The Palestinian national narrative is one of calamity and victimhood at the hands of the Jews. But their politics are largely driven by those who insist that they possess an innate, unstoppable strength, that Israel, for all its tanks and jet fighters, is a paper tiger that will wither in the face of sheer Palestinian willpower.
This rhetoric is rooted in the grand strategy of the Palestinian national movement since the days of Yasser Arafat, a strategy upheld today mainly by Hamas.
This strategy is a classically anti-colonial one: A colonial power invades a territory in order to exploit its resources, and in response, the anticolonialist attempts to make the cost of staying exceed the benefit. The brutality of anti-colonial warfare in the 20th century flows from this logic. As scholars of suicide terrorism have pointed out, the perpetrators’ very willingness to die is a key part of the strategic logic behind the operation, since it signals to the enemy not only that its own civilians are not safe, but that the attackers cannot be deterred, not even by death, and therefore that each attack foreshadows worse to come. (It is in response to this aspect of suicide terrorism that Israel sometimes pursues the much-criticized strategy of destroying the homes of terrorists’ families — a kind of third-party deterrence against those too eager for self-sacrifice to be deterrable on their own terms.)
In nearly every case throughout the 20th century, when a colonialist has faced such escalating brutality, the benefits obtained from the occupied territory lost their luster, and the would-be exploiter soon returned home.
That, at least, was what happened to French Algeria, the most obvious and oft-repeated historical parallel among Palestinians.
Earlier this week, faced with growing criticism in the Arab world, including the Palestinian Authority, for having dragged Gaza’s civilian population into a costly conflict with no apparent aim or clear exit strategy, Hamas was forced to defend its practices and policy — and the growing death toll in Gaza that has resulted from them. In a July 14 interview on the Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa TV, spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri explained:
“We are paying a price, but we remember our brothers in Algeria, who had at least a million and [a] half martyrs… In 1945, in a single day in Algeria, 45,000 Algerians died. In a single day. It wasn’t described in Algeria’s history as forsaking the blood of the Algerians, as some defeatists are describing today the number of martyrs as ‘trading with Palestinian blood and forsaking Palestinian blood’… We are not leading our people to execution as we stand by and look on. No. We are leading them to death — I mean, to confrontation.” (Translation from Palestinian Media Watch)
Abu Zuhri was mocked by Hamas’s opponents, especially Israel, for the telling slip (“We are leading them to death — I mean, to confrontation.”), but that was not the most revealing part of what he said. It was the Algerian reference that revealed the deep rationale behind Hamas’s belligerency.
The Algerian anticolonial struggle cost that country dearly, but ultimately resulted in liberation from the colonial oppressor. To Israelis, Hamas is a terror group engaged in wanton and pointless killing. But in Hamas’s vision of itself, it is the Algerian resistance, braving the horrific costs of the struggle in order to bring about the inevitable outcome: the expulsion of the occupier.
The anticolonial strategy depends on its ability to influence the psychology of the colonialist. So it only works if the colonialist believes he is one, if he has a separate “home country” to which he can return, if the only thing being weighed against the violence is the economic benefit of exploiting the occupied territory a little longer.
It is in these features that the strategic error (for the purposes of this argument, let’s momentarily ignore the moral problems) at the root of Hamas’s anticolonial struggle can be discerned. Israel is not the French occupation of Algeria. Again, that’s not a moral judgment, but a sociological fact. Israel’s Jews have a shared sense of national history and identity, a narrative of ancient belonging in the land and a language spoken nowhere else. More prosaically, Israel has eight million citizens, two million of them schoolchildren, living in 76 cities connected by 18,000 kilometers of road. It is no mere political system or settlement; it is a civilization. And, of course, unlike the French in Algeria, Israelis have nowhere else to go.
So we must ask: What happens when the anticolonial strategy of terrorism is employed against an indigenous national identity? Or more bluntly, what happens when you send a suicide bomber to murder the innocent children of a tribe that does not believe it has anywhere else to go? The response to such violence is the very opposite of the colonialist’s: instead of flight, war.
Needless to say, the historical truth of either the Israeli or Palestinian national narrative is irrelevant to the argument being made here. Hamas’s anticolonial strategy depends not so much on what Israel is as on what it believes itself to be.
