Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Hamas:  Il passato e il presente

Se volete capire cosa sta succedendo in Palestina, questi due articolo
sono indispensabili.
Il passato:  
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8449
 Hamas, Son of Israel
The Israelis birthed and nurtured their Islamist nemesis
by Justin Raimondo
Amid all the howls of pain and gnashing of teeth over the triumph of
Hamas in the Palestinian elections, one fact remains relatively
obscure, albeit highly relevant: Israel did much to launch Hamas as an
effective force in the occupied territories. If ever there was a clear
case of "blowback," then this is it. As Richard Sale pointed out in a
piece for UPI:
"Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but,
according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials,
beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect
financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel 'aided Hamas
directly - the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the
PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),' said Tony Cordesman, Middle
East analyst for the Center for Strategic [and International] Studies.
Israel's support for Hamas 'was a direct attempt to divide and dilute
support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious
alternative,' said a former senior CIA official."
Middle East analyst Ray Hanania concurs:
"In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat
and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a
workable alliance with Islamic, anti-Arafat forces that would also
extend Israel's control over the occupied territories."
In a conscious effort to undermine the Palestine Liberation
Organization and the leadership of Yasser Arafat, in 1978 the
government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved the
application of Sheik Ahmad Yassin to start a "humanitarian"
organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of
this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and
this was the seed that eventually grew into Hamas - but not before it
was amply fertilized and nurtured with Israeli funding and political
support.
Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, launched an effort to undercut
the PLO, creating the so-called Village Leagues, composed of local
councils of handpicked Palestinians who were willing to collaborate
with Israel - and, in return, were put on the Israeli payroll. Sheik
Yassin and his followers soon became a force within the Village
Leagues. This tactical alliance between Yassin and the Israelis was
based on a shared antipathy to the militantly secular and leftist PLO:
the Israelis allowed Yassin's group to publish a newspaper and set up
an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds
not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.
Ami Isseroff, writing on MideastWeb, shows how the Israelis
deliberately promoted the Islamists of the future Hamas by helping them
turn the Islamic University of Gaza into a base from which the group
recruited activists - and the suicide bombers of tomorrow. As the
only higher-education facility in the Gaza strip, and the only such
institution open to Palestinians since Anwar Sadat closed Egyptian
colleges to them, IUG contained within its grounds the seeds of the
future Palestinian state. When a conflict arose over religious issues,
however, the Israeli authorities sided with the Islamists against the
secularists of the Fatah-PLO mainstream. As Isseroff relates, the
Islamists
"Encouraged Israeli authorities to dismiss their opponents in the
committee in February of 1981, resulting in subsequent Islamisation of
IUG policy and staff (including the obligation on women to wear the
hijab and thobe and separate entrances for men and women), and enforced
by violence and ostracization of dissenters. Tacit complicity from both
university and Israeli authorities allowed Mujama to keep a weapons
cache to use against secularists. By the mid 1980s, it was the largest
university in occupied territories with 4,500 students, and student
elections were won handily by Mujama."
Again, the motive was to offset Arafat's influence and divide the
Palestinians. In the short term, this may have worked to some extent;
in the longer term, however, it backfired badly - as demonstrated by
the results of the recent Palestinian election.
The Hamas infrastructure of mosques, clinics, kindergartens, and other
educational institutions flourished not only because they were lavishly
funded, but also due to being efficiently run. Sheik Yassin and the
future leaders of Hamas acquired a reputation for "clean" governance
and good administrative practices, which would greatly aid them -
especially in comparison to the PLO, which was widely perceived as
corrupt. Indeed, "clean government" - and not the necessity of armed
struggle - was the main theme of their successful election campaign.
The response of Israel and the U.S. has been shock, horror - and a
stated refusal to deal with any government dominated by Hamas. U.S.
congressional leaders - who unhelpfully passed a resolution prior to
the Palestinian poll that demanded Hamas be banned from running - are
now calling the entire "peace process" into question. Yet no one
acknowledges that the victory of the Suicide Bombers Party
demonstrated, in practice, an ancient principle expressed, I believe,
by no less an authority than the Bible (Galatians 6:7):
"Be not deceived. God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap."
