“We’re doing this series not to either advocate for Hamas or to criticize it, but simply to clarify for people what it is, and then people can make up their own minds.” (Rami Khouri, Understanding Hamas @ 39.) One of my early learnings in training to become a mediator was the idea of the ease with which we demonize the ”other side” of a struggle, how we use the Drama Triangle, about which I’ve written previously, to create villains, victims & heroes, how we create fear and distrust of the other side, how we unconsciously fight cognitive dissonance by disregarding the positive aspects of our “enemy” or opponent, and strive for cognitive consonance, by reinforcing ideas that are consistent with our fears and prejudices. How we look for allies who agree with us, build constituencies with them and manage to close ourselves off from even hearing the viewpoint of “the other”, let alone taking it seriously and seeking ways to accommodate the interests of the other.
I was in deep need of more integrative, non-distributive ways of addressing conflict as a practising lawyer, working largely in the realm of family law and estates, highly relational areas where unresolved conflict has the potential to destroy families, at the very least, cause harsh divisions, harm to health, and serious psychological injury to children. Not to mention the money people spend fighting one another. Mediation training was one of the best things I ever undertook, because it gave me some “hows” for helping people listen to and speak respectfully with those with whom they had strong disagreement – the idea of “having tea with your demons”. It gave me a concrete practical path to recommend to my clients, and thankfully took me out of the firing line of litigation and positional advocacy. It is not that hard to extrapolate from interpersonal conflict to warfare.
Warfare always ends at some point, though hurts, wounds, losses and resentments not dealt with post-war, through such avenues as truth & reconciliation processes, can and do leave intergenerational scars. It’s my view that Jewish Israelis never engaged in the healing process necessary after the Holocaust, and we are seeing the results of trauma-damaged psyches taking out vengeance on the Palestinians, who ironically had nothing to do with the Holocaust. And because western governments have long had an agenda of creating and maintaining instability in the Middle East, and great reluctance to confront their own past settler-colonialism, any resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial agenda will be demonized. That means the international community must step up and help find ways to peace.
“Now it’s time to talk about Hamas as a representative of an important, a very important strand in the Palestinian national movement”. (Helena Cobban, ibid. @ 36.) Hamas is a necessary party to finding a resolution to the war on Gaza, and their representatives must be brought to the table along with Fatah (Mahmoud Abbas’ mostly ineffectual party) and perhaps Marwan Barghouthi, a Fatah leader, in Israeli prison since the 2nd Intifada, who consistently tops Palestinian polls as their preferred leader. Hamas has called for the release of Barghouthi. The Palestinians themselves will include Hamas among their representatives. Peace in South Africa could never have been accomplished without the inclusion of the ANF; peace in Ireland would be impossible without the inclusion of the IRA. These are a few examples for us to learn from.
So what is Hamas’ main agenda?
There has long been the Idea of 2 strands within Hamas’ thinking – the Islamist (religious) and the Palestinian nationalist. But it’s more nuanced than that. Middle East scholar/professor Dr. Khaled Hroub says: “Hamas is a multi-faceted… organization or movement. This means they are a political party; they are a charitable organization; they are a military faction; all of these combined together….If we want to… go to the simplified… I would say we have been witnessing a steady increase of the nationalist force within Hamas at the expense of the religious tendency within Hamas over the last two, three decades “. (ibid. @ 41)
Why do Palestinians say that you can never eradicate Hamas?
“I think maybe the key word for this is resistance. The Palestinians specifically, and then the Arab audiences and Arab peoples at large: I think the main reason they support Hamas is because of resistance, not because of religion, … nationalism, not because of anything else….This organization is clean-handed in their delivery, in social work, in running the business of government, but I think the core issue is resistance”. (ibid. @ 43) Hroub also points out that at the signing of Oslo in the early 90’s, Fatah, which began as a resistance movement headed by Yasser Arafat, started to decline because they “put resistance to the side”.
Don’t Gazans blame Hamas for the genocide they’re experiencing now?
No. A recent survey (2nd quarter, 2024) shows that most Gazans surveyed place blame for their suffering on Israel and the US, only 8% on Hamas. (Appendix 6, p.199)
(Next week: final Part 3)
