{"id":4741,"date":"2007-06-18T01:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-17T22:14:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-03-21T13:43:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T11:43:34","slug":"epalestine-hamas-shock-and-awe-by-sam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/2007\/06\/epalestine-hamas-shock-and-awe-by-sam\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamas’ Shock and Awe"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 18, 2007\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Hamas’ Shock and Awe<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

by Sam Bahour\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hamas supporters at a rally in Gaza City hold a portrait of deposed prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, 15 June 2007. (Wissam Nassar\/MaanImages)<\/p><\/div>\n

The recent overrunning of Gaza by Hamas militants was the equivalent to the United States\u2019 Shock and Awe<\/em> campaign in Iraq.\u00a0 Both campaigns were conducted outside the realm of international law and were violent and brutal, albeit each relative to their respective resources and internal contexts; both claimed to be \u2018preemptive\u2019 in nature; and both events placed the Palestinian people and struggle for national liberation in even a more precarious position.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Shock and Awe<\/em> is a US invention in the same way that the US flavor of \u201cshrink wrapped\u201d democracy is a US creation.\u00a0 As the Bush Administration failed to export its understanding of democracy to Iraq via the US military, the US\u2019s second regional blunder was trying to impose US democracy in occupied Palestine by using a proxy governing body called the Palestinian Authority.\u00a0 The US\u2019s weapon of choice for Palestine was to dangle millions of dollars as bait, there for the taking if the Palestinian leadership showed total obedience.\u00a0 While US and other donor countries channeled billions of dollars to \u2018promote\u2019 democracy and \u2018build\u2019 Palestinian security forces, Hamas was busy learning the intricacies of the US game of military shock and awe and imposed democracy.\u00a0 During the last 17 months, Hamas attempted both, successfully: they won democratically held elections, as confirmed by election observer President Jimmy Carter, and then went on to overrun Gaza by brute force.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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One thing Hamas did not do during this short time was govern.\u00a0 Correctly blaming their inability to govern on the Israeli and US-led economic blockade and the blatantly illegal Israeli policy of arresting Hamas-affiliated ministers and lawmakers, Hamas was given a free ride — permitted to sit in the seat of authority without having to assume the full responsibility of governance.\u00a0 Instead of respecting the outcome of elections that one if its own past presidents monitored, the US allowed the Palestinian people to remain unable to define Hamas either as a legitimate governing body or as a failed experience.\u00a0 US meddling in other peoples internal affairs is the norm in the Middle East, but in Palestine, that norm was violently challenged last week in Gaza.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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While Palestinian President Yasir Arafat was still alive, the US initiated the process of restructuring the Palestinian political system.\u00a0 The US forced Arafat to accept the creation of the position of prime minister, then they proceeded to demand that the bulk of the Palestinian President\u2019s authority be transferred from President Arafat to the newly appointed Prime Minister.\u00a0 Then the US created a series of political hoops that Arafat would have to jump through to remain in the political game, of which the most relevant given today\u2019s crisis was the restructuring of the Palestinian security forces.\u00a0 Millions of dollars and tons of equipment were dumped on the multitude of Palestinian security agencies and a high-profile US security \u2018expert,\u2019 U.S. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, set up shop in Israel to make sure the Palestinian security forces were developing strategically, those same security agencies that were overrun in Gaza in a matter of hours.\u00a0 Then, Palestinians, under extreme pressure from the US, held legislative and municipal elections and when the results were not to the US\u2019s liking, the Bush Administration mobilized the world to boycott the Palestinians — people and government alike.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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While all of this was going on, Israel maintained its hypocritical posture of the past 10 years — talking peace while at the same time destroying any chances for a peaceful settlement.\u00a0 In the hopeful days of the Oslo Peace Accords, Israel accelerated its illegal Jewish-only settlement-building in the West Bank like never before.\u00a0 When a Jewish extremist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Oslo framework was, for all intents and purposes, buried with him.\u00a0 To make sure the central Oslo principle of \u2018land for peace\u2019 would never be resurrected, Israel violently increased its attempts to bring about the collapse of Palestinian society via \u2018targeted\u2019 assassinations, home demolitions, uprooting of olive groves, over 500 military checkpoints, withholding $800 million in Palestinian tax revenues, nightly arrests, building of an internationally-proclaimed illegal separation wall on Palestinian lands, and on and on.