> On Aug 17, 2024, at 6:30 PM, John Edmundson via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The assassination of the King Abdullah of Jordan was justified.
My reaction is "so what" if it doesn't advance the movement, which it did not.
Rashid Khalidi discussed the problems of building the Palestinian liberation
movement in a recent interview with Tariq Ali,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/the-neck-and-the-sword.
Regarding the weaknesses of that movement:
Q: How do you explain the persistent weakness of the modern Palestinian
leadership? I know that the best people were killed.
A: That’s the first important point. Assassinating Palestinian leaders became
an Israeli speciality. An Israeli author, Ronen Bergman, has a chilling book
about this, Rise and Kill First. The title says it all. They have been very
careful in picking out the ones they want to eliminate.
Khalidi also noted "I am constantly struck by how poor a job the Palestinians
did in publicizing their cause, starting in 1917 and going well beyond 1967.
It’s only really with the current generation that there has been any kind of a
breakthrough. And this has not come from the political leadership, but from
civil society."
And he considered 10/7 a tragic miscalculation by the Hamas leadership, who
expected that transforming their population into cannon fodder (my
characterization, not his) would lead to a regional war of liberation:
"But while it may still explode into a full-scale war, so far it’s been tit for
tat, very measured and controlled. This is a function of what anybody with eyes
to see could have told the boys in the tunnels, which is that Iran did not
invest in building up Hezbollah’s capabilities for the sake of Hamas. It did so
in order to create a deterrent to protect Iran against Israel; that’s the only
reason. The idea that Hezbollah and the Iranians would shoot every arrow in
their quivers to support Hamas, in a war it started without warning its
allies—it beggars belief that anybody could think that that would be the case.
Iran is a nation state that has national interests, which are restricted to
regime preservation, self-defence and raison d’état. You can talk about Islam,
ideology and the ‘axis of resistance’ until you’re blue in the face. I will
tell you: raison d’état, regime protection—that’s what they care about, and
that’s why they backed the build-up of Hezbollah’s capacity. And they’re not
going to shoot that bolt. There was no possibility under any circumstances of
their doing that to support Hamas. If, heaven forbid, a full-scale war erupts,
it will be because of a miscalculation, or an accident, or an irrational move
by Netanyahu, not a decision by Hezbollah."
AFAICT, all the talk of justifiable retribution, particularly against a
civilian population, has never proven to be an effective means of building the
liberation movement.
Mark
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