Of course, it was a lie, a conscious pretext to justify what was to follow where tens of millions throughout the Middle East paid for this US “hard intelligence” with their liberty, their lives, and their yearning for little more than the universal right for them and their families to pursue the freedom of life. Some twenty years later the weapons of mass lie continue to propagate daily with an unbroken fabricated flood of deadly Western puffery about an innocent pastoral Israel under siege not at all by virtue of its own long and well-established regional hands of occupation filth, but of course by the voracious anti-Semitic appetite of Iran, Palestine, and Hamas. It’s a lie.
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| Gaza City under Israeli airstrikes, screengrab from Al Jazeera’s live feed. |
When expedient, for years we have been apprenticed by largely Western Christian and Jewish tutors along with purchased “Islamic scholars” about the branded unresolvable divide between Sunni and Shia denominations which, they preach, all but guarantees periodic eruptions within the Islamic world. After all, was it not this internecine scriptural split that explains away the horrors inflicted in Yemen upon the impoverished Iranian-supported Shias by the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia and UAE largely with weapons that were made in the USA?
Although the Saudi/UAE inflicted casualties continue, when the world last cared reliable sources report that over 150,000 people were killed in Yemen, as well as more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war.
Not packaged, let alone understood, for the internal civil war it was, how much easier and politically convenient to simply blame Iranian support and “control” over Houthi Shias against a Sunni government as the trigger for what was clearly an Indigenous political rebellion. How often were we told that Houthis were fighting as Iranian proxies rather than as combatants in a native uprising largely directed at the lingering legacy of European colonialism? Sound familiar?
So, tell me, if the marriage of an uprising in the Middle East is ultimately fueled not by aboriginal aspiration but strict theological obedience, how is it that the Shias of Iran are dictating to the Sunnis of Hamas what to do and when? They ain’t.
There is nothing I can say at this point in history that will move the lockstep sentiments of personally invested or reality-disconnected Israeli cheerleaders to understand, let alone accept, that Hamas is an Indigenous national liberation movement, born not from abstract thought, religious fueled hate or the chase of personal fortune, but rather from the hardscrabble roads of Gaza itself. So, I will not try.
Are there Palestinians who disagree, even at times despair, of Hamas… of course. But after 75 plus years of ethnic cleansing, you will not find any wanting for wholehearted support for the resistance–be it from millions still occupied by a deadly colonial project, or those long ago exiled at gun-point from their age-old homeland by Europeans who tore across it with unrestrained bombast and endless thirst for blood. For without defiance, whether from movements or “lone wolf” … be it by armed struggle or passive resistance … one comprised of Muslims, Christians and non-believers alike–of women and men, students and scholars, only fools or desperate wizards believe that if left to its own unchecked device, a kinder gentler Israel would emerge to ensure justice and human rights for those whose dwindling land they thirst and liberty they detest.
Has Iran provided financial aid to Hamas, some of which was used for the purchase or production of weapons? Of course. Why not. It is not the only country that has chosen sides in this struggle against ethnic cleansing and for righteous justice. After all, the United States has funded Israel to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars these many years which has financed the use of phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilians in Gaza in violation of Protocol III to The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1983 and The Convention on Cluster Munitions of 2008. It has also armed snipers who have shot tens of thousands of peaceful protestors on the Gaza border in violation of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Not one to limit its backing of Israeli butchery to but the air and land of Palestine, the US has long subsidized an Israeli navy whose prime function is to attack and destroy Palestinian fishing and humanitarian aid vessels be they in the Port of Gaza or afloat in the Mediterranean Sea.
Never one to suppress its own geo-political thirst or economic appetite, The Convention on Cluster Munitions was ignored earlier this year when the US elected to arm Ukraine with thousands of cluster bombs. So too, it disregarded the transfer of American-made weapons it provided to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners in Yemen later transferred to al Qaeda-linked fighters, and other so-called radical Salafi militias. Nothing new about this. Independent of its invasions and occupations of Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, in the last thirty-five years alone the United States has intervened or proxied up in numerous international hot spots through money or weapons including Syria, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. With an unbroken sordid record of meddling, there is abundant evidence that the US has engaged in nearly 400 military interventions of one sort or another between 1776 and 2023. But Iran is the problem.
