Posts Tagged ‘Hamas’
FWIW, a few thoughts on Hamas v Israel
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So I wanted to write about the Nobel Peace Prize, and the recent award to Narges Mohammadi, and the reaction to it within the all-male Iranian government, but the advent of a new war has disturbed this peace piece (which mightn’t have been particularly peaceful). So, while still very mindful of this important award, currently I’ll focus on the concepts of Holy War, monoculture, religion and other such bothersome things.
My readings around the Israel-Palestine situation include The case for Palestine, by the Australian lawyer Paul Heywood-Smith, Goliath: life and loathing in Greater Israel, by the US author Max Blumenthal, and Tears for Tarshiha, by Olfat Mahmoud, a Palestinian woman whose family were forced to flee their homeland due to the 1948 Nakba or “Catastrophe”. Mahmoud was born in a Lebanese refugee camp, which she barely survived, and went on to found the Palestinian Women’s Humanitarian Organisation (PWHO). My general view of the situation is that, as history often shows, the oppressed, if given the opportunity, become the oppressors, and the cycle may continue indefinitely without key interventions.
Obviously this is a horrific attack, and many innocent people have died. And though it can be described as a surprise attack, it is also hardly surprising given the many provocations from what most experts describe as the most extremist Israeli government since the country’s formation.
This will be, for me, both a fact-finding and an opinion piece. So, first, what is Hamas, who funds it and where does it fit among the various Palestinian liberation movements and opponents of the Israeli regime?
Hamas is the controlling force or government of the Gaza Strip, a tiny territory in the south-west corner of Israel – though not belonging to Israel. It shares an eleven-kilometre border with Egypt to the south and extends about 40 kilometres northwards along the Eastern Mediterranean. Hamas was elected to power there in 2006, the last election held in the region, in which it defeated Fatah, essentially a remnant of the PLO. The so-called Palestinian State consists of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (governed by Fatah), which are separated by almost 100 kilometres of Israeli territory. Most of the two million Gaza Strip people are Sunni Muslims, with a minority of Palestinian Christians. ‘Hamas’ is an Arabic acronym which essentially means ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’. It was founded in 1987 as the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, based in Egypt. Although it has moderated its demands over the years, Hamas has never accepted the legitimacy of the Israeli state. It receives some financial and military support from Iran (which supplies up to $100 million annually to Palestinian terrorist/liberation organisations, according to CNN), and some protection from Turkey.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clearly about an intolerance exacerbated by the creation of a state that always planned to be exclusionist. One hears egregious comments from both sides – I once worked with an Arab-Israeli teacher who considered the holocaust ‘hugely overblown’, and of course there are Haredi Jews, increasing in number, whose views have more than a whiff of insanity about them (from a WEIRD perspective). The tragedy of it all is that the region, anciently known as Canaan, was once home to a multi-ethnic, multilingual, god-saturated community that shared deities in the way that we share cuisines.
I’ve dealt elsewhere with the development of Judaic monotheism and the deadly ‘promised land’ mythology; what I’d like to focus on here is the women. Both orthodox Judaism and Islam are ultra-patriarchal, profoundly rejecting, indeed fleeing from WEIRD developments and its gradual opening up to the idea of women as possible movers and shakers in the world. And the war-like situation that has persisted in the region for decades has hardly been conducive to female empowerment. Even so, the only movement for reconciliation in the region seems unsurprisingly to be coming from women, though this is difficult especially for Palestinian women, who fear retribution from Hamas – which can be quite horrific.
Women will, of course, be thrust back further into the shadows by these recent events – events which were entirely foreseeable, not of course in detail, but in a more general sense, with so many of the most reasonable, tolerant and long-suffering Palestinians giving up and quitting the place. And while this most recent event seems particularly gruesome, and must certainly be condemned, it should be noted that the United Nations’ Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has kept figures – to the best of its ability – on “the number of Palestinians and Israelis who were killed or injured since 2008 in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) and Israel in the context of the occupation and conflict”. According to OCHA, from the beginning of 2008 to September 19 2023, Palestinian fatalities number 6,407, while Israeli fatalities number 308. There’s no doubt that, as the Israeli government prepares to retaliate, this massive imbalance will continue well into the future.
As I come to the end of reading Joseph Henrich’s extraordinary book The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, I note that the WEIRDness Henrich analyses is largely absent from Middle Eastern countries. Henrich’s book barely touches on feminism, but the better-late-than-never rise of female empowerment in the 20th century is undoubtedly a feature of the WEIRD phenomenon, and this rise has certainly influenced women in non-WEIRD, proto-WEIRD or ‘suppressed’ WEIRD regions (I think of those I’ve met who identify as Persian rather than Iranian, for example). And as to whether Israel ‘qualifies’ as a WEIRD nation, that question is beyond my pay grade (which is zero). My guess, though, is that it’s a rough amalgam of WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures and tendencies, and not exactly my ideal holiday location.
On the positive side, Women Wage Peace (WWP), ‘the largest grassroots peace movement in Israel today’, launched a partnership last year with Women of the Sun (WOS), a Palestinian women’s peace movement founded in 2021. Such initiatives are likely to be eclipsed for a while, with payback rising to the top of the agenda. Everyone is holding their breath, it seems, about how Israel’s far-right government will respond. The unevenness of the death toll caused by Palestinian-Israeli hostilities, mentioned above, amounts to more than 20 Palestinians for every Israeli, and the ill-treatment of this essentially manufactured underclass has worsened in recent times. We don’t currently know the full death toll from the Hamas attack, but we’re all pretty certain that there will be more death and destruction to come. Here’s how one news outlet, Vox, described Netanyahu’s new government earlier this year:
The policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s newly sworn-in governing coalition brought out 80,000 protesters over the weekend in Tel Aviv. The protesters were largely focused on the government’s proposals to overhaul the judicial system, which could weaken the country’s democracy and separation of powers. But the effects of the policies on the 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel and the 5.2 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories will be catastrophic, building upon years of policies that Israeli human rights organizations say constitute crimes against humanity.
The current difficulties faced by Palestinians within their own ancestral lands are truly shocking, though of course not unique – think of the Uyghurs in Xi’s China, the Hazaras in Afghanistan, the Kurds in Turkiye, Syria and surrounding regions, and so on. It would be impracticable for every ethnicity and/or language group to have its own nation, of course (there are more than 6000 languages currently spoken), but it is a breach of human rights to treat any ethnicity as inferior to any other, as well as being an offence to basic rationality. People of the WEIRD world generally understand that, including (non-Haredi) Israelis, and that helps to explain why so many have been protesting about their own government. This Hamas atrocity – a surprise in its particulars but hardly in the overall scheme of things – will surely escalate decades-long tensions, within the region and well beyond (look out for the US response to this attack upon their 51st state), and men and their weaponry will of course be front and centre.
Vive les bonobos. There are times when I really wouldn’t mind being one.
References
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hamas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
https://theconversation.com/why-did-hamas-attack-and-why-now-what-does-it-hope-to-gain-215248
https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
J Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, 2020
Women Wage Peace