This "blowback" principle applies to Hamas not only insofar as Israel
was involved in funding and encouraging Mujama, but also, after the
consolidation of Hamas as an armed group, due to Israeli military
policy. The much-touted "withdrawal," which amounts to Israel giving up
Gaza while strengthening its hand elsewhere in the occupied
territories, has been grist for the radical Islamist mill, as has the
Wall of Separation and the attempt to quash the vote in East Jerusalem.
Israel's relentless offensive against its perceived enemies - first
Fatah, now Hamas and Islamic Jihad - has created a backlash and
solidified support for fundamentalist extremist factions in the
Palestinian community.
Likewise, the victory of Hamas will embolden the ultra-Zionists in
Israel, who similarly mix a fanatic theology with faith in a military
"solution" to the Palestinian "problem." The electoral victory of Hamas
was only a few hours old before Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu went on
television explaining why any concessions to the Palestinians -
including the Gaza pullback - only served to embolden the most
radical elements, such as Hamas.
The stricken Ariel Sharon lies in his hospital bed, unconscious -
while his unilateral "land for peace" plan suffers from a very similar
condition. Sharon's newly-formed Kadima Party is the big potential
loser in all this, with Netanyahu's Likud looking to gain bigtime. The
irony is that, as defense minister, it was Sharon who helped conceive
and oversee the Village Leagues scheme that did so much to implant and
empower Hamas. Like some Middle Eastern version of Dr. Frankenstein, he
wound up being struck down by his own monstrous creation.
Il presente:      
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4425.shtml
Hamas' victory in the Palestinian Authority legislative elections has
everyone asking "what next"? The answer, and whether the result should
be seen as a good or bad thing, depends very much on who is asking the
question.
Although a Hamas success was heavily trailed, the scale of the victory
has been widely termed a "shock." Several factors explain the dramatic
rise of Hamas, including disillusionment and disgust with the
corruption, cynicism and lack of strategy of the Fatah faction which
has dominated the Palestinian movement for decades and had arrogantly
come to view itself as the natural and indisputable leader.
The election result is not entirely surprising, however, and has been
foreshadowed by recent events. Take for example the city of Qalqilya in
the north of the West Bank. Hemmed in by Israeli settlements and now
completely surrounded by a concrete wall, the city's fifty thousand
residents are prisoners in a Israeli-controlled giant ghetto. For years
Qalqilya's city council was controlled by Fatah but after the
completion of the wall, voters in last years' municipal elections
awarded every single city council seat to Hamas. The Qalqilya effect
has now spread across the occcupied territories, with Hamas reportedly
winning virtually all of the seats elected on a geographic basis. Thus
Hamas' success is as much an expression of the determination of
Palestinians to resist Israel's efforts to force their surrender as it
is a rejection of Fatah. It reduces the conflict to its most
fundamental elements: there is occupation, and there is resistance.
For Palestinians under occupation, it is not yet clear what Hamas' win
will mean. It is now common to speak of a Palestinian "government"
being formed out of the election results, as though Palestine were
already a sovereign and independent state. But if the first duty of a
government is to protect its people's lives, liberty and property, then
the Palestinian Authority has never deserved to be called a government.
Since its inception, it has not been able to protect Palestinians from
lethal daily attacks by the Israeli army in the heart of their towns
and refugee camps, or to prevent a single dunum of land being seized
for settlements, nor to save a single sapling of the more than one
million trees uprooted by Israel in the past ten years. Rather, in
Israel's conception the Palestinian Authority was supposed to crush
Palestinian resistance to make the occupied territories safe for
continued Israeli colonization. Hamas will certainly not allow that to
continue, but whether it will be able to tranform the Authority into an
arm of the struggle against Israel is by no means certain. Hamas, which
has observed a unilateral truce with Israel for a year, has signalled
that it wants to continue this if Israel "reciprocates." The movement
clearly believes it can make such an offer from a position of strength
and it is to its tactical advantage to leave uncertainty about when and
how it might resume full-scale armed resistance.
