Hamas Leader Clears Things Up About Peaceful Resistance.

 

Watch the interview:
From Suppressed News on X @SuppressedNws

It seems like some people still don’t understand why Palestinians chose armed resistance. Some still think they never tried "peaceful" resistance. I hope this 2021 interview with Yahya Sinwar clarifies it:
 

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
9-08-24

Whenever the discussion arises about Israel, Zionism and the Palestinians, what inevitably comes up with regard to Hamas, is that the conversation must start by condemning what they did on October 7th 2022 and then condemn the political organization in general as terrorists and brutal killers. The same was true of the PLO under Arafat.

Also, we are always reminded of the rockets that Hamas fires in to Israel whenever we criticize Israel’s regular bombings and invasions of Gaza by tanks; that accompanies their attempts at starving them to death. Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas since the Zionists assassinated Hamas’ lead negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in July, deals with this false argument very easily.

In my 1960's days from 11 to 20, Irish Catholics from Northern Ireland were the usual suspects. If you're reading this and haven't seen the movie, In The Name of the Father starring Daniel Day Lewis, Emma Thompson, and Pete Posslethwaite, please do so.

A group or grouping can become a “terrorist” organization very easily. The US government decides whether or not a group are “terrorists”. Hamas won the 2006 election in Gaza defeating Fatah, a Palestinian group the western media refers to as “more moderate” which means they were compliant when it came to the US and the Zionist regime. Fatah are the dominant force in the Occupied Territories which includes the West Bank, west of the Jordan River, and was governed by Jordan until the war of 1967. After it won the 2006 election to the dismay of the folks in Washington (although Hamas was considered by many including Israel, to be safer than Fatah at one point) the US declared Hamas as a “terrorist” group.

Hamas is a political organization, a religious based political organization. Israel has religious based political parties as do Pakistan, India, and the US really as the religion that dominates the political organizations in the US is Christianity though they are not described as distinctly religious groupings. One might ask what the Christian Democratic Union is in Germany if not a religious political formation.

Myself and many people that are supporters of the Palestinian resistance, a resistance of an indigenous population in their decades long struggle against a European settler state we know as Israel, would not agree with political organizations that are religion based.  I personally do not believe these groups can show a way forward, can solve the multitude of social and political problems that are a rooted in the capitalist system…..a system in decay that is clearly unraveling on a global scale. But a resistance movements include many factions and currents. It is not our role to lecture people under circumstances such as these about the failings of their leadership. We start first by supporting them in solidarity as workers.

I think we are right to refer to what occurred on October 7^th 2023 as an act of resistance; an occupied people resisting the violence and brutality of an occupier, a colonial regime.

There is some history here. In the nineties Israel imposed restrictions on movement and goods in Gaza. After Hamas won the election and took control of Gaza in 2006, the Zionist regime imposed further, more stringent controls including foods products, medicines and other necessities.

When October 7^th 2023 arrived, Initially many people, myself included, were cautious about referring to the October 7^th breakout from Gaza as a resistance, as the pressure form the mass media every minute of every day was to remind anyone that dared show concern for the people of Gaza or the Palestinian people in general suffering decades of violence and brutality at the hands of the Israeli’s that they must condemn Hamas first and foremost and the resistance as an act of terrorism. Surely, Hamas is a terrorist organization Antony Blinken, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris tell us so.

Worst of all, any criticism of Israel’s violence or of Zionism as an ideology is anti-Semitism. This term has been so misused and abused it has hardly any meaning at all today. In a sense, the efforts to associate Judaism with Zionism and a condemnation of Zionism as an attack on all Jews is itself anti-Semitic because it associates all Jews with Apartheid and oppression. It is a strategy to shut down debate. All Germans were not Nazis and all Jews are not Zionists. It has arrived at a point where many Jews in the British Labor Party have been expelled for anti-Semitism; it’s bizarre but useful for our enemies.

There are atrocities committed in warfare, in the struggle between nations states and anticolonial struggles. The US military has committed so many atrocities over the past decades they lead the pack. Three million dead Vietnamese and one million dead Iraqi’s at the hands of the US military machine is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

You don’t have to support Hamas as a political organization to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. You are not an anti-Semite if you oppose Zionism as an ideology or Israel’s genocide in Gaza or ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s indigenous population.