In the January 25 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) won a landslide victory. The US and the European Union have stated that unless Hamas renounces violence, disarms and changes its 1988 charter calling for the replacement of the Jewish state with an Islamic state, they will cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority.
These governments have never made it a condition of the massive military and economic aid they give to Israel that it renounces violence, disarms and ends the Zionist colonisation of the Palestinian nation's homeland. Nor have they made it a condition of aiding Israel that it abides by UN Security Council resolutions and withdraws its army to Israel's 1967 borders.
On February 7, acting Israeli PM Ehud Olmert announced his government's intention to annex the Jordan Valley and major Israeli settlement blocks in the West Bank, thus leaving any future independent Palestinian state on the West Bank entirely surrounded by Israel and without a direct link to neighbouring countries.
The following is an abridged version of a statement issued on January 31 by Khalid Mishal, the Damascus-based head of the political bureau of Hamas, that first appeared in English in the London Guardian newspaper, in which he outlined Hamas' proposal for negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The day Hamas won the Palestinian democratic elections, the world's leading democracies failed the test of democracy. Rather than recognise the legitimacy of Hamas as a freely elected representative of the Palestinian people, seize the opportunity created by the result to support the development of good governance in Palestine and search for a means of ending the bloodshed, the US and EU threatened the Palestinian people with collective punishment for exercising their right to choose their parliamentary representatives.
We are being punished simply for resisting oppression and striving for justice. Those who threaten to impose sanctions on our people are the same powers that initiated our suffering and continue to support our oppressors almost unconditionally. We, the victims, are being penalised while our oppressors are pampered.
The US and EU could have used the success of Hamas to open a new chapter in their relations with the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Muslims and to understand better a movement that has so far been seen largely through the eyes of the Zionist occupiers of our land.
Our message to the US and EU governments is this: Your attempt to force us to give up our principles or our struggle is in vain. Our people who gave thousands of martyrs, the millions of refugees who have waited for nearly 60 years to return home and our 9000 political and war prisoners in Israeli jails have not made those sacrifices in order to settle for close to nothing.
While we are keen on having friendly relations with all nations, we shall not seek friendships at the expense of our legitimate rights. We have seen how other nations, including the peoples of Vietnam and South Africa, persisted in their struggle until their quest for freedom and justice was accomplished. We are no different, our cause is no less worthy, our determination is no less profound and our patience is no less abundant.
Our message to the Palestinians is this: Our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home. We promise you that nothing in the world will deter us from pursuing our goal of liberation and return. We shall spare no effort to work with all factions and institutions in order to put our Palestinian house in order. Having won the parliamentary elections, our medium-term objective is to reform the PLO in order to revive its role as a true representative of all the Palestinian people, without exception or discrimination.
Our message to the Israelis is this: We do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion "the people of the book" who have a covenant from God and his messenger Mohammed (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us — our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.
We shall never recognise the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else's sins or solve somebody else's problem. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice. [Reprinted from Workers World.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 15, 2006.
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