Over the years, billions in humanitarian aid have come to Gaza from Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey and Algeria to name but a few of the supportive sister states. Donated largely for reconstruction of essential infrastructure, schools and hospitals targeted and laid to waste by Israeli bombs, ribbon cutting in Gaza one of the world’s most densely populated and impoverished territories has proven time and time again to be but a momentary tease–with each restoration quickly lost to the next Israeli onslaught and the next and the next.
Once upon a time, before the lure of US dollars and Israeli shekels purchased a new generation in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia armed Hamas with rockets and other weapons for the defense of Gaza. However, that solidarity was to change with the arrival of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman who the very year he had Jamal Khashoggi murdered, told Jewish leaders in New York City that Palestinians should “start accepting peace proposals or shut up.” Five years later at the urging of Biden and with the blessing of his personal hedge fund banker, Jared Kushner, in the run-up to the Hamas strike, bin Salman was expected to sign the Abraham Accords. With that signature, he would have joined UAE, Bahrain and Morocco in a treacherous pact with Israel which places their own economic and geo-political interests ahead of not just palpable Israeli violations of international law, but all standards of decency and humanity. Trading in his bisht and red & white keffiyeh for Armani pinstripes, how can anyone avoid the overpowering stench of a regional double standard?
And what of the “proof” that Iran provided the skill set and dictated the nature and timing of the most recent Hamas strikes against the occupation? Now streaming in from predictable Zionist echo chambers at AIPAC and ADL to the halls of a cheap ill-informed Congress to the amplified one-sided MSM breaking news cycle… there is none. To be sure, like it or not, as a seasoned national liberation movement with an armed wing that has successfully battled to a stand-still Israeli jets, tanks, and battleships for decades, Hamas needs not, nor does it accept direction from non-Palestinian actors on how or when to proceed in its struggle against the occupation. Any such claim oozes with pejorative ignorance and racist superiority. Bearing the reek of classic hasbara, these shouts are but another in a long line of played deceits that Israel is an enlightened democracy under perpetual siege in the midst of doctrinal fired anti-Semitism.
Of course, Israelis tutor the West that they and they alone love and care for their families and young while the dominant regional Arab and Palestinian populations are more than willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters to a nihilist agenda in the name of Islam. Very much a living lie, for decades this marketing lure has enticed the neo-colonial West to ignore Israel’s marriage of hate and violence providing the money, weapons and Security Council vetoes it needs to keep it just beyond the reach of universal law and international accountability. Zionists would have us believe that Palestinians, per capita among the most highly educated people and culture in the world, know not what they want and or how to get there, but rather are mere dutiful vassals of Iran as it seeks to impose its brand of Shia fundamentalism upon the rest of the region. Nonsense.
Hamas is a national liberation movement dating back some 40 years to a time and place where an earlier generation of explosive, deadly Kahanists sought to corrupt if not rid Palestine of any collective aspiration of self-determination, independence and justice. The notion that all these years later the movement, now among the most sophisticated and successful in the region, if not the world, needs guidance, training and edict from any other state or people to fight on is but seductive sophistry in search of a vulnerable and ill-informed audience to bite the poison political pill. At its core, the tired screed that the Islamic Resistance Movement’s self-determination is determined by others not born of Palestinian families and heritage is but a shoddy deflection from the horrors unleashed by Zionists these past 75 years upon an Indigenous community dating back not decades or centuries but millennium.
For days now deceitful politicians and traditional media across the globe have parroted the sculpted Zionist talisman that there is war between Hamas and Israel. Not true. It is a battle for survival between a “nation state” of occupiers and a people long beleaguered … but not defeated. To be sure, if Hamas were to disappear tomorrow, the global Palestinian struggle for self-determination, liberty and justice would and will continue till it be had. To hear the unbroken chant of “terrorists” by Israel and its funders beggars the undeniable history of nonstop Zionist terrorism beginning well before the Irgun, Haganah and Palmach hanged British soldiers, bombed the King David Hotel, sent mail bombs across Europe and assassinated Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator for Palestine all in the name of a theft of a land they had not known, if at all, for thousands of years.
