A Sceptical Islamist

The harsh reality of the limitations of the Palestinian struggle

"The Palestinians may well be forced into the streets for a third intifada sometime soon, to try and prevent the Israelis from achieving their goals; and this may well hinder the Israeli plans for a while and force them to adjust their short-term tactics yet again. But without a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the region, political as well as military, the overall progress of the US-Israeli agenda will not be reversed."

The US-Israeli thinking behind Abbas's call for elections in Palestine in January

"The Israelis and Americans have made it clear that they prefer the Palestinians to remain divided, and Hamas and Gaza isolated, in the hope that Abbas will be able to deliver a “peace settlement” on their terms on the basis of his political authority in the West Bank.

"Although most Palestinians realize that the division between Fatah and Hamas is deeply damaging to their struggle, Abbas and the Fatah leadership are so beholden to outside forces, specifically Israel and its hegemonic ally, that the interests of the Palestinians are no longer their prime concern."

Abbas’s attempt to re-invent Fatah marred by the movement’s contradictions

"When Fatah was established as a Palestinian national liberation movement by Yasser Arafat and other young Palestinian radicals in the late 1950s, they could probably never have imagined that it might one day hold a crucial convention in Israeli-occupied Palestine, and with the blessing and cooperation of the zionist state. The fact that that is precisely what happened in Bethlehem early last month is a measure not only of how much has changed in terms of the Palestinian struggle, but also how much Fatah has changed since its last general convention in Tunis in 1989...”

On the Palestinian unity talks and the West's new strategy towards Hamas

Question: What does a great power do when it suffers an unexpected defeat and a major setback in its plans for achieving an acceptable solution to a problem? 

Answer: It sits back, regroups, deflects public attention to other issues, and works quietly behind the scenes to prepare the ground for a new attempt to achieve its objectives by some other strategy in future. 

New patterns in Israel-Palestinian and intra-Palestinian politics

"Ironically, after months of stalemate, there is now a sense of renewed expectation of significant and genuine movement in political terms. Far from ending anything, Israel's brutal and murderous tantrum in Gaza was in fact an expression of its recognition that its previous approach had failed and would have to be replaced by a different one; and having vented its anger and demonstrated its power, Israel is now preparing to do precisely what it had previously refused to do: accept that it has to deal with Hamas, however reluctantly."

Towards peace on Israeli terms: the political context of the Gaza war

"In hindsight, the Israelis' decision to go to launch a war of exceptional ferocity on Gaza at that particular time should not have come as a surprise. It is how they usually react whenever they are politically out-manouevered, and how they usually start any new effort to re-establish dominance over the convoluted politics of Israeli-Palestinian relations..."

Political obstacles to Palestinian unity at a crucial time

"On the Palestinian side, meanwhile, president Mahmud Abbas faces a timebomb of a different sort.  His presidential term ends on January 9, and Hamas, which won the last major elections in the country, the parliamentary polls of January 2006, has made it clear that it will oppose any unilateral attempt to extend Abbas's rule beyond that date...  Abbas's problem – and by extension, that of his backers – is that every step he has taken against Hamas appears only to have made the Islamic movement stronger." >

Muslim world awaits Obama's approach after failure of neo-cons

(Editorial, Crescent International, December 2008.)

The celebrations in large parts of the US and most of the rest of the world following the election of Barack Obama as next president of the USA were perhaps understandable, even though there was very little chance of his failing to be elected, given the totality of the failure of the neo-cons under George W. Bush over the previous eight years.  Such is the US system of government, however, that Obama will not take office until late January, so it will be some time before the change of leadership is seen in the US's actual policies around the world.  Meanwhile we have the twilight of the "transition" period, during which the out-going and in-coming administrations supposedly work together to ensure a smooth transfer of power, but which tends to be characterised more by last-minute legacy building on the part of the out-going administration than anything else; something Obama's camp is well-positioned to understand, considering how many former senior members of the Clinton administration he is promoting in his own administration-in-waiting, which hardly suggests the  change from the established ways of doing things in Washngton that he had promised.

For most Muslims in the world – American Muslims interested in his domestic policy being the obvious exception – the main concern will be in what changes, if any, he will make in US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.  That there will be changes is inevitable – the political hollowness of Obama's call for "change" notwithstanding – because it has been in this area that the Bush administration's failure has been the greatest.  The idea that the US can act as the sole superpower, using pure military might to intimidate the rest of the world into submission, needing to take no notice of what anyone else thinks, has been so discredited that even Sarah Palin refused to acknowledge it on the campaign trail.  Indeed, the first results of the change in Washington have probably already been seen in this area: the Iraqi cabinet's approval of the draft US-Iraqi treaty in mid-November probably owed much to the knowledge that it would be dealing with a new administration in Washington within a few weeks of the treaty coming into effect.

On Yasser Arafat and Palestinian unity

The last few days have seen attempts at healing the breach between Hamas and Fatah, the two major Palestinian political groups, apparently come to naught for a number of reasons.  November 11 was also the fourth anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat, who symbolised the Palestinian struggle for decades.

The latest issue of the Al-Ahram Weekly (a useful source of English-language news and comment on the Arab world, and Palestine in particular) includes an article by Ghada Karmi suggesting that the problem of Palestinian disunity can be traced back to Arafat's death.

Two booklets on al-Quds and Hamas

This is a follow-up to my post on the current situation in Palestine, which included a copy of the obituary I wrote after Yasser Arafat's death in November 2004 (see here). 

Palestine is a subject that I have written on a fair bit over the years; I am currently working on a small book on Palestinian resistance which will expand on two booklets on the current situation in Palestine that I wrote for Crescent International (South Africa) in 2005 and earlier this year.  At the moment I am reading up on the struggle of Shaikh Izz al-din al-Qassam, who was killed by the British in 1935, and the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39.  (Shaikh al-Qassam is the leader after whom the Hamas military brigades are named.)  Fascinating stuff indeed.  So much history that deserves to be remembered but is largely forgotten...

Anyway -- those two booklets are available for downloading in pdf format from the website of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), if anyone is interested: