Guest post by Mikey
Amir Taheri made a very striking point in The Times yesterday:
Hamas is pan-Islamist, Fatah Palestinian nationalist….Hamas is … dedicated to creating a single global Islamic state. For it, Palestine is no more than a small corner of Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) that must one day defeat Dar al-Kufr (the House of the Infidel) to unite mankind under its banner.
The suggestion is that Hamas is not pro-Palestinian at all. It is simply pro-Islamist; its ideology sees the whole of historic Palestine – as well as the rest of the Middle East – as part of the wider Muslim Ummah. Palestine, as a country, means nothing to Hamas.
Where does this leave the “Palestine solidarity” campaigners? They are in a bind. Some of the more ardent anti-Zionists do not care. They are so fanatical in their hatred of Israel that nothing takes precedence. There is, for example, the vituperative blogger Mark Elf, who compares Fatah to the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto – and therefore Israelis with Nazis:
Many Jewish writers who were there have written of how the ghetto fighters in Warsaw had to kill the collaborators before they could fight the Germans. So this might be the start of a good thing.
By making this statement Mark Elf has aligned himself with Hamas against the “collaborators” of Fatah. His argument is clearly anti-Israel (let’s be honest – his analogy is antisemitic) as opposed to pro-Palestine. This is not new. Other anti-Zionist veterans – including the likes of Tony Greenstein and Roland Rance – left the Palestine Solidarity Campaign when the PLO appeared to recognise Israel. At that point the “anti-Zionists” showed their true colours; their aim was not to create Palestine, but to destroy Israel.
Regardless of the religious fanaticism of Hamas, and heedless of the genocidal antisemitism in its charter, these Marxist anti-Zionists are supporting the new rulers of Gaza – and making fools of themselves in the process. Richard Seymour (under his nom de plume “Lenin”) of Lenin’s Tomb – a blog that supports the supposedly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, but which is more appropriately described as “Strasserite” – announced yesterday:
Hamas, not Fatah, has spoken the language of moderation and conciliation in this dispute.
Perhaps he missed this report from the Daily Telegraph:
In the past 48 hours 19 Palestinians have been killed, tossed from rooftops, executed at point-blank range, and shot in hospital wards. That number seems certain to rise. More than 80 Palestinians have now been killed since mid May.
Among yesterday’s dead was a 14-year-old boy and three women, all killed in a Hamas attack on a Fatah security officer’s home.
“They’re firing at us, firing RPGs, firing mortars. We’re not Jews,” the brother of Jamal Abu Jediyan, a Fatah commander, pleaded during a live telephone conversation with a Palestinian radio station.
If this is what the “Palestine solidarity” activists regard as “moderation and conciliation” towards the Palestinians, what fate do they have in mind for the Israelis?
