A wake-up call from 34-year-old Hamas

In the world we live in, Israel, which seems almost an official certification of the brigand's becoming sovereign over the world, has become the source of myths about the superiority of power, technology, occupation and the unjust world order. As the myth of Israeli invincibility circulates as a name for a pride and arrogance that exhausts hopes of justice, freedom and dignity, the Palestinian resistance, especially Hamas's resistance, which has now reached 34 years, emerges against it as a myth-shattering story.

The myth of Israeli invincibility turns into a thoroughly laughable comedy before the Hamas resistance, yet at the same time it turns into a wake-up effect in which the nose of occupation, arrogance, power and disdain for need is rubbed in the dirt and, from their side, feet are forced to touch the ground again. Of course, for the oppressed too, this story holds lessons that will revive faith in humankind, and a warning that human beings must, never giving up hope under any condition, discover the infinite possibilities God has given them.

Israel is of course not only Israel. It is a structure that the dominant powers of the world planted, while designing the world to their liking, in the most improbable place, in the most impossible geography, with the arrogance of "whatever we want, happens."

Israel's presence on Palestinian land is a challenge to history, to geography, and to humanity. It also constitutes an exception to all of the values called modern. Secularism, for example, as a value exalted by the modern world, is rendered completely void by the support given to the Israeli occupation, which bases its entire existence and justification on a promise in the Torah. But if exception is a sign of being sovereign, the strength of a claim of sovereignty also passes through the extremity of its practices of principled exception. Occupation, the transformation of cities into concentration camps, systematic human rights violations, massacres: these are the very things the Enlightenment modern world promised to end. Yet when it comes to Israel, all of these are again overlooked as exceptions.

The power of this arrogant Israel, which claims a sovereignty so great that it makes exceptions even to the rules it has itself laid down and declared, bitterly encounters its own limits before Hamas.

Thirty-four years have passed since the Palestinian Hamas movement set out. On this occasion, in Istanbul, Khaled Meshaal, who served for many years as Hamas's chairman and is now its Head of the Political Bureau Abroad, organized a meeting in which he set out a kind of accounting of 34 years.

At the meeting, attended by about 50 journalists, writers and politicians from many countries, Meshaal made very clear assessments, which also presented a historical perspective on where Hamas has come from and to in terms of the goals it declared when it set out, and what its situation is at present.

Without doubt, the period when Hamas emerged was a period in which Israel, with the support of the world's dominant powers, was recklessly continuing its occupation and in which, within the world's current order, no resistance to this occupation was any longer to be seen. There was doubtless resistance before Hamas, too, and Hamas is not far from appreciating this resistance. But at a moment when the flame of this resistance was about to go out and the myth of Israeli invincibility was increasingly darkening all hopes, Hamas added an entirely new spirit and excitement to the resistance and has continued it up to these days without ever giving up.

Throughout these 34 years, in fact, various airs were repeatedly created that Israel's power was irresistible and invincible. Israel, through different quests for alliances with the countries of the region, tried to cut off the support of the Islamic world or other countries for the Palestinian cause.

There were times when it succeeded in this, but peace or stability, which Israel sought, never came. Before the ink of all the talks it held with Palestinian officials, through the supposed mediation of many countries, had dried, it continued its settlement programs, encouraged the violations of fanatical Jews, and continued to encourage their plans to annex Jerusalem. Since Israel is a crime machine conditioned to occupation, what it demanded in the end in all its quests for alliances was complicity in crime. Israel does nothing but spread its own crime of occupation to every country it touches. But there were countries that saw, from some angle, a gain for themselves even in this complicity in crime. Israel advanced along this line throughout.

Khaled Meshaal explained how Hamas's resistance showed Israel its limits each time and into what kind of despair it drove it. At the very moment when Israel last thought that all obstacles had been lifted from before it in its occupation and annexation plan, which it was pursuing by creating a new ground of agreement with Arab countries under the title of the Deal of the Century, it suffered a heavy defeat it had never expected at the hands of Hamas. It is no longer Israel's power that makes surprises, but Hamas's power.

Despite its indisputable superiority in technology, weapons power and international support, it not only failed to stop Hamas's advance, but this defeat also made nearly all the gains it had achieved at the diplomatic level come to nothing.

The rout that Hamas inflicted on Israel this year has, on the contrary, put the Arab countries that were trying to earn a premium through friendship with Israel in a very difficult position as well. Normalization with Israel is again being treated as a step that will bring no returns and will mean nothing other than shouldering the shame of complicity in crime.

Today, investing in the power or the diplomatic position that Israel represents no longer has its former appeal for Western countries either. That the Islamic countries in the race for normalization are far from understanding this is of course sad, but it can be said that Hamas has performed a wake-up service for them too. Whether they wake up or not is of course up to them.

Meshaal grounds all that he related both in terms of Hamas's strategies, together with assessments of risks and opportunities, and in terms of a strong historical perspective. However strong Israel is today, whatever its technology and position in the international balances, there have been many states like it in history, many states that were thought to be indestructible, invincible... States that collapsed in a very short time and where only the wind blows in their place...