[News] The question of Hamas and the Left

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/05/the-question-of-hamas-and-the-left/>
The question of Hamas and the Left
Abdaljawad Omar
May 31, 2024
------------------------------
[image: image.png]

Recently, a rash of articles has surfaced criticizing the Western left for
“celebrating” Hamas. Most of these critiques say that reducing support for
Palestinian resistance to supporting Hamas is a disservice to Palestinians
because Palestinians represent a multiplicity of voices with different
political dispositions. Instead, these arguments call on the Western left
to reckon with the complexity and diversity of Palestinian politics.

Bashir Abu Menneh’s article in *Jacobin*, “The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t
a Monolith
<https://jacobin.com/2024/04/gaza-left-hamas-occupation-war-solidarity>,”
chastises what he claims is the left’s celebration of a “socially
regressive” movement such as Hamas in an article that reads more like a
hidden critique of armed resistance itself than of Hamas. Matan Kaminer
penned a response
<https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/on-palestinian-resistance-and-global-solidarity>
to an article by Andreas Malm
<https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth>,
both published on the Verso blog, stating that the global “solidarity
movement must engage with the diversity of Palestinian politics,” in which
he takes issue with “counter-systemic” forces like Hamas that lack a
leftist agenda. In *Boston Review*, Ayça Çubukçu responded to
<https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/many-speak-for-palestine/> Jodi
Dean’s article, “Palestine speaks for everyone
<https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/palestine-speaks-for-everyone?fbclid=IwAR1qunUBtYUZ5HfyEsc97No-IQv1vqLOuklGEspedYUI7FVglERGle0Dh10>,”
due to Dean’s suggestion that the global solidarity movement should stand
alongside the organized left in Palestine in support of the current Hamas
leadership for the struggle for liberation.

Of course, giving attention to Palestinian politics, its history, and its
current conditions and multiplicity is imperative. Indeed, despite the
relatively small number of Palestinians, and despite the fact that
Palestine between the river and the sea is a small geography fraught with
highly contested terrain, one can find a myriad of Palestinians who echo
any number of fantasies or ideologies about the conflict — including
Palestinians who readily affirm Zionist ideology.

But funnily enough, this is what Western leftist critics of Hamas get
wrong. They fail to understand that the diversity in Palestinian society
and politics also translates into diverging attitudes toward resistance to
colonialism. While they call for a nuanced understanding of Palestinian
politics, that nuance doesn’t extend to an understanding of the dynamics
and forces that both motivate and shy away from (or actively oppose)
anticolonial resistance.

This ignorance of Palestinian politics is almost willful. It harbors a
secret hostility to resistance — especially armed resistance — but claims
to oppose Hamas on entirely different, perhaps ideological, grounds. Yet to
truly understand intra-Palestinian dynamics and unpack the “monolith,” we
have to actually understand how Palestinian political forces have evolved
with respect to the very idea of resistance in the first place.
*Fragmented geography, fragmented politics*

Palestinians are subjected to various divisions meticulously crafted by
Israel. In fact, it would be highly surprising if Palestinians were unified
when their everyday lives are so radically different — dispersed across the
globe and subjected to various governmentalities and modalities of Israeli
control. These divisions are not only geographic but also entail different
levels of privilege and exclusion imposed by the colonial state. I speak of
Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, the territories of 1948, and the diaspora.

Moreover, this radical fragmentation has led many Palestinians to begin
questioning the very notion of our unity as a people, pondering whether the
discrepancy in the capacity of Palestinians to resist is a sign of the
weight of geographic divisions and various colonial governmentalities after
75 years.

The genocidal war in Gaza exposed the simple fact that Palestinians in
their different localities — aside from Gaza — have been incapable of
accumulating power, devising new tactics, forging new organizations, or
building a new intellectual and material edifice for confronting the
challenge that settler colonialism presents to Palestinian people
everywhere. Nothing clarifies this failure more than the paralytic fear
that has gripped Palestinian society outside Gaza and outside some of the
more advanced articulations of the struggle and new modes of resistance
that have risen in the past decade, including the primacy of tactics
like atomized
acts of resistance
<https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/west-bank-dispatch-martyrs-lone-wolves-and-underground-lions/>
in the West Bank and ‘48 Palestine and the proliferation of armed
self-defense zones
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/07/jenin-the-fight-over-the-capacity-to-resist/>
in the northern West Bank.

