A Hamas leader says they will give up governing Gaza, but won’t lay down arms
A Hamas leader says they will give up governing Gaza, but won’t lay down arms
You're viewing a single thread.
Er... waitaminute I thought the claim all this time was that Hamas != Palestine, that Hamas was not in control of the territory but merely using the people of Palestine as a shield. Isn't the government of Palestine supposed to be distinct and separate from Hamas?
It's complicated. Hamas won a majority of seats in Palestine's parliament in 2006, but Fatah didn't like that. There was a bit of a civil war, and it ended up with Hamas controlling Gaza and Fatah controlling the West Bank. There haven't been any elections since. So no, Hamas doesn't represent all of Palestine, but they were democratically elected in 2006. They are in control of Gaza, but neither the West Bank, nor both territories as one Palestine. Really, there is no united Palestine right now. And I'm sure Israel is very happy to keep it that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_election
And I’m sure Israel is very happy to keep it that way.
It also seems like the people in charge of the split groups are happy to keep it that way. I'm sure there's a substantial amount of foreign influence, but it looks like neither PNA or PLO have had elections since 2006. PNA under Hamas clearly has some religious/military motivations that they play out with authoritarian style, but it seems that the current leadership of the PLO has inherited Arafat's financial empire:
According to a 1993 report by the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, the PLO was "the richest of all terrorist organizations", with $8–$10 billion in assets and an annual income of $1.5–$2 billion from "donations, extortion, payoffs, illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, etc." Estimates of the Palestine Liberation Organization's alleged hidden assets vary wildly and only Arafat had the whole picture. A former PLO finance minister said it was $3 billion to $5 billion.
So why would they be interested in sharing/dividing control of that? Israel is probably fanning the flames of the internal divisions, but I bet the self-interest of the leaders of the various groups carries more weight.
They were pretty fast from a majority in 2006. So they may have been democratically elected but it was not by most Palestinians.
Who has been making that claim? There was no authority except Hamas in Gaza prior to the ongoing fighting.
Hmm... are you implying that the PLO doesn't exist/isn't functional, or just that the PLO has no authority within Gaza specifically?
The Palestine Authority governs the west bank. Hamas governs Gaza. A divide and conquer strategy pushed by Netanyahu for years to prevent Palestinian unification
Hamas fought and killed the PLO in Gaza back in 2007.
Are you trying to say that Netanyahu was involved in that, or merely that he benefitted from it?
He literally funded Hamas for the purposes of dividing Palestinians and creating a more convenient scapegoat for his ongoing genocide than the moderate left wing PLO.
11 years after Hamas took over Gaza, and as part of a ceasefire deal brokered by Qatar.
It serves his purposes, but again, was done long after Hamas took over Gaza.
So that's where you want the goalposts to be now? The TIMING of the thing you so confidently claimed never happened?
I'll spell it out for you explicitly. The PA cannot govern in Gaza because all their personnel there have been dead since 2007. There are more barriers to the PA taking back governance in Gaza, and that should be plain as day. Yet here we are, with you making immature accusations of moving goalposts.
He benefits from it, sure. But saying he's solely responsible is just false.
The cause for the split was that Fatah was viewed as corrupt. Since at least 2012, Israel has focused on strengthening the split to keep Palestinian leadership fractured while the settlements continue.
This really turned and came to a head in 2007, when Hamas, after winning democratic elections in 2006, rose to power, and the Israeli authorities, along with the U.S., attempted to initiate a regime change operation, which facilitated a civil war between Hamas and Fatah and allowed Hamas to take over the Gaza Strip. Since then, Israeli authorities have actively embraced the idea that Hamas would be accepted as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip. Now, part of the calculus in that is because of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians. This is a demographic issue. Israel wanted to sever the Gaza Strip from the rest of historic Palestine in order to reinforce its claim that it’s a Jewish-majority state. By getting rid of 2 million Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are refugees demanding return, Israel can claim to be both a Jewish state and a democracy and restructure what is its apartheid regime.
As far back as December 2012, Netanyahu told prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Margalit, in an interview, said Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.
Israel’s goal was “to ensure that the next confrontation between Israel and Hamas will be the final showdown”, he wrote in the memo, dated December 21st, 2016. A pre-emptive strike, he said, could remove most of the “leadership of the military wing of Hamas”.
And Hamas is therefore... representative of Gaza.
Either they are the government of Gaza, or they aren't. Not both.
I'm not sure I would call the PLO functional but it exists in the West Bank. It has no presence at all in Gaza.
When the conflict started in October there were a lot of critics of Israel saying that attacks against the people of Gaza were unethical because Hamas does not represent them, and they were not responsible for Hamas' actions.
Attacks against civilians are unethical in any case, but my point here is that the claim that Hamas does not represent Gaza is spurious.
“Does not represent” as in “My government does not represent me when they abolish the right to abortion and ban library books”.
They’re in charge but not actually acting with the will of the people they’re in charge of in mind.
I think there's a difference between ruling and representing. I would argue that a government is not representative if there is no free speech and no democracy even if that government has widespread popular support. However, I'm not sure why this question is relevant in the context of the ongoing conflict. There's no principle dictating that a war may only be fought against a representative government.
The vast majority of Palestinians were too young to vote for Hamas the last time there was an election, if they were even born yet.
And yes, killing children to get to your enemy is unethical. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise.
The majority of Palestinians weren't even born when that last vote occurred.
There is no intellectual integrity in this question.
I honestly can't think of a non-bad faith reading of this comment.
Sorry, I should have said the majority of Palestinian's before the war weren't even born.
Given that starvation kills children first and the lancet medical journal estimated the dead at around 200,000 (or 10%) of the population, that may no longer be true.
EDIT: Does the CCP represent the will of the Chinese people? They have more of a say in their leaders than Gazans did. Or is this just a double standard that only applies to the enemies of the state of Israel?
I don't understand why you're getting down voted because I remember seeing that too.
Some people seem to have built their identity around the "Israel bad" opinion, and otherwise struggle with nuance.
They are not completely distinct at the moment but to say that Hamas represents Gazans would be incorrect. Hamas win about a third of the vote in 2006 but that was the most so they got control of the government but have not had an election since. Many in the Israeli government were happy with the result because it weakened the PLO and therefore calls for a two state solution. Hell, Israel funded Hamas' startup back in the 80s for exactly that purpose.
If Hamas does not represent Gaza, then who do they represent?
Themselves.
Would you bother continuing to claim to control territory that was just a bunch of bombed out rubble?
I think it's more that they have no issue with someone else, a unity government of Palestinians, to rule both Gaza and the West Bank. But they don't want to give up resistance to the Occupation