Help Fatah fight Hamas

a) that's a ridiculous method - can a "congenial" conversation be had with some representative of an organisation, and what you can "imagine" or otherwise about whether it would be possible with someone from another faction? Try to be a little bit serious! For a start, in fact you could find plenty of Hamas figures who were perfectly capable of being "congenial", and making all the right noises in a general conversation. Read some of the interviews with senior Hamas figures available online, try and find the one with Loewenstein and Meshal for example. But what they couldn't do is defend, to an informed socialist willing to dig deep, what they do. I don't know if the comrade in question is informed on the political character of Fatah or not. If they are, they evidently didn't raise, sharply, what they knew. Fatah, like Hamas, is a complicated, diverse, factionalised phenomenon, with unclear boundaries - but a senior official must be held responsible for the actions of the official organisation.

b) the sympathy for Fatah illustrated above is either a symptom of total ignorance of the real political situation in Palestine, or support by AWL members (neither for the first or last time, unfortunately) for an imperialist faction. Fatah since Arafat - under whose tenure its character was ambiguous and highly conflicted - has become ever more obviously an extension of the Israeli state, a sort of colonial police force for the West Bank, and a would be colonial police force for Gaza. Consider the real relation between US/Israeli imperialism and the official Fatah.

Who trains Fatah’s soldiers? The US army - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/world/middleeast/27palestinians.html?_r=1. Why, do you think?

Who provided equipment, funds and training for the planned Fatah coup in Gaza (which the Hamas coup pre-empted)? Israel -http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7030.shtml, http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/09/20/abbas-to-dahlans-men-during-gaza-uprising-slaughter-them/, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804. Why, do you think?

Who provided targeting information for Israel during Cast Lead? Fatah figures - http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/12/a-fatah-friend-writes-i-apos-m-supporting-the-israeli-air-force/9269/.

Who ordered their police force to quash solidarity demonstrations with Gaza in the West Bank, during Cast Lead? Google it. It’s not rocket science.

If anyone thinks that Fatah is less likely to slaughter or otherwise repress revolutionaries than Hamas, they’re dead wrong. Fatah’s record of suppression of its political opponents is quite clear and unambiguous. They use imprisonment, torture, and murder if necessary. You think they’d be kinder on leftists if they posed a similar challenge to them getting tight with the US and Israel? Get real.

What is the agenda of Israel in the West Bank? It is ethnic cleansing – that is what settlements, and the barrier are. Who has made themselves Israel’s ally? Fatah. Who do AWL members here ask us to support? The very same. “We should recognise and state the differences”. Very well. Let’s hear a complete statement of the differences then!

It’s also based on half-baked slogans instead of analysis. “Fatah supports Two States, and Hamas has a reactionary programme for the destruction of Israel”, says Mark O. What do serious political analysts, who don’t base their positions on Manichean fantasy say? International Crisis Group analyst: "On Hamas I would not hesitate to say that the organization as a whole has essentially reconciled itself to a two-state settlement as a strategic option but has not formally adopted this as an organisational position. Yasin, Rantisi, Abu Shanab, Mashal, etc. have all made such statements. Have they made others that contradict them? Of course. But I think it can safely be concluded the strategic decisions have been made, the tactics remain unresolved and the formalities will come last." The International Crisis Group have published a number of lengthy documents on Hamas, co-written by regional experts. I have posted links to at least one on this site before. What do you have? You have nothing but irresponsible demonization and punditry, which fits neatly with Israel’s imperialist “no partner for peace” rhetoric.

You wonder why the rest of the left characterises the AWL’s politics on the middle east as soft on imperialism? You’re continually outraged by allegations to that effect? Take a closer look at what you’re actually saying. And do some research.

You’re substituting “congeniality” for political analysis, and factionalism for internationalism. For independent working class politics – and against this accommodation with the imperialism of the US and Israel!

Even if you do just use Google, you can find that Hamas says different things at (not very widely separated) different points. And this for the consumption of the world media! What do you think the leaders say to their own members? In so far as there is a single coherent public line, it is that they would use an independent state within the 67 borders as a launch point for a further campaign to abolish Israel. And whether it is based on armed struggle at any given point, an Arab campaign to abolish Israel is reactionary, particular when it's an Islamist one.

I stand by my point above. I don't think any Hamas leader could have had that kind of discussion with the socialist in question - and there's a reason for that. Not the most significant or conclusive observation, but right nonetheless.

Sacha

Google and Wikipedia

I gave book references in the last discussion on Hamas on this site, look 'em up. What are your sources then? The regional experts aren't "unnamed"; go to the Crisis Group website, their names are all over it! And it's not just the Crisis Group. The point is, as I say, you're not engaging with serious analytical work that has been done about Hamas. You're just culling sound bites.