This multiplicity is not merely a function of the variegated political
ideologies amongst Palestinians that fall under different modes of
structural control. Rather, it erupts within the very fabric of the
individual Palestinian psyche. An intense internal dialogue unfolds where
Palestinians are torn between the radical potentiality of resistance and
their visceral dread of the relentless Israeli military juggernaut.
Consider the paradox between the desire for liberation and the gnawing fear
that any disturbance of everyday life — even one caused by resistance —
could unravel the fragile semblance of normalcy. This is the true site of
ideological struggle, not only in the public sphere but at the level of the
individual, where the sublime possibility of freedom confronts the
traumatic reality of potential annihilation by a superior military machine.

Each force, with its own demands, pulls the Palestinians towards an array
of existential choices — revolution or resignation, emigration or
steadfastness, symbolic effacement or the full affirmation of identity
through acts of sacrifice. This silent internal dialogue manifests itself
in diverse political articulations — in the oscillation between the stance
of the intellectual and martyr Bassel Al-Araj, who declared that
“resistance always has efficacy in time,” and the more cynical resignation
implied by positions like those of Mahmoud Abbas, which proclaim “long live
resistance, but it is already dead and should be killed wherever it
reappears!”

But let’s not be fooled. The ideological machine tied to the Palestinian
Authority that claims unmediated access to “bare reality” operates
precisely by denying its own ideology. They boast of seeing the world free
from ideological blinders, asserting that their clarity necessitates
forging an authoritarian political system that views resistance to
colonialism as a “farce” and cooperation with the colonizer as a “sacred”
imperative. This realist-pragmatic stance ostensibly leads Palestinians
toward a kind of negation — a symbolic, political, and material
self-effacement, yet cunningly masking this erasure through pretenses of
political representation and establishing a state.

Meanwhile, the ruling class, in its lust for continuity and control,
perpetuates a “political realism” that conveniently overlooks its own class
bias and social prejudices. A narrow elite from among the colonized
profits. The ultimate aim of this pragmatism is to create a reality in
which the very notion of resistance is lost in the annals of a compromised
reality. But it is nothing more than sophisticated rhetoric justifying
security and economic alliance with a settler colonial regime that replaces
the colonized with the colonizers.

The result is a continuum in Palestinian politics with varying dispositions
towards resistance. One could imagine figures like Mahmoud Abbas and
Mansour Abbas on one end of the spectrum, and political formations like
Islamic Jihad and Hamas on the other, with hardly any serious political
force in the middle.

What all this tells us is that the main dividing line between Palestinian
political factions isn’t over the schism between secularism and Islamism,
the struggle over divergent socio-economic agendas, or the merits of a
particular tactic in service of liberation. All those are important issues
in their own right, but what is actually causing a rift in the Palestinian
political arena is the chasm between a politics of raw defiance, and a
politics of accommodation, cooperation, and collaboration.

Ultimately, the Western left’s quixotic search for a secular progressive
alternative to Hamas overlooks a simple fact: at this particular historical
juncture, the political forces that are still holding onto and leading a
resistance agenda are not of the secular left.

None of this is by accident. Israel and its allies meticulously cultivate
and mold a Palestinian leadership that aligns with their colonial
ambitions, while at the same time arresting, intimidating, and
assassinating alternatives.

This also isn’t unusual for anticolonial movements, and being a member of
the colonized does not automatically confer upon you fidelity to the
anticolonial effort. In Palestine, a century of colonialism has created
many distortions in the Palestinian body politic, transforming the
once-revolutionary PLO into a Vichy-like regime that kills the nation in
the name of the nation. Other Palestinians have embraced new affinities and
identities, including identifying with Israel (to the extent that it’s
possible to identify with an entity whose main feature is Jewish
supremacism). History has taught us that there are instances where people
will also fight for their servitude, and one need not look beyond figures
like Joseph Haddad and Mosab Hassan Yousef to understand what that means.

Yet, there’s a deeper struggle at play: Palestinians have long battled not
merely for the recognition of their plight but fundamentally for the world
to acknowledge the imperative to resist. This necessity to resist and the
right to such resistance becomes even more critical in a global context
where the narrative of Palestinian resistance is manipulated — cynically
used to justify and legitimize Israel’s century-long assault on Palestinian
existence and agency. It’s a perverse scenario where the act of resistance,
essential for survival and the possibility for justice, is twisted into a
justification for the oppression it seeks to overcome.

