Taking the temperature at the House of Commons
For some reason this came up in an alert – Hansard’s Daily Written Answers from the House of Commons, 2nd Nov. It includes a statement on the boycott, the situation for Gazans, the British Government’s response to the flaws of the Goldstone report on Gaza.
Here’s the press statement.
Three books about Hamas
Reviewed in the New York Review of Books.
It’s particularly interesting to read about the struggle between the pragmatists who want what’s best for Gaza, and the ideologues who seek God’s Kingdom on earth.
“Cracks emerged when Hamas drifted from social activism and armed struggle into politics. After Hamas decided to contest the 2006 elections, one of its preachers in Rafah left the movement with scores of followers. God’s will above man’s, he said, and besides Hamas had no business participating in an authority established by agreement with Israel. During the contentious interregnum of national unity government before Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in June 2007, both Fatah and Hamas solicited Salafist support. Unruly clans seeking an Islamist cover to press their claims bolstered their ranks. Amid the chaos, the Salafists sought to enforce their authority by waging a nasty morality campaign against Internet cafés, hairdressers, the American school, and other such places of ill-repute.
Armed confrontation with the Salafists followed fast on the heels of Hamas’s takeover. In July 2007 the Qassam Brigades laid siege to the stronghold of one jihadist group, the Army of Islam, forcing the release of the BBC’s kidnapped correspondent Alan Johnston.”
Analysis of Israel’s role in Hamas’ fortunes comes towards the end:
“Indeed, Israel’s mishandling of Hamas began even before the group’s creation. The Israelis turned a blind eye to recruitment by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s, largely because they saw the Islamists as a foil to nationalist groups. Belatedly alerted to the arming of Hamas cells during the first intifada, Israel increased its appeal by televising the trial of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound Gaza preacher who was Hamas’s spiritual head, and then by exiling hundreds of Hamas activists to Lebanon, where they had a useful chance to make contact with fellow Islamists such as Hezbollah.
Hamas’s subsequent resort to hideous “martyrdom operations,” as suicide bombings were called, owed much to Hezbollah’s inspiration and perhaps also to its technical expertise. Israel’s response of targeted assassinations hugely bolstered Palestinian sympathy for Hamas, even as it served to radicalize its followers. As Paul McGeough’s book makes abundantly clear, for instance, Khaled Meshaal, a relative hard-liner, rode to dominance within Hamas on the wave of outrage that followed Israel’s botched attempt to poison him in Amman in 1997. By contrast, when in 2003 Israel succeeded in murdering Ismail Abu Shanab, a respected Gazan intellectual with an engineering degree from Colorado State University, it eliminated a Hamas official who had argued passionately against suicide bombings and in favor of a long-term truce.
Israel’s dramatic acceleration of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories during the 1990s, and its systematic undermining of the Palestinian economy by means of roadblocks and closures, convinced many Palestinians that Hamas was perhaps correct in judging the peace process a sham. Even as Yasser Arafat’s credit waned among his own people, both Israel and the Clinton administration pushed him to crack down on Hamas. This he did, with some brutality and considerable success, in a campaign that put hundreds of Hamas activists into Palestinian prisons. Yet rather than being rewarded for risking the anger of his own people, Arafat was simply pressured to do more, and told that he would be held to account for any atrocity carried out by Hamas.
In effect if not in intention, Israel handed the Islamists veto power over the peace process. It also so weakened Arafat that when Israel floated the possibility of an offer at Camp David in 2000, the Palestinian leader shied from pursuing it, largely because he feared he could not swing his people to support it. When, in the autumn of 2000, the second intifada broke out in the wake of this failure, Arafat felt obliged to ride the violence rather than attempt to contain it, and soon lost control of his movement as local Fatah activists strove to outdo Hamas in fury.”
It’s good to read everybody’s favourite type of criticism – criticism of Israel – from people who a) haven’t got it in for Israel and b) know what they’re talking about. (The Green Party’s International Committee should try it sometime.)
Read it all and, for all the blandness of the account, be grateful you don’t live in a country Hamas runs, having your marriage licence checked by morality police, dissenting in fear of your life, and waiting for your government to give you a chance to vote them out. And be grateful you don’t have Hamas in the country next door.
Thoughts from an SPSC (Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign) supporter
One interest Palestinians, Israelis and Jews share (whether or not they realise it) is to ensure that the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign remain marginal in the movement to end the occupation of Palestinian lands.
This is the kind of support it attracts:
“anyone who is not boycotting Israel (both economically and culturally) is supporting Ethnic Cleansing!”
After that comes a call for American tourists to boycott Scotland, pledges to boycott the United States on grounds of its support of Israel, and the wild opinion “I would NOT describe the U.S.A as a democracy”.
