Gaza's ceasefire of despair

The ceasefire in Gaza Strip is not only precarious; it is also quite meaningless. For, it will be no less than a continuation of the Israeli war on Palestinians by other means. Means that constitute a consistent ideological offensive ��� not lulled by explosive conflagrations or their seething absence ��� of conflating Hamas with the pernicious pan-Islamism of Al Qaeda. And Osama bin Laden���s latest audio release calling for a jehad against Israel has only served to smoothen that Zionist course. That the core ideology of Hamas, elected to head the government of Gaza by its inhabitants three years ago, is Islamist has made it easier for the Israeli propaganda machine to render its vile acts of occupation ��� such as the 30-month-long blockade of Gaza ��� internationally legitimate.

But if there can be an abomination greater than this enormity, it is the keen hunger with which the international liberal community has lapped up such disingenuous Israeli propaganda. How else do we explain its near complete abandonment of Palestine; a cause that till the other day had been its never-ending love affair. In fact, the erstwhile drivers of the pro-Palestine global liberal consensus have on this count been more loyal to the anti-Islamic perversions of ���political Zionism��� than Israel itself. They ascribe ��� allusively if not explicitly ��� this shift in their position to the emergence of the radical Islamist Hamas as the principal agency of Palestinian resistance. That, in their reckoning, is indefensible at a time when the terroristic depredations of Al Qaeda���s pan-Islamism have put the very existence of global secular modernity in jeopardy.

Such a global liberal consensus has ensured an ideological victory for the unwarranted Israeli project of occupation and territorial annexation in advance. The ideological eagerness of most ���democratic��� nation-states and sizeable sections of their liberal societies to buy this Hamas-Al Qaeda equation, even before Tel Aviv spelt it out, stems from the current conjuncture that is characterised by a complete institutionalisation of the ideas of liberal-democracy and secularism into an anti-democratic centre of social domination.

It is this subjugation of secular reason by power that prevents the global liberal community from asking what compelled the majority of Palestinians to dump their original secular PLO leadership for Hamas. That is, clearly, the source of their ideological reluctance to see the political in terms of the social. The question of political autonomy, which is what all identity struggles for self-determination essentially are, cannot be resolved unless the attendant necessity of effecting cooperative social association is posed either directly or implicitly.

To see the rise of Hamas as an outcome of corruption in PLO ranks ��� manifest most acutely by its post-Oslo Palestinian Authority (PA) ��� is to merely put the problem in a moral frame. In real terms, the political venality of the PLO is no more than a manifestation of the emergence of a privileged class within the larger Palestinian society. It is no coincidence that West Bank, which is home to Palestinians who have much better access to socio-economic entitlements such as education, employment, health, and various civic amenities, is the base of PLO-PA and its secular Palestinian identity. On the other hand, Gaza, inhabited primarily by a pauperised Palestinian underclass, has come to be the centre of Hamas���s politics of uncompromising resistance.

Hamas���s refusal to expressly eschew its stated position of not recognising Israel���s right to exist must be situated in this context. The Oslo Accords between Tel Aviv and Yasser Arafat���s PLO in 1993 resulted in Palestinians recognising Israel���s right to exist as an independent nation in exchange for Tel Aviv���s acceptance of Palestinian national self-determination through interim self-government arrangements within the pre-1967 boundaries. The acceptance of those boundaries meant, in practical terms, acknowledging only the two territories of West Bank and Gaza Strip as Palestinian. But in real terms, Oslo has meant Palestinian self-determination only on paper, what with Israel continuously gerrymandering ���facts on the ground��� by constantly pushing more and more Jewish settlers way beyond the real pre-1967 borders and deep into the Palestinian territories.

The PA, especially under Arafat���s successors such as Ahmed Querie and Mahmoud Abbas, has not only acquiesced in this brazen molestation of the accords but also facilitated such violation by deploying its security forces against Palestinian protesters. Hamas���s refusal to abandon its stated position questioning Israel���s right to exist is, in such circumstances, a repudiation of Oslo, and the socio-political domination of the Palestinian underclass it has entailed through a collaboration between Tel Aviv and PLO-PA.

All that does not, however, still explain why an authentic agency of the Palestinian underclass would need to abandon the original secular-nationalist idiom of the movement for a more puritan variety of Islam. The so-called secular-nationalist ideology of the Palestinian national struggle under the PLO can be traced to the late 19th century Nahada (Arab Renaissance), when Islam was read against its traditional grain to articulate an absolutely modern idea of Arab nationalism against the Turkish Ottomans, whose imperial caliphate had then embodied the traditional idea of institutionalised pan-Islamism. The ideological shift of the poor Palestinians ��� who now constitute the vanguard of the struggle for self-determination ��� towards a relatively more pietistic conception of the religion must, in that light, be seen as a movement within the Islamic ideological space, away from its more liberal end; precisely because this liberalism has lost its earlier inclusiveness.

It would, therefore, be grossly inaccurate to equate Hamas with Al Qaeda merely because both articulate their politics in the idiom of religious Islam. The latter posits its Islam as an anti-democratic institution that needs to be imposed on the entire world in the form of an international caliphate. For Hamas, on the other hand, Islam is an organic language of resistance and autonomy. Al Qaeda is a force of fascist regression, Hamas, the harbinger of struggle and hope.