[A-List] Hamas Victory: Chickens Coming Home To Roost

["tony black" <tal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\01\28\story_28-1-2006_pg3_2


Daily Times (Pakistan)
January 28, 2007


Victory of Hamas: chickens come home to roost
Farish A Noor


Hamas’ spectacular victory at the polls has caught
many Palestine watchers by surprise. It should not
have been a surprise at all.

The resounding victory — it won 76 seats compared to
Fatah’s 43 — has given Hamas an outright majority in
the parliament. The high turnout (77 percent) also
indicates that the victory is no fluke. It is indeed a
decisive indictment of Fatah and other moderate
Palestinian leaders to keep the Palestinian pact going
and to persuasively argue Palestine’s case on the
international stage.

All eyes are now on the Hamas leadership to see
whether it can and does opt for the democratic
constitutional path to politics and governance or uses
the overwhelming mandate to interpret its victory as a
resounding sanction for continued violence.

Its leaders like Mahmoud Zahar have insisted that
Hamas will retain its original objective of fighting
for the total freedom of Palestine and all
Palestinians. To add to the worries of the
powers-that-be in Washington and Israel, they have
dismissed the idea of asking the movement’s militias
to stand down.

It is too early, however, to tell if this is all
bluster and rhetoric or a prelude to the eventual
softening up of Hamas. After all, if Hamas is about to
enter the corridors of power its leaders — like
politicians elsewhere — will sooner rather than later
learn that smart business suits and silk ties do not
sit well with Kalashnikovs and grenades. Hamas has
only to look at another former militia movement that
has made the successful transition to constitutional
politics: Hizbullah.

Hizbullah, which commands the support of hundreds of
thousands of Shias in the region, began as a militant
movement that was even more dogmatic and doctrinaire
in its politics and praxis. It refused to compromise
and work with other movements such as the Mujahideen
in Afghanistan that it argued were in the pay of
Washington. For years it supported only the most
kosher of resistance movements, such as the IRA, and
the liberation movements in North Africa, Latin and
Central America that it regarded as being firm in
their commitment to anti-imperialism.

Hamas, on the other hand, has always been seen as more
political in form and content, to the point that it
has been accused of being aided (indirectly) by
Israeli agents who were keen to tarnish the image of
the once-popular and credible PLO under the late
Yasser Arafat.

This tangled history makes it all the more problematic
to determine where Hamas will go next. Caught up in
the internecine political labyrinth of Palestinian
politics, Hamas is as much a turf-war fighter as it is
a liberation movement. Its support base comes mainly
from disenfranchised Palestinian Muslims disillusioned
with the secular nationalist ideology and rhetoric of
the PLO.

While the PLO was a broad-based movement that fought
for the liberation of Palestine and all Palestinians —
regardless of religious, ethnic or clan background,
Hamas is blatantly and unashamedly exclusive. Its
rhetoric has been shaped by the religious vocabulary
of absolutes and a monochromatic view of the world
that divides people between Good and Evil, friends and
enemies. It is the sort of language President Bush Jr
should be more than familiar with.

Hamas’ coming to power therefore reads as a case of
the militant chickens coming home to roost. For
decades, the Israeli government, with the backing of
the USA, has sought to discredit the more inclusive
and secular nationalist movement led by the PLO. The
PLO’s left-leaning nationalist agenda was seen as too
inclusive and capable of uniting Palestinians of
different religious and ethnic backgrounds, and its
ultimate success in the 1970s of gaining global
recognition — up to the level of the United Nations —
made it seem even more dangerous for Israeli
politicians bent on containing and defeating the
Palestinian movement once and for all.

The emergence of Hamas was, ironically, a boon of
sorts for Israel. Here was a Palestinian movement that
could easily be demonised and marginalised thanks to
its fiery rhetoric, replete as it was with talk of
hellfire and damnation for the unbelievers. Cast as a
demonic fundamentalist threat, Hamas was presented as
a global terrorist bogeyman long before wannabes like
Osama Bin Laden were even on the scene.

But Hamas’ enemies failed to appreciate a vital
factor: movements like Hamas thrive on demonisation
and stigma. The more the leaders and members of Hamas
were targeted, arrested and assassinated, the grander
its hall of martyrs and heroes grew.

While the PLO was seen as growing increasingly
moderate, Hamas claimed the glory of being one of the
organisations most hated and feared by Israel, ending
up on the black list of every developed industrialised
nation. This gave Hamas an aura of power and influence
it initially lacked. Israel’s demonisation of Hamas
was its best publicity campaign.

Now that the votes have been counted and it is clear
that Hamas is about to step into the murky political
arena of Palestinian politics for the first time, it
remains to be seen whether its leaders can retain the
edge and reputation of sacrifice and martyrdom that
has been their political and cultural capital for so
long.

Hamas, like many other movements that have remained
outside politics, thus far has developed the image of
a movement untainted by the dirt and grime of
realpolitik. But governance is a dirty job. It soils
reputations as fast as it adds to the waistline: just
ask the failed and discredited leaders of Fatah.

Should Hamas play the game of constitutional politics
by the rules, it will be only the latest Islamist
militant movement that has undergone the discursive
change to enter the world of politics. This may leave
a vacuum that may later be filled in by yet another
marginal group that claims the authenticity of being
‘outside the system’ and thus cleaner, purer and
holier. Hamas will therefore have to find the means to
both domesticate itself and retain the support of its
impatient constituents and supporters. This will
hardly be an easy task.

But for now at least, while the AK-47s are being shot
skywards in joy rather than anger, the neo-cons of
Washington and the elites of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
can sit back and pause for a second: Hamas’s victory
is not novel. Indeed it is the perfectly logical
consequence of a sustained policy of oppression,
dehumanisation and subjugation of a people. What did
they expect, save an angry chicken coming home to
roost?

Dr Farish A Noor is a Malaysian political scientist
and human rights activist, based at the Zentrum
Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin



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