|
loquitor---if you look at the history of the occupation, hamas is a direct result of earlier israeli efforts to fragment the plo/fatah so they could then not negociate about settlements etc. by claiming that there is no-one to negociate with. the assumption was the same as informed the siege---if you prevent a political organization from governing, the people will turn against it. except that everyone knows they main reason these organizations can't govern is the colonial occupation. hamas represents a rejection of conventional politics because the occupation has been such that conventional politics don't function. what's stupid--and i put this up before---is that such a organizations are typically not prepared to actually win something like an election and would have found itself moderating in all probability had israel and the united states recognized the results of the jan 06 elections. remember hamas is also located in syria and the syrian hamas is FAR more moderate than is it's--o what do you call it exactly--not a branch--it's namesake in gaza. to my mind, that refusal is the policy blunder that set up all of this. you can post all the anecdotal stuff you want to demonstrate that you personally prefer to bracket all this and focus on what nasty fellows hamas is comprised of in gaza--but the fact remains that while i do not doubt that some of it is true even, the problem was that the israelis--again--used the discourse of terrorism to refer to hamas and that boxed in the idiots in the bush administration, who in turn supported unconditionally, as a function of their wholesale abdication of any pretense to being even interested in brokering peace in the region, the genuinely awful idea of refusing to acknowledge the elections and imposing the siege instead.
this siege has *strengthened* hamas' position and has imposed no significant challenge to it organizationally.
the pattern of oppositional groups finding themselves in a quandry if they actually win in conventional political elections (or some other process) is well known and has repeated over and over and over. just as the pattern of failure of the israeli "idea" that you can brutalize the palestinians with the result that they'll turn against their own organizations has been repeated over and over and over.
i don't understand what your motivation is in avoiding the political reality of the situation and instead imposing this simplistic overlay on it. i really don't. it doesn't enable you to do anything except rationalize away what's happening now to the civilian population of gaza. i can't seem to find it within myself to pretend it's not happening. i find doing so to be an analytic and ethical problem.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|