Hamas, and liberal terror. posted by Richard Seymour

"Wait til you see the whites of their eyes, boys..."

The reaction to Hamas' electoral win has been almost universal: horror compounded by the darkest imaginings about exactly what these guys have in store. An Islamic State, the dread burqa, suicide bombings, and absolutely no recognition of Israel's Right To Exist. Decades of bloodshed, all because of Extremists On Both Sides/Palestinian Intransigence/Hamas' Refusal To Stop Terror/Etc. There are threats that aid to the Palestinians will be cut, a more or less open admission that aid is a political tool to domesticate and control Palestinian politics.

A couple of observations. Here's Shuggy, one of the sweeter HP Sauce types, pouring what I suppose he imagines is scorn on the "bloggers, clapped-out pseudo-Marxists, and liberal journalists" (and, he forgot to add, "bruschetta munchers, wreckers, woolly Hampstead liberals, car theives" etc). What's eating him apart from tapeworm? Well, Jonathan Steele - said liberal journalist - remarks that "Murdering a Palestinian politician by a long-range attack that is bound also to kill innocent civilians is morally and legally no better than a suicide bomb on a bus." Unto which: "I'm still shocked to read the liberal apologetics for those that declare there to be no difference between civilian casualties incurred and those who target only civilians; between those who might be shown to be careless, even criminally negligent with regards to civilian casualties and those for whom killing civilians is as legitimate pursuit of their ends as killing Israeli or American soldiers - because for them the concept of a civilian is meaningless, if the civilian in question happens to be a Jew."

Why does it have to be repeated and underlined? Israel deliberately and specifically targets civilians all the time. Here are some samples:

[Human Rights Watch] found a pattern of repeated Israeli use of excessive lethal force during clashes between its security forces and Palestinian demonstrators in situations where demonstrators were unarmed and posed no threat of death or serious injury to the security forces or to others. In cases that Human Rights Watch investigated where gunfire by Palestinian security forces or armed protesters was a factor, use of lethal force by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was indiscriminate and not directed at the source of the threat, in violation of international law enforcement standards. (Source)

[T]he majority of people killed were taking part in demonstrations where stones were the only weapon used ... A large proportion of those injured and killed included children usually present and often among those throwing stones during demonstrations. Bystanders, people within their homes and ambulance personnel were also killed. Many persons were apparently killed by poorly targeted lethal fire; others ... appear, on many occasions, to have been deliberately targeted. In many of the locations where children were killed there was no imminent danger to life nor reasonable expectation of future danger. (Source)

[Open-fire] regulations apparently enable firing in situations where there is no clear and present danger to life, or even in situations where there is no life-threatening danger at all ... the Military Police investigations unit has opened almost no investigations into cases where soldiers fired in violation of the Regulations ... During the first months of the al-Aqsa intifada, Palestinians held hundreds of demonstrations near IDF posts ... there was no shooting by Palestinian demonstrators in the vast majority of demonstrations. The soldiers’ response to these demonstrations is characterized by use of excessive and disproportional use of force, leading to the death and injury of many persons, including children. (Source).

Samples, mind you. The daily war on the Palestinians, where demonstrations against the occupation are a frequent fixture of political life, must inevitably eventuate many such incidents given the open-fire regulations that B'Tselem discusses. And, of course, one could think of grand massacres like the one in Jenin, where both HRW and Amnesty found ample evidence that civilians had been killed deliberately by the IDF. It isn't as if the IDF is somehow incapable of sparing life and limb - no Jewish demonstration has ever been fired upon, not even with rubber bullets. Not even the cringeworthy, lachrymose, but often quite violent demonstrations organised by the colonists of Gaza could induce the IDF to pull the trigger. For the IDF, 'civilian' is a meaningless concept if you're a Palestinian.