Hamas is an easy scarecrow here. It is an Islamist political group that
both centers a politics of defiance and pushes a social agenda that seeks
to reconstitute the Palestinian subject. Critics of resistance can easily
point to shortcomings in Hamas’s socioeconomic outlook or deride its
“socially regressive” agenda. But they aren’t really interested in
undermining Hamas’s social agenda. In truth, they want to undermine or
distance themselves from the form of resistance that Hamas chose to pursue.
But many of Hamas’s critics offer nothing in their alliance system, in
their forms of struggle, or even in their intellectual output that could
match its work to accumulate power in the Gaza Strip and its opening of a
strategic pandora’s box that has overflowed and deformed the colonial
regime, providing a historical moment that includes among its many
possibilities the potential for Palestinian liberation.
*The politics of ‘**Muzawada’*

“*Muzawada*” is a term in the Arab political lexicon that could crudely be
translated to “political one-upmanship.” It has a longstanding tradition of
being wielded as a tool of disparagement among political rivals, and in
practice, its primary function has been to defame and demoralize one’s
political competitor by exposing their hypocrisy, unrealistic discourse, or
their inability to translate rhetoric into action. The Syrian Marxist
intellectual Elias Murkus gave the example of how Syrian Baathists employed
*muzawada* to undermine Jamal Abdul Nasser in the 1960s, pointing out the
chasm between his rhetoric and his actions regarding the liberation of
Palestine. But Murkus notes that this disparagement did not so much come
from a genuine concern for Palestinian liberation as it did originate in
the desire to erode Nasser’s charismatic influence within Syria and Lebanon.

In this context, it is not surprising that Palestine historically emerges
as the prime theater for such political “outbidding” or “one-upmanship” in
the Arab political landscape. Crucially, *muzawada* is not confined to
rhetorical jousting, even though that is how it was historically employed.
In Palestine, *muzawada* evolved from rhetorical outbidding to “actualized
outbidding” in the 1990s, where political factions competed with one
another through the ability to create and actualize resistance.

These dual manifestations — rhetorical and actualized *muzawada*— are
pivotal for understanding internal Palestinian political rivalries. During
the Second Intifada, the emergence of the figure of the “*istishhadi*” was
one such form of actualized one-upping, as it transcended the traditional “
*fida’i.*” The *fida’i *was a figure of self-sacrifice who would engage the
enemy but might return to his base, whereas the *istishadi *embodied the
self-sacrifice of the fighter who did not plan to return to base, but kills
and gets killed, thereby becoming a martyr.

The emergence of this new counter-hegemonic force at the turn of the
century, largely at the initiative of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, saw the
reformulation of resistance through the creation of new oppositional
modalities and a new figure of sacrifice for resistance.

In the Second Intifada, “one-upping” meant outdoing one’s political rival
through actualized resistance operations. This form of intra-competition
saw the labor of resistance as the means of directing internal political
grievances outwardly toward the colonizer. Palestinian factions were
unified in the direction of their political actions but also competed to
outdo their rivals through the actualization of different acts of
resistance.

Yet the current nature of the disunity in Palestine is not a form of
outbidding similar to the Second Intifada and is not based on the idea of
outdoing one’s internal rival. Rather, it is a disunity that emerged once
the PA elevated cooperation with Israel to the “sacred” and saw the
continuation of resistance as a farce. On the other end of this disunity,
Hamas and Islamic Jihad emerged as the most proactive forces leading
organized forms of resistance. The division took on geographic,
ideological, and political forms.

In this form of outbidding, one side of the political equation employed
Israel’s militaristic response to resistance to claim: “See? This is what
happens when you resist!” It suspends the search for a politics of
defiance, and in fact argues for political paralysis, stasis, and
accommodation of Israel at the expense of the long-term ability of
Palestinians to resist.

Within this telos, three leftist Palestinian responses have emerged. The
first is a left that weds itself to the Palestinian Authority and comprador
class on the basis of “secularism” and as a result of its organizational
weakness — for example, the Palestinian People’s Party (formerly the
Communist Party). Another left positions itself with Islamist forces on the
level of shared resistance to anti-colonialism, but distances itself on the
level of social agenda, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP). A third left equates between Hamas and the Palestinian
Authority in the hopes of being seen as an alternative to both, seemingly
claiming that “they are both equally bad,” yet remaining incapable of
organizing a social or political alternative, such as the Democratic Front
for the Liberation of Palestine.