With its leadership prominently displayed and well deserved on “wanted” posters throughout Palestine and in Europe for heinous offenses against civilians and repeated violations of settled international law, these Europeans went on to inspire generations to come with a dark deadly vision of a homeland not theirs to reclaim or to reconstruct and where, to them, no crime was too disturbing … no rationale too obtuse.
No matter what the Zionists rewrite, Palestine is a land stolen from age-old Indigenous communities with hundreds of thousands driven at gunpoint from their homes, but not their history. For the fortunate, they were exiled to refugee camps in and out of their homeland; for the less so, mass assassination, rape and a final rest rotting in wells were left as a message for others across Palestine. In the years since, that nightmare has continued unabated with millions of Palestinians living under the often-deadly, always despotic yoke of Zionist expanse and excuse; with many more eking out existence as stateless refugees living long and far from their native land.
In the years since the onset of the unchanged Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians including children and the elderly have been shot, crippled and murdered always in the name of a perverse ideal built fundamentally upon the suffering of others. Even more have seen the damp dark cellblocks of political prisons, uncharged or tried, stripped of their families and lives for little more than a voice, a prayer, a hope. For years, Gaza has been the world’s largest open-air prison, one bounded on all sides by the hatred and terror of Israel and the complicity of its partner in cruelty–Egypt. But a short recast reminds us it is no stranger to Israeli war crimes.
With an opening salvo on December 27, 2008, Israel bombed the main police headquarters in Gaza City, killing 42 cadets standing in formation–none bearing weapons. Later it blew up 18 other police stations throughout the Gaza Strip. In total, 248 police officers were killed having not fired a single shot at Israeli forces. Over the twenty-one days that followed, Israel deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure and made widespread use of prohibited weapons, such as white phosphorous, in highly populated areas in clear violation of international law. During the onslaught, Israel targeted 23 U.N. buildings and/or compounds killing numerous civilians who had taken shelter there. In the deadliest case, 43 civilians were killed by an Israeli shelling of one such compound. Palestinian schools were also targeted. On January 5, an aerial strike killed three men who had sought shelter at the Asma Elementary Co-Ed A School. Twelve days later, a military ordinance struck the Beit Lahia Elementary School while it was being used as an emergency shelter… killing two young boys and injuring 13 others. Human Rights Watch documented at least seven instances where Israeli soldiers executed civilians… including five women and four children who were standing together waving white flags to convey they posed no threat. In another incident, Israeli soldiers shot and killed several members of the al-Najar family in Khuza’a village, east of Khan Yunis. Following orders from soldiers to leave their neighborhood, and while waving white flags, Rawiya al-Najjar and her family were gunned down. When the carnage ended, some 1440 Palestinians were killed and more than 5,000 injured… most of them civilians. According to the Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem, 252 minors under the age of 16 (boys and girls) who did not take part in any fighting were killed along with 111 women and girls over 16.
Five years later, in the summer of 2014, the world was reminded of what it is to be a Palestinian in the crosshairs of a colonial fiend hell-bent on relegating them en masse to the ranks of the disappeared. During Israel’s unhinged six-week rampage it dropped 40,000 tons of explosives on more than 5200 “targets” throughout Gaza. At its end, some 2200 Palestinians were slaughtered, including 550 children, with some 10,000 others injured. Almost all the victims were civilians. More than 1900 children were orphaned, and hundreds of thousands were internally displaced with 20,000 homes, 26 NGO service providers, a half-dozen UNRWA facilities, 23 hospitals and health-care facilities, 133 schools, 360 factories, and 50,000 acres of croplands destroyed or damaged by Israel. Half of Gaza’s poultry stock was slaughtered along with thousands of family pets.