The debate over peace and Palestinian independence once marked the defining fracture of Israeli politics, one that claimed the life of an elected prime minister and threatened to tear apart the fabric of Israel’s public life. Then came the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada in 2000, followed by a decade and a half of rocket volleys, shootings and other attacks.
As countless polls, voter turnout data and a library of qualitative research has shown, this violence did not convince Israelis to abandon Israel. Instead, it helped Israelis to draw together and overcome their internal social and political divisions, unifying a majority of Israelis behind a simple, clear demand for security. As the vast majority of Israelis viewed it, peace had been offered, at great risk and with great sacrifice, but was rejected by the Palestinians in favor of yet another wave of terrorism aimed not at Israeli policies, but at Israelis’ very existence.
This lesson was bolstered in the wake of the Gaza disengagement of August 2005. The withdrawal from Gaza was carried out to the last centimeter and the last settler. The following year, Ehud Olmert won a national election after expressly promising to deliver a similar unilateral withdrawal from much of the West Bank. But instead of acknowledging and accepting Israel’s keenness to end the occupation, Palestinian “resistance” groups simply insisted that the strategy of the Algerian resistance was paying off. The colonialist was slowly withdrawing in the face of the pain inflicted by Palestinian terror, and so that terror must be increased, must become a permanent feature of Israeli life. That, after all, is the logic of Algeria.
And so Hamas set about turning Gaza into the steppingstone for an expanded anticolonial campaign designed to liberate Jerusalem, Beersheba and Tel Aviv. In its inability to view Israelis except through the lens of its own ideology, Hamas misunderstood the nature of the Gaza withdrawal, the Israeli exhaustion with the dysfunction, violence and ideological ossification of the Palestinian national movement — and failed to realize that Israel’s desire to disentangle itself from the Palestinians did not mean it would no longer defend itself.
Instead of transforming Gaza into a haven for foreign donations (as the PA did in Ramallah), or linking it economically to Israel, the wealthiest and healthiest of regional economies, as it partly was during the Oslo years, Hamas led the impoverished territory into a state of permanent confrontation. And in doing so it brought upon the beleaguered Strip wave after wave of conflict, an eight-year siege and a stiffening of Israeli security demands for any possible future peace in the West Bank. Over the past two years, it even managed to make enemies of the Egyptian military on the one hand (having sided with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s revolution) and Hezbollah, the Assad regime and Iran on the other (having sided with the Sunni Syrian opposition in that country’s civil war). This has further impoverished the beleaguered residents of Gaza, who are forced to watch helplessly as their government subordinates their economic and political conditions to the dictates of its ideological vision.
In 2012, when rockets rained down on Israeli cities and the Israeli cabinet seriously considered a costly and almost certainly bloody ground invasion of the Strip, the dovish Meretz party, the last bastion of the Oslo faithful, openly supported Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s air assault on Hamas. The very strategy meant to dismay and ultimately dislodge the Israelis from Israel has become the glue holding Israel’s otherwise fractious politics together. When rockets fall, the gaps between left and right, dove and hawk, fade almost to irrelevance.
Hamas’s leaders and planners are not stupid. They know the strategy isn’t working. They know Israel continues to strengthen and prosper even as the Arab world around it crumbles and their own fiefdom in Gaza collapses. They know they have been able to deliver only minuscule tactical successes while Israel continues to emerge overwhelmingly triumphant.
But Hamas cannot relent. To surrender their anti-colonial campaign, to move from a strategy of violence that cannot possibly liberate Palestine to one of compromise that might liberate at least part of Palestine, Hamas must surrender a basic fixture of its ideology and identity – the assumption that the Jews are rootless foreigners in this land, or at least that the Jews can be expected to behave as foreigners when confronted with terrorism. If either of those assumptions are wrong, then the strategy’s very premise is undermined, and Hamas’s endless war is doomed to ignominious failure.
And so Gaza is locked into a war of fruitless aggression, battling an enemy that only really exists in the Palestinian imagination, and doing so with an arsenal of tactics that only serve to strengthen the resolve and cohesion of the actual opponent it is facing in the real world.
Re: Hamas attacks southern Israel
Originally Posted by nhytgbvfeco2
For the people thinking this war was a ploy by Netanyahu to somehow gain support, no:
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