The notion of being “socially regressive” or “socially progressive” in the
current political landscape of Palestine is, to say the least, exceedingly
complex. How, for instance, can we reconcile leftist parties that support
forms of social regression and political authoritarianism in the West Bank
like the current disposition of the remnants of the Communist Party? How do
we even define “social regression” within the context of an advancing
settler colonialism that seeks to erase an entire society? Isn’t resistance
to that colonialism in and of itself a progressive act that will empower
the dispossessed? And isn’t collaboration itself a socially regressive
force because it subordinates the colonized? Or is the proclaimed ideology
of those who resist more important?

Where do we start articulating a socially progressive agenda in concrete
situations like the West Bank, where the PA uses a mix of authoritarian
practices, insists on forms of banking-education, employs traditional
social structures such as families and clans, and sees in the internal foe
the ultimate enemy, creating the condition for an ongoing civil war and
division as Palestinians also attempt to fight back against colonial
encroachment and effacement. On a strictly “Western” plane, there is no
totally or fully progressive force in Palestine, but only progressive
elements or dispositions — even within political formations that are
dismissed as regressive.
*Hidden critique of armed resistance*

In these successive articles, we encounter a perplexing contortion that
seeks to undermine support for resistance, particularly armed resistance.
There’s a growing recognition among many in the “West” of the necessity and
efficacy of resistance, or at least that after decades of negligence in
explaining its sources and necessity, one could start the process of
grappling with its reality. This includes engaging with it without rendering
it profane
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/hopeful-pathologies-in-the-war-for-palestine-a-reply-to-adam-shatz/>.
This shift in the Western left does not mean that it has suddenly embraced
Islamism, but it recognizes the nature of the condition in which
Palestinians are ensnared — a ferocious settler colony that refuses to
speak a political language with those it renders abject, that relies on
excessive violence and diplomatic and legal impunity, and which employs a
complex system of architectural, technological, and indirect forms of
control.

But more troublingly, the persistence and evolution of armed resistance
defy some of the Palestinian intelligentsia’s operative theories,
interests, and political dispositions, including the anxiety of a true
break in the colonial regime that permits the work of decolonization to
commence.

These are the theories that have persisted for decades, utilizing a widely
accepted talking point that Palestinians should refrain from armed
resistance in order to cultivate a favorable image in the West, and on the
global stage more broadly.

The prevailing notion is that armed resistance is fundamentally
incompatible with garnering sympathy for the Palestinian cause. They
fetishize a particular reading of the First Intifada as an exemplary model
of a largely nonviolent and widespread popular revolt capable of conjuring
support from the masses, civil society, and international legal bodies,
thus appealing to the liberal sensibilities of mainstream Western
societies.

Of course, such a reading also hides the psychic and ideological onslaught
that Palestinians faced in the wake of the Second Intifada, which attempted
to sear into Palestinian consciousness
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/the-palestine-walid-saw-from-the-little-prison-to-the-big-prison/>
the notion that resistance is futile, that armed resistance will only bring
about havoc, and that Palestinians cannot and should not confront Israel
militarily due to the asymmetry in power. However, much like the
Palestinian Authority, a defiant alternative built around “popular
resistance” or “peaceful popular resistance” was only used as an
ideological and psychic tool to sustain what Abu Mazen and the PA called
“sacred security cooperation.” Very few attempts to organize popular
resistance were conceived, and in many instances, they were also fought by
the PA and its security system and were met with severe violence in both
Gaza
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/08/palestinians-rebut-israeli-hysteria-over-princeton-course-teaching-book-on-israels-policy-to-maim/>
and the West Bank.

The notion that the Western left has suddenly become cheerleaders for Hamas
is profoundly disingenuous. Jodi Dean did not celebrate Hamas, but perhaps
she found something exhilarating in the act of defiance — the march to
break the colonial regime that encircles Gaza. She aligned herself with
part of the Palestinian left that engages in resistance. Most Palestinians
shared Dean’s sentiment on that particular day, including many who later
grew disillusioned or revised their views, either out of ethical
considerations or due to Israel’s carpet-bombing campaign and genocidal
war, deeming some to conclude that “it wasn’t worth it.”