These are but a few of the more glaring examples of the recent yet unbroken mayhem long unleashed by Israel against a Palestinian community that never left its roots or lost the call of its collective claim. To keep track of this havoc is to bear witness to unspeakable crimes typically against the frail, the young, the passive who carry hope and horror-not weapons. According to Save the Children in the run-up to the most recent explosion, 2023 had already proved to be the deadliest year for Palestinian children since records began with at least 38 of them killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. That number has increased exponentially over the last several days with, it has been reported, some 500 additional children killed in Gaza. The Defense for Children International, a Palestinian human rights organization focused on child rights, reports that since 2005 major Israeli military offensives have killed more than 1,000 children in the 140 square mile prison of Gaza.
Meanwhile, there are some 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli prisons including 33 women and 170 children held largely on what are described as “security grounds.” Detained essentially indefinitely, they never see the inside of an Israeli civilian courtroom with the benefit of meaningful counsel, and the rights to due process and a trial. For them, it is very much a military star chamber–one overseen by a military judge and a military prosecutor with endless six-month detention extensions absent any cap, or established evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
In the most recent battle, the list of dead and injured civilians continues to grow on both sides and must stop. Yet the narrative of what has happened and why is no less destructive. No matter how many times politicians and theists of all callings seek to control and market the account by blaming Hamas and victimizing Israelis alone, even a cursory search establishes it is an obscene escape from reality. Long before Hamas arrived, Palestinians of all faiths, politics and aspirations fought against the expulsion, hatred and violence forced upon them by European terrorists in the name of a desperate historical rewrite. One which sought and continues to justify ongoing ethnic cleansing as so much an absolute historical rite of passage–a claim that defies the reality of time and long-settled decency and humanitarian law.
Tragically, after all the millennium we still live in times not unlike the dark march of history where struggles are judged not by the equal application of international law or the will and wail of justice but by the color of one’s skin, the echo of one’s words, the pose of one’s prayer. All too often, the scale of righteousness is weighted not by the credence of the cause but the partisan of one’s cheer. A double standard at best, it is a jury of institutional inequality–one that passes judgment not by the virtuous but the powerful; not by equal application of law but the coercive command of presence. It is specious posturing at its finest; an opportune script sculpted by occupiers across the globe, and not the occupied. It must stop.
Until the community of onlookers imposes the same standards upon colonizer as they do the colonized; upon Jews and Christians as they do Muslims; on skin tones of white as they do of color, the history of yesterday and that unfolding before us today remains locked in a dismissal falsified story-line. Ultimately, that description instills upon us all the bleak chronicle that the difference between “freedom fighter” and “terrorist” is not the justness of the cause … but who wins.
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| Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City. |
Thanks for posting this on TPQ Stanley. I find it very insightful and referred my friend Christy to it as well.
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ReplyDeleteA brilliantly written piece but it hasn't changed my view of Hamas, Israel, Iran, or the US. I have never seen Hamas as anything but indigenous and as I said elsewhere, I don't think Iran was behind their latest atrocities anymore than the US is behind Israel's. Both Israel and Hamas are capable of being vicious all on their own regardless of the source of any weaponry.
I think Stanely and I are coming from opposite perspectives. Stanely asserts: "Until the community of onlookers imposes the same standards upon colonizer as they do the colonized." Whereas, my perspective is that if you behave no better, or even worse, than the colonizer then you don't have a leg to stand on; as the legal mantra goes, 'he who comes to equity must come with clean hands'. Not excusing the Israelis but Hamas deliberately and effectively control the savagery inflicted upon their own people -I do not seen it as a tactical strategy for freedom but a marketing tool for sympathy and funding. To Hamas, Palestinian lives are expendable. I have also seen how they mistreat the Palestinian people and they are no better alternative to the Israelis -they are autocratic thugs. If we accept the accuracy of everything Stanley has to say about the excesses of Israel or the US abuses, that does not mean Hamas therefore must be the good guys. And indigenous is also a loaded term because the Jews are indigenous but driven out from that region. Likewise antisemitism is also a loaded term because Israelis and Palestinians are both Semites. Because Israelis are bad guys does not automatically mean Hamas are good guys. But the horrors and despicable acts of depravity they committed last week remove any doubt that they are an Islamist terror group beyond redemption.
