A wake-up call from 36-year-old Hamas

Two years ago I wrote a piece under the same title, "A Wake-Up Service from 34-Year-Old Hamas." Let us read it again, to recall some of the signs it gave about today and to cast a different light on what is happening now.

"Israel, which looks like the official registration, so to speak, of the outlaw's becoming sovereign of the world we live in, has also become the source of the myths about the superiority of power, technology, occupation and the unjust world order. As Israeli invincibility circulates as a myth, the name of a pride and arrogance that exhaust the hopes of justice, freedom and dignity, the Palestinian resistance, and especially Hamas's resistance, which has reached 34 years, emerges against it as a myth-shattering story.

The myth of Israeli invincibility turns into a thoroughly ridiculous comedy in the face of the Hamas resistance, but at the same time it turns into a wake-up effect in which the nose of occupation, arrogance, power and disdain is rubbed in the dirt, in which they are forced to put their feet back on the ground. And for the oppressed too, this story holds lessons that will revive faith in human beings, and a warning that a person must discover the infinite possibilities God has given him, never giving up hope under any circumstances.

Israel, of course, does not consist merely of Israel. It is a structure that the world's dominant powers, while arranging the world to their liking, planted in the most improbable place, 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 the values called modern. Secularism, for example, 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 the sign of being sovereign, the strength of the claim to sovereignty also passes through the extremity of the exceptions applied in principle. Occupation, the turning of cities into concentration camps, systematic human rights violations, massacres: these are things the Enlightenment-based modern world promised to end. Yet all of these are again overlooked as exceptions when Israel is concerned.

The power of this arrogant Israel, so sovereign-minded that it makes exceptions even of the rules it itself set and proclaimed, is painfully encountering its own limits in the face of Hamas.

Thirty-four years have passed since the Palestinian Hamas movement set out. On this occasion, Khaled Meshaal, who long served as the head of Hamas and is now the head of its Political Bureau abroad, organized a meeting in Istanbul in which he laid out a kind of reckoning of 34 years.

At the meeting, attended by some 50 journalists, writers and politicians from many countries, Meshaal made very clear assessments that also offered a historical perspective on where Hamas has come from and to, in terms of the goals it declared when it set out, and on where it stands now.

Undoubtedly, the period in which Hamas emerged was one in which Israel, with the support of the world's dominant powers, was recklessly continuing its occupation, and in which, within the world's existing order, no resistance to this occupation was any longer to be seen. There had of course been a resistance before Hamas too, and Hamas is not far from appreciating it. But at a moment when the flame of this resistance was about to go out and the myth of Israeli invincibility was gradually darkening all hopes, Hamas added a brand-new spirit and excitement to the resistance and has kept it going to this day without ever giving in.

Throughout these 34 years, various atmospheres were in fact created, time and again, suggesting that Israel's power was irresistible and unbeatable. Israel, through various searches for alliances with the countries of the region, tried to cut off the support of the Islamic world or of other countries for the Palestinian cause.

There were times when it succeeded in this, but peace or stability, which it sought, never came to Israel. Before the ink had dried on all the talks it held with Palestinian officials through the mediation of so many so-called countries, it continued its settlement programs, encouraged the violations of fanatical Jews, and continued to encourage their plans to annex Jerusalem. Because Israel is a crime machine conditioned to occupation, what it ultimately demanded in all its searches for alliances was complicity in crime. Israel does nothing but infect every country it touches with its own crime of occupation. But there have been countries that saw even this complicity as profitable for themselves in some respect. And Israel has always advanced along this line.

Khaled Meshaal explained how Hamas's resistance showed Israel its limits each time and what despair it drove it into. Just when Israel thought all obstacles had been lifted from before its path of occupation and annexation, which it was continuing by building a new basis for agreement with Arab countries under the heading of the Deal of the Century, it suffered a heavy defeat it never expected at the hands of Hamas. It is no longer Israel's power but Hamas's power that makes the surprises.

Despite its indisputable superiority in technology, weapons power and international support, it has not only been unable to stop Hamas's advance, but this defeat has also nearly nullified all the gains it had made at the diplomatic level.

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

Today, investing in the power or diplomatic position that Israel represents no longer holds its old appeal for Western countries either. That the Islamic countries in the normalization race are far from grasping this is of course regrettable, but it can be said that Hamas has performed a wake-up service for them too. Whether they wake up is of course up to them.

Meshaal grounds all of these accounts both in terms of Hamas's strategies, accompanied by risk and opportunity assessments, and in terms of a strong historical perspective. However powerful Israel is today, whatever its technology and its position in the international balances, there have been so many states like it in history, so many states thought to be indestructible and unbeatable... States that collapsed within a very short time and in whose places the winds now blow..."