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to start with, i'll say that i am not at all sure that i'd be as appalled as i am about hamas being taken on militarily if the siege was not in place, were the borders around gaza not entirely sealed off, were the civilian population not sitting ducks, waiting to be massacred.
i've said this several times in this thread, but i think that israel, with the full support of those policy geniuses in the bush administration, made a fundamental error in refusing to acknowledge that hamas won the last elections in gaza. because i think hamas is not run by the sharpest forks in the drawer, i think that allowing them to govern would have been more problematic politically for them than has been the siege.
the siege has been a brutal, unnecessary failure. hamas is stronger at the moment than they would have been had they been placed in a position of having to deal with more or less routine aspects of power--they're an oppositional group, a horizontal military organization which is not particularly organized as a political party--i think they would have had difficult transitioning into conventional politics and that those difficulties would have done more to undermine support for it than anything else.
hamas as a direct result of the myopic and often brutal occupation since 1967. that israel finds itself in this position is then a function of it's own policy choices--you could say that the assumption that you can brutalize the palestinian population with the expectation that they will blame not the military superpower which is doing the brutalization, but their own political leadership for what's happening is already entirely falsified by the fact the present situation exists at all. the period through the 80s into the early 90s during which the israelis would pulverize the plo, make their situation impossible and then claim that there was no point in negociation because there was no-one to negociate with...the more recent period during which the israelis had arafat trapped in a building for months....
what's more, hamas repeats some of the pattern that you see with the iranian revolution if you look into how it came about and why the revolution ended up adopting the language of extreme religious conservatism to articulate it's politics.
so hamas is an expression of the incoherence of the israeli approach to the political consequences of the post-67 occupation.--they are an expression of the failure of the peace processes--an expression of the failure of the international community---an expression of the failure of american policy. hamas is also an expression of the failure of the region---many states in the area will not be exactly disappointed to see hamas crushed, just as they would not be exactly disappointed to see hezbollah crushed because both represent non-state military organizations and so both represent organizational and ideological threats to state power and to those who hold it.
so from a distance, hamas is both the result of failed policies, failed actions and a condemnation of the entire logic that has resulted in this present state of affairs--and it's strangely consistent because i find them to be opportunistic, one-dimensional and frankly stupid. i can understand in theory why they've adopted the line of refusing to recognize israel at all--it's a tactic that responds to the actual effects of occupation--those effects in themselves pose problems for the israelis because they--again--represent the failure of their main policy logic.
but my biggest problem with hamas is that they decided it was a good idea to play chicken with israel at the end of this past cease fire. their main claim is that the continuation of the siege of gaza was in itself a violation of the cease-fire agreement. fine--i actually accept that premise functionally--i think the siege has been a violation of fundamental human rights from the outset---but knowing that hamas is facing elections soon--and knowing that the bush administration is vanishing, so the window of spinelessly unconditional support for anything and everything done by the israeli right from the united states is about to change---knowing that there are soon to be elections in israel, knowing the weak position kadima is in after the scandals that have come up about the olmert government---weak governements facing significant political change at teh same time--weak governments that have shown that they will use military action to prop up themselves, to compensate for their own stupidity and weakness--to decide that this is a good time to start lobbing rockets as a demonstration that you can act in order to attempt to put yourself (hamas--sorry about the pronoun shift) in a stronger position for negociating another cease fire--that's just idiotic. i would maybe have understood had this started in, say, october--but that this started in december, after the american elections, so after it was clear that a change in american policy--of some kind--was coming...it's just stupid.
so i see this as one of those horrible everybody sucks moments. egypt for example--mubarak would not doubt not loose a wink of sleep were hamas to be crushed because of the relations between hamas and political opposition within egypt. israel and the united states---hamas itself----total failure.
so now, like i said at the beginning, the civilian population finds itself trapped in gaza, unable to get out, unable to flee, after 18 months of siege, confronting a situation that is the expression of wholesale failure of conventional politics.
that's more or less what i think about hamas---and that's why i have such a hard time not getting angry when i post about this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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