The principal from which all else follows is identifying the entity responsible for the bulk of terrorism. Once that is done to our satisfaction, we know where to direct our focus. 700 dead Palestinian children in the past ten days puts the matter of infanticide into perspective and dwarfs the atrocities committed by Hamas last week.
DeleteMorally, the violence of one side that kills civilians is on a par with another. But there is always the serious matter of degree which is to be evaluated not within abstract concepts of morality uninformed by lived experience. Israeli slaughter of civilians has always been and remains much higher than that of Hamas. That makes Israel's hands much dirtier. There is also the serious power deficiency. The terrorism of the weak has always more mitigating factors than the terrorism of the strong even when we set our faces against the principle of terrorism.
Hamas does not control the terror inflicted on the Palestinian people. That has been controlled for decades by the Israeli state. To phrase it as you do absolves the perpetrator for its prime responsibility. The culpability for the terror bombing of German cities during WW2 lies with the British and the US, not the Nazis. They were exclusively British and US war crimes. The Nazis have a host of their own war crimes to answer for.
I see very few people claim that Hamas are the good guys. People who target civilians when conducting such targeting are not good guys. But even the BBC, given the asymmetry of the war, exhibits a reluctance to label Hamas as terrorist, while identifying as terrorist what it did to Israeli civilians.
The violence of Hamas against Israel is primarily grounded not in some wish to impose theocracy on Israel but in opposition to long standing usurpation of Palestinian society and Palestinian rights.
I think the Israeli author Shlomo Sand does an excellent job in rupturing the creation myth of Israel, and would see the value of a term like Indigenous to describe the Palestinians.
If Hamas is beyond redemption, the Israeli state is much further down the beyond path. In this asymmetrical battle, it occupies the ninth circle of Hell.
PS; And I say beyond redemption because as a group they can be defeated or replaced and their days might be numbered. I say that not because of any plans Israel might have for them but because the Gazan's are unlikely to be forgiving for the suffering they have caused through their proxy Israel.
ReplyDeletePragmatism trumps principle -the Israelis aren't going anywhere. Maybe some or all ground in the West Bank can be reclaimed from the settlers but Israel is now a sovereign state short of some catastrophic event. Just like the 6 counties are now part of the UK =short of the outcome of a border poll -dissidents are not going to change that through violence. Claiming to have a moral right to resort to violence does not mean it is right to do so. A strategy of getting your own people killed is not what I recognize as a legitimate freedom struggle. Inflicting atrocities on the most vulnerable among your enemies and then using your own people as a human shield is not moral or admirable . I had always thought of Israel as a terrorist state and over the years I have come to see Hamas a worsening light. When I see the destruction and suffering Israeli bombs are inflicting in Gaza I cannot watch it without holding Hamas responsible. What Hamas did on 7th October was not a blow for freedom but out of sense of outrage over a mosque and their aspirations to create an Islamic state. I have no respect or sympathy for them and they no longer have an electoral mandate from Palestinians.
ReplyDeleteThe Palestinians would seem to see it very differently. All shades of Palestinian opinion that I have listened to including those vigorously opposed to Hamas have not sought to depict their resistance as one dimensional terrorism. They reject such characterisation as the product of Israeli and much Western propaganda.
DeleteNor is it a seesaw where because Hamas is seen in a less favourable light that Israel is seen in a better light - as one goes down the other goes up. Israel is a terror state that practices apartheid to the extent that even South Africans who experienced Apartheid think the Israeli version is worse. It is dangerously close to fascism, has neo-Nazis (if Haaretz is to be believed) in government, is pursuing a colonisation policy of the West Bank, ensures an open air prison in Gaza . . .
And the notion that the Palestinians should accept the war crime of settlements on the grounds of pragmatism is unlikely to fly. Genocide is hardly going to be viewed as a pragmatic outcome.
The moral right to use violence is now addressed strategically by you which is a different argument and a better one than the 'they are all terrorists' perspective. I have heard Palestinians make the same argument. What they avoid is depicting Hamas as the Israelis do.
