Like Israel, Hamas isn’t offering Palestinians a ‘day after’
JVL Introduction
Amira Hass is a celebrated Jewish Israeli journalist who has lived in and reported bravely on Palestine in Haaretz for almost 30 years. In this article she thinks hard about the possible futures that Hamas’s attack on October 7th and Israel’s genocidal response now offers to Israelis and to Palestinians.
She reflects on the armed struggle strategy of Hamas over 30 years and finds it to have led Palestinians to a dead-end, without preventing Israel’s decades of land grabs. But she also concedes that the strategy of negotiation and diplomacy conducted by the PLO and the Palestine Authority has also been a complete failure.
Her article then seems lost in despair: for her this is not a situation where one party loses while the other gains, but one in which both, Israelis and Palestinians, lose – a sort of negative sum game.
But viewed from a different angle – one which Hass does not address – October 7th can be seen not as a dead-end but as the start of a whole new and more hopeful chapter for Palestine, albeit at a terrible cost. In the larger world Israel will not recover its previous reputation for decades if ever.
Palestine is now the political cause of new generations.
Boycott Divestment and Sanctions can now supply the munitions that can take the cause of the Palestinians, outgunned in conventional weaponry, towards the rights and liberties that Israel seeks to deny to them.
JR
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Sun 2 Jun 2024. Read the original here.
Like Israel, Hamas isn't offering Palestinians a 'day after' – just more war and suffering
Armed struggle has failed to stop the ongoing theft of Palestinian land. The destruction and death wrought by Israel in the Gaza Strip calls for a different kind of struggle – one that takes into account its people’s right to live
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I agree with much of this analysis – especially about the awful costs in lives and futures (Palestinian and Israeli) since 7 Oct.
Regretfully, though, I doubt whether the peace activists in Israel and elsewhere can do MUCH to stop Israel’s ever-growing oppression and ethnic cleansing. External force is desperately needed (eg ICC and ICJ prosecutions) to support their efforts.
The lessons from domestic abuse crimes suggest that when the assailant with overwhelming power (and a habit of using it) isn’t stopped early in their violence against the weaker party, then nothing the victim does can bring about their reformation.
Where the police don’t act effectively, the domestic abuse victim can only end the family’s suffering by fleeing beyond the oppressor’s reach or killing him on an occasion when he’s as physically vulnerable as she always is. Whatever the victim’s desperate choice, the price she and the family will pay is horrible and life-changing.
South Africa and the other countries wouldn’t have been able to bring their cases against Israel’s genocide and war crimes if the Palestine Authority and Hamas’s diplomatic efforts hadn’t been able to win (partial) recognition of Palestine as a state.
Those cases have enabled other legal cases in the US, UK, Germany and elsewhere to try to block Israel’s access to arms. Israeli passport holders can’t now holiday in the Maldives and important universities are now cutting their links with their counterparts in Israel. The pressure on Israel to change its behaviour and policies towards Gaza is becoming ever more forceful – and Israeli society as a whole is becoming more aware that leaving things as they are harms their interests too.
I agree with the JVL view – we are closer to recognition of Palestinian rights than we’ve been for a long time, of course at a terrible cost.
A very long & interesting article by Amira Hass. One which I read and kept thinking “yes but what about . . . ?“ only for Amira to come up with a comment that took my doubts into account.
However, it is the statement made in the final paragraph that disturbs me: “It is a must – and it is possible – to come up with and develop means of struggle that take into consideration one’s own people’s right to live.”
Really?
Is it ’possible’ . . . when you’re dealing with a fanatical state full of zealots, supported by equally psychotic and bigoted politicians in the US?
I used to think that the answer would be to follow Gandhi’s example: use nonviolent resistance.
The cold blooded murder of hundred of protesters trapped behind Israel’s ‘protective fence’ during the Great March of Return in 2018/2019 showed me how naive I was.
I honestly believe that if the people of Palestine were to strip off and walk together naked towards the IDF they would be mown down, after all, “Israel has a right to defend itself”. And of course the precedent has been set by the IDF shooting at and killing people walking behind raised white flags even when three of them were Israeli hostages.
I don’t think it is possible for the Palestinians alone to prevent the inevitability of their eradication – either due to the awful genocide we are witnessing at this moment in time or the much slower but equally effective, in the long term, ethnic cleansing by increased settler land grabbing & violence in the West Bank.
But I hope that “It is a must and it is possible” for the World to support the Palestinians and come up with and develop a means of struggle that helps them regain that “right to live” because the Palestinians, like all human beings, also have the right “to defend themselves”.
“Blessed are those who suffer. Oppression is worse than the grave. Better to die for a noble cause than to live the life of a slave.” – The Last Poets.
Oppressors will always have to live with this.
Amira is usually amazing in her detailed analysis and exposure of settlement crimes being perpetrated in the West Bank, yet in this piece she most blames Hamas as the generator of the genocide in not planning what came after. We know that Israel is enacting what Zionism’s intention has always been, the elimination or tight imprisonment of the the Palestinians. Without the total collaboration of the US, UK and EU, who should have been enforcing international law, and the prevention of an early ceasefire by the US, Israel would not have been able to pursue its criminal genocide and total eradication of Gaza. They should not have allowed the designation of Hamas as a terrorist entity, giving Israel the excuse to carry out out its dirty work. The Palestinians should be allowed to choose their own government, not have some oppressive regime imposed on them. The onus for what comes next lies with the sane world taking a firm stand and enforcing sanctions, arrests and payment by Israel for the cost of the damage and reconstruction. Israel must be expelled from the UN, and an international force brought in to free the Palestinians from Israel’s jackboot for there to be any solution to this international crime.
So she’s ignoring that Hamas offered to release ALL the Hostages on Oct9th.. if Israel stopped its attacks on Gaza but Israel said NO. She’s ignoring that Israel has had one agenda since day one to take all of Palestine.. she’s ignoring that Israel has dropped White Phosphorus gas on Gaza.. how can Hamas offer a future at the moment.. that future MUST be funded with compensation and reparation by US & UK for we with casual Colonial arrogance carved up Palestine and gave it to the Zionists.. Zionists who Britain & America had labelled Terrorists after they had been targeted themselves. Britain just left the Palestinians to their fate.. 76 years of terror.
Did we expect WW2 Resistance Fighters to rebuild Europe.. Why would we think Hamas has a magic wand to rebuild especially as Israel hasn’t finished the annihilation of Palestine yet anyway.. It’s the world’s collective responsibility and moral duty to rebuild Palestine.. we did it for Germany and Germany was guilty . Palestine is the innocent victim in this story. Because RETALIATION should never be condemned just because it suits a Political narrative. Note the difference in MSM reporting on Ukraine and Palestine.. & our Politicians support of in one scenario of the victim of invasion & in the other scenario the invaders.. why is the fact Israeli lobbyists fund so many of those Politicians not ringing alarm bells.
In my opinion, there is only one thing that must happen right now. Israel must be stopped. First, for the sake of the right to life and to a country of their own of all the surviving Palestinian people. Second, because the rule of law, and especially of international and humanitarian law, and the ability of the United Nations’ bodies to ensure it is implemented and enforced, is at grave risk. Third, because of the fact, or perception, that only one man can stop what is happening and no one should ever have been able to accrue that power to himself or his country. This third “fact” is not really true but it is removing the burden of actual international collective responsibility from everyone else’s shoulders — to act and not just mouth the words, eloquent as they are, knowing full well that the words alone have no power. I have begun to believe that only when these three things are achieved will World War II actually begin to be over and the possibility of international community be realisable.