Yes, there are many voices that detest Hamas in Gaza, the West Bank, and
across the Palestinian polity — for a myriad of reasons. Among them are
many on the Palestinian “left” who use their ideological differences and
the Islamist-secular divide as a cover for their rejection of “resistance”
altogether. As Bassel Al-Araj said, if the left in Palestine wants to
compete with Islamists, they should compete in resistance. *Muzawada*
through action.

Hamas, at the end of the day, is the contemporary articulation of a long
history of resistance that folded within it the peasants of pre-Nakba
Palestine, Palestinian revolutionaries in exile during the early years of
the PLO, and the Islamists who took the wide-scale initiative in the 80s
and beyond.

Many among the secular left have grown pale, rejecting Hamas’s resistance
not out of a conviction of its inevitable failure, but rather due to a
deep-seated anxiety about its potential success.

This isn’t merely an ethical opposition to the use of violence; it’s a fear
that the Islamists might actually prove to be more effective than their
own, now largely melancholic and demobilized, political stance. Meanwhile,
certain factions within the Palestinian elite gaze upon Israel as a beacon
of modernity, and are driven by a profound fear of their own perceived
“regressive” society — a telling indication of their ideological
dispositions, ensnared in the lure of the Other and terrified of the
emancipatory potential of the Palestinian masses.

To have political and ideological differences with Hamas and tactical
disagreements, including ethical problems with its targeting or its
war-making abilities, is one thing. But to undermine the minimum level of
understanding of why Palestinians, in all their ideological formations and
historical articulations, see resistance in all its armed and unarmed forms
as a necessity, is another. In fact, it is nothing short of brash,
especially in an environment that fires professors for voicing any emotion
or symbolism of support for Palestinian resistance.

The world can indeed recognize the necessity of resistance and the efforts
of individuals to fight and reclaim what they’ve lost. To do so moves
beyond the concept of victimhood to which many liberals in Palestine and
some within the left want us to confine our struggle — a form of
Palestinian subjectivity that only elicits pity.
*Resistance is pre-political*

Even in the absence of formal armed movements or strict ideological
formations, the West Bank witnessed the emergence of small, informal groups
— trust circles, collections of friends, and small-scale armed units
<https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/the-story-of-the-lions-den/> that transcended
ideological boundaries
<https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/inside-the-wasps-nest-the-rise-of-the-jenin-brigade/>.
This means that any analysis must start from tangible realities. Projecting
idealized, rigid frameworks on political groups is not only unhelpful but
intellectually lazy and profoundly ignorant of the fact that this
generation will continue to resist
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/from-the-cities-to-the-countryside-armed-resistance-is-spreading-in-the-west-bank/>
.

Resistance is pre-political. It exists organically among this generation of
Palestinians who continue to be erased from their land and continue to lose
their friends and loved ones. It is those forces who do well in organizing
that latent resistance and end up becoming a force to be reckoned with in
Palestinian society. It is a necessity, and even in its militarization, it
grows from tangible material realities, rather than from ideological
choices alone.

The prevailing fear, as always, is that beneath the guise of significant
ideological differences (which I also hold), our critique of resistance
becomes an attempt to extinguish its very possibility.

Hamas represents only one of many political projects and historical
attempts to break through the Iron Wall imposed by Israel. It might fail or
it might succeed, but it hasn’t done anything that other socially
progressive forces in Palestine haven’t tried. More importantly, Hamas in
Gaza is not merely an external influence or importation; it is
intrinsically woven into the larger social fabric and, at the very least,
merits more than being summarily dismissed on simplistic grounds of being
“regressive” versus “progressive.”

Hamas isn’t going anywhere in Palestinian politics. It is an energetic
political entity that has astutely learned from the mistakes of its
predecessor, the PLO, both in warfare and negotiations. It has meticulously
invested its intellectual, political, and military resources into
understanding Israel and its psychic center of gravity. Whether we like it
or not, Hamas is now the primary force leading the Palestinian struggle.

The left must confront this basic fact. One cannot ground solidarity with
Palestine on a politics that dismisses, overlooks, or excludes Hamas. This
stance fails to grasp the complexities and contradictions inherent in the
Palestinian struggle. In doing so, the left overlooks the dividing line
between collaboration and resistance to its peril.
------------------------------


*Abdaljawad Omar <https://mondoweiss.net/author/abdaljawad-omar/>*Abdaljawad
Omar is a PhD student and part-time lecturer in the Philosophy and Cultural
Studies Department at Birzeit University.
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