We must adjust our distorted image of Hamas

Taken from The Times, UK, December 31, 2008
By William Sieghart

Last week I was in Gaza. While I was there I met a group of 20 or so police officers who were undergoing a course in conflict management. They were eager to know whether foreigners felt safer since Hamas had taken over the Government? Indeed we did, we told them. Without doubt the past 18 months had seen a comparative calm on the streets of Gaza; no gunmen on the streets, no more kidnappings. They smiled with great pride and waved us goodbye.

Less than a week later all of these men were dead, killed by an Israeli rocket at a graduation ceremony. Were they “dangerous Hamas militant gunmen”? No, they were unarmed police officers, public servants killed not in a “militant training camp” but in the same police station in the middle of Gaza City that had been used by the British, the Israelis and Fatah during their periods of rule there.

This distinction is crucial because while the horrific scenes in Gaza and Israel play themselves out on our television screens, a war of words is being fought that is clouding our understanding of the realities on the ground.

Who or what is Hamas, the movement that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, would like to wipe out as though it were a virus? Why did it win the Palestinian elections and why does it allow rockets to be fired into Israel? The story of Hamas over the past three years reveals how the Israeli, US and UK governments' misunderstanding of this Islamist movement has led us to the brutal and desperate situation that we are in now.

The story begins nearly three years ago when Change and Reform - Hamas's political party - unexpectedly won the first free and fair elections in the Arab world, on a platform of ending endemic corruption and improving the almost non-existent public services in Gaza and the West Bank. Against a divided opposition this ostensibly religious party impressed the predominantly secular community to win with 42 per cent of the vote.

Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them. Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state. It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won't recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world's commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.

In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that. People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.

The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals - doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West. It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people. It has consistently offered a ten-year ceasefire to give breathing space to resolve a conflict that has continued for more than 60 years.

The Bush-Blair response to the Hamas victory in 2006 is the key to today's horror. Instead of accepting the democratically elected Government, they funded an attempt to remove it by force; training and arming groups of Fatah fighters to unseat Hamas militarily and impose a new, unelected government on the Palestinians. Further, 45 Hamas MPs are still being held in Israeli jails.

Six months ago the Israeli Government agreed to an Egyptian- brokered ceasefire with Hamas. In return for a ceasefire, Israel agreed to open the crossing points and allow a free flow of essential supplies in and out of Gaza. The rocket barrages ended but the crossings never fully opened, and the people of Gaza began to starve. This crippling embargo was no reward for peace.

When Westerners ask what is in the mind of Hamas leaders when they order or allow rockets to be fired at Israel they fail to understand the Palestinian position. Two months ago the Israeli Defence Forces broke the ceasefire by entering Gaza and beginning the cycle of killing again. In the Palestinian narrative each round of rocket attacks is a response to Israeli attacks. In the Israeli narrative it is the other way round.

But what does it mean when Mr Barak talks of destroying Hamas? Does it mean killing the 42 per cent of Palestinians who voted for it? Does it mean reoccupying the Gaza strip that Israel withdrew from so painfully three years ago? Or does it mean permanently separating the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, politically and geographically? And for those whose mantra is Israeli security, what sort of threat do the three quarters of a million young people growing up in Gaza with an implacable hatred of those who starve and bomb them pose?

It is said that this conflict is impossible to solve. In fact, it is very simple. The top 1,000 people who run Israel - the politicians, generals and security staff - and the top Palestinian Islamists have never met. Genuine peace will require that these two groups sit down together without preconditions. But the events of the past few days seem to have made this more unlikely than ever. That is the challenge for the new administration in Washington and for its European allies.

William Sieghart is chairman of Forward Thinking, an independent conflict resolution agency

Robert Fisk: Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony

Taken from The Independent, UK, Tuesday, 30 December 2008

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.

But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.

Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world.

Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West.

Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon's bloody "pacification", starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to be tamed now.

Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice – I'm talking about the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and how the Israelis must miss him now) – is silent and their predicament largely unexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. "It's the most terrifying place I've ever been in," Said once said of Gaza. "It's a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa."

Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that "sometimes also civilians pay the price," an argument she would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed. Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel's arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was "pointless to play the numbers game". Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But what of the rest? If the UN's conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.

To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.

As usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will (if it even takes place), appoint an "action committee" to draw up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its corrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them. Which they will. Indeed, within a few months, we'll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having "secret talks" – just as we once did about Israel and the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.

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Another brilliant article by Robert Fisk - I wish there were more journalist like him - telling the truth with accurate reporting.

this is an interesting article extracted from Haaretz, 31/12/2008

Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about
By Barak Ravid

Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces "Cast Lead" operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning.

The disinformation effort, according to defense officials, took Hamas by surprise and served to significantly increase the number of its casualties in the strike. Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well.

Barak gave orders to carry out a comprehensive intelligence-gathering drive which sought to map out Hamas' security infrastructure, along with that of other militant organizations operating in the Strip. This intelligence-gathering effort brought back information about permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps, the homes of senior officials and coordinates for other facilities. The plan of action that was implemented in Operation Cast Lead remained only a blueprint until a month ago, when tensions soared after the IDF carried out an incursion into Gaza during the ceasefire to take out a tunnel which the army said was intended to facilitate an attack by Palestinian militants on IDF troops.

So it was all pre-planned including killing civilians - women and children included!

Israel Threatens To Kill Palestinian PM

Taken from The Guardian, UK, May 22, 2007
By James Orr and agencies

The Israeli government today said its military could attempt to kill the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, to end rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip.

Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy defence minister, declared in a radio interview that "no one" in the Hamas leaderships was "immune from strike".

