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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://mondoweiss.net/2024/05/the-question-of-hamas-and-the-left/">mondoweiss.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The question of Hamas and the Left</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Abdaljawad Omar</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">May 31, 2024<br></div>
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<img src="cid:ii_lww1trzz0" alt="image.png" width="438" height="292"><br><p>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. </p>
<p>Bashir Abu Menneh’s article in <em>Jacobin</em>, “<a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/04/gaza-left-hamas-occupation-war-solidarity">The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith</a>,”
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 href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/on-palestinian-resistance-and-global-solidarity">a response</a> to an article <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth">by Andreas Malm</a>,
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 <em>Boston Review</em>, <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/many-speak-for-palestine/">Ayça Çubukçu responded to</a> Jodi Dean’s article, “<a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/palestine-speaks-for-everyone?fbclid=IwAR1qunUBtYUZ5HfyEsc97No-IQv1vqLOuklGEspedYUI7FVglERGle0Dh10">Palestine speaks for everyone</a>,”
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2><strong>Fragmented geography, fragmented politics</strong></h2>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/west-bank-dispatch-martyrs-lone-wolves-and-underground-lions/">atomized acts of resistance</a> in the West Bank and ‘48 Palestine and the proliferation of <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/07/jenin-the-fight-over-the-capacity-to-resist/">armed self-defense zones</a> in the northern West Bank.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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!” </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<h2><strong>The politics of ‘</strong><strong><em>Muzawada’</em></strong></h2>
<p>“<em>Muzawada</em>” 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 <em>muzawada</em> 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.</p>
<p>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, <em>muzawada</em> is not confined to rhetorical jousting, even though that is how it was historically employed. In Palestine, <em>muzawada</em>
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.</p>
<p>These dual manifestations — rhetorical and actualized <em>muzawada</em>—
are pivotal for understanding internal Palestinian political rivalries.
During the Second Intifada, the emergence of the figure of the “<em>istishhadi</em>” was one such form of actualized one-upping, as it transcended the traditional “<em>fida’i.</em>” The <em>fida’i </em>was a figure of self-sacrifice who would engage the enemy but might return to his base, whereas the <em>istishadi </em>embodied
the self-sacrifice of the fighter who did not plan to return to base,
but kills and gets killed, thereby becoming a martyr.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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? </p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2><strong>Hidden critique of armed resistance</strong></h2>
<p>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 <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/hopeful-pathologies-in-the-war-for-palestine-a-reply-to-adam-shatz/">rendering it profane</a>.
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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/the-palestine-walid-saw-from-the-little-prison-to-the-big-prison/">sear into Palestinian consciousness</a>
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 <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/08/palestinians-rebut-israeli-hysteria-over-princeton-course-teaching-book-on-israels-policy-to-maim/">Gaza</a> and the West Bank.</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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. <em>Muzawada</em> through action. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<h2><strong>Resistance is pre-political</strong></h2>
<p>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 <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/the-story-of-the-lions-den/">armed units</a> that <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/inside-the-wasps-nest-the-rise-of-the-jenin-brigade/">transcended ideological boundaries</a>.
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 <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/from-the-cities-to-the-countryside-armed-resistance-is-spreading-in-the-west-bank/">will continue to resist</a>. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/author/abdaljawad-omar/">Abdaljawad Omar<br></a></strong>Abdaljawad Omar is a PhD student and part-time lecturer in the Philosophy and Cultural Studies Department at Birzeit University.</p>
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