The Palestinians have often been let down by their own leadership. Even Hamas, the Islamic movement, finds itself in difficulties once again because of the ouster of President Mohamed Mursi from power in Egypt.
Civilian suffering, especially that of children, always arouses deep concern among Muslims, indeed all people. Human suffering of any kind should concern people everywhere and they should help end this tragic situation as quickly as possible. It is, however, at the larger level that there is much confusion and misunderstanding about what is really afoot in Syria.
Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that heads the government in Ghazzah, has scored a stunning victory over the Zionist State of Israel. It is not merely the numbers: 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier.
Unity at last between Hamas and Fatah! Shocking says Israel. Unacceptable declares America. The American regime headed by Barack Obama retained its back-to-the-wall approach by declaring that Hamas was “a terrorist organization” and that any Palestinian government would have to “renounce violence”, respect past “peace deals” and recognize Israel’s “right to exist”.
The Palestinian issue has been virtually stalemated since before Israel’s war on Gaza in 2008–2009, with Hamas, the most popular and legitimate Palestinian leadership bottled up in the besieged and densely populated Gaza, and the West Bank under the increasingly repressive rule of Mahmood Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA).
The Zionist State of Israel and its financial underwriter, the US, are getting desperate. They can no longer get away with their propaganda branding Hizbullah and Hamas as terrorist organizations. People worldwide are beginning to understand the true nature of Zionism.
The US, UK, Fatah and the secular tribal dictatorships in the Arabian world cannot use Islam to discredit Hamas because the Muslim masses judge individuals, organizations and states based on Islamic principles...
No one really knows the number of pro-Israeli and anti-Islamic forces stationed by the US in and around Arabia
The election last month of Mohammed Badei as the eighth Murshid al-‘Am (General Guide) of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt, and the results of December’s elections for the Ikhwan’s Maktab al-Irshad...
Question: What does a great power do when it suffers an unexpected defeat and a major setback in its plans for achieving an acceptable solution to a problem? Answer: It sits back, regroups, deflects public attention to other issues, and works quietly behind the scenes to prepare the ground for a new attempt to achieve its objectives by some other strategy in future.
Political commentators have advanced numerous reasons for Israel’s onslaught on Ghazzah. From the official Israeli line to stop Hamas rocket attacks to Israeli politicians’ need to act tough before next month’s elections to presenting a fait accompli to the incoming US president have all been trotted out.
To mark the cccasion of Yaum al-Quds this year, Crescent International in South Africa published a booklet analysing the rise of Hamas and the current state of the Palestinian struggle. Here we publish an abridged version of this booklet. The full version is available on the website of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought.
When the Bush administration first let it be known that it was planning a major “peace conference” between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas, administration sources told journalists that it would be a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Dayton conference that ended the Bosnian war in 1994.
Asked about the lesson of fasting, Imam Husain (r.a.) is reported to have replied that “the rich should feel the pangs of hunger and appreciate what the poor have to endure, and therefore share Allah’s bounty with them.”As Muslims begin the month of Ramadan later this month, they should think of the suffering of their brothers and sisters in Palestine, and Ghazzah in particular.
Months of increasing tension between the Fatah and Hamas movements in Palestine came to a head on June 14, when Hamas militias captured Fatah-controlled institutions in Ghazzah that had refused to accept the authority of the Hamas government of prime minister Ismail Haniya. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responded by dismissing the Haniya government and appointing a new administration, under Salam Fayyad, in Ramallah, in the West Bank.
Last month’s developments in Palestine are no great surprise. Basically, we have seen a political coup by an established, pro-Western political elite against a popular Islamic movement that was growing in power and credibility, and threatened to take a Muslim people and country in a direction unacceptable to Washington and Tel Aviv. The fact that this particular coup has taken place in the particular circumstances of zionist-occupied Palestine, rather than in one of the many Muslim nation-states where similar events have occurred, should not distract from that fundamental reality
Although Western propaganda portrays the Hamas takeover of Ghazzah as a coup against the legitimate power there, this is an exact inversion of the real situation. While the world’s attention turned to the West Bank and the politicking there after Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Hamas government, people in Ghazzah were celebrating what many regarded as liberation from the oppression and exploitation of Fatah security officials, who were particularly known for their extortion from shopkeepers, businessmen and others, and for living well on the proceeds.
The creation of Israel in 1948 is commonly referred to as the nakba: the catastrophe. It is a measure of the disaster of the Arab defeat in June 1967, when al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the Haram al-Sharif were captured that, of all the disasters that the Palestinians have suffered since 1948, that is the one known as the second nakba. This month, the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War will be marked all over the world.
Was it a coincidence that Israel suddenly started unscheduled demolition work at the Haram al-Sharif in al-Quds, launching protests across occupied Palestine, just as Fatah and Hamas leaders were on the verge of a landmark power-sharing agreement in Makkah? Probably not, for the Makkah Agreement signed on February 8 marks the failure of the US and Israel’s strategy of forcing Hamas to relinquish the mandate to lead the Palestinian people that Hamas won in Palestine’s parliamentary elections in January last year.
For a few tense days in December, after the attempted assassination of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh as he re-entered Ghazzah at the Rafah border crossing, apparently perpetrated by gunmen associated with the Fatah movement led by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, it appeared that Palestine might slide into civil war. As so often in the past, the Palestinians drew back from the brink, knowing that the slightest slip would play into the hands of their enemies.