Just ask yourself which of the two entities in the region, Hamas or the Israelis, have been culpable for more atrocity and the slaughter of civilians. The Palestinians will tell you very definitively that it is the Israelis. The Israelis will tell you no less definitively that it is Hamas. I'm with the Palestinians on this one as I believe is the data. You might agree with the Israelis although your conclusion is arrived at independently from them.
Yes Hamas did cite the Mosque which is an outrage to Palestinians but they also cited settlements, and the consensus among Palestinians seems to go along with that. It is hard to find any Palestinians alleging it was motivated by theocracy.
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DeleteI have supported the Palestinians for as long as I can remember and because I call out Hamas is not to elevate Israelis. I say both Hamas and Israelis are bad for the Palestinians -I doubt very many Gazans think Hamas latest attacks advanced their cause 1 iota. And politics and exposure might discourage any Palestinian being critical of Hamas let alone call them terrorists -in fact to go that far might be seen as betrayal and too favourable to Israel to be critical of their own like that -just the same as SF would never condemn botched IRA attacks even though they expressed their anger/disgust within the right circles.
From the moment I learned of Hamas savagery I immediately thought how they had sacrificed Gaza to untold devastation and suffering --what in that attack do you, or anyone else, think they got right in the best interests of the Palestinians and resistance? -they pulled off a spectacular incursion but that was short-lived when they behaved as marauding Islamist terrorists, burning and abducting babies and slaughtering unarmed young people at a festival and carrying out at least 1 beheading and other crimes against humanity --you think they should get away with that because of whataboutry and the Israelis? That does not excuse them for what they have done. In fact the consequences of their savagery are not over yet -their own people are currently suffering the rest of what they set in motion --and 2 years of planning they can only have known that they were sacrificing Gaza to god knows what terrors and horrors. Their incursion plan was a good idea but thousands of people would still be alive today had they left as 'a good idea but no thanks. It will never be remembered in history as a heroic act of defiance and resistance --because it wasnt and they use their own people as human shields to cower behind.
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DeleteLook up Hamas Covenant or Charter --and find a translated version on a credible website you are satisfied with.
Calling out Hamas is not an isolated position. I have been calling them out for the best part of two decades along with a host of Islamic groups. A huge number of pro Palestine activists have been doing likewise. I have been on two vigils and heard the criticism of Hamas being vented. Almost everybody I talk to about it is critical. Apart from some internet revolutionary on Twitter today, I have engaged with nobody who feels the killing of children was justified. What we don't do, however, is lose sight of the core issue and seek to strip away the political and historical context by pigeonholing their armed opposition to Israeli terror as some deviant theocratic impulse.
DeleteThat tactic has been played out so often in relation to every struggle against repression. The academic terrorism industry is renowned for delegitimising opposition to the status quo it wishes to defend and invariably seeks to reduce oppositional violence to psychopathic personalities or theocratic malcontents - Sands, Khalid, Guevara, Mandela, Camara were all terrorists engaged in an aggravated crime wave - every attempt to call a spade a shovel and mask the essence of the dynamic driving such people and the movements they represent.
And while you might feel for very genuine reasons that you are not echoing those sentiments, your discourse is indistinguishable from that echo.
Hamas terrorism poses a much less significant threat to Israel than Israeli terrorism does to Palestine. Yet, unless I am tone deaf, the greater Israeli terror escapes the thrust of your criticism. It seems to get a passing mention. You tend towards blaming Hamas for what happens to Gaza when the culpability should be placed firmly on the people bombing Gaza. As I write there are reports of 300-500 civilians murdered by the Israelis after they bombed a hospital. If that is true who is to be called out for yet another atrocious war crime? Is Hamas responsible for that act of terrorism?
Again, the question I ask is who in the region poses the greatest terrorist threat? It is Israel or Hamas?
DeleteTime will tell if the cause of Palestine has been advanced one iota by the Hamas attack. At the start I was convinced it would not but Israeli war crimes have been so pronounced over the years that even the usual suspects are showing signs of discomfort. If Israel is ever constrained in its use of war crimes then it can no longer rule and occupy as it previously has and might be forced to think again.
