The Arab Dilemma: Between Criticizing Hamas And Adapting Israel’s Narrative

-Analysis-

CAIRO — In his memoir, former Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel recounted how late President Anwar Sadat reacted to the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978, known as Operation Litani.

When the invasion began, the minister tried to phone the president several times, but Sadat was sleeping. After waking up, and getting updated on the latest developments, the then president laughed and wondered if Israel had “disciplined” the Palestinians. But Sadat was surprised and fell silent when he heard that the Palestinian and Lebanese military were resisting the invasion.

Years later, Kamel found out that Israel had informed Sadat of the operation before he went to bed, when the first tank crossed the border. Sadat was clearly comfortable by Israel’s invasion of an Arab country while he was negotiating a comprehensive peace with Israel, so he went to sleep reassured.

Sadat’s hostility to the Palestinians after they refused to follow his unilateral initiative, pushed him to gradually adopt the Israeli project with its goal of eliminating the Palestinian resistance.

During the same period, the Lebanese Christian Right’s hostility towards the Palestinians and the Lebanese National Front, prompted them to also ally themselves with the Jewish State, and eventually called on Israel to invade and occupy Lebanon in 1982.

Recent weeks in the region have witnessed the appearances of the likes of Sadat and the Lebanese Christian Right — but in new forms. They have mocked the resistance to Israel’s wars and occupation, and almost explicitly wish for an Israeli victory, due to their hostility towards Hezbollah or Hamas, or both.

Among these pivotal moments, what happened when Hezbollah published the propaganda video Imad 4, then its weak response to the assassination of one of its top commanders, Fouad Shukr, and the empty speech a few days later by the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.

One-bank river?

The dream of ending sectarian resistance organizations looks like a dream that sees half of a promised paradise, divided by a river: with Israel on one bank and Arab countries on the other. The Arab half is imagined after it has been purified from the “illusion” of religiously-oriented resistance. As if, in the absence of Hezbollah and Hamas, we would live in a perfectly secular and democratic paradise.

But the owners of this truncated dream ignore the other bank of this would-be river of paradise. It’s the hell of a religious, racist, extremist and aggressive State of Israel. History has proven that its mere existence in its current religious nature is the primary factor that led to the establishment of hostile religious forces.

Limiting the promised paradise to one bank of the river does not result from ignorance or lack of awareness of history or reality, but rather from a conscious intention to keep the public ignorant of what exists on the other bank. It’s as if Israel’s aggression is just a reaction to our actions.

Right to self-determination

This also means a denial of the existence of a different political and intellectual path, even a small one. It rejects the interference of religion in politics and social conflicts, without neglecting that the basic hostility is with Israel — before any hostility with any Arab religious force confronting Israel.

This view is also an expression of a postmodern inclination to prefer that state, simply because it is a recognized state, over the militia. So that the victory of the religious, colonialist and racist “state” of occupation (Israel) over religious resistance movements that belong to our societies, becomes a victory for modernity. This kind of modernity ignores the barbaric nature of the “State” of Israel, after all the old illusions about its democracy, modernity and the possibility of coexistence with it have fallen.

The defeated people’s position is based on an assumption that sails towards an Israeli port: the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of Oct. 7 was without a horizon, and that Hamas didn’t carefully study its consequences.

The “non-resistance” factions offered no vision or realistic program

This criticism may be correct, but it lacks the other side of the question: the “non-resistance” factions offered no vision or realistic program whatsoever to end the decades-old tragedy of the Palestinian people.

It ceded to the idea that the Palestinians should surrender to their fate in humiliation, waiting for heaven’s gifts that will never come; that the Arabist, Islamist, and leftist, who are hostile to Israel, refrain from any action; that the tragedy of the Palestinian people be resolved on its own, and that the aggressive, religious, and racist occupying state fall on its own.

The intended solution here for the Palestinian tragedy is not merely stopping the ongoing genocide, which is just part of an extended chain, but it’s the most violent and the bloodiest.

The solution of the Palestinian tragedy will not happen unless the Palestinian people in all the land occupied since 1948 and in the diaspora enjoy the right to self-determination. And that the international community respects this right and that all Palestinian refugees are guaranteed the right of return.

​Israel and the Arab repressive regimes

The nihilist-realists rely on another correct assumption, which is that the oppressive Arab regimes, the resistance and others, have benefited from the existence of the “bogeyman” of Israel, and from the rhetoric about the tragedy of the Palestinian people.

But this correct assumption also does not look within its folds to the other side of the truth: Israel and its Western allies played a fundamental role in building and supporting such oppressive Arab authoritarian regimes, because Israel and its allies also benefit from the continuation of such Arab regimes.

Then, we must ask: What is the solution? Ending the existence of oppressive regimes, or the existence of the state of Israel, or both? Or do we tell the Palestinians not to do anything until we overthrow our regimes and build our bright future, and then we will turn to you…

History as guide

The real dilemma is that ending the tragedies of our peoples will not happen only by ending the existence of regimes and gradually eliminating the use of religion outside places of worship, but also by real freedom for the Palestinian people.

I don’t say that the answers are easy, and the dilemmas are not new. But history can be a guide. For it tells us that close cooperation and brotherly alliance that linked the right-wing Christian militias in Lebanon with Israel in the 1970s and 1980s produced nothing but tragedies for everyone before and after the assassination of its most prominent symbol, Bashir Gemayel.

This is what happened with the Sadat project that laid the foundation stone for all the Egyptian and Arab devastation that we see today. Israel was the biggest beneficiary in both cases.

We should also remember that neither Sadat nor Arafat had a project for peace or a state.

But the other aspect that should not be ignored here is that fear from one party led to alliances with the other party, the enemy. This calls into question Hezbollah’s ill-considered adventure in 2006, its involvement in crimes and its armed involvement in Syria after 2011. As for Hamas, there were its confrontations with Mahmoud Dahlan’s Preventive Security Forces in Gaza in 2006 and 2007.

This is in addition to a fundamental troubling factor that we all know: Hamas and Hezbollah are asking everyone to either line up with them to the point of subordination, or to be with the enemy.

Embodying the enemy

Is it necessary to equate the enemy, who has become a machine for producing and recycling most of our people’s tragedies, with those who resist that enemy? Is this a practical argument at a moment of genocide of this magnitude?

We should also remember that neither Sadat nor Arafat had a project for peace or a state. If there had been such a project with an Israeli intention to resolve the conflict and the Palestinian tragedy, Hamas and other radical resistance factions would have lost its justification for existence.

In the face of this reality, and because the alternative is inaction and extinction, we can understand the action, even if it lacks a clear horizon and expresses despair more than anything.

But the action that certainly lacks any horizon and leads to suicide is when the enmity towards the Islamic forces leads to the adaptation and embodiment of the enemy’s narrative.