Engaging Hamas and Hizballah

A Great Piece
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, Oct 29, 2007

"Nothing could be easier in the present atmosphere than to accuse anyone who calls for recognition of and dialogue with Hamas, Hizballah and other Islamist movements of being closet supporters of reactionary "extremism" or naive fellow travelers of "terrorists." This tactic is not surprising coming from neoconservatives and Zionists. What is novel is to see it expressed in supposedly progressive quarters......

Some of these attitudes may arise from confusion, but there may also be an effort to scare us off from attempting to understand Hamas in Palestine and Hizballah in Lebanon outside any paradigm except a "clash of civilizations" that pits allegedly universal and superior Western liberal values against what is represented as medieval oriental barbarity......

Hamas and Hizballah emerged in the context of brutal Israeli invasions and military occupations. Their popular support and legitimacy have increased as they demonstrated their ability to present a credible veto on the unrestrained exercise of Israeli power where state actors, international bodies, the peace process industry and secular nationalist resistance movements notably failed......

The claim that Hamas should be opposed (while "strategic solidarity" should presumably be extended to other Palestinian factions more amenable to a so-called Western agenda) is based on a caricature of the movement's changing gender ideologies and practices and ignores the achievements of the Islamist women's movement in Palestine......

As the work of Birzeit University professor Islah Jad has demonstrated, the Islamist women's movement has played a major role in transforming Hamas' ideology about women, placing its demands at the center of internal debates, and in mobilizing women within Hamas and in society at large to play greater political and economic roles (sixty percent of students at Gaza's Islamic University, for example, are female)......

Islamist women have emerged as an important factor in Palestinian political life partly as a result of the demobilization of the secular nationalist women's movement as it became depoliticized, "NGOized," professionalized, and detached from its grassroots. [10].....

This is where we have to look beyond caricatures and consider that for many of their adherents Islamist movements are attractive because they offer the hope of alternative forms of social organization that put the human being and the community, rather than the market and the consumer at the center of life......

The dialogues that once instransigent colonial rulers and their foreign backers opened with the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, and Sinn Fein and the IRA in Northern Ireland -- that led eventually to peaceful transformations of those societies -- are the appropriate model for how to engage with movements like Hamas and Hizballah today.....

.....The increasing influence of mainstream Islamists also terrifies the existing establishments in the Palestinian Authority and other Arab states, who in desperation to preserve their power, have joined the chorus of fear-mongering and repression and some have forged more or less open alliances with Israel.
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When broader conflict looms, fueled by the ideology of the clash of civilizations, and the American president drops casual, smirking references to World War III, a new approach is urgently needed. The European governments, for example, that speak to Hamas in secret, but collude with the brutal sanctions against Gaza, out of fear of the United States, should break with their harmful and misguided policies. They should openly defy Washington and Tel Aviv and engage with Islamist movements in Lebanon and Palestine and more broadly, on equal terms.

Since this change is unlikely in the short term, and the dangers are great, it is the role of progressives to support anti-colonial liberation movements without imposing their own agendas, to push for equal dialogue, to listen carefully to what Islamist movements are saying, and to expose and resist the efforts to demonize and dehumanize entire societies in preparation for new wars."