against any Arab or Palestinian
acquiescence -- "because it means canceling the right to
return to their homes of six million refugees, and the
forced expulsion of our people in the 1948 areas
[Palestinian citizens of Israel] from their cities and
villages." Israel's demand, according to Meshal, is no
different than racist demands made by fascist Italy and
the Nazis. *

*Reaffirmed Hamas' previous acceptance of "the program
that represents the minimum demands of our people," for
"the establishment of a Palestinian state whose capital is
Jerusalem with complete sovereignty on the borders of 4
June 1967, after the withdrawal of the occupation forces,
and the dismantling of all the settlements, and the
realization of the Right of Return." *

*Reaffirmed that "the refugees' Right of Return to the
homes from which they were expelled in 1948 is a national
right and an individual right held personally" by the
refugees "and no leader or negotiator can waive it or
compromise on it."

Meshal also offered a nuanced response to Obama's call on
Palestinians to abandon "dead end" violence in favor of
nonviolent resistance. "We reaffirm our adherence to
resistance as a strategic choice to liberate the homeland
and restore our rights," Meshal said, citing armed
European resistance to Nazi Germany, American resistance
to British rule and the Vietnamese and South African
anti-colonial struggles as precedents for Palestinians.

"Nonviolent resistance is appropriate in a struggle for
civil rights," Meshal argued, "But when it comes to a
military occupation using conventional and nonconventional
weapons, such an occupation can only be confronted with
armed resistance." Palestinians were forced to take up
arms, Meshal said. He could also have been implying that
if Palestinians changed the definition of their struggle
as being one for civil rights then the appropriate means
of resistance would also change.

"Resistance is a means and not an end," Meshal said, "and
it is not blind. Indeed it perceives the changes
underway." Yet, while staunchly defending the right to
armed resistance -- and even threatening new operations to
take Israeli soldiers prisoner if it was the only way to
free Palestinians prisoners -- Meshal also recognized
other forms of struggle. He called for increased
Palestinian, Arab and international solidarity efforts,
including ongoing efforts to break the siege on Gaza, to
resist the apartheid wall and settlements and to prevent
home demolitions and "Judaiziation" in Jerusalem.

For Hamas leaders, the dangers of submitting to western
preconditions can be seen merely by looking at the
trajectory of the Palestine Liberation Organization
leadership which recognized Israel in 1993, renounced
armed struggle and signed the Oslo accords. Since that
time, Meshal argued, the occupation and its oppression
deepened as the number of Israeli settlements and
Palestinian prisoners grew.

As Meshal put it, "These conditions do not end; as soon as
the Palestinian negotiator commits to one, more conditions
are imposed. For example, first the condition was to
recognize Israel, now it is to recognize the Jewishness of
Israel. Then, that Jerusalem is its eternal capital,
giving up the Right of Return, accepting that settlement
blocks will remain. Then [Palestinians] must not only
abandon resistance, but themselves work to oppress, pursue
and disarm the resistance."

The latter point was a reference to the arrest campaign in
the West Bank and what Meshal called other "oppressive
measures undertaken by the [Palestinian] Authority and the
government of Salam Fayyad and its security forces under
the supervision of the American General [Keith] Dayton."
Meshal presented this ongoing cooperation between the
Ramallah security forces, Israel and the US as the biggest
obstacle to Palestinian reconciliation talks in Cairo
aimed at restoring a unified national leadership.

After Hamas won the 2006 legislative election, the Bush
administration began a program overseen by Dayton to arm
and train anti-Hamas militias nominally loyal to
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The
campaign has been accompanied by what Hamas and some human
rights groups have described as a systematic crackdown on
politicians, professors, charities and journalists
suspected of sympathy or links with Hamas. Hamas has often
retaliated by arresting Fatah-linked individuals in the
Gaza Strip. In recent weeks, the Dayton-supervised
militias have killed several members of Hamas in the West
Bank ostensibly while trying to arrest them. Meshal
cleverly drew attention to the external role in fueling
Palestinian divisions -- and how little has actually
changed from the Bush Administration -- by "calling on
Obama to withdraw Dayton from the West Bank and return him
to the United States, in keeping with the new spirit of
change."