So, Khalid Meshal has done an interview in which he’s really very nice. He says one thing, and does another.

Exactly, that was my point, that's why Sacha congeniality-based analysis is nonsense. Glad you agree, at least on the methodological point.

Hamas is no partner for peace (the Israelis are right; even if Likud is quietly pleased). Fatah is a different matter.

And Israel? Is Likud, or Labour, or any of the significant political tendencies in Israel, a partner for peace?

Anyway, you're wrong. But there you are.

So, Tom, are you for a negotiated peace or not?

erm, basically, Mark. I'm certainly not for one imposed by any state militarily. I'd be in favour of a non-negotiated one established by grassroots resistance to the occupation, the internal collapse of the IDF, or in fact a unilateral withdrawal by Israel to the Green line with all its settlers (in that sense, there really isn't alot to negotiate, and valorising "the negotiations" works day by day to obscure that). But it's irrelevant, since Hamas is quite capable of being a partner for peace, and there is no prospect whatever of "the conquering Arab armies", as the phrase used to have it, making an appearance. There is no existential threat to Israel, nor the prospect of one.

I make no mention of the working class? Please. The only mention of it in your article is when you implausibly claim that your perspective speaks for the class: it doesn't. Gaza is a one party state? There's more space in The West Bank for the left to organise? Please. Is the PFLP and the associated secular-leftist NGOs like UPMRC stronger in the West Bank or Gaza? That'd be Gaza. (If you're going to do a class analysis of Palestine, do it properly. How do you analyse the refugees, the small farmers, etc?) And the West Bank - that's some sort of pluralist liberal haven is it? No, it's a one party state where political opponents - leftists as well as Islamists - are persecuted. These are facts. This is not to defend Hamas's record in Gaza, although I'm sure you'll do your level best to present it that way. It is to assert that you are failing to present Fatah accurately, in the round.

On an ideological level, and on the level of their social vision, Hamas are more reactionary. But what you are doing is whitewashing Fatah. You call for workers to support Fatah against Hamas. Most recently, materially, that would have meant supporting Israel and the USA, working through Fatah, against Hamas in a bloody internecine war; the USA and Israel fighting Iran and Saudi dissident grand-bourgeoisie through proxies. That was what the fighting in Gaza around the coup was about. And you want the workers to take sides? This is an "independent working class perspective". (Oh and of course Fatah has interests of its own. Hamas has independent interests, Abbas and Livni and Israel and the PA and every faction, individual, and nation state at every level have distinct interests of their own. The question is not whether Fatah is a simple cipher for the interests of Israel - or whether Israel is a cipher for the interests of the USA - the question is: what is their place, overall, in the power struggles that go on in the region?)

On the West Bank there is repression (mostly against Hamas), but unions continue to exist; leftists can function; the media is not controlled by the state in the blanket way it is in Gaza; women can freely walk about without covering up.

This reveals your highly idealised understanding of political and social relations in Palestine. Women could not walk around freely in Gaza without covering up long before Hamas came to state power, and even whilst Fatah was overwhelmingly dominant politically. There are a large number of differences between the West Bank and Gaza, one relevant one of which is the sizeable Christian minority in the West Bank, which doesn't exist in Gaza, and which has held back the general culture of Islamisation - at least in the central West Bank, if not in areas like Jenin, many villages etc. Reducing this to a question of who has state power is nonsense. Unions continue to exist? What are the unions? Do they express class autonomy? Are you aware of any strikes in the West Bank against the PA? They're more or less Fatah political organisations. And the media is controlled by the state in the West Bank as well.

How did Fatah's PA treat trade unionists in Gaza before the Hamas coup. Let's ask Rasem Al Bayari, Deputy General Secretary of the PGFTU (Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions).

Following the destruction of a PGFTU building in October 2006 and the firing of two rockets at his home in January, on 6 April Rasem Al Bayari was injured by masked men who attacked him while he was in a car with his family.

He describes these events and the enormous problems faced by workers in Palestine.

Have you any idea who could have ordered these attacks?
The Palestinian authorities are to blame for the first and second attacks, both the firing of rockets at my house and the attack on the PGFTU building. Vehicles belonging to the Ministry of the Interior were used in those attacks: any Palestinian can recognise them easily. We know that the people who attacked the radio station work for the Interior Ministry. PGFTU employees saw them and they painted messages on the walls of the radio station after setting fire to it stating that “Hamas has been here”. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior admitted that the ministry was responsible for those attacks. What is more, the Palestinian authorities failed to condemn the violence against us and did not hold any investigation.

http://libcom.org/library/interview-rasem-al-bayari-palestinian-trade-unionist

Mark calls for us to defend these friends of the workers' organisations on tactical grounds. Nice...

