The Chris Hedges Report with Paola Caridi on the origins and aims of Hamas and why armed resistance against Israeli occupation is the only option most Palestinians have left.
Hamas, like all resistance groups from the African National Congress to The Irish Republic Army, Palestinian resistance organizations, from the Palestine Liberation Organization to Few Few groups are as demonized or as misunderstood in the Middle East as Hamas. Hamas is not, despite what Israel and Washington say, a terrorist organization – although like most resistance groups, including the Jewish militias that created the state of Israel, it has used terrorism as a tactic. Hamas is a religious, nationalist political movement. It does not hold the Palestinians in Gaza hostage. It has broad popular support among Palestinians, largely because of the failure of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, to deliver the promises made with Israel in the Oslo Accords, but also because its dogged resistance to the Israeli attack on Gaza. Indeed, since the Israeli attacks it has become lionized throughout the Muslim world. The ferocity of the Israeli violence against Hamas, including the routine assassination and imprisonment of its leadership, has failed to dismantle the organization. To outsiders the intransigence of Hamas, which in its 1988 charter called for Israel’s destruction, and which carried out suicide bombings in Israeli cities, fires rockets into Israel and led the incursion into Israel that left some 1,200 Israeli dead, is dismissed by Israel and Washington as evidence of the group’s fanaticism. Because those on the outside do not understand what when into making Hamas, the steady drip of humiliation, violence, and impoverishment that define Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, Hamas and its ideology is incomprehensible. But from the Palestinian perspective, Israel has left the Palestinians with no other choice. The secular Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the occupied West Bank, has devolved into little more than a hated colonial police force. It has failed to blunt Israel’s slow motion ethnic cleaning. Israel steadily dispossesses more and more Palestinians from their homes and land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, seizes water resources and uses indiscriminate violence to quell dissent. In short, by shutting the door to any peaceful resolution to the conflict Israel created its own nemesis, the mirror image of an intransigent and brutal apartheid state. Joining me to discuss the Palestinian resistant group Hamas is journalist and historian Paola Caridi author of Hamas: From Resistance to Regime.
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