[News] Hamas & Arab Public Opinion

[Anti-Imperialist News]

consortiumnews.com
<https://consortiumnews.com/2024/01/03/asad-abukhalil-hamas-arab-public-opinion/>
AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Hamas & Arab Public Opinion
January 3, 2024
------------------------------

*The Palestinian people have been waiting for a moment to shake the earth
underneath the Israeli army. *

Palestinian flag in the West Bank city Ramallah, the de facto
administrative capital of Palestine, 2015. (Chetanya Robinson, Flickr, CC
BY 2.0)

*By **As`ad AbuKhalil*
<https://consortiumnews.com/tag/asad-abukhalil/>*Special to Consortium
News *

*U.*S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, trying to
appear sensitive, claim that Hamas does not speak for the Palestinian
people.  All along they have sought to portray the war on the Palestinian
people as a war on Hamas.

More than 21,000 Palestinian have been murdered and the war ostensibly is
still solely  targeted against Hamas, according to U.S. and Israeli
officials.

(Israel at least admits more than half the dead are not Hamas combatants,
wildly exaggerating the number of Hamas fighters killed in order to
camouflage genocide. Israel brags it has killed “only” over 10,000
Palestinian civilians).

The Biden administration made its preference clear: they want the Fatah
movement (after its “revitalization” or “revamping”) to rule over Gaza (on
behalf of Israel).

But the Palestinian Authority is widely hated and despised by the
Palestinian people and its leaders are rightly perceived as thugs,
criminals, embezzlers and collaborators with Israel.

The Palestinian Authority can only stay in power by force of arms, just
like repressive Arab regimes. It is for good reason that Fatah has refused
to hold any election since Hamas won in 2006. Nor does the U.S., which used
to press the Palestinians to hold elections, want to allow elections to
take place because it is clear that the Fatah gang would be ousted in a
vote.

*Repressive Palestinian Authority  *

The Palestinian Authority’s Presidential Palace in Bethlehem, 2017. (White
House, Flickr, Shealah Craighead)

The rule of the PA is now like any Arab authoritarian government and the
repressive army of thugs is run by U.S. intelligence. Hamas has run Gaza
far less repressively than Fatah ran the West Bank, and Hamas only went
after who they found to be Israeli collaborators and spies.

The competition between Hamas and Fatah was long settled.  Hamas has been
favored by the Palestinians for many years, and for many reasons.

Hamas is not corrupt while Fatah is the personification of corruption;
Hamas fights Israel, while Fatah collaborates with Israel; Hamas leaders
live among the people, while Fatah leaders live in well-protected mansions;
Hamas leaders live a modest life, while Fatah enjoy extravagant
lifestyles.  Furthermore, Fatah is rightly blamed for the failed and
miserable path of the Oslo accords, which Hamas never supported.

But Hamas is now undergoing a second rebirth.  One military operation can
make a difference in the history of Palestinian national struggle for
independence.

The Karamah battle
<https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/165/battle-al-karama-1968> of 1968
(in which Yasser Arafat and Fatah wildly exaggerated their exploits)
propelled the Fatah movement into the position of preeminent leadership
within the PLO.  Hani Hassan (one of the Fatah leaders) tells how thousands
of Palestinians flocked to join the movement after Karamah.

But the Hamas operation (“The Deluge of Aqsa”) of Oct. 7, will be more
significant than Karamah in Palestinian historical memory, and indeed in
Arab historical memory.

Regardless of Western condemnations and recriminations — or maybe partly
because of them — Arabs and Muslims worldwide were impressed with the
daring operation and the ability of Hamas fighters to take the Israeli army
by surprise.

Iranians celebrate the Al Aqsa Flood attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
(Ahamadreza Madah, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

The details of what happened on that night remain murky and Israel is very
secretive about what transpired to suppress news of its complicity
<https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/>
in the killing of Israelis.  The nature of the attacks on civilians are
still being debated and many Arabs disbelieve Israeli narratives and blame
the Israeli army for the death and destruction that ensued.

Hamas made it clear that it did not engage in the atrocities or sexual
assaults that Israel claimed happened on that day, and there is absolutely
nothing in Hamas history to corroborate Israeli claims of sexual assaults.

The Palestinian people have been waiting for a moment to shake the earth
underneath the Israeli army.  The Oslo process and the creation of a
collaborationist regime in Ramallah (which serves as an appendage of the
Israeli occupation and takes its orders from regional U.S. intelligence
officials), smashed the hopes of masses.

Those who dreamt for decades about the liberation of Palestine experienced
even worse stages of the occupation, and the cruel siege of Gaza only got
tighter over time.

Palestinians in the West Bank, for the first time, had to deal with fellow
Palestinians who were put in charge of them to prevent them from engaging
in resistance or even criticizing the collaborators.

A Palestinian confronts a group of charging Israeli soldiers in Bilin in
the occupied West Bank in 2010. (Edo Medicks, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

There was an expectation that something would happen to break the hold of
the occupation and the PA over the lives of Palestinians.  And in Gaza, the
miserable life that Israel forced on the Palestinians could not last
forever.

