Now Playing: Hamas

History will tell that the Israeli-Palestinian narrative is merely a tale of surprises and enigmatic suspense.

Hamas won a significant victory in last week’s Palestinian elections, to many observers’ surprise. What happened? The entire universe of reason and common sense seems to be falling apart—who is to blame? The responsibility for Hamas’s electoral victory lies across the board. Fatah’s decades of corruption and incompetence, and Israel’s fixation on improvising unilateral plans of action to resolve a persisting crisis, has diverted precious resources that could have helped thwart the fledgling Islamists. Nevertheless, this is not the time to blame different sides for the imprudence of their policies or the shortcomings of their performance. There is a new reality on the ground in Palestine, but it is neither unprecedented nor reason to panic.

This abrupt political upset in the Middle-East is not unprecedented in nature and scope; the general election rivaled, in its ferocity and politically unsettling outcome, the Israeli political epic of 1977.

In 1977, the Israeli Labour party lost the general elections to the Likud for the first time in the history of the state of Israel. The disciples of David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the Jewish State, lost to the descendants of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist revisionist who articulated the Iron Wall theory and sought to include Transjordan in the borders of the future Israeli state. Believing that only force and unilateral action could defeat Arab nationalists, Jabotinsky wrote that “No agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arabs; they would accept Zionism only when they find themselves up against an Iron Wall, when they realize they had no alternative but to accept Jewish Settlement.”

In an article published last week in Haaretz, Israel’s leading newspaper, Bradley Bursten recalls that “In 1977, the Likud of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir was derided abroad—and by the left at home—as a group led by terror warlords, a movement with roots in armed wings that had engaged in bombings and cold-blooded shootings. It was seen—ingenuously, by the left—as little more than an outgrowth of the Irgun and Lehi, heirs to Deir Yassin, implacable in its opposition to sharing or ceding land.”

In fact, Begin and Shamir, both on Great Britain’s Most Wanted Terrorists’ list, won the 1977 elections for the same reason that Mishaal and Zahhar defeated Fatah loyalists in last week’s Palestinian elections: the previously dominant party, Labour and Fatah respectively, had been torn by scandals and accusations of corruption and misuse of national funds. The erosion of Labour’s popularly enabled the grand entrance of Likud into Israeli politics; similarly, widespread disillusionment with Fatah has underpinned Hamas’ political success.

Nor was the rhetoric of Begin and Shamir any less inflammatory than that of today’s Hamas. Begin has been accused of being responsible for the Irgun and the Lehi attack on Deir Yassin, a Palestinian village that was annihilated in 1948. Minachem Begin, after the attack stated: “Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack…Continue this until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.” Following his election in 1977 as prime minister, he said: “The Jewish people have unchallengeable, eternal, historic right to the Land of Israel including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the inheritance of their forefathers.”

Alas, perhaps it is the words of Karl Marx that describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict most accurately: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Yesterday it was the rise of the Likud, and today it is Hamas. The Palestinian people have never been more in need of moderate leadership than today and, yet, they chose extremists to lead their way. Some might argue that Palestinians had, as usual, chosen the wrong side at every turn in history; as Abba Ebban, former Israeli Foreign Minister, liked to describe Palestinians: “they never miss a chance to miss a chance.”

I too am unhappy by the choice my people made; my fear is mostly centered on domestic issues: civil liberties and individual rights and the maintenance of the secular nature of Palestinian society. But, at the same time, I find that I have no right to blame Palestinians for the cards they were dealt. The choice was between incompetence and corruption of Fatah on the one hand, or Hamas which campaigned under the slogan of “Change and Reform” on the other.

For the Bush administration, the result of the free Palestinian elections illuminates the dangers inherent in the process of democratizing the Middle-East: extremists use democracy, along with popular resentment of corrupt autocratic rulers, to establish a strong foothold in Middle-East politics. Furthermore, the American administration and its European counterparts will have to—rightly—reassess aid flowing to the Palestinian Authority. In the process, they should keep in mind that, if they opt to cut the light on our neighborhood, innocent people will be left in the dark to fend for themselves, while Hamas will continue to flourish from aid coming from Iran and other sympathetic wealthy Arab and Muslim regimes.

For now, the prospects of peace continue to be dim. Should we be worried that Hamas is in power? Certainly, but we should not panic. The greater cause for fear in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis is the absence of a concrete and sustainable plan to end the conflict. As for Hamas, who knows, the Likud experience in power shows us that radical transformations in doctrines and ideologies are more than possible in the realm of Middle-East politics.



Mohammed J. Herzallah ’07, a Crimson editor, is a government concentrator in Adams House.