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<a href="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</a>
<br><br>
From the Los Angeles Times<br>
Opinion<br>
Hamas speaks<br>
A Hamas official insists that a 'legacy of suffering' <br>
under Israel is what fuels Palestinian resistance.<br>
By Mousa Abu Marzook<br><br>
January 6, 2009<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Mousa Abu Marzook is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the
Islamic Resistance Movement.<br><br>
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