Hamas no, human rights yes

Why are the left and the anti-war movement ignoring Hamas’s repression of the Palestinian people?

By Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner and Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford East

The Guardian – Comment is Free – London – 18 February 2009

 

Hamas is intensifying its repression of the Palestinian citizens of Gaza, according to recent reports by Amnesty International and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. This repression includes beatings, kneecappings, executions, detention without trial, torture, restrictions on civic organisations and violent attacks on critics and protesters, as reported in The Guardian on Friday 13 February 2009.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/13/hamas-gaza-murders-abduction-torture

Amnesty International is highly critical of the Hamas “campaign of abductions, deliberate and unlawful killings, torture and death threats.”
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/hamas-waged-deadly-campaign-war-devastated-gaza-20090212

Referring to Palestinians who were beaten or murdered by Hamas, Amnesty notes:

“Most of the victims were abducted from their homes; they were later dumped – dead or injured – in isolated areas…Some were shot dead in the hospitals.”

In a media briefing, Amnesty International added:

“There is incontrovertible evidence that Hamas security forces and armed militias have been responsible for grave human rights abuses and that the victims of such abuses and many others are being intimidated and discouraged from testifying about their ordeal. The Hamas de-facto administration has displayed a flagrant disregard for the most fundamental human rights norms, not only allowing such abuses to be perpetrated, but actually facilitating and encouraging the abuses by justifying them and by granting absolute impunity to the perpetrators.”
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE21/001/2009/en/9f210586-f762-11dd-8fd7-f57af21896e1/mde210012009en.html

A dossier by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights independently corroborates Amnesty’s allegations:

“The human rights violations perpetrated….have included killings of fugitives, prisoners and detainees, injuries caused by severe physical violence, torture and misuse of weapons, the imposition of house arrest, and other restrictions that have been imposed on civil society organisations.”
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/Reports/English/pdf_spec/Increase_rep.pdf

These abuses, which are part of a long-standing pattern of human rights violations, reveal Hamas’s totalitarian agenda and are a portent of the Iranian-style theocratic tyranny they would impose on the Palestinian people if they ever secured absolute power. It is an anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-trade union, authoritarian, clericalist movement.

Nevertheless, none of Hamas’s crimes excuse Israel’s disproportionate, reckless and indiscriminate attacks on Gaza. The Israeli armed forces wantonly targeted civilian areas and caused thousands of civilian casualties, including the deaths of over 400 children. Under international law, such as the Geneva Conventions, Israel’s actions are war crimes and its political and military leaders should be taken to The Hague and put on trial.
http://blog.amnestyusa.org/middle-east/there-is-no-lens-wide-enough-to-embrace-the-sheer-dimensions-of-the-devastation/

This is the broad consensus among much of liberal and left opinion in western countries like the UK and US. I agree. But while progressive opinion is justifiably quick to condemn Israel, it is oddly silent when Palestinians are being persecuted by fellow Palestinians. Why the double standards?

Hamas styles itself as a resistance movement. In fact, it is as much a repression movement and the victims of its repression are fellow Palestinians who don’t toe the Hamas line.

In the future, Hamas is potentially as much of a threat to Palestinian freedom as Israel is today. Hamas shares a similar religious-political ideology to the tyrants in Tehran – Islamism. More than a faith, Islamism is a religious-inspired fundamentalist political movement. The Islamists of Hamas have the ultimate goal of establishing a religious dictatorship, where every detail of Palestinian life is governed by its perverse hard-line misinterpretation of the Qu’ran.

If it ever managed to secure total control of a Palestinian state, Hamas would begin to impose its own restrictive Islamist version of democracy, as has happened in Iran under the ayatollahs. It would eventually ban non-Islamist parties and candidates. Gradually, genuine democracy and human rights would be dismantled and replaced by Hamas’s own qualified, limited Islamist version, which would not be true democracy at all.

