Daniel Lazare posed the question “what has Hamas achieved?” in his recent Cosmonaut letter. For starters, al-Aqsa flood reanimated the Palestinian cause with new urgency and brought it to the global forefront. The post-Oslo paradigm of the last few decades and the fall of the Soviet bloc have narrowed the Palestinian political horizon and rendered their situation very desperate indeed. Israel’s occupation and repression has only become increasingly entrenched while Israel’s normalization schemes in the Arab world and expansionist belligerence have accelerated. Hamas has provoked Israel into laying bare the full ferocity of the Israeli colonial project to the whole world, further isolating Israel on the international stage and (hopefully) hastening its demise.
Hamas has also successfully drawn Israel into urban guerilla warfare on Hamas’ home turf. That was Mahmoud Ajrami’s stated goal, and Israel’s military capacities are being gutted in Gaza. IOF air and ground forces are divided and weakened between fighting the ground war in Gaza and fighting Hezbollah in the north. 10/7 also made Israel look weak. It demonstrated to the world and to the occupation itself that its intelligence, military and political factions are in a state of critical discord and instability, and that, for all its advanced instruments of death, the occupation is vincible. In this sense, 10/7 served a similar propaganda function to the Gilboa Prison break in 2021.
Daniel Lazare, a man whose second-rate journalism seems to be obliquely related to political Islam, does not appear to have bothered to engage with Hamas’ 2017 charter at all before opining. If only Edward Said had coined a term for such individuals… Lazare claimed that Hamas intends to “inspire jihad throughout the Muslim world in a medieval religious crusade.” First of all, jihad is good. It is typically translated as something innocuous like “righteous struggle against injustice,” but it’s been given something of the “intifada” treatment in the western lexicon. But anyways, rather than inciting a crusader-esque regional war of religious conquest, Hamas explicitly limits its struggle to the fight against Israel and Zionism. In its 2017 charter, it distanced itself from the Muslim Brotherhood, its parent/sister organization, due to regional and international politicking – primarily to appease Saudi and Egypt. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has been Sisi’s nemesis and scapegoat since he deposed Morsi in 2013, and Hamas and Sisi have closed ranks in recent years in a security cooperation against Islamic State in the Sinai. But Hamas also distanced itself from the Muslim Brotherhood because it is privileging Palestinian nationalism over Islamist transnationalism.
Hamas is a wasati (centrist) movement as opposed to a salafi-jihadist movement. Khalid Mish’al described Hamas as tracing middle ground between extremist Islamism, as exemplified by Islamic State, and “secular defeatism” as exemplified by the PLO. Since its electoral win in 2006, Hamas has shown a willingness to adopt new positions on basic issues and take stances oppositional to those in its 1988 charter. Its relatively pluralist 2017 charter broke with the original charter’s description of Palestine as an “Islamic endowment” (waqf) by instead framing its struggle in nationalist terms. One might also point to the popular support for Hamas amongst Gaza’s small Christian population and their incorporation into Hamas’ political bureaucracy as indicative of pluralism. In fact, incorporation of and tolerance towards Christians has resulted in accusations of apostasy from al-Qaeda.
Lazare lambasted Hamas for having “not held an election since 2006.” I’m not keen on diminishing criticism of Hamas’ autocratic governance, especially from Gazans, but let’s not get loose with the facts. Hamas was willing to hold elections in May of 2021, but the legislative elections were cancelled by Fatah, Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence, and Israel. Hamas is quite popular in the West Bank, while Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, as essentially a comprador security force for the occupation, are deeply reviled and illegitimate. Hamas and rival factions also announced several days before 10/7, on 9/27, their intent to facilitate local elections and Hamas’ intent to abide by the results. Glean from that what you will. Hamas’ illiberalism also arises from a context where neoconservatives in the Bush administration, along with Fatah, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, covertly attempted to coup Hamas after its initial electoral win. With regard to Hamas’ denunciation of the French and Russian revolutions in their outdated charter, I fear you would be hard pressed to find many amongst the “Palestinian masses” who give a fuck. Hamas denounced the French and Russian revolutions with an antisemitic inflection decades before most Gazans were even born. Who cares. But in terms of Jamal Mansour’s European philosophical-political influences, here’s a paper.
The passage Lazare invoked from Lenin’s 1920 “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” actually affirms exactly what the united front of Palestinian political-guerilla factions in Gaza are doing right now, which is waging a coalitional armed struggle against the IOF while maintaining their ideological autonomy and integrity. The united front in Gaza right now includes a rotation of Hamas, PIJ, PRC, PFLP, DFLP, Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades (which just recently entered the fray), and Palestinian Mujahideen, all as fairly distinct political formations. Of the non-Islamist factions, the secular Maoist DFLP has been most heavily contributing to attacks against the IOF in the past several weeks. But even if Lenin’s edicts did not sanction this temporary alliance with the “national bourgeoisie,” we still ought to support the united front. Because we are not dogmatists. Because in the face of imminent annihilation, what the hell else would you do?
“The class question must be emphasized, not glossed over.” I usually dismiss the analytic of ‘primary vs secondary contradiction’ as a mechanical and reductive framework in the context of a mature colonial situation like the US, because it’s typically cited by communists to chauvinistically downplay the antagonistic severity and economic structuring of race and gender. However, it is perfectly reasonable in an advanced colonial situation such as the Gaza Strip, and especially during imperialist-inflicted genocide, to prioritize the fight against imperialism above all else. It is the Israeli-Egyptian medieval siege on Gaza that is responsible for economic stagnation and underdevelopment in the Strip. It is the Israeli blockade that is responsible for creating the small economic elite in Gaza who grew wealthy from the smuggler economy. To the extent that there is class stratification in Gaza, it is directly downstream from Israel’s aggression. Emphasizing economic disparity amongst Gazans, who are all under Israeli bombardment right now, in an attempt to diminish socialist support for the united front is counterintuitive and obscene.
Lazare ends his letter with the proclamation that “there is no military solution in Israel-Palestine.” This is actually a fantastical claim rather than a self-evident truism, and the onus is on the people saying “there is no military solution” to prove that there is an avenue for diplomatic solution to the Palestinian national question – even when framed as a depoliticized humanitarian question – in the face of unconstrained Israeli aggression and expansion.
I am a secularist. I believe in secular governance. I staunchly oppose salafi-jihadist Islamic fascist movements like Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State – as does most of the Muslim world. But this is not an excuse for me or other western socialists to remain completely ignorant to the contours of Islamist political terrain, where Hamas is situated within it, and how Hamas diverges from the caricatures circulating about it. I will not condemn Hamas, just as I would not have condemned the FLN during the Algerian War, despite the FLN’s social conservatism and reactionary currents. If you aren’t with the resistance, you’re a bastard.
– AJ
