Engage With Hamas: We Earned Our Support
By Ahmed Yousef
The Washington Post 20 June 2007
<link>GAZA CITY, Palestine -- The Palestinian National Authority
apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or
toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that
had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and
elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist
in the fiction that the United States is following a "road
map" to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the
Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building.
Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and
Hamas is stronger than ever.
For the first time in months, Gaza is secure. This may be a
momentary peace as Israel prepares an attempt to retake parts
of Gaza. Yet neither blunt force nor U.S. subterfuge will
extinguish Palestinian aspirations for self-governance, free
from outside interference.
Hamas's actions to secure Gaza from the horrific recent
violence of the Palestinian contras have been out of
self-defense. The assassinations of Hamas officials and
supporters, attempts on the life of the elected prime
minister, and kidnappings and bombings by some in President
Mahmoud Abbas's paramilitary groups had to stop. The PA has a
clear legal right, indeed an obligation, to prevent this
violence, by force if necessary, and to protect the
Palestinian people.
It is not Hamas that has "outlawed" the government. (When has
an elected party with a voting majority ever resorted to
banning the government to get its way?) The success of the
Reform and Change Party is neither a chimera nor a momentary
lapse in reason on the part of the electorate. Rather, it is
the result of four decades of hard work in Palestinian
society. It reflects the trust of the people. Those who
collaborate with the occupiers to void the electoral process
will not succeed. Abbas's "state of emergency" and his U.S.
and Israeli arms will not prevail in Gaza or quench the thirst
for political freedom in the West Bank.
Some critics raise the red flag of "al-Qaeda" and say that
Hamas and parliament are a stalking horse for Salafi
jihadists. I defy them to demonstrate one instance in which
Hamas's military structure has struck against any force
outside the theater of the occupation. The struggle has always
been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and
conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and
nationalism -- Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending
faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one's
creed?
Likewise, those who demean resistance to the occupation as
little more than a proxy for Iran, Syria or Hezbollah are
ignorant of history. The long-suffering Palestinians have
gratefully accepted assistance from neighbors both near and
far, Arab and Western, Muslim or otherwise. Slighting the
generosity of those who sympathize with the Palestinians is
hypocritical given America's billions of annual aid dollars
for Israel, money that has only purchased tragedy.
Palestinians want, on their terms, the same thing Western
societies want: self-determination, modernity, access to
markets and their own economic power, and freedom for civil
society to evolve. Those who warn of "failed states" and
"Hamastan" as a breeding ground for terrorism forget where
blame for failure belongs -- at the feet of the American
administration, which has chosen to isolate, rather than deal
with, the elected government.
The Bush administration never intended to honor the outcome of
fair and transparent elections in the occupied territories.
The embargo, designed to punish the electorate for its choice,
was the first step toward crushing new democratic
institutions. The second has been to find collaborators for
the American agenda and to supply them with advisers, funds
and weapons for their campaign of destabilization. The final
step will be to truncate Gaza from any proposed Palestinian
state and make it a de facto prison for all "undesirable"
aspects of Palestinian nationalism. This will culminate in
provocations designed to trigger a military response from
Israel, which will "justify" a war on Gazans. This would be
tragic for all concerned, and the international community,
especially the Arab League, must not allow such an outcome.
What can be salvaged from the wreckage of the multiparty
system? Those who have dissolved the government and joined
with the occupiers are embraced by the Bush and Olmert
administrations, which have released Palestinian tax revenue
and taken other steps to shore up the Abbas government's
legitimacy and proclaim it the future of a Palestine shorn of
troublesome Gaza.
Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and
other parties, and they all share the same goals -- the end of
occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of
return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal
among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For
more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and
checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the
poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a
unified front against the occupation.
We urge the Bush administration not to repeat the mistakes
that have become hallmarks of its actions in the Middle East.
Allow the Palestinian people to chart their own course, free
from the influence of those who seek little more than to
perpetuate the status quo. The alternative is unacceptable.
Ahmed Yousef is a senior political adviser to Ismail Haniyeh,
who is contesting his dismissal as prime minister by Mahmoud
Abbas.
