The atrocities committed by Hamas fighters in Israel represent a political failure that is matched by the stupidity of the reaction to them in the West, argues Peter Ramsay.
The massacres, hostage-taking and humiliation of prisoners during the Hamas attack on Israel are vile and shocking: as vile and shocking as they were predictable.
For decades now a huge Palestinian population has been crammed into the Gaza Strip and blockaded by Israel, humiliated by defeat, poverty and hopelessness. Their fellow Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are steadily slaughtered by Israeli forces and terrorised by settlers as Israel relentlessly erodes the territory Palestinians control. Israeli governments have utterly humiliated the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation, following its surrender to them in the 1990s. This policy has fostered the rise of the Muslim fundamentalists of Hamas, an organisation originally cultivated by Israeli intelligence back in the eighties. The Palestinian project of national liberation has steadily been incorporated into and redefined by the reactionary project of the holy warriors. Atrocity, carried out with the jihadis’ familiar medieval relish, is the all-but inevitable result.
There is no shortage of speculation as to why exactly Hamas chose the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur war to send out their young men to wreak havoc, or about which other players may have been involved. But the Islamists in any case need to keep control of the grim little fiefdom allotted to them by Israel, and this fiefdom relentlessly produces young, impoverished militants with nothing to lose. From time to time, the young will have to be sent out if only to keep a lid on things at home. This time they got through in numbers and exacted a bloody revenge. They took some prisoners as leverage to get some of their own prisoners back from their enemy. Everyone in Gaza knows that the Israelis’ own revenge will be severe. Hamas’s hostages may moderate it.
One thing that was as predictable as the violence itself was the noisy stupidity of the response to it in Britain and the wider West. On the one hand, the Hamas-apologists celebrated what they pretended was a great blow for the national liberation of Palestine. According to Rivkah Brown, editor at Novaramedia:
‘Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide, as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory. The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.’
Hamas is not leading a struggle for freedom. It may represent the desperate Palestinians of Gaza. But Hamas does not believe in freedom or national sovereignty, and its victory would not lead to democracy or meaningful civil rights of any kind. Blind to the way the world has changed since the 1990s, the left has ended up backing this reactionary movement and its sectarian violence that is itself the product of Israeli policy.
While the left celebrates sectarian atrocity and backwardness, the Israel-apologists make loud demands for condemnation of the Palestinian violence the better to obscure the real context of these events.
Former Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill opined that
‘The invasion of Israel by Hamas gunmen is an obscene assault on national sovereignty and the Jewish people.’
It is obviously an assault on Israel’s territory and, insofar as Israel is indeed the ‘Jewish state’ that it proclaims itself to be, it is an attack on the Jewish people. His comment would be a banality, but O’Neill’s phrasing is deliberate. By missing out the word ‘Israeli’ before the words ‘national sovereignty’, he deflects attention from the precise character of this particular attack on a particular nation’s sovereignty. Attacks on a nation’s territorial integrity and its people are a normal aspect of war, and this is the latest episode in a decades’ long war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But O’Neill pretends it has nothing to do with the long political struggle over the territory, mirroring the left’s pretence that this is all about anti-imperialism and democracy. He criminalises the Palestinians’ part in the political conflict in the familiar manner of a pious humanitarian liberal:
‘Today’s invasion of Israel is no mere clash of nations, no mere tussle over borders – it’s a hate crime of global proportions.’
Israel is a legally sovereign state that has, since the Oslo Peace Accords, entirely dominated the territory of historical Palestine that it had conquered. It is a legally sovereign state that has since then failed to establish any form of political representation that would reconcile the people it conquered to its rule. Instead, Israel has deliberately impoverished and made war on them. It permitted the creation of a Palestinian Authority in the territories it occupied and then ensured that that authority would fail as a state. Hamas’s control of Gaza is the result.
Sovereign states are responsible for the territory they control and three decades on from the PLO’s surrender at Oslo in 1993 Israel has assiduously cultivated the hatred of its sovereignty among the Arabs it rules over. Israel has sown the wind and now it reaps the whirlwind. To say, as O’Neill does, that this has ‘the whiff of a pogrom’ is cheap posturing that reverses the real power relations of recent decades, and covers up the source of the deeper failure of sovereignty in Israel’s tiny empire.
While a real war between two failed states— Israel and Palestine—prevails in the Middle East, culture war preening is the order of the day in the West. You can choose between two poisonous half truths: Hamas the heroic freedom fighters against colonialism or Israel the vulnerable outpost of civilisation among the Islamic hordes. As soon as the Hamas leadership prompted the media to switch the spotlight on, our culture warriors were there right on cue to act out their virtue by rushing to identify with one set of victims or the other. This repulsive spectacle is what substitutes for serious analysis in our public life.
Follow us on Twitter @TakingControl
You can leave a comment below (comments are moderated).
The Northern Star 
Leave a comment