Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Guest Post: Andre's Reflections on Palestine and Israel

Hi everyone- we are honored to have our first guest post! Our friend Andre read my first two posts about Israel and Palestine and had a few thoughts of his own (and I finally got around to posting it). He has studied this issue intensively, and so we really value his perspective. Thanks Andre!
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It is an excellent point that by reading Hamas solely through the lens of terrorism, the American public tends to falsely see Hamas as it sees “terrorists” in general—a poorly defined group of violent, reactionary, fundamentalists that act based on timeless religious extremism rather than political motivation grounded in relatively recent events. While this perspective is misleading to say the least, Hamas does have a thoroughly Islamist ideology that has gone way beyond Palestinian nationalism. So to me Hamas bears no resemblance to the French Resistance or any other group motivated solely by human rights. Fundamentalist religious ideology almost by definition makes compromise and negotiation especially difficult, since a religious fundamentalist connection to the land tends to preclude giving up any part of it. So there is no mention of any sort of two state solution from Hamas beyond a long term ceasefire (and we’ve seen how ceasefires work out—if there is no reconciliation and closure, then there will always be some excuse to reignite conflict). This is in contrast to Fatah and most other elements of the PLO, since even the most dogmatic secular nationalists can talk about real compromise without sounding too hypocritical. That’s why Israel funded Hamas in the late 1980s and created the monster that it faces today, so that it could undermine realistic movement towards a two-state compromise. Hamas’ Islamism in this way is an ironic reflection of the ideology of right wing Israelis who will not even consider giving up an inch of the land originally encompassed in the British Mandate. On both sides it is important to keep in mind that religious rhetoric in a political conflict is inextricably tied up with political goals, i.e. to a great extent Hamas’ Islamist rhetoric is an effect as well as a cause of its power aspirations, and same with right wing, fundamentalist Israelis.


I think you’re also right that identity is the linchpin currently holding together and perpetuating the many elements of the conflict. Palestinian and Israeli identities both developed largely in opposition to each other, so as long as they both exist as such the conflict remains intractable. But what fuels the reproduction of polemic identities isn’t unchanging, pre-existing belief —it is personal experience of trauma and loss. If a youth has been displaced and continually harassed by the IDF and seen family members killed, political action they take is based on this, rather than some pre-existing a priori belief in a political or religious ideal. Like they say, all politics is personal. So I hope that if Israelis can finally muster up the political will to rein in their government and military and gradually loosen up their choke hold, there will be gradually less trauma to drive oppositional identities and reconciliation can occur. But obviously that is a big if.

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