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Hamas and Us Gila Svirsky Coalition of Women for Peace 1) Who's to blame? Listening to the reactions of passersby at the recent Jerusalem vigil of Women in Black, you would think it was our peaceful little group that put the Hamas into power. This stems from Israeli right-wing politicians who are asserting that Hamas won because of the Gaza withdrawal and other conciliatory overtures, i.e., "rewarding terrorism". Indeed, Bibi Netanyahu & co. are delighted with the Hamas victory, on which they can now build a fear-saturated election campaign, and return voters to the fold who lately had slipped into something more moderate. But here's my take on what made Hamas victorious in the recent elections: Israel's failure to sit down and negotiate an end to the occupation. This is often phrased as "the failure of Fatah to make progress on peace", but they amount to the same thing: the Fatah failed because Israel refused to offer any reward for moderation, refusing to sit down and negotiate with them. And what about the corruption claim - that voting for Hamas was also a vote against the corruption of the Fatah politicians? This may have played a role for some voters, but since when does corruption bring down a politician? Certainly not in Israel, where Sharon's corruption has been an open book, but forgiven by those who support his politics. Corruption is tolerated when approval ratings are high in other respects. The corruption of the previous Palestinian government would have been overlooked, had the politicians only managed to show some progress on ending the occupation. 2) When terrorists become politicians I remember standing on the balcony of my home in Jerusalem on a lovely May morning of 1977 and gasping when I heard who had won the Israeli election: Menahem Begin, former head of a Jewish terrorist organization that had killed 91 civilians by bombing the King David Hotel in 1946. And then it was Begin who returned the Sinai Peninsula and negotiated peace with Egypt. In 2001, Israel elected Ariel Sharon, responsible for blood-soaked episodes in Qibiya, Beirut, Gaza, Sabra and Shatila, and more. And then it was Sharon who returned Gaza - imperfect, but a singularly important precedent. I condemn terrorism, whether 'rogue' or state sanctioned, and I would never have voted for Hamas (or Begin or Sharon). But who is better positioned than Hamas to reach a compromise peace agreement? We have the mirror image of Israel in the Palestinian election: Just as the Israeli right (Begin and Sharon) could more easily make concessions than Yitzhak Rabin, who had to fight our right wing all the way, so too the Hamas can mobilize more support for concessions than the more moderate Fatah could now undertake. 3) About creeping fundamentalism Yes, I am worried about Hamas rule, particularly its domestic agenda in Palestine: I worry about women, non-Muslims, journalists, gays, people in the arts, and all those who benefit from the open society. To what extent will the Hamas increase the role of Shari'a (Muslim) law in civilian life? Or religious education in the schools? On the other hand, it's quite evident that Palestinians have experienced democracy and will not easily tolerate a closing of their society. I take heart from this week's survey of the Palestinian population, published in the Palestinian Authority's Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda and reported in the Jerusalem Post*: 84% of Palestinians support a peace deal with Israel. In case you wondered if this includes the Hamas, 75% of Hamas voters are opposed to calls for the destruction of Israel. The Hamas knows that seculars comprise a large portion of their constituency. 4) And who benefits from ending foreign aid? So along come American and Israeli politicians advocating for a policy that would isolate and punish the Palestinians by withholding financial aid. Everyone knows this would destabilize the fragile economy, harm the innocent (but not the politicians), and foster increasing bitterness against the secular west. A much more reasonable approach would be to extend support and see how responsibly Hamas uses it. Or does someone have an interest in sowing chaos in the Palestinian territories? Yes, I too would like to demand a renunciation of terrorism and violence as a precondition for talking .I'd like to demand it from both sides. But realistically this has to be done as part of the negotiations. Gila Svirsky Jerusalem www.coalitionofwomen.org *** http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/02/05/do0509.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/02/05/ixnewstop.html This is folly, not a clash of civilisations By John Casey (Filed: 05/02/2006) A couple of years ago I was in a small boat on the Nile in Upper Egypt, looking for a place to moor and have a picnic. The current was strong, and there were no trees to attach the boat to. The peasant farmer had noticed our plight, turned up with a stake, drove it into the muddy bank, tied the rope, and went away without a word. A few minutes later he was bathing in the Nile, and not long after that I saw that he had stretched out a prayer mat in the middle of the field and was at his devotions. Then he brought us some tea. I persuaded him to join us, and we talked. And what did he most want to talk about? He wanted to know what were the English equivalents of the Arabic