On the record with Hamas
JVL Introduction
In a long article, Drop Site News collects together historic and contemporary interviews with senior Hamas leaders with commentaries from informed Palestinian and Israeli experts sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle.
Hamas has certainly succeeded at putting the question of Palestine back on the agenda – but the price has been very high.
A few tasters:
- In the years before October 7th “We talked to the mediators, especially the United Nations and the Egyptians and the Qataris: ‘Tell Israel to stop this. We will not be able to tolerate more and more’” said Ghazi Hamad, the former Hamas deputy foreign minister and a longstanding member of its political bureau. “They did not listen to us.”
- “October 7,” says Dr Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau and a former government minister in Gaza “is an act of defense, maybe the last chance for Palestinians to defend themselves.”
- Rashid Khalidi: “Their resistance, the fact that they’re still fighting the Israelis on the one hand makes a lot of Palestinians, especially the ones farther away from Gaza, heartened. On the other hand, what has happened to the people of Gaza leaves a lot of Palestinians, especially the ones in Gaza, not so happy.”
Mouin Rabbani, a former UN official who worked as a special advisor on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, sums it up very well:
“The problem that the West has with Palestinian resistance is not terrorism. It’s not the targeting of civilians. It’s not armed resistance. It’s resistance full stop. Whether it’s massacring civilians or successfully hitting military targets or popular mobilization or boycott campaigns, there is not a single form of Palestinian resistance that the West is prepared to accept.”
RK (h/t TG)
This article was originally published by Drop Site on Tue 9 Jul 2024. Read the original here.
On the record with Hamas
In a Drop Site News exclusive, Hamas officials discuss their motivations, political objectives, and the human costs of their armed uprising against Israel
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A very thought provoking article. Statements in the Lancet, in which it said “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza” and that of Haaretz, which confirms the IDF put into action the Hannibal Directive on October 7, something previously reported by The Electronic Intafada and The Grayzone, should also be considered.
The article raises some difficult questions that are hard to answer at this stage while the genocide is on-going and the future unclear – especially, I imagine, if you are a Palestinian that is actually suffering this extreme violence as we speak.
We must continue to do all we can to stop this genocide and obtain justice and freedom for the Palestinians. Anything else would be a betrayal.
Hamas’s leadership SEEMS to me to be far more intelligent, rational, principled and truth-respecting than the leaderships of most of the other parties in this conflict. To a greater extent than any other Palestinian faction they have a relatively recent electoral mandate; popular support; and competence as negotiators and in governance.
Which leads me to hope that as many of the Hamas leaders as possible survive the Israeli government’s attempts to kill them. A Hamas negotiated permanent peace with statehood for Palestine on the 1967 borders and reparations for Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem have a SLIM CHANCE of working. All of the other options preferred by Blinken, Netanyahu etc have no chance at all.