BY SAMYA NASSER
JERUSALEM — While there was never any doubt that the secular groups within the Palestine Liberation Organisation conducted the intifada of 1987, the Islamist Hamas sees itself as the leader of the present one. The Hamas leaders proclaim as their immediate goal nothing less than "the destruction of the Zionist entity".
How serious are the Hamas leaders when they make such proclamations? Does the Islamic leadership have, in fact, a magic formula for defeating Zionism? When we look at the actual politics of Hamas, we see a large gap between its rhetoric and its ability, or even willingness, to muster the forces it would need in order to vanquish Israel.
Hamas opposed the [Israel-PLO] Oslo accords. It also boycotted the 1996 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Nevertheless, its leaders repeatedly declare that the movement does not see itself as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority. It held this position even in 1996-97, when the PA helped Israel by jailing Hamas activists.
Until just recently, the top Hamas political leader, Abed Aziz Rentisi, sat in a PA prison in Gaza. In an April interview with the Qatar-based TV station al Jeezera, Rentisi declared the security coordination between Israel and the PA to be "the hardest obstacle before the resistance movement". He had little to tell the PA, however, other than warning it not "to go back to the same old square".
At an August round-table sponsored by al Jeezera, Osama Hamdan, the leader of Hamas in Lebanon, spoke in a similar vein: "Our declared policy, ever since the PA arrived in the Territories, has been to avoid conflict with it. Today we have reached a stage where we and the PA and the entire Palestinian people stand shoulder to shoulder against the Zionist program."
When it comes to the PA, Hamas is opportunistic. On the one hand, it puts itself forth as the "leading force" in the intifada, but on the other, it provides a cover for the PA's treacherous policy, which remains within the parameters of Oslo (represented by the Mitchell Report, the CIA and the White House). Hamas deludes itself and its supporters, as though there were but a single camp, that of resistance to Israel.
Two of the Arab world's crucial regimes, the Egyptian and the Saudi, are opposed to letting the intifada unwind. Their inaction, in the face of Israeli violence, engenders rage among Palestinians. Yet the Arab regimes are umbilically tied to America. That is why they keep urging Arafat to return to the negotiating table, and, in effect, to revive the Oslo program.
Hamas is unwilling to criticise these regimes (it gets its funding from the Gulf), although the regimes, by choosing Oslo, smother in advance any prospect of a just solution. Hamas winds up backing, in effect, the very forces against which it rants and raves.
The suicide-bombers are the heaviest Hamas weapon. Osama Hamdan claims, "The cumulative effect of the suicides will bring liberation. Not today, not tomorrow, but ultimately."
In his al Jeezera interview with Rentisi, Ahmed Mansur put the matter thus: "Many commentators make the claim that the suicide-bombings by Hamas express nothing but the despair in which Palestinian youngsters find themselves. They see no future except to blow themselves up."
By encouraging these acts of despair, Hamas plays into the hands of the Oslo bloc. With each such act, Hamas gives Israel a pretext for escalating its reprisals against the PA.
If Israel gets sufficient pretext to force the issue, the result will be one of two things: either the PA will vanish from the scene, or [Yasser] Arafat will accept the Israeli terms and tell his people, in effect: "Well, we tried, didn't we? We tried everything in our power and still we failed. Now it's time to go back to the Oslo process."
The extravagant promises of Hamas have no relation to reality. The PA (which Hamas does not wish to confront) surrendered at Oslo because the balance of forces, it claimed, did not allow it to achieve all it wanted.
There was a seed of truth in this (although Arafat exploited the resulting political situation as a pretext for establishing a corrupt dictatorial regime). Indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major blow to all anti-colonialist movements.
No national-liberation movement within the Third World, be it secular or religious, can make significant gains without global support. In the past, the Soviet Union provided this backing for many states and movements, the PLO among them. Now the backing is gone.
On what, then, does Hamas rely? Does it really think that suicide-bombings will bring Israel to its knees?
In the light of its opportunistic politics, one wonders what Hamas really intends. It appears as a movement that disavows the Oslo surrender, yet in practice, it supports the wider Oslo regime (stretching from Washington through the Arab states to the PA and even to Israel).
The suicide-bombings, rather than helping the Palestinian people shake off the Israeli occupation, help Hamas to gain popularity while concealing the fact that it has no strategy.
The Palestinian people faces one of its hardest hours. Day after day it suffers losses in persons and property. We need a politics of revolutionary sanity, not a politics that takes satisfaction in blowing itself and the world to pieces.
[Samya Nasser is the manager of the Baqa centre in the Galilean village of Majd al Krum. Abridged from Challenge, a Jerusalem bimonthly journal which offers investigative reporting and in-depth analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Oslo process. To subscribe, visit the Challenge web site <http://www.odaction.org/challenge/>.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 12, 2001.
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