[News] Hamas Speaks

[Anti-Imperialist News]

<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-marzook6-2009jan06,0,7077954.story>http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-marzook6-2009jan06,0,7077954.story

 From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
Hamas speaks
A Hamas official insists that a 'legacy of suffering'
under Israel is what fuels Palestinian resistance.
By Mousa Abu Marzook

January 6, 2009

Reporting from Damascus — While Americans may 
believe that the current violence in Gaza began 
Dec. 27, in fact Palestinians have been dying 
from bombardments for many weeks. On Nov. 4, when 
the Israeli-Palestinian truce was still in effect 
but global attention was turned to the U.S. 
elections, Israel launched a "preemptive" 
airstrike on Gaza, alleging intelligence about an 
imminent operation to capture Israeli soldiers; 
more assaults took place throughout the month.

The truce thus shattered, any incentive by 
Palestinian leaders to enforce the moratorium on 
rocket fire was gone. Any extension of the 
agreement or improvement of its implementation at 
that point would have required Israel to engage 
Hamas, to agree to additional trust-building 
measures and negotiation with our movement -- a 
political impossibility for Israel, with its own elections only weeks away.

Not that the truce had been easy on Palestinians. 
In the six-month period preceding this week's 
bombardment, one Israeli was killed, while dozens 
of Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli 
military and police actions, and numerous others died for want of medical care.

The war on Gaza should not be mistaken for an 
Israeli triumph. Rather, Israel's failure to make 
the truce work, and its inevitable resort to 
bloodshed, demonstrate again that it cannot 
permit a future built on Palestinian political 
self-determination. The truce failed because 
Israel will not open Gaza's borders, because 
Israel would rather be a jailer than a neighbor, 
and because its intransigent leadership 
forestalls Palestinian destiny and will not make peace with history.

This week's war is not an attack on the Izzidin 
al-Qassam units -- our movement's military wing 
-- but is simply aggression targeting the people, 
infrastructure and economic life of Gaza, 
designed to sow terror and loose anarchy; it aims 
to establish new "facts on the ground" -- that 
is, heaps of rubble with bodies trapped beneath 
-- in advance of the coming American administration.

Israel claims loudly that it had no other choice 
this week but to rain death on refugees in camps, 
killing dozens of women and children, while 
Defense Minister Ehud Barak (the once and 
would-be prime minister) -- his eye fixed on 
February elections -- employs mass murder as his 
party's latest vote-getting appeal, an electoral 
strategy fit to shame the most hardened Chicago political operative.

But, of course, options remained available. 
Israel might have relented months ago, for the 
sake of the truce, in its criminal determination 
to starve Gaza, cutting off much of its fuel and 
choking all commerce to a trickle, blocking 
relief organizations from delivering food and 
medicine, and consigning Gaza's citizens to 
famine rations. Only the most cynical observer 
would call this grinding attrition "good faith" 
adherence to the truce. Blockades, after all, are explicitly acts of war.

Palestinians everywhere mark the closing of the 
Bush era with relief; nevertheless, skepticism 
runs high that any justice for our people might 
come from a new president who remained ominously 
silent in the presence of the latest Israeli 
onslaught, and who has aligned himself so 
thoroughly with Israel's interests, so long in 
advance of taking power. Barack Obama's 
helicopter ride two years ago above the Holy Land 
was not unusual in the annals of American 
parliamentarians junketed on "fact finding" trips 
by Israel's lobbyists; yet his fond remarks on 
what he saw -- "houses and streets like ones you 
might find" in any American suburb -- were 
notable for their silence as to any troubling 
sights. Did he miss the security roads and 
checkpoints that riddle the West Bank, or the 
construction of the wall, or the illegal 
settlements? Perhaps his helicopter flew too high.

But now, amid Israel's latest attack on our 
people, as the death toll rises in the hundreds, 
with thousands wounded -- all victims of American 
taxpayers' largesse -- Palestinians wonder how 
Obama will react to the escalating crisis. They 
demand of the next White House a new paradigm of 
respect and accountability, because when 
Palestinians see an F-16 with the Star of David 
painted on its tail, they see America.

Palestinians are understandably guarded about the 
coming administration, noting its appointments 
with trepidation. The soon-to-be secretary of 
State is unforgettable for urging years ago U.S. 
recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's "undivided" 
capital, while the administration's chief of 
staff bears the stain of his father's service in 
the banned terrorist Irgun paramilitary, a 
Zionist group responsible for numerous atrocities.

Renewed calls today for our movement to 
"recognize the right of Israel to exist," in the 
face of murderous onslaught, ring as hollow as 
Israel's continuing claims to be acting in 
"self-defense" as her jets bomb civilians. 
Without debating here the Zionist state's 
fictive, existential "right," which of the many 
Israels, precisely, would the West have us 
recognize? Is it the Israel that militarily 
occupies land belonging to three of its 
neighbors, ignoring international law and scores 
of U.N. resolutions over decades? Is it the 
Israel that illegally settles its citizens on 
other people's land, seizes water sources and 
uproots olive trees? Is it the Israel that in 60 
years has never acknowledged the forced expulsion 
of Palestinians from their farms and villages as 
the foundational act of its statehood and denies 
refugees their right to return?

Through bitter experience, when we hear demands 
for "recognition" of Israel as a precondition to 
dialogue, what we hear is a call for acquiescence 
in its crimes against us, validating the 
injustices that have been wrought in its name.

Our spirit to fight on is the legacy of 
collective suffering: With tens of thousands dead 
or wounded by decades of the "peace process," you 
cannot find a family in Palestine -- Muslim or 
Christian, Hamas, Fatah, PFLP or Islamic Jihad -- 
without a son or daughter killed, injured, jailed 
or tortured, or which does not count itself or 
its kin among the millions of refugees living in U.N. camps.

Hamas is not a handful of leaders. Israel may 
kill all of the current leadership in this round 
of violence, including me, and its organic, 
social infrastructure will not go away. We are, 
simply put, a homegrown national liberation 
resistance movement, with millions of people who 
support our struggle for freedom and justice.

President-elect Obama spoke courageously in his 
campaign for a policy of open dialogue, absent 
preconditions, with those deemed inimical to U.S. 
interests, and we were listening. One former U.S. 
president -- a true peacemaker -- has dared to 
visit with us and hear our side of this struggle, 
while offering us no shortage of criticism. It 
has been a refreshing exchange. Now is the time 
for the next U.S. president to do the same.

No American leader has ever visited a Palestinian 
refugee camp anywhere, much less in Gaza -- a 
startling fact, considering the central role 
America has played in our people's narrative. 
None has dared to look our refugees in their 
faces and experience their suffering directly.

In observance of the storied tradition of Arab 
hospitality to guests, and anticipating that day 
when an American president fulfills his promise 
of change, we extend the invitation now, and we will put the kettle on.

Mousa Abu Marzook is the deputy of the political 
bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.



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