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Image and Reality

(Al-Ahram-Egypt) Abdel-Moneim Said - Hamas' strategic point of view, as expressed by its spokesmen on Arab satellite stations, is based on several assumptions. The first is that global leadership, throughout history, has rotated. The Soviet empire fell, and the same will happen to the American empire, as a result of resistance in Iraq and of internal fractures within American society and an increasingly indebted economy. The second is that other international powers are rising - China, Japan, Europe, India, and to a lesser extent Russia, which still harbors its own dreams of empire. This will result in an external sapping of relative American power. The third assumption is that the world will quickly rid itself of the American domination that characterized the 1990s. It is no coincidence that Khaled Mashaal has announced his intention to visit Venezuela. Any setback in the circumstances of the U.S., Hamas argues, involves a concomitant setback in the circumstances of Israel, and as power balances shift, the Palestinian national movement will, in the future, be able to secure the kind of gains it has failed to make in the past. However, it would be foolish to assume that the other emerging international powers will automatically adopt a position on the Palestinian issue opposed to America's. And what, after all, is Chavez expected to do to liberate the Palestinian territories? Hamas now has a mandate to build a state and achieve what others - Fatah - did not. To achieve this its leaders cannot live in a world of delusion. Lenin accepted the Brest-Litovsk Treaty during WWI in order to establish socialism in one state. Mustafa El-Nahhas accepted the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936 to secure Egypt's presence in the League of Nations before WWII. The Irish accepted a state lacking its northernmost six counties because English settlers had made themselves a majority in that area. Malaysia accepted Singapore, realizing the presence of a flourishing neighbor need not bring evil. Of course, it is Hamas' right to retain its revolutionary spirit; it is just that it will further postpone the emergence of a Palestinian state.
2006-04-14 00:00:00
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