Hamas”/“Islamic Jihad” as False Synecdoche for the Entirety of Palestine

Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”?

Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact.

In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has been overwhelmingly peaceful in decidedly cultural and apolitical terms.

A systematic Islamophobia first informs what the world understands by the term “Hamas,” or [“PIJ”] and then this very “Hamas”/“PIJ” stands like a firm but false synecdoche for the entirety of Palestine—so that all Palestinians are identified with this “Islam” that stands in diametrical opposition to “the West,” which now Israel represents. Any people subjected to enduring military occupation by a foreign force is entitled to any form of resistance available to them—no matter how feeble and pathetic. But if we dismantle that false synecdoche between Hamas and Palestine and do not allow it to stand for the entirety of the nation, then something extraordinary happens. The cosmopolitan disposition of Palestine emerges as the single most potent metaphor of our world dreaming of its own liberation in nonsectarian, nondenominational, and entirely life-affirming and worldly terms.

To be sure, there is no moral equivalency between the colonizer and the colonized, between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the occupier and the occupied, between a massive, astronomical military industry that tests its newest weapons on Palestinian targets before selling them around the world and a few flimsy rockets Palestinians throw at it. Israel’s moral failure as a settler colony is of a different rank and order than Hamas’s miserable military failures. Hamas’s military failures however are symbolic of its ideological exhaustion—of its irrelevance to the future of Palestine. Representing an entirely depleted ideological site of militant Islamism, Hamas can never represent the totality of the Palestinian struggles for self-determination, but nor can the PLO or PA or any other fake state blueprints feigning authority under occupation. An “Islamic Republic of Palestine” is a nightmare mirror image of “the Jewish State” it opposes. The “Islam” of the “Islamic Republic” and the Zionism that lays a false claim on Judaism at the heart of the “Jewish State” are both the products of the “West” they either oppose or seek to appease, respectively.

Instead of thinking of Hamas [or PIJ] as synecdoche for Palestine, we should think of Gaza as a metaphor for the world at large—as a floating signifier for liberation from wanton cruelty and colonial conquest everywhere… The false identification of Hamas with the entirety of the Palestinian cause is a by-product of the belated order of “Islam and the West… The murder of George Floyd and the guilty verdict of his murderer should change the way Americans viewed Palestinians under brutal Israeli occupation.

Palestine too has saved the Black Lives Matter movement from its potential provincialization and domestication inside the systemic corruption of American politics—where the election of a Barack Obama might seriously derail. The proposition that no one is free until African Americans are free is also true the other way around: no one is free unless Palestinians are free.

The infamous statement of former US president Barack Obama that “the Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia” is typical of the ahistorical assessments that manufactured hostility between Islam and Judaism, and perforce between Jews and Muslims. There is far more historical credence in the validity of a Judeo-Islamic heritage than in a “Judeo-Christian” one—with its history of pogroms leading to the Holocaust.

The link between militant Islamism, triumphalist Zionism, and Christian imperialism in the context of European colonialism is the main frame of reference here… Militant Islamism, fanatical Zionism, and Christian imperialism are the triangulated foregrounding of fear and fanaticism that has wreaked havoc in our world and systematically and consistently distorted the clarity of our historical visions…

Fanatical Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, militant Shi’ism in Iran, secular zeal of Kemalism in Turkey, and triumphalist Zionism in historic Palestine have all been the identical ideological by-products of European colonialism.

Excerpt From The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi, 2022 (ebook version)

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.” In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people. Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...

Europe's Refugee Camps

"Just three and a half years after the signing of the refugee deal, these camps have become symbols of Europe's failure to protect those who knocked on its door for help. These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity." The invisible violence of Europe's refugees camps

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

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