A Great Misunderstanding

JERUSALEM, Israel – President Putin has invited the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas to Moscow for talks, France supports the invitation, and even the rest of the world, as represented by the Quartet, is taking a wait-and-see attitude, as Secretary of State Rice expressed recently in London. It’s a great misunderstanding.Ms. Rice, while wisely withholding new subsidies to the Palestinian Authority until Hamas decides whether to give up its armed struggle, proclaimed, that the Palestinian Arabs are a “wonderful people.” Which might be true psychologically, or aesthetically. But certainly not politically unless you think that their vote for Hamas is just a matter of chance. I don’t deny that one day the Palestinians could become a wonderful democratic people. I don’t know about the future. But I do know about today. I know from personal experience the reasons why they voted for Hamas, and they are not good.I went to the West Bank to report on and interview Palestinian Arabs before, during, and after the elections. In the market of Hebron, a pretty woman, Raeda, 22, with a veil down to her eyebrows, books and notebooks under her arm, told me that she prefers Hamas because it’s a religious party that will reestablish the Islamic rule on all the land occupied by the Jews. With a lovely smile she also told me that in her life she wants to teach, she wants to help people; and that she wouldn’t mind if her son (she has one already) becomes a martyr. For the sake of Islam and Palestine she would sacrifice herself and everybody she loves.Hamad Hassan Zama’ari, an old man with an Arafat-style headscarf, said that with the help of God, Fatah – Arafat’s old faction – and Hamas will find an agreement. The Jews don’t give anything if they are not obliged by force, everybody knows it, he said.Ahmad, 22 years old, said: “We have been negotiating for the last 15 years, and it served nothing. Only resistance can help”.A group of children told me, almost singing, that: “Religion says that there is no peace with the infidels.” Where did they learn that? At school. What do they think about martyrs? All of them want to be one.Ali Zamar, the boss of Fatah in Hebron, told me that Hamas is very strong because people are ignorant and superstitious; Hamas looks for consensus with simple and dogmatic sentences, like the one that proclaims without doubt that Israel must be destroyed. “They want Hamas so that they will not to be obliged to make peace” he told me plainly.Naef Rajub, a very important leader of Hamas, answered my questions about the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying “Well, he was not very diplomatic when he said that he wants to sweep Israel out of the map. It was precocious. He had to wait until the bomb were ready.”In front of a voting commission office in Bethlehem, Naji, from Hamas, told a very young policeman from Fatah that for him, pubs, cinemas, beers, girls can all disappear. He will not miss them. He needs only Islam, and Hamas will give it to all the world.I cannot forget also the several professors, lawyers, pharmacists, dressed in duffel coats and scarves like revolutionaries of La Sorbonne. A professor of urban planning, Aziz Dued, enthusiastically explained to me that all of these intellectuals were candidates for Hamas because they are proud of Islam as a universal religion. Universal? Yes, because being the last revelation, the Koran includes the Torah and the Gospel. Hamas has two fights going, said Professor Dued, one for the Islamization of the world and the second for Palestine.In a word, it’s a pathetic joke to try to launder the Hamas victory as if the Palestinian Arabs simply wanted to vote against the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and as if religion is not so important because the Palestinians are traditionally a secular people.From what I saw and heard, it was an Islamist and violent vote, with deep cultural roots in the Palestinian education system and in the messages of the Palestinian Arab leadership during the intifada, from Sheik Yassin to Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah candidate who wrote an electoral open letter full of religious reminiscences.The reality is that secularism since has declined since the 1970s. Even Arafat used to excite the crowds with his Al Aqsa Intifada and his Al Aqsa Brigade, invoking the name of the mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The martyrdom has an undeniable religious meaning and religious support. It will be very difficult, whatever the Hamas leadership will try to do now, to bury the deep ideological meaning of Hamas’s electoral victory. It’s a pity, it’s regrettable, but no statement renouncing violence or terror or acknowledging Israeli’s right to exist can cancel out the religious and violence-oriented education of the past decade that culminated in the election.Ms. Nirenstein is an Italian journalist and author based in Israel.

A Great Misunderstanding

A Great Misunderstanding

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