To acknowledge this is to be guilty, in Shuggy's eyes, of 'moral equivalence' - that greasy neocon phrase, as meaningless as it is supposed to be disarming. Of course it isn't Shuggy's fault, or at least not entirely, as we shall see. But I do want to mention a few other things before departing from his post: he notes that Hamas "played down" its tactic of suicide bombings in the elections, and takes satisfaction that "most people - including, obviously, people in Palestine - take a fairly dim view of this blowing yourself up business ... Because most people haven't been trained in the moral relativism laced with western liberal guilt that seems to be so popular with the Guardian." He goes on to add "expect lots of hand-wringing about the hypocrisy of our democracy from the usual suspects, with liberal eyes rolling at the mention of anything to do with terrorism from any western politician. Just quibbling because they don't like the result of the election, they'll say." And then, in a scandalous use of hypertext, he ironically links to a "quibble" which turns out to be a story about a suicide attack in Israel. As one of the "usual suspects" (people who actually do give a damn about the Palestinians) I have no desire to make Shuggy feel guilty, or to drag him down into a morass of relativism where there are only various shades of grey. (Curious, however, that this alleged "liberal guilt" so captures the imagination of the pro-war crowd.) What I will say is that: a) he is wrong if he imagines that most Palestinians do not endorse the tactic of suicide bombing (the last poll I saw in 2002 showed that approximately 7 in 10 Palestinians supported it - see also. As Diego Gambetta et al point out, suicide attackers in Palestine rely upon a community of support and an enabling infrastructure supplied by the public); b) Hamas is by no means alone in using the tactic, since many of these attacks are carried out by groups within Fateh and by other secular groups like the PFLP, so the 'quibble' amounts to precisely fuck all, c) of course the occupiers of Palestine and their international backers are not just "quibbling" over the election results. They are both furious at the Palestinians' insubordination and at alert to the possibility of finally implementing the Sharonist/Kadima programme of ethnically cleansing the West Bank, colonising it in the same process and demolishing the Palestinians as a nation. This has nothing to do with suicide attacks, since Hamas has not launched one in a whole year, and has offered a truce. It is to do with seeking excuses to further marginalise the Palestinians and crush their expectations.

Ben White writes, in an excellent article:

In the last few years Israel has continued its time-honored practice of establishing facts on the ground, unhindered in part due to its stalling tactics in the remaining vestiges of a 'peace process'. The typical argument has been that there can be no progress in negotiations or concessions until the Palestinians, one, 'reform' their institutions and purge the corruption from the PA, and two, 'rein in the militants'.

The implications of these demands have almost been rendered irrelevant by the spirit in which they are repeated – to distract from the main issues of occupation and rapacious land confiscation. 'Reform' and disarmament became the tests the Palestinians are intended to fail, foiling even feeble efforts at energizing negotiations.

The same can be said of demands that Hamas 'recognise Israel's Right To Exist', as if the Palestinians can really, genuinely be expected to consider the occupation of any part of their land legitimate. But of course, the discussion of this issue is permanently crippled by wilful and engendered ignorance, as well as no small measure of racism. On Channel Four tonight, Azzam Tamimi was asked to debate the Hamas victory with someone whose brother was killed by a Hamas suicide attack. A nice, even-handed debate, then. What was noticeable was just how much Mr Tamimi would have had to explain to make his points remotely comprehensible to his opponent, to Jon Snow, and to the audience. How does one call Israel a "terrorist state" - which it is, and much more besides, if so few people understand that Israel does in fact engage in terrorism (I'm talking text-book definition terrorism) and targets civilians? How does one even begin, if the news routinely gives people the impression that the conflict is over Palestinian aggression, or religious intolerance, or a struggle over a strip of land between two contiguous states - as various respondents told Greg Philo's study (see Bad News From Israel)?

Hamas has won the election because Fatah has shown that it is hideously servile, prepared to accept US-Israeli tutelage in return for control of a corrupt little fiefdom. Whether there will be suicide bombings or not depends on whether Israel intends to relinquish its present plan to leave Gaza an open-air prison and continue to expand settlements into the West Bank as 'facts on the ground' while constructing a wall that will subsume huge amounts of Palestinian territory into 'official' Israeli boundaries. It depends on whether the five thousand residents of Qalqiliya will continue to be imprisoned in an Israeli-siezed ghetto. It depends on whether Israel continues to impose 'collective punishment' on Palestinian neighbourhoods, blockade the cash-strapped Palestinian economy, imprison children, beat and torture prisoners. This much would be balls-achingly obvious to anyone who understood either the history of the Zionist movement or its present comportment, or indeed the condition of Palestine. Whether you like it or not, the Palestinians want freedom: that is why they voted Hamas.