Criminalizing Resistance – Tactics to Dehumanize Hamas are Doomed to Fail

Eleven years after the Palestinian Resistance movement Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, former British leader Tony Blair made a remarkable confession.

In an interview with Donald Macintyre published in The Guardian in 2017, he shamelessly admitted to denying Palestinians their democratic choice – a colossal crime indeed.

Blair said that he and other world leaders were wrong to yield to Israeli pressure to impose an immediate boycott of Hamas following its victory at the polls.

Although the elections were declared free and fair by credible international monitors, Blair as prime minister at the time, fell hook, line, and sinker for Israel’s campaign to delegitimize both the elections and the victor Hamas.

As has been the norm for most American presidents to kowtow to Israel, George W. Bush drove the settler colonial regime’s demands to halt aid to and cut off relations with, the newly-elected Hamas government.

Blair, widely recognized as Bush’s poodle, who also burnished his reputation as a war criminal of note, demanded that Palestinians forego their democratic choice unless certain conditions were met.

Typical of western governments who remain caught up in imperialism and a colonial mindset, Bush and Blair insisted that Hamas recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by previous agreements between its Fatah predecessors and the occupying regime.

Austria, which held the EU’s rotating presidency at the time, issued a statement on behalf of the 25-nation bloc stating that “there is no place in a political process for groups or individuals who advocate violence.”

Vicious efforts to isolate and oust Hamas from political power was spearheaded by Bush and Blair.

As a countermeasure to strengthen the hand of a willing collaborator, they hastily provided diplomatic and financial support to Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah.

A futile strategy that clearly failed with Abbas limping on, linked to a non-existent “peace process” that delivered zero victories- until now. In fact, to this day he continues limping.

Macintyre wrote that Blair, who became envoy of the Middle East quartet composed of the US, EU, UN, and Russia – “… after leaving Downing Street, now says the international community should have tried to ‘pull Hamas into a dialogue'”.

Within a year following Hamas’s stunning victory, the Zionist settler colonial regime imposed a stifling boycott as well as an economic blockade of Gaza.

An unending 17-year blockade since 2007 that has seen relentless bombings, assassinations, detentions and denial of basic supplies, which correctly has been described by my colleague Dr. Firoz Osman as a policy of “extermination”, is what the world is witness to in Gaza today.

It puts a lie to the Zionist narrative peddled unashamedly by western leaders and many mainstream media platforms, about Oct 7 having occurred in “a vacuum”.

Western hypocrisy and double standards that many around the world were shocked to discover post-Oct7, are not new. It has its genesis in the illegal creation of Israel as a colony in the land of Palestine in 1948.

But for the generation who witnessed Hamas’s stunning 2006 election victory, it became more shocking and stark to discover western powers warning that they would not deal with a Palestinian government led by Hamas.

NBC news reported at the time that Hamas had won so overwhelmingly and fairly — former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said the elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were “completely honest”.

That Carter endorsed the election as free and fair, compounded the dilemma for Pro-ApartheidIsrael western governments. After all, the decisive victory saw Hamas taking nearly two-thirds of the 132 parliament seats.

The profiling of Hamas as a “terrorist” organization is not only a ruse but deliberately manufactured by Israel and latched on by its western lackeys, to demonize and criminalize resistance including armed struggle.

Not to be outdone by governments linked to the settler colonial regime, are Zionist pressure groups who work in tandem with rightwing allies across a range of so-called “think tanks”, NGOs and Israeli-funded “research bodies”.

The Zionist playing field in South Africa has been no exception. Pro-Apartheid Israel lobbies ranging from the SA Zionist Federation to the SA Jewish Board, have hysterically been profiling Hamas as a “terror” group.

A tactic doomed to fail, both at the national and international levels, if they were wise enough to heed the lessons of South Africa’s liberation movements.

Palestine’s freedom movement, notwithstanding the slaughter by Israel of innocent civilians in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and Lebanon, is recorded as an epic struggle destined to overcome Zionism.

– Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the South Africa-based Media Review Network. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. Visit: http://www.mediareviewnet.com