Elements of the Palestinian Authority security services run by Fatah
figures may be unwilling to put themselves under the control of a
Hamas-led authority, which could lead to the collapse of what is left
of the Authority's structure, or even its break-up into personal
militias. Israel and the United States which refuses to accept the
outcome of the election may see an interest in encouraging such an
internal conflict. Israel is likely to use Hamas' win as a further
pretext to tighten repression and accelerate its unilateral imposition
of walls and settlements on the West Bank designed to annex the maximum
number of land with the minimum number of Palestinians. Such
developments increase the risks of a dramatic escalation of
Israeli-Palestinian violence.
As for the majority of Palestinians, who live as refugees and exiles in
the diaspora, they have been progressively excluded and marginalized
from efforts to solve the conflict. Whereas the US and its allies, with
UN assistance, went to extraordinary lengths to allow Iraqi "out of
country voters" to participate in that country's elections, the same
powers have shown no interest in giving Palestinian refugees a voice.
Fatah, which many Palestinian refugees suspect would sell out their
rights in a peace deal with Israel, obviously had no incentive to
demand such participation. It remains to be seen if Hamas, born in Gaza
where ninety percent of the population are refugees, will be able to
articulate an agenda that speaks to the concerns of the diaspora.
For the "international community" -- principally the 'Quartet' made up
of the United States, the European Union, Russia and UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan, the election result is a major embarassment. They,
and the coterie of well-funded NGOs and think tanks that generate so
much of their intellectual guff have built their approach on the notion
that Palestinian "reform" rather than an end to the Israeli occupation,
is the way to resolve the conflict. While nominally committing
themselves to a two-state solution, these powers dragged the Fatah-led
Palestinian Authority into an endless game where Palestinians have to
jump through hoops to prove their worthiness of basic rights, while at
the same time no pressure has been applied to Israel to end the
confiscation of land and expansion of settlements. This peace process
industry chose to hail Israel's tactical withdrawal of eight thousand
settlers from Gaza last summer, while ignoring the far larger number of
settlers Israel has continued to plant all over the West Bank
effectively rendering a two-state solution unachievable.
The principal purpose of this game is not to bring about a just and
lasting peace but merely to inoculate the players from the charge that
they are doing nothing to resolve a conflict that remains an enduring
focus of regional and worldwide concern. A true peace effort would
require confronting Israel and holding it accountable, something none
of the Quartet members have the political will to do. There is no doubt
that Fatah was entirely complicit in the game, to which it had become
both a prisoner and an indispensable partner. Why else would the United
States have desperately tried to shore Fatah up by spending millions of
dollars on projects in recent months designed to buy votes, and why
else would the EU have threatened to cut off aid if Palestinians voted
for Hamas? Most Palestinians could see clearly that after years of
negotiations and billions of dollars of foreign aid that they are
poorer and less free than ever before as more of their land has been
seized. It is no wonder that this kind of bribery and blackmail had no
power over them and probably had the opposite effect, increasing Hamas
support.
Hamas' victory pulls the rug from under the project of trying to
deflect the blame for the conflict from Israeli colonization to
Palestinian internal pathologies. The peace process industry will not
give up easily, however, and will now urge Hamas to act "responsibly"
and to "moderate" its positions -- which means in effect to abandoning
all forms of resistance and assuming the docile and complicit role
hitherto played by Fatah.
The instant US demand that Hamas "recognize Israel" is like rewinding
the clock twenty-five years to when this same demand was the pretext to
ignore and exclude the PLO from peace negotiations. But as Hamas has
observed, all the PLO's submission to these demands did not lead to any
loosening of Israel's grip or any lessening of US support for Israel.
Hamas is unlikely to do as the US demands, and even if it did, it would
probably only give rise to new resistance groups responding to the
worsening conditions on the ground generated by the occupation.

 by Justin Raimondo
Toh, un altro imbecille che crede che i palestinesi  siano un popolo di 
minus habens.
Incredibili, 'sti filopalestinesi. Fossi un palestinese, li rispedirei a 
calci in culo fino a Mosca.
Tb