How Hamas won leadership in Gaza

The rise of Hamas is due to the failure of Arab nationalist and leftist forces to push back imperialism. Throughout the post-war period in the Middle East, socialism or left-wing nationalist ideas were the most popular but they failed because they always sought to substitute a great leader or a band of heroic fighters for the revolutionary movement of the mass of people.

The first idol to fall was Egyptian President Abdel Nasser. A radical nationalist, he formed a united Arab republic with Syria, promised Palestinian liberation and took Suez back from the British. His humiliating defeat at the hands of the Israeli military machine left the Palestinians hopeless until the emergence of the fedayeen (Palestinian guerillas) in the 1960s. Drawing on socialist rhetoric and Mao and Guevara’s military theories, the fedayeen captured the imagination of the Arab masses. To take the initiative back, Israel provoked the 1967 war, which smashed the Syrian and Egyptian armies once again. The fedayeen kept fighting though and a victory over the Israeli army in a 12-hour battle in Jordan in 1968 made them heroes throughout the Arab world. Even King Hussein of Jordan, a stooge of the US, was forced to declare, “We are all fedayeen now”.
But the popularity of the Palestinian resistance and the fact that Palestinian refugees were a majority in Jordan made King Hussein a very worried man.
Before Hussein’s eyes, the seeds of a new society were sprouting and threatening his rule. Jordanian officials watched as goods “For the Palestinian Nation” arrived in Amman [the capital]. Aid from liberation movements such as that in Vietnam flowed into Jordan. In Amman, the guerillas maintained their own military checkpoints, newspapers and office. In November 1968, Hussein’s army opened fire on Palestinian offices in Amman and on three refugee camps. Several camp-dwellers were killed but the fedayeen repulsed the attack. Nasser in Egypt refused to condemn Hussein, claiming he could not violate Jordanian ‘sovereignty’.
There was a debate within the fedayeen on the role of Arab states. The left argued that the Arab states should be challenged (in the case of Jordan this would mean overthrown). Yasser Arafat’s Fatah argued that this would compromise their struggle against Israel. Fatah won, at great cost, as in Black September 1970, Hussein launched a year-long all out war on the Palestinians, at the cost of thousands of lives. A similar story of massacre was repeated in 1982 in Lebanon (where the PLO fled to), with Syria and Israel, supposedly enemies, both acting to crush the threat the Palestinians posed.
The PLO strategy was summed up as the gun and the olive branch – meaning narrowly defined guerilla (and terrorist) actions or negotiations with the US and Israel. Such a narrowly defined struggle that refused to look for allies in the Arab working class was bound to lose. When the Intifada of 1987 broke out, the PLO had little influence or control over what was a genuine, spontaneous mass outpouring of frustration. Arafat was allowed back by Israel after decades in exile but the role he played since his return is local policeman on behalf of Israel. The Oslo Accords, which offered only servitude, were the end of his political credibility.
Into this vacuum stepped Hamas. Although they are a religious organization and although members of the organization have made wildly contradictory statements that veer between Nazi-style anti-semitism and soft opportunism, they have the leadership of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, and increasingly, in the West Bank. Socialists always look to the struggle from below. If Hamas have the leadership of this struggle then it’s the job of socialists not to smash the movement because we disagree with the leadership but to recognize that they have won that position through being the most effective tool the Palestinians have to resist. If we want to see fundamentalism go, we have to provide better, more effective  tools.

Mike T