Hamas broke out of the prison, and there was unanimous support for its
action in Palestinian and Arab public opinion. (For some reason, Western
media assume that Western opinions influence people around the world. They
discovered in the Ukraine war that the “world” is not the West).

Moreover, Arab governments — under the leadership of Saudi Arabia and the
UAE — have all but abandoned the Palestinian cause. They have concluded
that normalization with Israel is a requirement to receive the most
advanced weapons from the U.S. government, and that it is a great guarantor
of American indulgence of human rights abuses.

Sept. 15, 2020: From left: UAE’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullah bin
Zayed Al Nahyani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bahrain’s
Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zay and  U.S.
President Donald Trump during the signing ceremony for the Abraham
Accords. (White
House, Joyce N. Boghosian)

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat experienced that first hand and for that, in the months
preceding his assassination, went on a rampage of repression, crackdowns
and persecution of dissidents.  The West supported him all the way, as it
supports present-day despots, provided they don’t bother Israel and its
occupation.

The Palestinians did not pin their hopes on Arab governments, but the level
of open Gulf hostility toward the Palestinians killed any chance that Arab
governments would help recover Arab lands from Israel.  Far from it, the
Saudi regime media embarked on a campaign of demonizing Palestinians,
especially Hamas.

In the wake of the Deluge of Aqsa, admiration for Hamas and for its
perceived bravery and daring spread among the Arab people. The videos of
Abu `Ubayda (the military spokesperson of the military wing of Hamas) were
a huge hit, and were widely circulated in traditional Arab and social
media.

The image of `Ubayda was painted on walls and children dressed like him,
covering their faces with the traditional Palestinian kufiyyahs.

Poster of Hamas’ military spokesman Abu `Ubayda at the Istanbul city wall,
Nov. 10, 2023. (Mahmoud al-turki, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)

The quality of Hamas military propaganda improved greatly and people were
glued to their screens in anticipation of the next pronouncement.  The tone
of defiance in Hamas statements impressed many in the Arab world and they
contrasted that with the abysmal political and military performance of the
PLO.

Three months into the fighting, and the mighty Israeli army could not score
a notable military victory and is still unable to reach to the top command
of Hamas (yet, it bragged about capturing a shoe of Hamas leader, Yihya
Sinwar and hitting an apartment that it claimed was once used as a
hideout). [On Tuesday, Israel killed
<https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/02/middleeast/beirut-lebanon-hamas-official-killed-intl/index.html>
Saleh Al-Arouri, deputy head of the political bureau of Hamas, in a drone
attack in Beirut, Lebanon.]

In 1982, the Israeli army crossed the entire South Lebanon region into the
outskirts of Beirut in a matter of hours, despite the presence of thousands
of fighters from the PLO and the Lebanese National Movement.

*New Quality of Resistance*

Arab public opinion has taken notice that the new resistance movements, in
Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen are of a different quality from those of the
 past. That the personalities of the new leaders of the resistance are
fierce and even ruthless in comparison to PLO leaders who did not hold up
well under pressure (even Arafat who handled pressure better than many of
his colleagues, experienced bouts of doubt and exhibited severe temper
tantrums during the siege of Beirut, according to the account of the then
Lebanese prime minister, Sa’eb Salam, in his recently posthumously released
memoirs).

The rise of Hamas will continue, and it will dominate the Palestinian
political scene for many years to come.  The name of Hamas is heard in all
the chants of Arab demonstrators and the names of its leaders can be
recognized in street graffiti.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia meanwhile want to promote the Palestinian
Authority as the alternative (the UAE wants to replace Mahmoud Abbas with
the thuggish, Muhammad Dahlan, a tool of Muhammad Bin Zayid).

The Palestinian political spectrum is likely to shift after the dust
settles in Gaza.

It is likely that those Fatah officials who built their careers on
corruption and fealty toward the Israeli army will be ostracized or even
assassinated.  The end of the Gaza war will usher in a phase of internecine
Palestinian war, where collaborators will be targeted (Yahya Sinwar, the
political leader of Hamas, has a history of chasing and punishing Israeli
collaborators and infiltrators).

The Palestinian Authority is unlikely to spread into Gaza, despite the
wishes of the Biden-Blinken team.  Hamas, in the wake of Gaza, will be more
emboldened and the plan (by the U.S. and Israel) to eliminate Hamas will
ensure that it will remain the backbone of the Palestinian liberation
movement.

Paradoxically, while Israel and the U.S. insisted that Hamas will be
eliminated, the genocidal war in Gaza and the stiff resistance by Hamas has
guaranteed it a prominent place of the movement in Palestinian and Arab
public opinion.  Hamas will not be dislodged no matter how much brutal
force Israel employs.

*As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at
California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical
Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on
Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the
popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as **@asadabukhalil*
<https://twitter.com/search?q=%40asadabukhalil&src=typd>

*The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of **Consortium News.*
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