That does not detract from the horrible strategic use of people as human pawns. While I do not believe Hamas should ever have responded to Israeli terrorism as it did, had they only killed IDF would the Israeli response have been any different?
I don't think it is vaguely credible to suggest that the whole of Palestinian society is so cowered by Hamas that it is afraid to criticise Hamas. It seems many of them have been doing just that - strongly criticising the operation but refusing to do what you seem to be doing - explaining it all away as some theocratic impulse and not borne of the material conditions under which Palestinians are forced to exist.
For you Hamas set it all this in motion out of some theocratic impulse. For me it was part of a linear descent into Hell, the provenance of which can be traced to Israeli occupation, expansionism, colonialism, war crimes. This is not some ahistorical aberration but fits firmly into a long history of repression and resistance.
Nowhere have I remotely suggested that Hamas should get away with war crimes. No one should. The Palestinian Authority has for long argued for a war crimes tribunal. The Israelis backed by the US refuse to recognise the authority of the ICC. And were Hamas to appear in it alongside the Israelis they would occupy a small section of the courtroom by comparison.
It is not you opposition to Hamas that I disagree with. I am fine with that. It is the decontextualising of the circumstances that gives rise to them.
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DeleteWhen I refer to Hamas drawing and Israeli disproportionate response or their sacrificing Gaza I am referring to the predicable nature of the beast that is Israel. My focus on Hamas is not that they are an insignificant group versus Israel -I knew that whatever the Israelis do it would be like nothing we have seen from them before. Given the planning Hamas put into killing, burning and abducting babies was part of the plan and Hamas have indirectly confirmed as much, I saw the end result was to provoke the whole region into a war. Why I now feel Hamas factored into their plan the killing of babies in very gruesome ways is because its a particularly emotive and provocative crime and it was intentional. The only mistake Hamas indicate they made was to abduct some non-Israelis -so all else was intentional including the babies and children. I believe they wanted to provoke an Armageddon -and how the Israelis respond is part of their plan to that affect. If I am right then Hamas played the predicable brutality of Israel to blitz the Palestinian people and that makes them the architects of all we are watching unfold.
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DeleteAnd I am not ignoring the oppression of the Palestinians --I just do not see Hamas as freedom fighters like other Palestinian groups --they are Islamist's in a holy war and at the minute they want to see the genocide of Jews -it will be somebody else after that.
You have identified the main cleavage in opinion that exists between. Hamas is not the architect of predictable Israeli barbarism. It is part of the architecture of violence that plagues the place, a link in a long chain of violence and given the human agency that attaches itself to such matters, it has to take responsibility for its actions. That architecture was designed and put in place by Israeli barbarism. Hamas, despite the viciousness of its violence, is not a constant oppressor of Israel whereas Israel is a constant oppressor of Palestinians. Hamas coming out of its corner first for round 27 is not indicative of it having started the fight. Although only a fool would think the current attempt to turn Gaza into a blend of Stalingrad-Leningrad would be currently happening anyway independent of the Hamas attack.
DeleteOn a related point, the historical figure Netanyahu reminds me of in his extreme callousness and dehumanising, genocidal contempt for Palestinians is Heydrich. Begin was almost saint-like besides this bloodthirsty psychopath. I guess if we are anti-Nazi, it tends to instinctively make us anti-Israel.
I am no longer so sure that the hospital attack was the result of an Israeli air strike. I know that Norman Finkelstein has been claiming differently and laying out the basis for doing so, but I think we are going to have to wait until Bellingcat conclude its own investigation before we will really know.
Thank you, Mr Cohen, for sharing your thoughts and analysis. Analysis with which I largely concur. The US's need for a suppliant ally in the region allows for and perhaps encourages Israel's war crimes against the indigenous Palestinians.
ReplyDeleteA namesake of yours, one Nir Avishai Cohen, a major in the IDF reserves, was referenced in an article in today's Irish Times by Fintan O'Toole. The article headlined 'Humanity is insufficient in Israel-Hamas war because, too often, it only means ‘people like us’ quotes from Major Cohen's own recent New York Times article. In that opinion piece, the reservist says;
“I’d like to say one thing clearly, before I go to battle: There’s no such thing as ‘unavoidable.’ This war could have been avoided, and no one did enough to prevent it. Israel did not do enough to make peace; we just conquered the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, expanded the illegal settlements and imposed a long-term siege on the Gaza Strip.”