Sacha - you may stand by your point, but you can't explain whether the issues I mention were raised, or explain what you think would have happened had they been. Like Mark, you'd rather gloss over these things.

I'm reminded of Trotsky's comments about the policy of the Third Period Stalinists, who essentially denied any difference between the Nazis and the (highly repressive, preparing the way for the Nazis) Bonapartist regime which they went on to replace - and accused the Trotskyists of softness on the latter:

"The notion that nothing new will be added by the victory of fascists is being zealously propagated now in all sections of the Comintern. In the January issue of the French periodical Cahiers du Bolchevisme we read, "The Trotskyists behave in practice like Breitscheid; they accept the famous Social Democratic theory of the ‘lesser evil,’ according to which Brüning is not as bad as Hitler, according to which it is not so unpleasant to starve under Brüning as under Hitler, and infinitely more preferable to be shot down by Groener than by Frick." This is not the most stupid passage, although – to give it due credit – stupid enough. Unfortunately, however, it expresses the gist of the political philosophy of the leaders of the Comintern."

www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1932-ger/next01.htm#s2

Tom, you think the German Bonapartist regime - or even the republican-Social Democratic phase of the Weimar Republic which went before - did not witness serious repression against the working class?! And therefore - there was no important difference, from a working-class point of view, between that period and the Nazi regime? What about the Spanish civil war? Were the bourgeois-Stalinist Republicans fantastic friends of the working class? And therefore the war was about nothing, and workers should have been neutral?

Sacha

Tom,

No, you've misunderstood.

My point wasn't that Fatah/Hamas is a close analogy to Social Democracy/Nazism. In fact I wasn't comparing Fatah to the German Social Democracy at all! The most obvious and important differences are that the SPD was a workers' organisation in a sense that Fatah isn't, and that there is no even ostensibly mass revolutionary communist movement in Palestine. I am not arguing that revolutionary workers in Palestine should offer Fatah a united front in the sense that Trotsky advocated the Communists offer a united front to Social Democracy. No, Fatah is more comparable to the bourgeois political forces who dominated Germany's decaying, Bonapartist republican regime.

My point was rather that your methodology is similar to that of the Third Period Stalinists, in that you accuse those of us who see important distinctions between Fatah and Hamas of softness on Fatah, and make use of Fatah's indisputably and undisputed anti-working class record to blur the dividing line with Hamas' project: a totalitarian Islamic state which involves the total destruction of all workers' organisations and space for workers to organise. Trotky's criticism of the Stalinists wasn't just about their assessment of the Social Democrats; it was about their assessment of the non-fascist bourgeois parties as well.

In Spain, Trotsky advocated workers fight alongside the bourgeois republicans to stop a fascist takeover (while maintaining their independence, using their own methods and fighting to overthrow the bourgeoisie); if a civil war had take place between the Nazis and the bourgeois "democrats" in Germany he would no doubt have taken a similar position. My point is that this didn't mean he thought these bourgeois forces were "friends of the working class"!

Sacha

A Workers' Liberty delegation has spent the last five days in Palestine, and spent today with left-wing (non-Fatah) PGFTU activists in Nablus.

What we discovered is that this union, which is far from a Fatah front (Fatah has its own front union federation, the GUPW, and there are many critical activists in the PGFTU and struggles over internal democracy etc), operates relatively without hindrance in the West Bank. And, yes, there are strikes against the PA - by the independent unions, but by PGFTU unions as well! There is space, up to a point, for all kinds of secular, left-leaning organisation. In Gaza, in contrast, the unions have been driven under ground, forbidden from holding meetings etc, and their activists are not even allowed to leave Gaza for union conferences. Meanwhile Hamas is trying to replace them with "Islamic unions" (ie labour fronts) under its control.

In the West Bank you see women without the hijab (not many, except in the PGFTU office, but apparently going bare-headed is once again becoming more common among teenage women as a slight degree of social stability reasserts itself), you can buy alcohol, have a party etc etc. None of this true in Gaza - as one PGFTU activist put it, Hamas is not just against trade union rights but all democratic rights. They have recently arrested women in Gaza for smoking shisha in (women-only) coffeeshops! Of course things were not great before Hamas took power in Gaza; but this didn't come out of nowhere, the point is that they were already an extremely influential movement.

This was also the message presented to us by the organiser of a cultural centre in one of Nablus' refugee camps. Neither he nor the PGFTU person were Fatah supporters or had any reason to whitewash Fatah.

Sacha Ismail

See here for some recent evidence of how politically misleading (if possibly justifiable by strict parsing of language) Tom's comment that Palestinian workers are "really... mostly UNRWA funded refugees, very small bourgeoisie, and smallholders, or living off family or savings" is.

Sacha