Kathianne
10-13-2023, 04:31 PM
I keep running across articles from writers there, quite good so far. This is very interesting from someone who thought Hamas was marginally good/bad, now knows better:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/how-hamas-fooled-the-experts
Navigate to Israel & The Middle East sectionHow Hamas Fooled the Experts
Why so many misread the Palestinian terror group’s openly stated intentions and motives
BY
ARMIN ROSEN
OCTOBER 12, 2023
For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.
This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.
The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.
But that was hardly the whole story, I thought. After all, my hotel offered a comfortable room with stunning views of the Mediterranean. Hamas was eerily invisible in the Strip once you were past their checkpoint on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing, whose Israeli half is an absurdist labyrinth of concrete corridors, sinister loudspeakers, and remote-operated doors. Most Gazans I met had no particular love for the group and just wanted to be left alone. Gaza was hard to beat for sheer surrealism, what with the war damage and the excellent fish restaurants. I experienced the Hamas-era Strip as a weird and tragic expression of a bleak roster of immovable realities.
I now know I suffered from a failure of imagination, both moral and practical. Under Hamas, Gaza wasn’t a place where extremists had resigned themselves to their own strange version of normality. Rather, it was an active launching pad for an insane utopia, for the vision of a purified world the group’s fighters carried out during their atrocious rampage this past weekend.
The expert class labored under similar delusions. “It wasn’t so much a misreading of what was in [Hamas’] hearts as it was the sense that they had accommodated to reality,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, including the period when Hamas won the only Palestinian parliamentary elections in history and took over the Gaza Strip. “They understood they couldn’t destroy Israel, and that their real goal in these 15 years was to take over the West Bank as they had taken over Gaza—to create the maximum amount of violence and terror in the West Bank, and to protect their rule in Gaza. You have to look fairly widely to find someone who didn’t basically accept that view.” Abrams did not exempt himself from this group.
...
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/how-hamas-fooled-the-experts
Navigate to Israel & The Middle East sectionHow Hamas Fooled the Experts
Why so many misread the Palestinian terror group’s openly stated intentions and motives
BY
ARMIN ROSEN
OCTOBER 12, 2023
For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.
This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.
The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.
But that was hardly the whole story, I thought. After all, my hotel offered a comfortable room with stunning views of the Mediterranean. Hamas was eerily invisible in the Strip once you were past their checkpoint on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing, whose Israeli half is an absurdist labyrinth of concrete corridors, sinister loudspeakers, and remote-operated doors. Most Gazans I met had no particular love for the group and just wanted to be left alone. Gaza was hard to beat for sheer surrealism, what with the war damage and the excellent fish restaurants. I experienced the Hamas-era Strip as a weird and tragic expression of a bleak roster of immovable realities.
I now know I suffered from a failure of imagination, both moral and practical. Under Hamas, Gaza wasn’t a place where extremists had resigned themselves to their own strange version of normality. Rather, it was an active launching pad for an insane utopia, for the vision of a purified world the group’s fighters carried out during their atrocious rampage this past weekend.
The expert class labored under similar delusions. “It wasn’t so much a misreading of what was in [Hamas’] hearts as it was the sense that they had accommodated to reality,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, including the period when Hamas won the only Palestinian parliamentary elections in history and took over the Gaza Strip. “They understood they couldn’t destroy Israel, and that their real goal in these 15 years was to take over the West Bank as they had taken over Gaza—to create the maximum amount of violence and terror in the West Bank, and to protect their rule in Gaza. You have to look fairly widely to find someone who didn’t basically accept that view.” Abrams did not exempt himself from this group.
...