\u00a0 This is the true context leading to the violence in Gaza. All of this — and the international community watched, while continuing to fund the status quo and, all the while, referencing Israeli obligations in the already buried Oslo Peace Accords.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Thus, today\u2019s events did not drop out of the sky unexpectedly.\u00a0 A 4-part mixture of 40 years of Israeli occupation, a US-led coup to collapse a democratically elected Palestinian government, a shift in internal Palestinian power-sharing after over 40 years of a single-party monopoly on authority, and most importantly, the international community\u2019s failure to uphold its obligations under International Humanitarian Law \u2013 the Fourth Geneva Convention to be specific: All contributed to bringing us to where we are today.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The international community has a clear decision to make, and the decision must be made now.\u00a0 Will the community of nations bring about an abrupt end to the four-decade-old Israeli occupation that has caused so much death and destruction to both Palestinians and Israelis? To end the occupation today would mean to do the near impossible task of salvaging a sovereign Palestinian state on all of the land that was acquired by force by Israel in 1967. Barring this, the international community will likely continue to appease the Israeli occupiers, thereby forcing the Palestinians to revert back to calling for possibly the only remaining viable solution, the formal creation of one state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River for all its citizens.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Given the Israeli refusal, even today, to classify the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as \u201coccupied lands\u201d and the refusal to mark the Green Line (1949 Armistice Line) in most of the textbooks in their schools, all indications are that the Israelis have already decided that there is no room, on the ground, for another state between Israel and Jordan, although in cheap verbal discourse one may be led to believe that such a state already exists and that its citizens are squabbling over ministerial positions.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The US and Israel, drunk on power and addicted to war, have enlisted many in the region to do their dirty work.\u00a0 As the US and Israel try to distance themselves from their many colossal failures — from Iraq to Palestine — by engineering the creation of banana republics to serve their narrow self-interests, millions of common folk fall deeper into poverty and extremism.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Palestinians may be at a low point in their history and corrective action is undoubtedly on the horizon.\u00a0 The Palestinian people have a collective memory like that of an elephant, and as such the rampage and killings in Gaza by fellow Palestinians will not be legitimized or swept under the rug.\u00a0 Most likely, Hamas\u2019 brutal actions in Gaza will mark the beginning of the end of Hamas as we know it today.\u00a0 With Hamas in the picture, or otherwise, the Palestinians will maintain a pluralistic society and political system that will continue to resist, as has been the case since the outset of this struggle, all foreign intervention in its internal affairs, be it Western, Iranian or Arab.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The present is volatile and the future is bleak, but one thing remains constant: When all the dust settles, there will still be an occupied and dispersed people — the Palestinians — and a colonial, military occupier — Israel.\u00a0 No Shock and Awe<\/em> campaign, from Hamas or Israel, and no imposed democracy, from Fatah or the US, will change this equation.\u00a0 Until Palestinians are free — all Palestinians — the world would be well advised, for all our sakes, not to turn its back on our just struggle.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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– The writer is a Palestinian-American living in El-Bireh\/Ramallah and may be reached at sbahour@gmail.com .<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent overrunning of Gaza by Hamas militants was the equivalent to the United States\u2019 Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq.\u00a0 Both campaigns were conducted outside the realm of international law and were violent and brutal, albeit each relative to their respective resources and internal contexts; both claimed to be \u2018preemptive\u2019 in nature; and both events placed the Palestinian people and struggle for national liberation in even a more precarious position.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[942],"tags":[1401],"ppma_author":[936],"class_list":["post-4741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sams-writings","tag-hamas"],"authors":[{"term_id":936,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"sambahour","display_name":"Sam Bahour","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bca109c333bf6d8ae807746dd512adde46265d37c923f6cd0fc4aab437f8e9aa?s=96&d=mm&r=g","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4741"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7782,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4741\/revisions\/7782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4741"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=4741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}