The claim that Israel is conducting ethnic cleansing is false, and it’s also false and vindictive to assert that opposition to the total isolation of Israel is tantamount to support of ethnic cleansing. This person is clearly disaffected to the extreme. From what I know of the SPSC, he or she fits in well there.
More SPSC:
- Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign remembers the Holocaust by blaming Zionists
- The SPSC and the Holocaust
- What is going on in the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign?
- What is it with the Scottish PSC?
- Scottish PSC and the Jerusalem Quartet
- Scottish PSC crows as Israelis are not boycotted but chased from Turkish basketball court
- What doesn’t motivate the SPSC
- Open antisemitism is challenging ‘antiracist’ anti-Zionism in the Palestine solidarity movement
- SPSC host Gilad Atzmon
Other fault lines in Israeli society
British Greens tend only to pay attention to the Jewish-Palestinian fault-lines in Israeli society. But of course like any society – and particularly in the Middle East with its many different communities – there are others. The New York Times has a piece on Jerusalem’s Sabbath Wars between the secular and militantly orthodox (sexually segregating, sabbath enforcing) Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem.
“In a modest counterstrike on a recent weekday morning, eight non-Orthodox Jewish activists — six women and two men — got on a No. 40 bus heading from the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot D into town. The women sat down in the front rows. The men went to the back.
Ramot D is an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood where rigid religious rules are applied. The No. 40 is one of several public bus lines designated as “mehadrin,” or strictly kosher, where the men sit in the front and the women behind. The activists view this draconian interpretation of the modesty code practiced by Orthodox Jews as discriminatory, and the policy is being appealed in Israel’s Supreme Court.
Stern black-coated male passengers muttered their disapproval, but the Rosa Parks-inspired act of civil disobedience took place peacefully, largely because the bus driver, an Arab, decided not to try to enforce the rules.”
Avigdor Lieberman and Israeli Arabs
A (lamentably unsourced) scan of attempts by Lieberman’s party to keep Israeli Arabs down, and responses from the leftermost sections of the Israeli government, from Dan Katz at Workers’ Liberty.
Means, ends and reasons
Further to the crisis of confidence in Human Rights Watch of last week, the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber, and the stunningly unfounded allegations of organ theft by Israelis, three scenarios and a two theories from S.O.Muffin.
In the comments to that piece, Eve Garrard reminds readers not to underestimate the importance of vanity on human affairs, and to think about the implications of publicly pillorying our policy makers for making mistakes.
David Runciman, author of a fairly recent book Political Hypocrisy: the Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell, and Beyond, also cautions against this, arguing that merciless pillorying promotes hypocrisy:
“Runciman argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics, but without resigning ourselves to it, let alone cynically embracing it. We should stop trying to eliminate every form of hypocrisy, and we should stop vainly searching for ideally authentic politicians. Instead, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and should worry only about its most damaging varieties.”
Why are some forms of persecution treated differently from others?
Barkingside 21 draws attention to violence against Christians in Pakistan, and the peculiar British selectivity about international matters.
“On Wednesday 12th August the BBC reported on “Sectarian violence hits Pakistani town” an event that took place on 1st August. However, it was tucked away in the South Asia news section and was not deemed significant enough for the main world news page. It is an event that has gone largely un-noticed in the UK media and on the blogosphere. Even a post on the subject published on our own Red-i forum was withdrawn an hour or so later.”
It was brought to my attention by a local activist who happens to be a Pakistani Christian and he attended the protests outside 10 Downing Street and later outside the Pakistani Embassy in London. Also, as far as I can tell, not reported on mainstream media.
The story has been picked up since, [after I prodded an email discussion list] and Adrian gives a far more eloquent summary than I could, so just go and read that.”
The two state solution evaluated in issue 16 of Democratiya
Issue 16 of Democratiya (latest edition but I’ve been slow off the blocks) is partly concerned with revisiting the two-state solution in the light of Gaza.
“First, we asked a range of writers whether the two-state solution was viable after the conflict in Gaza, and if so what they saw as the obstacles to its realisation. Michael Walzer argues that two states is in bad shape, but remains the only viable solution and can be advanced by a combination of ‘internal unilateralism’ on both sides, and greater support by the US and EU. John Strawson argues the time has come for the international community to consider compelling the two parties to reach a compromise. Ghada Karmi makes the case for the one-state solution as realistic not utopian, while Donna Robinson Divine calls for both sides to go beyond those constitutive narratives around which identities have hardened and which have blocked progress. Martin Shaw calls for 1948 to be revisited as well as 1967 and for the idealism of the one-state solution to inform the two-state solution, while Alex Stein argues none of the existing ’solutions’ remain viable and what’s really needed is imagination and radical new ideas. Menchem Kellner and Fred Seigel and Sol Stern warn of the dangers of moving towards two states without a radical change of attitude towards Israel by the Palestinian leaderships, while Eric Lee surveys the trade unions reaction to the conflict in Gaza.”
