During the Gaza conflict this past January, one of our fellow bloggers, Cameron,who had become very active onsite for the Gazan cause, posted an interview with a Gazan friend of his Wael, who had lost family members during the Israeli incursion. In reading it, I was extremely struck by the following exchange
C.B. : But you do agree that Hamas was created by Israel … right?
W. : No. It is not true. This is a propaganda by the Israelis and other Arab nations who are afraid of a real Palestinian party.
C.B. : But there are many documentaries and documents about it.
W. : These are all lies and produced by Israel to turn the Palestinians away from Hamas. But we know what the truth is.
There the particular exchange ended. I was struck so by it because most of those of us on the “left” who have vociferously advocated for the Gazan cause cherish as a basic tenet that Hamas was created, if not in whole, at least in no small part, through Israeli Mossad operations and funding, to provide a counterbalance to the secular Soviet-backed PLO, in a “divide and conquer” tactic similar to that of the US-Saudi creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
We dearly cherish this tenet because for us it provides clear proof that Israel has been intrusive, aggressive, unscrupulous and last but not least blundering in its dealings with Palestine. In other words, for us it discredits Israel. Yet for Wael, whose cause we are devoted to, it does just the opposite. It discredits the Palestinians.
I found this so supremely ironic that I thought I’d like to write a blog on it called “What is Hamas?” I was concerned more with philosphical quesiions of perception, of how we create our world views according to our “existential” circumstances of birth, environment, vested interest, etc. However, this cherished notion of mine and many of those who share my ideology is so entrenched that it didn’t even occur to me to give credence to,much less investigate, to find out if there might be a legitimate basis for Wael’s c;laim. And anyway I didn’t get around to writing the blog
And then the other day I was doing the news feeds and I came across an article in al Jazeera by Ramzy Baroud called “Was Hamas the Work of the Israeli Mossad?” Baroud is a highly respected world-class journalist, not extremist in any way, and frequently featured in reputable Western publications. His answer: “hogwash.” Propaganda. And a long elaboration of the history of Hamas an an autonomous Palestinian movement.
At this point the ramifications of my original question, what is Hamas?, became for me far more concrete. And I am sure that there are many here who are several steps ahead of the game and who have already explored this paradox, and come to some good conclusions. But I’m also sure as indeed Baroud emphatically assures us, that there are many like me who never even bothered to question this cherished tenet of ours that Hamas was in no small part a creation of the Mossad. In fact I’ve seen it voiced many times here, by no means only by Cameron. And mysef. And yet the issue also remains a philosphical one for me: What do we really know after all? I mean REALLY know?
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I once read a book by a Buddhist meditator who had training in Western science and he said that if our receptors were not limited and could perceive all “reality”, as perceived by all living beings–the sonar sensing of the bats, the high-pitched frequencies of the dogs and so forth–,that probably we would perceive only pure energy and sound, something like the “white light” and the “om” of the meditator’s “Empty Mind”. In other words to perceive EVERYTHING would be to perceive NOTHING.
But most of us aren’t yogis on a hill. We simply cannot survive that way. We need a framework to navigate our reality, and no matter how flexible we try to be, this framework by definition forms an ideology. So I think there’s a lesson for many of us here. At least there is for me.
***
In writing this I couldn’t really say we cherish the tenet that Hamas was created by the Mossad. More accurately the tenet is that in no small part part Hamas was created by the Mossad. And so that’s what I wrote. And then I noticed that within Baroud’s painstaking debunking of this Western myth of mine, there appears the following sentence:
Israel purposely did little to halt the establishment of the organization, as it also did little to assist in its growth.” (emphasis mine).
What is “little”? What is “in no small part?” These are relative terms. Do they converge? What do we really, I mean really know? And if we all assumed, not all that much, would we find that together we know a lot more? And that some of it was the same all along?
No worries. No bats, no dogs here. We’d still be able to navigate our world.
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Oh yes, ps, the photo–the one a few of you object to, because it demonizes Hamas and ignorantly succumbs to Western propaganda, to the terrorist Bogeyman image of these freedom fighters–which proves to you what you knew about me all along, that I am this or that or whatnot…
It comes from Baroud’s article . It’s from al Jazeera. .
