Muslims and Liberals

Dawn – Editorial
January 27, 2009

THE Obama administration should build on the Israeli and Hamas ceasefires to promote a durable truce between them but realise that Hamas’s survival in the Gaza war has unravelled the basis of the current peace process.

Of the nearly 1,200 Palestinians killed in the war, only about 300 were Hamas fighters. And despite the havoc the Israelis wreaked on Gaza’s infrastructure and economy, they have failed to achieve their main goals: to “topple Hamas” and stop its missiles. Meanwhile, Arab states invited Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal to a summit in Qatar to discuss the Israeli invasion. Responding to Meshaal’s call for a boycott of Israel, Qatar and Mauritania have suspended trade relations with the Jewish state.

The Israeli invasion has sidelined Fatah, the secular Palestinian organisation that the Islamist Hamas has expelled from Gaza and now rules the West Bank. “This is the first time in its history that [Fatah] is neither leading nor participating in the conflict against Israel,” Qadourah Fares, a former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, told England’s Guardian newspaper.

“The Palestinian people are fighting the occupation, while Fatah is playing the role of the spectator.” Given the growing Palestinian antipathy for Fatah, it may well be that Hamas will replace it as the vanguard of the Palestinian independence movement.Hamas wouldn’t settle for a disarmed Palestine within its pre-1967 borders or renounce the Palestinian refugees’ demand for their return to Israel from where they were driven out in 1948, as Fatah would. Someday somebody will have to work out a peace model that would enable the Palestinians and Jews to share the holy land as they had for centuries before the establishment of the ethnically cleansed Israel. One doesn’t know when and at what cost in terms of the blood spilled.

As an Islamist movement, Hamas is also part of the regional struggle against foreign domination. The Gaza war has bolstered that struggle, which was galvanised by the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s. The Soviets’ defeat at the hands of Afghan Mujahideen was “a Eureka moment” for the Islamists, Khurshid Ahmed, a Pakistani Islamic intellectual and politician, told me in Islamabad in October 1989. If Muslim militants could roll back the world’s largest conventional military power, he said, they could one day end the American-Israeli hegemony in West Asia. During research trips in 1991, 1995 and 2007 some of my Islamist interviewees in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates echoed his assessment.

The Arab and Muslim quest for a strategy to challenge Israeli and American domination of the Middle East began right after the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel had defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. That drove home to Arabs and Muslims that their postcolonial states could not free Palestine from Israeli occupation or throw off American tutelage over other Muslim societies. A clue to effective “anti-hegemonic” struggle was revealed by the 1983 suicide attack on US military barracks in Lebanon. A single blast by an Islamist militant, which killed 241 American troops, forced the Reagan administration to call off its military intervention in that country.

A string of subsequent Muslim guerrilla successes seemed to confirm the belief that Islamist militants could overcome non-Muslim domination. Among those successes: the expulsion of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah in 2000, abandonment of US bases in Saudi Arabia in the wake of 9/11, Israel’s retreat from Gaza under Hamas fire in 2005 and Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

People don’t have organic ties to artificially created postcolonial states, which make up most of the Middle East. They have a deeper sense of belonging to their religious and ethnic communities and the urge to fight and die defending them. The Iraqi state’s army of 400,000 crumbled within days of the 2003 US invasion, but Shia and Sunni Islamic guerrillas have forced the world’s only superpower to plan for a retreat from Iraq.

Lebanon has a 61,000-strong army, 60 per cent of it Shia. And the Lebanese state lost all its many military encounters with Israel and no longer has the will to engage the Jewish state militarily. Yet, as mentioned, a couple of thousands of Shia Islamic militants under the Hezbollah banner rolled back the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and faced down the invading Israeli force in the Second Lebanon War.

The Palestinians’ is the mother of all Muslim anti-hegemonic movements. The passing of the leadership of that struggle to the Islamist Hamas will not only change the goals of the Palestinian struggle but also reinforce Islamist domination of the Muslim anti-hegemonic movements elsewhere.

Successful anti-hegemonic movements have often been propelled by religious upsurge. The American Revolution was spurred by the First Great Awakening (1730-1770). In my native Indian subcontinent, the epic struggle for independent from British colonial rule followed the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-1924), fuelled by Islamic and Hindu religious fervour. I suspect that US-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East will eventually be eroded by Islamist movements. Among them Hamas which has been chastened by the Gaza war.