heritageposts reblogged
Palestinians have long battled not merely for the recognition of their plight but fundamentally for the world to acknowledge the imperative to resist. This necessity to resist and the right to such resistance becomes even more critical in a global context where the narrative of Palestinian resistance is manipulated — cynically used to justify and legitimize Israel’s century-long assault on Palestinian existence and agency. It’s a perverse scenario where the act of resistance, essential for survival and the possibility for justice, is twisted into a justification for the oppression it seeks to overcome. Hamas is an easy scarecrow here. It is an Islamist political group that both centers a politics of defiance and pushes a social agenda that seeks to reconstitute the Palestinian subject. Critics of resistance can easily point to shortcomings in Hamas’s socioeconomic outlook or deride its “socially regressive” agenda. But they aren’t really interested in undermining Hamas’s social agenda. In truth, they want to undermine or distance themselves from the form of resistance that Hamas chose to pursue. But many of Hamas’s critics offer nothing in their alliance system, in their forms of struggle, or even in their intellectual output that could match its work to accumulate power in the Gaza Strip and its opening of a strategic pandora’s box that has overflowed and deformed the colonial regime, providing a historical moment that includes among its many possibilities the potential for Palestinian liberation.
Hamas isn’t going anywhere in Palestinian politics. It is an energetic political entity that has astutely learned from the mistakes of its predecessor, the PLO, both in warfare and negotiations. It has meticulously invested its intellectual, political, and military resources into understanding Israel and its psychic center of gravity. Whether we like it or not, Hamas is now the primary force leading the Palestinian struggle.
The left must confront this basic fact. One cannot ground solidarity with Palestine on a politics that dismisses, overlooks, or excludes Hamas. This stance fails to grasp the complexities and contradictions inherent in the Palestinian struggle. In doing so, the left overlooks the dividing line between collaboration and resistance to its peril.