Peter Beinart, think before you speak about Palestinians and Hamas -
By Maher Mughrabi | Jun. 23, 2014 |
Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.600494
Peter says that just as Jewish liberals must challenge Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian liberals must publicly challenge Hamas. There is a crucial distinction here that appears to escape him. In the West Bank, Israel is a foreign power controlling a disenfranchised people. Both Samah and I might criticise Hamas and even stand opposed to them, but Hamas are not foreigners - they are part of the Palestinian community and they ran for election by that community. To call this abduction is to deny Palestinians agency and demean their choices. (I wouldn’t say that Shas or Habayit Hayehudi have “abducted” Zionism, for much the same reasons.)
It’s certainly true that a democratic vote can produce a result people find repugnant. I recall the swearing-in of an Austrian government in 2000 that was immediately the target of sanctions from many European countries because it included the far-right Freedom Party led by Joerg Haider. Yet even if we were to accept such a comparison in the case of Hamas, the sanctions Austria experienced then did not deny the Austrian people freedom of movement or basic foodstuffs, nor did they prevent the Austrian parliament from meeting.
At the Melbourne Town Hall, I told the audience that peace was about being able to build a house or a life without worrying about when a foreign power would undo one’s decision. I could just as easily have said “to cast a ballot.” There will always be divisions in Palestinian life, as there have been in Israeli life. Some of those differences will prove so difficult to resolve that they must be deferred, as David Ben-Gurion found with the question of religion, and some may demand immediate and even violent resolution, as Ben-Gurion found when he sank the ship called the Altalena. All over the world, we see that independence is not the end of a nation’s troubles but the beginning. We also see that the debates national communities have to have require an inviolable public space. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish, himself no great fan of Hamas, wrote at the height of the second intifada:
و مختلفون على واجبات النساء
:مختلفون على كل شيء. لنا هدف واحد
… ان نكون
و من بعده يجد الفرد متسعاً لاختيار الهدف
“And we’ll disagree over women’s duties . . .
“We’ll disagree over everything. And we have one goal:
“To be . . .
“After that one finds room to choose other goals”
In the mid-1980s, the apartheid regime in South Africa offered Nelson Mandela his freedom if he would repudiate armed struggle. He turned down the offer, telling his jailers that “Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Only free men can negotiate.”
Peace between Israelis and Palestinians is a contract. Normalisation – if that is still what Zionists want – is a contract. Yet Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not free. It is the repeated failure to address that fact that should be of primary concern to Peter Beinart – and all of us.
Maher Mughrabi is foreign news editor of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers in Australia. The views expressed are his own.