These Cohen men call it right.
Article 7 of the Hamas charter.
ReplyDelete""The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)."
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ReplyDeleteNo question Israel is the longest abuser of international law on war crimes and genocide. But if an organization plots atrocities which also factors in the war crimes of others as part of their plan -they are responsible from more than just what they did -not absolving Israel for its own behavior.
An Islamist group using the word Resistance in its name means something different than secular popular armed freedom fighters. Hamas abolished elections so they have no democratic electoral mandate and that is consistent with Islamist's. Their stated objective is to wipe Jews out of existence. The Gazan population is expendable to their plans rather than they are fighting for their freedom. Detailed plans have been discovered on the bodies of the dead terrorists -killing and abducting civilians of all ages was part of their plan -by their own account the only mistake they made was to take some non-Israelis hostage. I dont know how any group that plans and carries out deliberate killing babies and toddlers by shooting them or burning them alive is not a terrorist group in anyone's eyes? Plus abducting others. Have they to be around for as long as the Israelis -I think their actions rather than any time period determines if they are terrorists. And I dont accept any rational that Israel made them do it because they were cunts first.
By this point we are into argument by reiteration and not really bringing a lot new to the exchange.
DeleteJust a couple of points I'll finish on for the sake of clarity.
I have not yet seen or made any argument that Hamas is not culpable for terrorism, atrocity, crimes against humanity and war crimes. To reduce it to a one dimensional terrorist group driven by theocracy is in my view not a plausible argument. The Right have been making it for years with diminishing success.
Nor has the argument been made on this blog either by me or by any contributor that Israel made Hamas do it. The very notion of agency leading to responsibility for actions challenges any such suggestion. But that agency is not a free floating particle independent of an embedded structure of violence. What is being said, and not just here, is that Israel was a greater causal factor in a violent response than a theological addiction to terrorism, and its acquisition of more genocidal traits, Israel made a violent response inevitable at any number of links along the chain. It did not make the unpardonable form of that response inevitable - that was the choice and responsibility of Hamas. And in circumstances where the devaluing of children's lives in general and Palestinian children's lives in particular has increased exponentially as the outworking of methodical and persistent Israeli child murder, we can hardly feign shock and horror that this pattern of infanticide would see itself extended into another theatre.
But even here I am arguing by reiteration. It has all been said numerous times.
AM
ReplyDeleteIslamism is one dimensional, it is about Islamic fundamentalism -not the freedom, welfare or interests of the Palestinian people. Hamas cynically use the plight of the Palestinians as cover of convenience to dupe people into assuming they are freedom fighters or a resistance force against oppression. They exploit the oppression of Palestinians to advance their religious fundamentalist objectives. I note even Al Jazeera call them Islamists.
Even if Islamism is one dimensional, it seems eminently plausible to believe that Hamas is not one dimensional.
DeleteAnd as a final word: even I make the mistake of misinterpreting Hamas --Islamism has been around longer than Israel.
ReplyDeleteNot if you believe the Bible - which neither of us do - Israel has been around for almost ever, fuelling Zionist claims to the land. Back in 48 the Jews should have been given a huge swathe of Germany as a homeland. They were European and not Middle Eastern. And it would have been a more just reparation.
DeleteAnyway . . .
Islamic fundamentalism drove them out of the Middle East -ultimately the bottom line now is that what the Palestinian are suffering over both Hamas and Israel needs to stop ASAP.
ReplyDeleteIf Marx were right and indeed "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature" then maybe we could better understand the tendency for evolutionary creep from a liberation movement to a jihadist one.
ReplyDeleteFor hundreds of years in the region, if not thousands, the drives for political and economic control have been wrapped and enmeshed in religiosity. The cultural clashes at the interface between East and West have been cloaked in religiosity since the time of the Knights Templar and the Crusades; and probably long before that too.