The resistance option

[ProgressiveMuslim]

Robin Yassin-Kassab


Hamas isn't Hizballah and Gaza isn't Lebanon. The resistance in Gaza -- which includes leftist and nationalist as well as Islamist forces -- doesn't have mountains to fight in. It has no strategic depth. It doesn't have Syria behind it to keep supply lines open; instead it has Israel's wall and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's goons. Lebanese civilians can flee north and east, while Gaza's repeat-refugees have no escape. The Lebanese have their farms, and supplies from outside; Gaza has been under total siege for years. Hizballah has remarkable discipline and is surely the best-trained, most disciplined force in the region. Although it has made great strides, Hamas is still undisciplined. Crucially, Hizballah has air-tight intelligence control in Lebanon, while Gaza contains collaborators like maggots in a corpse.

But Hamas is still standing. On the rare occasions when Israel actually fought -- rather than just called in air strikes -- its soldiers reported "ferocious" resistance. Hamas withstood 22 days of the most barbaric bombing Zionism has yet stooped to, and did not surrender. Rocket fire continued from Gaza after Israel declared its unilateral ceasefire.

Let's put this in context. In 1947-48 Zionist militias drove out more than 700,000 Palestinians without too much trouble. In 1967 it took Israel six days to destroy the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, and to capture the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Zionism's last "victory" was the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut in 1982 -- if it was a victory.

The long and bloody occupation of Lebanon gave birth to new forms of resistance. Where Arab states and armies had failed, popular resistance removed American and French forces from Beirut, and then steadily rolled back the Israelis. The first suicide bomber of the conflict was a Marxist woman of Christian background. The human bomb was a tactic to which Israeli troops had no answer. Hizballah formed, and developed into the power that would drive Israel from almost all of Lebanon by 2000. In 2006 Israel returned, in an effort to finish the resistance once and for all. What happened was a historic turnaround: for five weeks Israeli troops bled in the border villages, and failed to move beyond them. For the first time, the hi-tech, first-world savagery of the Zionist army, supposedly the fourth strongest army in the world, was kept at bay. Israel of course killed far more civilians than Hizballah did, and performed its usual rampage against civilian infrastructure, but in terms of the soldiers in battle, casualties were roughly equal.

There has been a lot of talk, particularly by Arab collaborators, about Hizballah being an Iranian proxy. While Iran does assist the resistance with weapons and funds, the Lebanese resistance is Lebanese, the creation of the villagers of the south and the Bekaa, and the families of the southern suburbs of Beirut. It was the people themselves who turned Zionism back. Even more improbably, the same collaborators now accuse Hamas, a democratically-elected Palestinian Sunni movement, of taking orders from Tehran.

One reason given for this latest massacre in Gaza was Israel's desire to restore its deterrence after the 2006 debacle. Certainly the Arabs now know (as if they didn't know before) that any whisper of resistance will be met by the most fanatical violence. Certainly Hamas and others will have to factor this into their tactical decisions. But in strategic terms the Israeli deterrent looks even shoddier than it did a month ago. The Arab peoples are no longer scared of Israel, whatever Israel throws at them. A psychological tipping point has been passed, and this, in the long term, counts for more than nuclear bombs.


more...
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10281.shtml

Clearly not a popular POV here, but nonetheless, it is, I'd warrant, a common POV in Palestine and worth reading for that reason.

[Vegasaurus]

1. Sadly, for the Palestinians

It is opinions such as this that will keep them in perpetual and increasing misery.

[Sezu]

14. That's because the "purists," are safe and sound

in other countries spreading their dogma of resistance. They don't have to die. Their pawns do it for them. Bread and circusses for the other Arab leaderships....don't look here, look there THERE at Israel.

[Alamuti Lotus]

2. Nice piece, thanks

[iconicgnom]

3. Robin Yassin-Kassab is spot on.

Robin's description of the current situation is spot on, and the argument is clear that Palestinians need to create a new frame. The article ends:
{begin quote}
In spite of Israel's onslaught in Gaza, in Palestine and throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, Hamas and the resistance option it represents is immeasurably stronger. The ridiculous no-longer-president-of-anything Mahmoud Abbas, and the gangs loyal to Fatah warlord Muhammad Dahlan, are much weaker. It wasn't Abbas but Hamas political chief in exile, Khaled Meshal who represented Palestine at the Doha emergency summit last month. While the Abbas-Dahlan traitors arrested Hamas activists, and tried (and largely failed) to suppress solidarity demonstrations on the West Bank, the resistance was standing firm against Zionist terror.

In solidarity with the resistance, Palestinians in Israel organized the biggest demonstrations in their history. There is no doubt to which nation these Palestinians belong, especially in the eyes of the main Israeli political parties, which sought to ban Arab parties from standing in the approaching elections on the grounds of "disloyalty" to the apartheid state.

