Fiction
has given way to fact. Charges against
Israel of crimes against humanity, nay of deliberate genocide of the
Palestinian people, cunningly manipulated and loudly trumpeted by Hamas, were
taken up with enthusiasm by the world’s media.
Now they have been displaced by genuine and horrific reality in the
northern mountains of Iraq. And apart
from what might be termed “the usual suspects”, most world leaders appear to
have recognized the real thing when they see it.
Over the past few weeks, as the army of
the Islamic State (IS) has been bulldozing its way into vast tracts of Iraq, tens
of thousands of Christians with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, have
been fleeing for their lives from towns like Qaraqosh and Bartilla.
"What's happening now to the
Christians, to the Yazidis, to the minorities," Dr Sarah Ahmed, of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, told CBS News, “is a genocide.” She said that they were shooting people,
including children, laying them on the ground and driving tractors over them in
front of their families.
"We have striking evidence,” reported Iraq’s Human Rights Minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, “obtained from Yazidis
fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images, that
show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least
500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar. Some
of the victims, including women and children, were buried alive in scattered
mass graves in and around Sinjar."
Beheadings, crucifixions,
amputation of hands, indiscriminate slaughter of women and children, burying
victims alive – these are indeed ferocious
and savage crimes against humanity committed by barbaric terrorist extremists
lacking the faintest spark of compassion for the fellow human beings they
regard as the enemies of Islam.
No longer in the
spotlight, and with the world’s headlines concerned with efforts by the western
powers to bring humanitarian relief to the refugees and military assistance to
those battling the armies of the IS, Hamas is desperate to snatch some shreds of
victory from the jaws of defeat, as they managed to do in their previous
encounters with Israel. Negotiation is
the only way to come out of this self-generated conflict with something to show
for all the wasted effort and unnecessary death, so Hamas takes advantage of
the dip in media attention to extend the ceasefire and negotiate.
In a final ceasefire Hamas may indeed come away with some achievements it can wave in the
public’s face. It is unlikely to get all it wants. It may gain the payment of
salaries to its employees and an increase in the distance that Gazan fishermen
are permitted to fish. It wants a free flow of people into and out of Israel through
the Erez crossing, and Israel may agree to more flexibility on this. Hamas is demanding
a port and airfield. Israel is mulling over the possibility of reopening Gaza
port. To Hamas’s demand for the free
flow of cement into Gaza, Israel, determined that it be restricted to
rebuilding infrastructure and not for reconstructing military installations or
tunnels, might agree, but only under the condition of strict international
control and supervision. Similar
rigorous restrictions would be imposed on any easing of the rules governing the
flow of Israeli goods into Gaza, and for the same reasons.
These will be modest
achievements. Hamas has no-one in its leadership with the charisma or undoubted
military talent of the enigmatic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who now dubs himself the
Caliph of the Islamic State and the head of Muslims the world over. When the
new Islamic State was set up, in June 2014, the group's spokesman, Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, declared “the legality of all emirates, groups,
states and organizations becomes null by the expansion of the caliph's
authority and the arrival of its troops to their areas. Support your state, which grows every day.''
An
official document, released in English and several other languages, urged Muslims to "gather around
your caliph, so that you may return as you once were for ages, kings of the earth and
knights of war." The announcement was couched in
terms of ending a century-long calamity – namely the break-up of the Islamic
Middle East into artificial sovereign states following the first World War –
and as marking the return of dignity and honour to the Islamic umma or
nation.
Planning to take an iron
grip on the whole of Syria and Iraq, Baghdadi doubtless has ambitions to extend
his caliphate ever wider, swallowing Jordan, Lebanon and no doubt the
Palestinian lands including Gaza. He may
balk somewhat at the thought of confronting Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or
Israel, but if he succeeds in winning a convincing victory against President
Bashir Assad in Syria, and then in pouring over the border into Lebanon, he
will have considerably weakened Iran’s allies and Iran itself.
A so-far unanswered question hangs over the IS. As journalist David Blair recently pointed out, volunteers are flocking
to fight under Baghdadi’s black banner, including many from Europe, America and
even Australia. In capturing territory, securing vast financial resources,
achieving propaganda coups and sowing terror by persecuting Christians, Shias and
Yazidis, Baghdadi has come further and faster than he could ever have dreamt – except, as Blair puts it, “there is one
missing piece in his jihadist jigsaw”. He has not yet landed a blow on the West, the
antithesis of everything he stands for. But with volunteers flowing in from all
over the world, with his military successes and almost limitless resources,
Baghdadi has a real opportunity to strike the West. Will he do so? Will he, in
short, having broken with mainstream al-Qaida, attempt to beat them at their
own game by carrying the Islamist struggle into the western world, the main
enemy of Islamist values?
Compared to the
boundless ambition of the new caliph, Hamas’s aspirations are comparatively
modest, but they put the organisation ultimately at odds with the Islamic
State. Like the IS, what Hamas really
seeks is power – power to rule over the Gaza Strip, power to take over the
Palestinian Authority and extend its domination to the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, and finally the power to attack, overcome and defeat Israel and, by
slaughtering, expelling or subjugating all Jews in the area, establish control over the
whole of the old mandated Palestine “from the river to the sea”. How frustrating it would be, while striving
to achieve these objectives, to be out-manoeuvred by a triumphant caliph at the
head of a rampant Islamic State army, dedicated to imposing his own brand of
extremist Islam not only across the Middle East, but on the whole world.
Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 17 August 2014:
Published in the Eurasia Review, 17 August 2014:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/17082014-hamas-islamic-state-oped/
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