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Palestine | |||||||
![]() Hamas must rebrand and take the wind out of Israel’s and America’s sails
In the five years since I became interested in the Palestinians, only two things of positive note have happened in the occupied territories.
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Thursday, August 19,2010 14:14 | |||||||
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In the five years since I became interested in the Palestinians, only two things of positive note have happened in the occupied territories.
The Palestinians held full and fair elections in 2006 to establish themselves as a democracy – and much good it did them. And in Gaza these amazing people have resolutely survived a vicious land and sea blockade imposed by Israel and aided and abetted by the Western powers as soon as those elections put Hamas into government. They have resisted almost daily air strikes and armed intrusions for four years and courageously withstood the cowardly Israeli blitzkrieg of 20 months ago. And during all that time they have endured unending barbarity and betrayal, which would have brought a lesser nation to its knees. They have come through. I often wonder if the British could have clung on through the London blitz, which my family lived under, if they’d had nothing to fight with and nowhere to run and, in addition, they’d had to contend with Nazi tanks in the streets, thousands of checkpoints, Nazi rifle butts smashing down their front doors, and the foul stench of Nazi stormtroopers in their jackboots ransacking their homes and dragging off family members. Palestinians have been put through that sort of mangle for decades. Death and misery still stalk their daily lives thanks to piss-poor Palestinian leadership and the international community’s moral bankruptcy. When Palestinians elected Hamas, sore losers Fatah set out to cause maximum trouble. The relentless pressures of occupation and bribery succeed in causing internal divisions and self-destruction. When an attempted coup was beaten off there were claims that Hamas "seized control" when it simply acted to enforce its legitimate authority. With Palestine's internal squabbles continuing – even now - Yasser Arafat would be spinning under his mausoleum slab if he could see the depths to which his party has sunk. Meanwhile, Israel's propaganda machine, unchallenged, churns out the lies that Western politicians and Western media feed on and broadcast in order to sustain the racist entity. “Impossible to reach agreement with Israel”Khalid Amayreh, writing in Desert Peace, describes how the Palestinian Authority's President Mahmoud Abbas is being pressed yet again by Washington to resume "seemingly futile" peace talks, while two of Fatah's veteran heavyweights speak out against any more concessions to the Obama administration. Ahmed Qurei, a one-time aide to Arafat and a former prime minister of the PA, argued that, in view of Israel's refusal to give up the spoils of the 1967 war, it was pointless to keep talking just for the sake of it. Nineteen years of talks had achieved nothing. “It seems utterly impossible to reach an agreement with Israel. Therefore, the Palestinian people must seek alternatives... Israel is not willing to end its occupation and allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state.” He didn’t say what the “alternatives” might be, which is a little unhelpful. "We are not trained like the Israelis," I heard one senior PA man say. Exactly. That’s the problem. The PA was offered media skills training some four years ago and turned it down. There may be murky reasons. It has been suggested that the PA, in its game of “footsie” with the US, was made to promise not to embarrass Israel publicly. This has given rise to suspicions that Palestinian ambassadors around the world are gagged by the regime in Ramallah and prevented from crossing swords with their blood-thirsty opponents. Why else would headquarters have left its London office, in particular, so woefully lacking in the skills and resources needed to make a proper impact at this important time? “A house divided cannot stand”Ordinary working people from countries far away, who put their hands in their own pockets and bravely drove with Free-Gaza convoys or sailed with mercy-mission ships, have done far more for the Palestinian cause than the internationally-funded, natty-suited poseurs who have no democratic mandate but strut the international stage achieving – well, achieving what? Meanwhile, it is four-and-a-half years since the fateful day Hamas was elected to power. They may have been surprised and unprepared then, but there is no excuse for squandering such a heaven-sent opportunity now. If, as the Islamic resistance movement has said before, it is prepared to accept the reality of Israel behind the internationally-recognized pre-1967 borders, its much criticized Charter no longer has a place in Hamas diplomacy. Why hasn’t it been consigned to the wastepaper basket of Palestinian history and replaced with something more constructive? Hamas must do (within chosen limits, of course) whatever it takes to abolish its sinister image and make the rest of the world feel comfortable. It must erase its ‘terrorist’ reputation, whether justified or not.
If that’s the case, the authors might consider turning their report into a fully-fledged action plan taking into account what has happened in the last two years and what might happen next if the paralysis continues, and making it a working document for the international community as well as the PA and Hamas to study. Source: Redress Information & Analysis (http://www.redress.cc). Material published on Redress may be republished with full attribution to Redress Information & Analysis (http://www.redress.cc) |
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tags: Hamas / Palestinians / Occupied Territories / Blockade / Fatah / Abbas
Posted in Palestine |
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