Sneh issued the threat a day after an Israeli woman was killed by a rocket in the southern town of Sderot, in the first fatality in a Palestinian strike since November.

Israeli air strikes over the last week have killed at least 34 Palestinians, including four Islamic Jihad militants described by the military as a rocket-launching squad.

When asked if Haniyeh was on Israel's hit list, Sneh told Israel Radio: "I'll put it like this - there is no one who is in the circle of commanders and leaders in Hamas who is immune from a strike.

"For what does political Hamas do? It gives the operational approval to those who are doing the fighting."

Senior Israeli officials say some 150 rockets have been fired from Gaza in the current wave of attacks.

The latest Israeli air strikes in Gaza destroyed a metal foundry that officials claimed produced weapons, and a building described as a command centre for Hamas militants.
There were no reports of casualties.

Yesterday, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, criticised by an official inquiry over his handling of last year's costly Lebanon war, was quoted by the YNet news website as telling Sderot residents that there was no immediate solution to the rocket attacks.

He was later booed by local people as he visited the town to express his sadness over the death there.

Palestinian officials said the president, Mahmoud Abbas, planned to travel to Gaza to speak to leaders about maintaining law and order after weeks of fighting between his Fatah faction and Hamas.

The Palestinian foreign minister, Ziad Abu Amr, said the president may discuss the possibility of resuming a Gaza truce with Israel.

Ahmed Youssef, a Hamas official and senior adviser to Haniyeh, renewed a longstanding call for a comprehensive ceasefire with Israel extending to the occupied West Bank.

"The (Palestinian) government is ready to get the factions to accept a ceasefire if Israel stops the series of killings and raids (in the West Bank)," Youssef told reporters.

Israel has said its raids to detain suspected militants in the West Bank are aimed at preventing attacks on Israelis.

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said yesterday that Hamas had exploited periods of calm to "build up its power" and smuggle weapons across the Egyptian border into Gaza.

Freed Hamas Leader Shuns Terror Tactics

Taken from The Sunday Telegraph, 17/03/2007
By Joshua Mitnick in Aroura

A prominent Hamas leader released after 15 years in Israeli jails is urging the Islamic group to abandon bus bombings and start talking to the Jewish state.

The last time Salah Arouri was free, he was a Hamas commander raising money and winning recruits for the violent militant group, on the fringe of the first Palestinian uprising.

As his first five-year sentence was extended by successive Israeli military orders, he became the voice for thousands of Palestinian inmates in talks with the Israeli prison authorities and rubbed shoulders with almost all of Hamas's jailed leaders. He was released unexpectedly last weekend, on the eve of Hamas's unity coalition agreement with Fatah which made it the senior partner in the Palestinian government.

The accord has been criticised by Israel, America and Europe for not recognising the Jewish state or committing to honour peace agreements with it, and for failing to renounce violence.

But Arouri, 40, insisted that Hamas's rise to the forefront of Palestinian politics, triggered by its election victory last year, signalled a shift away from violence in favour of political process and the attempt to establish a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also admitted that the campaign of bomb attacks against Israeli civilians had harmed the Palestinians' cause, and expressed hope that it would end.

"We are harmed if we target civilians," he said, adding that political progress would be easier if Israel would also show restraint. "At the end of the day, the fruit of military actions is political action," he said. "All wars end with truces and negotiations."

Arouri's release was celebrated on the front pages of Palestinian newspapers. He gave a press conference and received visits from leading Palestinian figures spanning the political spectrum.

Yet the more moderate tone he now adopts towards the struggle with Israel, compared with that of some Hamas leaders, suggests a possible advantage for Israel in releasing others among its 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, whose views may have changed during their incarceration - like the former IRA and Protestant paramilitary prisoners who eventually backed political engagement in Northern Ireland.

"The development of the Islamic movement from a militarilyoriented party into a political movement is a desirable outcome," he said. "It is a natural process."

In prison Arouri learned Hebrew and took correspondence courses on Israeli politics through the Hebrew University. As he held court after his release, with male relatives and acquaintances seated around a table spread with coconut chocolate bars, he insisted that Hamas was now resigned to the de facto acceptance of peace accords reached with Israel under the leadership of the rival Fatah faction.

Hamas's leaders have refused to recognise the legitimacy of Israel or to discuss the possibility of negotiations with it, offering instead an extended truce in return for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all territory occupied since 1967.

In the policy guidelines of the unity government, confirmed by the Palestinian parliament yesterday, Hamas would agree only a vague reference to respecting the peace agreements with Israel negotiated under Fatah. Arouri said: "Israel is a reality, but not a legitimate reality."

However, Arouri, who was consulted about the unity deal while in prison, added: "It is political participation, whether it is labelled as respect of agreements, or resolutions, or commitment to summit decisions."

Hamas has demanded the release of more than 1,000 security prisoners like Arouri in return for Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit, abducted last June at the Gaza Strip border. Israel is thought to be in indirect talks with the Islamic militants on a prisoner swap, but a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, denied that Arouri's release was connected. Returning last week to his home village of Aroura, a West Bank hamlet of 3,000, Arouri realised how much he had missed while in jail. Village elders, including his father, had died, while he had never met young relatives such as his 11-year-old niece Aya.

Some are tipping him as a shoo-in on Hamas's parliamentary slate in the next election. But Arouri admitted that more pressing was his imminent wedding to the woman who has been waiting years for his prison release. "All I can see is the near future, and that is my wedding tonight," he said. Was he nervous? "No," he replied with a grin. "In prison, you learn how to keep cool under pressure."