The Al-Aqsa Flood, two years on: Hamas's political manoeuvrability and gains

Today is 6 October, and exactly two years have passed since the day the Al-Aqsa Flood began. Two full years in which Israel, with the world's largest, most technological and best-equipped army, intelligence service and level of brutality, bore down with all its might on the Qassam Brigades, whose most advanced material weapon is the Yasin 105, and yet could not bring them to their knees. And on the other hand, two full years of the epic resistance of the Hamas mujahideen, who showed the whole world that their greatest weapon against this barbaric army is in fact the faith in their chests.

The Al-Aqsa Flood is of course not an action that the Hamas mujahideen carried out out of the blue, setting off on the fantasy of "whose blood shall we spill today." On the contrary, it was a response given to a 75-year-long, unending occupying aggression that advances step by step anew every day. Perhaps the Palestinian resistance had given daily responses to these occupation policies before as well, but those responses were day-to-day, reactive and ineffective.

The difference of the Al-Aqsa Flood was that, for the first time, it carried out this resistance by attacking the field of the occupying Israel. It was said that doing this was suicide and that they had, as it were, deserved Israel's inevitable wrath. That those who said this were people who for years had merely cursed the Israeli occupation attacks day by day while watching shows, in fact, that the injustice of the Palestinian cause, of the Zionist occupation at its core, has not been sufficiently understood by people, even by Muslims.

The routine formed by step-by-step occupations turns barbaric and insolent occupation practices, after a while, into a habit that can be endured and even ignored. This is the human being; what does he not get accustomed to? People can be made to grow accustomed even to the barbaric slaughter of innocent people and children before our eyes every day. Even a comfort of life can be built on this habit. After a while a situation can arise in which it is not these massacres but those who oppose them that disturb the peace. Yet remaining silent about those massacres ensures the continuation of a banditry that gradually destroys the humanity of all people, that has come to dominate the whole world, and that at any moment can target the life, honor, homeland and chastity of all of us.

There are those who behave as though the Hamas mujahideen, who showed the courage to stand against Israel's banditry, not only endangered their own people but disturbed the peace of nearly the whole world. Yet Gaza was dying step by step every day, and the Qassam mujahideen put this problem on the agenda of the whole world, which had become indifferent to it. At the price of their own lives, they warned and awakened the whole world about a great danger to which the world was exposed.

Today there is an awakening across the whole world. People are awakening, seeing how the ruling orders over their heads or in their worlds have taken them captive and humiliated them, and they are rising against them; in doing so they are also beginning to show signs of vitality on their own behalf; and they are also noticing the oppression that Gaza and Palestine have endured for 75 years and showing solidarity with it.

At the end of a two-year struggle, Gaza today has become the cause of the whole world. Israel is heading toward losing the privileges it has had since the day it was founded, and has exhausted all the sympathy it had accumulated about itself in so many media, cultural and political apparatuses. Despite all the support of the US, which has invested so much in it, the losses it has directly suffered in the war are beyond measure. Beyond its soldiers or citizens who have died, been wounded, gone mad, committed suicide, or resigned and fled Israel, the sense of rout that everyone feels at not having defeated Hamas for two years makes Israel's losses incalculable.

Last week, the developments on the agenda as the Trump plan seemed as if they would make up Israel's losses on the battlefield at the table. There was great insolence and victory-drunkenness on the Netanyahu front, and complete pessimism on the Palestinian front. Hamas seemed almost cornered in the face of the epic resistance it had shown for two years. The plan offered Hamas, as an option, surrendering in exchange for the lives of Gaza's surviving people, handing over its weapons, leaving Gaza to the administration of foreign powers, otherwise being declared a stubborn party that does not want peace.

Was this what should have come out of what was discussed at the summit of the leaders of Islamic countries, which the President attended together with Trump? It was such nonsense that such a result of so many diplomatic initiatives would cause a hope-shattering disappointment for the entire process. Until the information was announced that the plan was far from what had been discussed and agreed at the summit of Islamic countries, many people even went so far as to say that the Islamic countries too had betrayed Gaza.

Yet the response Hamas gave to the plan after several days of thought and intensive consultations changed the whole atmosphere at once. To get out of such a deadlock with such a clever, even brilliant maneuver can be seen as a new ring of victory, or golden page, added in the same quality to the epic struggle displayed over two years.

In its response, which began by accepting in advance the handover of the captives as the most important element of Trump's plan and by thanking Trump and everyone who contributed to the peace process, Hamas said, "however, in order to hand over the captives, it was necessary to reach the places where they were located under constant bombardment." For this, a ceasefire needed to be declared urgently.

When Trump announced this response from his official account as "Hamas is ready for peace," he in effect also recognized Hamas as an interlocutor. The fact that the "buts" in Hamas's response were valid enough to open a new door of negotiation for it produced an outcome in which Netanyahu, going for the rice, would lose the bulgur at home.

Moreover, in its response Hamas distinguished between what it has as a movement and has the right to decide, and what the Palestinian people have as national rights that it cannot decide alone. It agreed to release the captives, but tied this to the end of the war, the rejection of the occupation of the Gaza Strip, the prevention of displacement, and the entry of aid. On the other hand, by skillfully bypassing the international tutelage assumed in the plan, by including the Arab states in the process and making them directly responsible for supporting the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip the day after, it made yet another clever move.

Hamas had no eye on the administration of Gaza anyway, but it once more put forward, in an incontestable context, that the administration of Gaza is also a matter of the Palestinian people's will and a part of Palestine's right to self-determination.

Thus Hamas encouraged all elements of the Palestinian people to be real partners in the processes of decision-making about Palestine. Hamas leads the resistance, but it has had the opportunity to show once again that it does not exercise tutelage over the Palestinian people, who are the owner of national decision-making and of the right to self-determination.

In essence, Hamas as an organization has no need of this at all. The Palestinian people are already Hamas now, and Hamas is Palestine..