This Ongoing War: A Blog: 23-Apr-14: On the road to... what?

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

23-Apr-14: On the road to... what?

Zahar, rifle and unkissed baby:
Powerful combination in theirvalue system

Now that Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah/PLO/PA and Hamas have decided to spend the next five weeks pursuing "unity" and exploring how to do good things collaboratively, we feel there's value in going back for a short refresher of the views of that senior figure in Hamas who appeared in a post of ours yesterday ["22-Apr-14: Not quite your average foreign minister or baby-kissing politician"]. The brief excerpt below is from an interview published this week in the web magazine, Al-Monitor.

Interviewer: Has Hamas truly abandoned armed resistance while other parties insist upon continuing it?

Mahmoud al-Zahar: Anyone who claims so must be drunk. How has Hamas abandoned the resistance effort? What are the manifestations of it doing so? Where have we prevented the launching of rockets? The last time three men were martyred as they fired rockets, did we stop them..?

Interviewer: What about the re-emergence of the armed Qassam Brigades in the West Bank?

Mahmoud al-Zahar: An occupied community has the right to defend itself. I do not want to go into the details, yet negotiations did not yield any results until now. Now in Gaza we kicked the occupation out and the people should opt for another choice. We [publicly] declare this choice and we are not ashamed of it. The project of resistance has to be adopted with all its tools to end Israeli occupation.

Knowing what this man says and possibly believes, thinking that an outcome that is somehow good and conceivably includes something close to peace might result means a person (a) thinks Zahar is lying when he makes statements like these; (b) believes Zahar, thinks he means 'resistance' when he says 'resistance' but hopes it will all work it alright in the end somehow; or (c) is convinced Zahar and the other ideological zealots of Hamas will be outsmarted and out-outmaneuvered by the efficient pragmatists of Fatah who, in turn, seriously want peaceful relations with Israel.

Optimistic we're not.

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