Greens Engage

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.

Earlier I promised a post on the new Israeli government. It seemed necessary on Greens Engage, a blog about the intersection of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. But at Greens Engage we could be more interested in Israeli politics. In fact, we are much more concerned with our own back yard – keeping Britain a good place for Jews to live. It happens that this involves putting up some alternatives to the unfeasably vilifying ways of regarding Israel which are stridently advanced in the Green Party. Personally I find it strange that in order to safeguard my place in this country, I have to get acquainted with Israeli politics – to debunk untruths, to balance slants, to point out counter-examples to the vilification. But there you go.

Luckily, I can sit back today because we have Alex Stein, an Anglo-Israeli blogging at False Dichotomies. He has written a guest post on Harry’s Place analysing the state of Israel’s new Netanyahu-led government. Have a read.

Bitter Lemons is a weekly publication of two Israeli points of view and two Palestinian points of view on a given topic of the day. This week’s topic is outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

See also previous editions.

Rosso Verde points us to this interview with Knesset Member Dov Kenin, from Israel’s communist Hadash party. His red/green alliance did extraordinarily in Tel Aviv’s mayoral elections, securing 35% of the votes overall and 75% of the votes of young people under 35. Although he didn’t win:

“… even so, I got 35% of the votes. And City for All, the movement we established in Tel Aviv, which is a kind of red-green alliance, is the strongest movement inside the Tel Aviv municipality following the elections. So this really shows the possibilities existing within Israeli society. You know, seeing Israeli society from abroad, you may see mostly problems, problems and dangers. But understanding Israeli society from within, you see not only problems, but also possibilities. You see the new generation of young Israelis, more open to new ideas, new thinking, more open to criticism, to social and environmental and political criticism, of Israeli society and politics. So the experience of City for All really shows up that the building of a new left in Israeli society is not only very much needed, but is also very very possible.”

On boycott:

“We do support a boycott of things produced in the Israeli settlements, we are for a boycott of products from the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. However, I do not believe that an indiscriminate boycott of Israel and Israelis will help to improve the situation in any way. You know, the right wing establishment in Israel use these kind of boycotts to prove once more to the Israelis that all the world is against us, that people do not make any clear marking line between moderates and extremists, that all the world is anti-semitic and so on. So an undiscrimated boycott I don’t think is very helpful.”

My response is that all things being equal I could nod impassively at this. I’m not against it. But like many Israelis, Dov Kenin is understandably more interested in his own country than in looking out for Jews in other countries. There’s a discernable reluctance among many on the Israeli left to talk about antisemitism and the role it plays in the conflict – a slight sense of impatience or of wanting to move on and look beyond. Perhaps they think that it’s the least tractable part of the conflict. We in Britain shouldn’t turn a blind eye though, and not being participants in the conflict we don’t have to.

Given that the most Israel boycotters also tend to evince this special intense hostility to Israel which implicates ‘Zionists’, while giving barely a second glance at any of the world’s other excellent candidates for boycott,  and given that other well-meaners are unlikely to have the will nor the aptitude to distinguish between Israeli products and settlement products, I feel obliged to narrow my eyes at any boycott campaign. Hopefully goes without saying that there would have been no eye-narrowing before the Cairo Conference, Durban, and an unflinchingly antisemitic boycott campaign in Britain. However, if the boycott movement managed to unhitch itself from anti-Zionism, realign itself with Palestinian liberation by selectively boycotting stuff from the territories and shake off the antisemites humping its leg – i.e. became more like Dov Kenin’s idea of boycott – I think the pro-settlers may well be isolated in objecting to it. On the way forward:

“Well, first of all Israel should open real and serious dialogue with the Palestinians, with Syria and with the Arab League, based on the Arab Peace Initiative. I think that concerning the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Israel should immediately cease building and expanding the settlements. You know, with all these recent deals, building of the settlements continued at very great speed; it was under Labour defence ministers and under Kadima administrations, that Israel continued building these settlements at record speed. So Israel should immediately cease building the settlements; Israel should re-open all the kinds of blockages in the Palestinian territories; Israel should establish a ceasefire with Gaza, including the opening of the blockade on Gaza. Israel should agree on the exhange of prisoners and detainees, including bringing back Gilad Shalit to his home and his family.”

Absolutely on the money about the settlements. On Hamas, thin on detail – given Hamas’ stated aim to wipe out Israel, not to mention Jews, does a ceasefire help Hamas more than it helps Israel, in the same way that it has helped Hesbollah to rearm in Lebanon? No country has to stand for that. People are right when they say that the conflict is asymmetric – it is also asymmetric in aims. Hamas and Hesbollah want to wipe out Israel and ‘return’ the land to Islam. Israel wants simply to exist in security if not peace.

But to submit to ongoing hostilities is also not an option. We could better understand the principles behind a ceasefire and what, optimally, should happen during a ceasefire. Kenin also does that thing that people on the far left do of blaming Hamas on Israel, but never blaming the state of Israeli politics on the wider conflict or on regional Jew-hatred. It looks like underdoggism to me. Double standards against yourself may feel big and generous if you’re an Israeli trying to make peace but they are of dubious use in the long run with those enemies who have an expansionist vision of Islamism.

But good for Kenin – he is doing a lot right.

Some people say that Avigdor Lieberman is only acting like a nationalist secular fundamentalist. If so he’s doing a very convincing job.

See Hitchens in Slate for a review of his approach to shaping Israeli society.

Hat tip: @CarrieWorthen.