This is obvious to anyone with knowledge of Hamas’s founding documents and guiding principles. These set out its plan to create not a Muslim state, but an Islamist one, where harsh religious edicts become the law of the land. Many Palestinians – probably most – reject theocracy. They do not wish to live under religious tyranny. Their desire is a democratic, secular state where people of all faiths are free to practice their beliefs but where religion does not dictate legislation and control government policy.

It is therefore disturbing that significant sections (not all) of the left are flirting with Hamas. During the January protests in the UK against Israel’s barbaric bombardment of Gaza, there were frequent pro-Hamas chants and placards. “We are all Hamas now!” some marchers yelled. At one rally in Hyde Park, speakers on the main stage urged “Victory to Hamas!” and received tumultuous cheers of approval (with only a few boos).

I am tired of hearing left-wingers defend Hamas on the grounds that it was democratically elected. So what? The Israeli leaders are democratically elected but that does not make their war in Gaza right. A democratic mandate is not, by itself, sufficient to secure legitimacy for the government in Gaza – or anywhere else. If democratically elected governments violate human rights they forfeit their legitimacy, as in the case of Britain when it was torturing and assassinating Irish republican suspects in the 1970s and 80s.

Besides, support for Hamas has declined dramatically as people have experienced the consequences of its administration in Gaza. If a genuinely free and fair election were held today, Hamas would not win.

Another favourite left and liberal justification of Hamas is that it is less corrupt than its Palestinian rivals in Fatah and that it organises social programmes for the poor. You could say the same about the Nazis, compared to the indulgence and incompetence of some Weimar Republic leaders. No, a few good works do not exonerate Hamas. Yes, their critique of Fatah nepotism, pocket-lining and thuggism has some truth. But the alternative they are offering is far worse.

Some of the left seem to see Hamas as a Palestinian equivalent of the African National Congress of South Africa – a heroic national liberation movement that is resisting the iniquities of Israeli occupation. Sorry, this analogy does not wash, as Brett Lock argued on the Harry’s Place blog a couple of weeks ago.
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/01/29/why-the-anc-deserved-support/

He pointed out that Hamas is offering nothing akin to the political and ethical stature of the ANC’s Freedom Charter. In fact, Hamas’s charter is a charter for discrimination and religious tyranny – the exact opposite of what the ANC stood for.

Moreover, Hamas’s macho posturing mirrors that of the Israeli extreme right. It has a juvenile tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye war mentality. To supposedly prove its resistance credentials and outdo Fatah, it fires rockets into Israel against non-military targets, with no concern for the civilian casualties caused there and no regard for the effects on Palestinian civilians of Israeli retaliatory attacks.

Far from advancing the Palestinian cause, Hamas’s strategy is constantly weakening and undermining it. The people of Gaza are worse off in every way since Hamas took control.

The Gazan people are lions led by Hamas donkeys. These donkeys keep giving Israel an excuse to attack the Palestinian people and to frustrate the urgent task of creating a viable, independent Palestinian state.

I have some sympathy for a one-state solution – a unified democratic, secular state of Palestine-Israel, based on a confederation of autonomous, self-governing Jewish, Arab and mixed towns and cities, where all Israelis and Palestinians can live together in peace, security, harmony and equality.

As well as the intransigence of short-sighted Israelis, one of the major obstacles to this dream is Hamas. It demands an Islamist state governed by sharia law. It won’t accept equal co-existence or secularism, democracy and human rights.

If I did not know better, I would suspect that the leaders of Hamas are Mossad agents, who were long ago planted in the Islamist movement by the Israelis to frustrate Palestinian national ambitions.

Despite my many criticisms of Hamas, I also believe that Israel and the West should negotiate with them, just as the British negotiated with the Irish Republican Army, the US negotiated with North Korea and Pakistanis are now negotiating with the Taliban. The ideology that Hamas represents has a sizable, if shrinking, minority following among Palestinians. You cannot defeat an ideology by military means; especially not an ideology that is fuelled by the fundamental injustice of Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinian people from their land. Even with the opponents of freedom, talk, talk is better than war, war.