Re: [Marxism] A SETBACK FOR THE BUSH DOCTRINE IN GAZA

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am glad that the US-backed Dahlan units, which were the US and Israeli
backed "white hope" candidates to terrorize a "Palestinian state" were
defeated.  This highlights the fact that the Palestinian people have still
not been crushed, and still represent one of the insuperable obstacles to
the Israeli plans, supported by the US, for Palestine and the US plans,
supported by Israel, for the whole region.

 

It reflects also the gigantic price that Washington will pay for an attack
on Iran.

 

But I think the Hamas decision to go beyond crushing Dahlan to establishing,
to all intents and purposes, a Hamas regime across all of Gaza is not
positive, and I do not support it.

 

What we must not forget is that what the Palestinian people need above all
is a genuine united front against Israeli.  The Hamas move to effectively
drive Fatah out of Gaza does not advance that requirement.

 

The answer is not the replacement of Fatah leadership by Hamas leadership
but the recreation of a genuine united front.In a sense, this means getting
back to some of the perspectives of the young, fighting nationalist Arafat,
but in a way that takes account of some of the changed conditions.

 

Basically, a Hamas regime in Gaza will be seized on by Washington and Israel
to justify more attacks, isolation, and starvation of the people of Gaza.
And it will push Abbas and the rest of the Fatah leadership - who are not
the same as 

Dahlan and continue to have a real base in Palestine - into even greater
dependence on imperialism and its Israeli client and partner.

 

Hamas, like Fatah today with Dahlan's group, which has now suffered a big
defeat, in the furthest position in subordination to imperialism and Israel,
places its own sectarian and basically bourgeois interests (not just
religiously, but politically) ahead of the Palestinians increasingly
desperate need for unity against their oppressors in Israel and in
Washington.

 

I just want to make one comment on the article that Louis submitted from
MRZine giving three cheers for "secular" Izmir in Turkey. I found this
Turkish "leftist" snobbery toward the Islamic people, especially in the
countryside genuinely sickening, as well as the portrayal of the
secular-Islamist split as right-left with the Islamists as the right and the
"seculars" as the left.  I am not sure why, in today's world,  worship of
Ataturk is so superior to worship of Allah or, for that matter, Khomeini.

 

Fundamentally, Ataturk was the Khomeini of Turkey, a certain kind of
bourgeois revolutionary, seeking to accomplish a bourgeois transformation
and modernization of a backward country.  And in some ways, his repressive
version of  "secularism"  is no more progressive, and has proven to be just
as powerful a weapon for dividing and disorienting sections of the masses,
as Khomeini's Islamism. In Ataturk's case, it served well for keeping the
rural Islamic population effectively out of politics, a policy which the
author appears to support but has been disrupted, she complains, by the flow
of barbaric backward peasants into the cities as a result of
"neoliberalism", i.e., capitalism.

 

Well, Islamism is not the answer for Turkey, I agree.  But the secularism of
Ataturk is not the answer either.  And neither is this author's snobbish
fear of the Turkish peasantry's flow into political life.  That kind  of
bourgeois antidemocratic secularism is dead and deserves to die. And the
kind of  "left" that bases itself on that is part of a past that has no
future.

Fred Feldman

 

 

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