Throughout the speech, Meshal sought to reassure
Palestinians that Hamas would not abandon its core
principles in pursuit of recognition and power. "The land
is more important than authority, and liberation before a
state," he said at one point, and "no Palestinian
leadership has the right to waive Palestinian national
rights and interests as the price for recognition."

Some Palestinians worry that despite such assurances,
Hamas has already set off down the very path Meshal warned
about and risks squandering the sacrifices Palestinians
made, especially in Gaza. Haidar Eid, an independent
analyst in Gaza, wrote before Meshal's speech that some of
the early enthusiastic Hamas responses to Obama's Cairo
speech, as well as acceptance of the two-state solution,
indicated "the beginning of a process of deterioration --
even Osloization -- not only in rhetoric, but also in
action." This writer has heard similar fears voiced by
Palestinians from the West Bank and recently in Amman.
Given that many Palestinians consider that a previous
generation of resistance leaders turned their backs on
their people's most fundamental interests and rights --
all the while claiming to uphold them -- such fears are
far from irrational or uncommon.

Another analysis of Hamas' shift currently circulating
argues that Hamas has accepted the Palestinian "consensus"
position of a two-state solution on every inch of the 1967
occupied territories with removal of all settlements and
with the Right of Return. But it knows that no potential
peace deal coming from the Obama initiative will ever
reach even these minimal conditions, and that if Abbas and
former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could not reach
even the outlines of an agreement after two years of
negotiations, the chances of any deal with a
Netanyahu-Lieberman government are even tinier. In this
scenario, Hamas need not stand in the way of a two-state
solution because it will fail anyway. But by saying it
would accept that minimalist outcome, it would avoid blame
for the failure and its adherence to resistance would be
vindicated.

What we do know is that Hamas' leaders, and the
Palestinians generally, have been placed under intense
pressure, occupation, blockades, starvation sieges and
recurrent Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity,
and the vast majority so far has not submitted to Israeli
conditions. But while emphasizing the role of resistance
and struggle to achieve liberation, Hamas has not offered
a clear vision of what liberation looks like other than
the unconvincing and increasingly unrealistic two-state
vision (leaving aside its long, outdated, though
much-cited charter that offers no guide to the movement's
current thinking).

Meshal's speech confirms Hamas' long-term shift away from
Islamist rhetoric toward mainstream Palestinian
nationalist discourse. It indicates that Hamas is highly
sensitive to international and Palestinian public opinion
and is aware that Palestinians need to build real
international solidarity as part of a strategy to level
the glaring power imbalance with Israel. But it is not
prepared to seek recognition at any price. All this has
implications for the movement's message and methods.

This leaves the field open for an urgent debate among
Palestinians about what that future vision should be and
what role resistance in all its legitimate forms should
play. No group of leaders, whether from Hamas or any other
organization, could or should carry the burden of
restoring Palestinian rights by itself. Hamas, like other
Palestinian organizations, can only be a guardian of
fundamental rights to the extent that it is embedded in a
broader movement mobilized in Palestine and globally to
defend those rights.

And if Hamas' potential interlocutors are sincerely
seeking ways to recognize the democratic mandate of the
movement without trying to force it to forfeit its
legitimacy, there are precedents. South Africa's African
National Congress and the Irish Republican Army were both
able to take part in successful political negotiations
that got their respective countries out of disastrous
political and military stalemates without being required
to submit to unacceptable preconditions. That took a
measure of leadership, foresight and political courage by
others that has been notably absent in international
dealings with Hamas.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article was
published with the last two lines in the second paragraph
inadvertently deleted.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Abunimah also co-founded The
Electronic Intifada. This analysis was originally
published by the Palestine Center.


Endnotes

[1] The speech is in Arabic. All excerpts quoted
in this article are the author's translation. A transcript
and recording of the speech were made available by the
Palestinian Information Center, a Hamas-affiliated
website. See: http://bit.ly/mK7kS.

[2] In a paper given at the Annual Symposium of the Center
for Contemporary Arab Studies at the School of Foreign
Service, Georgetown University on the theme: "Palestine
and the Palestinians Today," 2-3 April 2009, Washington,
DC.


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