names for the four Archangels. There is a clash of civilisations, but it is not between us and the Muslims. It is between those who find that anecdote (which is true in every detail) incomprehensible or, at best, quaint, and those who see it as the expression of a piety we can easily understand and respect. The spectacle of ordinary Muslim piety astonishes and sometimes scandalises Western liberals, especially those from northern Europe. Cardinal Newman distinguished between "notional" and "real" assent to religious doctrines. He thought that Catholics and Russian Orthodox really assented to Christian belief because they had numinous liturgies, loved religious images, were not surprised by miracles, and felt themselves surrounded by God, Mary and the saints. To the Catholic convert, Newman, Protestantism was coldly "notional". Muslims abhor images, and have hardly any ritual. But God is certainly alive and well in Muslim countries. You cannot get away from unselfconscious public piety. I once came out of a shop in a little alley in Cairo, and was embarrassed to find that I had to walk through a group of locals praying in my direction. It simply was prayer-time and this was the direction of Mecca. Obviously a religion that aims to guide its followers both politically and spiritually finds it hard to accept those who reject its beliefs. Yet Islam from the beginning gave a status to Jews and Christians while Christianity, as soon as it got power in the Roman Empire, began systematically stripping the Jews of all civil rights. This does not mean that the current cant about Islam being a tolerant religion is true, for the simple reason that none of the monotheistic faiths have been tolerant. Think of the language with which the Jews of Amsterdam expelled Spinoza for heresy: "Cursed be he by day, and cursed by night, let no man show him any kindness, the Lord pardon him never." Islam has all the triumphalism that the Catholic Church had until the Second Vatican Council less than 50 years ago. Muslims have exactly the same desire to convert as did the Catholics of my youth. "You have read the Koran, been to the mosques, lived among us, how can you not believe?" Have we in the West become so historically ignorant that we forget how closely, within living memory, Christian attitudes to the sacred resembled those of Muslims? The face of Christ was rarely shown by Hollywood until at least the 1960s, because to do that on film seemed disrespectful compared with a stylised representation in painting. There is little doubt that only a generation ago the blasphemy laws would have been used against Jerry Springer, the Opera. They would certainly have been used against Gibbon had he not concealed his assault on Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire under layers of irony. It is simply good manners to try to understand other people's sense of the sacred. We have very little idea of how Muslims love and revere Mohammed, while resolutely insisting that he was simply a man. Throughout the Muslim world, you see people reading their Korans in shop doorways, on buses, anywhere. Talk to any group of students in Cairo, or Damascus, or Isfahan, and one of them is bound to ask: "What do you think of our Prophet?" To see their Prophet ridiculed, presented as a terrorist, or with a pig's face causes not just rage, but actual grief. The trouble with the Danish cartoons that have set the Muslim world ablaze is that they are stupid, historically uninformed and therefore in appalling taste. We all know that Islam commands jihad and that this can mean either inner spiritual struggle or actual fighting for the faith. But to assume, as these drawings seem to suggest, that Islam is therefore a faith given to terrorism is as silly as to assume that Christianity goes naturally with invasion, oppression and murder because of the Crusades, the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain. The current political violence by Muslims can be traced to two quite clear events. The first was the fatal decision of President Sadat of Egypt to bring the Islamists into politics as a weapon against the Left. The second was the creation by the Americans of the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. This Frankenstein's monster has stalked the world ever since. Among our own pieties, I certainly revere the right to satirise and attack religion and rejoice that the Government's sinister attempts to curb this have been defeated. But we exercise that right more intelligently if we understand the pieties of others. Last year I was in a Turkish bath in Aleppo. A group of young men in high spirits came in chanting boisterously. I assumed it was some equivalent of "Manchester United!" An Arabic speaker set me right: "They are chanting: 'Revere the Prophet and honour the family of the Prophet!'" Yes they are different. . John Casey is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and is currently writing An Intelligent Person's Guide to Heaven and Hell _________________________________ The Middle East & North Africa Email List MENA Info - [EMAIL PROTECTED] *To access the MENA Info ARCHIVE, please visit: http://www.yourmailinglistprovider.com/pubarchive.php?MENAinfo *To SUBSCRIBE to the MENA Info List, please add your emailaddress here: http://hometown.aol.com/menainfo/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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