What now? Enough nonsensical talk of peace processes. Peace might be nice, but it isn't, and never has been, on the agenda. It is time to build a new Palestine Liberation Organization, as elected as possible, to represent all Palestinians, both Islamist and secular, those living in the lands stolen in 1948, the lands stolen in 1967, and those in exile. The Palestinian Authority should be abolished, and the Oslo/Road Map farce officially abandoned. Then Palestinians have to decide what their aims and strategies will be. The two-state solution is no solution. There is a huge amount of work to do. All Palestinians should agitate for the new organization.
{END QUOTE}

[delad]

4. excellent stuff n/t

[Alamuti Lotus]

5. A thought regarding the PA/Oslo process and similar comparisons

One should look with interest how well the "peace process" in Sri Lanka has worked out with much the same players. The 'quartet' of outside negotiators -- US, EU, Norway, and Japan -- are all blatently militarily supporting the Sinhala chauvinist regime ("anti-terror", it must be recalled) as it rampages through the north and east parts of the island. That is what the current "road map" for Palestine (allegedly for 'peace') is also resembling, but can be prevented.

[Idealism]

6. "They Make It a Desert and Call It Peace." n/t

[iconicgnom]

7. Does this suggest that the US is the world's #1 arms dealer,

and foments war in order to sell its goods?

If so, a solution to the current US situation isn't just to shovel out 100's of billions of $$, with no thought except how it might, in the abstract at any rate, "create jobs". The solution must be to retool the US economy for peaceful purposes. And this isn't just mechanically, it's also socially, including universal health and school care.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

12. A definitive critique of Oslo:

The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam
Henry Siegman
When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June, they concluded that Hamas’s violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.<*> (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he needed with the Palestinian people in order to prevail over Hamas.

Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory. Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.

Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner.

lots more...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/sieg01_.html

[bemildred]

13. Well, the point is that a "peace process" is not peace.

It's some form of stall. So you have to ask who wants to stall and why? If there was agreement on how to settle the issues, that would be done.

[eyl]

8. This guy's Hamas favoritism is leading him

to overestimate things or invent them out of whole cloth.

forex, "freocious resistance"? LOL. Hamas' forces, after promising Israel "hell on Earth" if they set foot in the Gaza Strip, barely engaged IDF forces and managed to kill what, a whole 5 soldiers? Or proclaiming that Hizbullah's losses were similiar to the IDF's, when AFAIK Hizbullah has never released their casualty rate - all we have are wildly varying estimates.

The Israeli Arab demonstrations in support of Gaza being the "biggest ever"? hardly

I also like how any Arab accusing Hamas of Tehran ties is a collaborator....

[ProgressiveProfessor]

10. Its from EI, those kind of fantasies are de rigeur for their site

[ProgressiveMuslim]

11. yes, ever since you learned about EI 13 days ago, LOL!

You're such the expert!

[ProgressiveProfessor]

16. I've known about EI for quite sometime. Its always been a very marginal source

[Violet_Crumble]

19. Yeah, but you were attacking Ha'aretz as a source at one point...

So when it comes to calls on the credibility of sources, yr opinion is pretty questionable...

[ProgressiveProfessor]

20. IIRC it was pointing out that Haaretz is was a single point source at that time

EI is bad fiction and always has been

[oberliner]

9. The author is not a Palestinian nor does he live in the region

It's a lot easier to support resistance from the UK (or Syria).

[Sezu]

15. BINGO! n/t

[Violet_Crumble]

18. I hope yr not trying to make out that Palestinians don't support resistance...

..if they live in the Occupied Territories, because that would be just a bit silly....

btw, why is it that you never worry about where a writer lives if the writer is pro-Israeli?

[oberliner]

22. Definitely think it's important to know where "pro-Israeli writers" are writing from as well

Someone who actually lives in Israel has a lot more stake in what's going on than someone writing from the US, Europe, or elsewhere.

Similarly, someone giving advice to Palestinians from abroad is different from someone writing about Gaza or the West Bank and actually living there.

Those of us who live outside the region can speculate about what actions the folks living there ought to take, but the Israelis and the Palestinians are the ones who would actually be impacted by these theoretical proposals.

[Boojatta]

17. language and facts

Hamas withstood 22 days of the most barbaric bombing Zionism has yet stooped to, and did not surrender. Rocket fire continued from Gaza after Israel declared its unilateral ceasefire.

How can any kind of ism (such as Zionism) perform a bombing attack?

The long and bloody occupation of Lebanon gave birth to new forms of resistance. Where Arab states and armies had failed, popular resistance removed American and French forces from Beirut, and then steadily rolled back the Israelis.

Is the suggestion that the general public in Lebanon actively participated in the construction and transportation of the bomb that killed 241 of the more than 300 American troops who were involved in a U.N. peacekeeping mission? Alternatively, should it be considered "popular resistance" on the grounds that although a small group of people directly participated in planning, preparing, and implementing the attack, there is reason to believe that the general public in Lebanon approved of the attack?

[Taitertots]

21. "Resistance Option", you mean terrorsim option

Don't you mean the terrorism option? The "resistance" has been nothing but terrorism, with the stated goal of genocide/destruction of Israel and its people. The "resistance" has made its entire campaign against the civilians of Israel, with little to no military targets being attacked. Human bombs and rockets aimed at cities is not resistance, it is terrorism and deplorable.