'Forms of Hamas'

This week's LRB has a truly loathsome article on those poor misunderstood dudes at Hamas. Reading it, I was often uncertain whether Tom Stevenson intended me to laugh, or spew. 

The key takeout was less about the subject matter than about the author himself and his ilk. 

For it shows the lengths that the extreme Left will now go to in order to take the maniacal edge off this violent obsession, for once you have concluded that the cause is somehow righteous and have simultaneously discounted the deeper historical narrative beyond the impositions of ideology, and thus have internalised the implications of descriptors like ‘occupation’, ‘resistance’ and ‘apartheid’, along with 'Israel is always to blame' and needs to go, you are on your way to excusing just about anything. 

The central pillars of this exculpation, as far as October 7 was concerned, would appear to be...

• Israel was always going to respond with genocide / invent a terrible pogrom after the incursion, so Hamas might just as well have committed their own atrocity, as not commit one. Why squander the chance?
  
• But anyway...all the bad stuff only really happened because of some chaos and indiscipline, the fog of war and all that, as the equally dastardly British armed forces are themselves fully aware. 
• Hamas never expected to bump into a trance music festival and so, kind of did what anyone else would have done under the circumstances.

Stevenson also carefully conveys the notion that October 7 was conceived as a commando-style raid, thereby obviating the need to mention the numbers involved — a brigade-sized invasion, bigger than the land force Thatcher sent to the Falklands — further muddying the issue by suggesting that many civilian irregulars had poured over the border, thereby confusing both scale and objectives.

A few sentences that simply begged to be copied and pasted, many of which read almost like sneering parody, eliciting a few unexpected chuckles...

"In the US, Hamas quickly became a co-ordinate on the axis of evil (the suicide bombers hadn’t helped) and was conflated with al-Qaida.

"To say that Hamas is simply the zealous champion of a righteous struggle against a brutal military occupation, exercising legal right to armed resistance, is to pass over quite a lot.

(On October 7) "The outward form of a special forces operation quickly devolved into uncontrolled violence (a pattern not unfamiliar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the actions of British special forces in Afghanistan).

"Nothing Hamas did on 7 October approaches what Israel has done in Gaza.

"In the absence of real atrocities, false ones would have been invented, and military action would have been characterised as terrorism. Everything Israel has done was predictable from the moment Hamas paraglided over the barrier.

"The chance that Israel wouldn’t provoke armed resistance from Gaza was always zero. Gazans were in effect under siege, and military action to break the siege can’t be dismissed as terrorism or classed as a pogrom.

"It is in the nature of revolutionary violence to bring about insoluble problems. One must side with the people breaking out of a concentration camp. Yet one must also side with the non-combatant against the man pointing a rifle at him."

Such a delicate ethical tight rope walk the woke these days. Or at least the 'revolutionary' woke.

There's a lot of exposition about the rise of Hamas set within a carefully cherry-picked historical narrative. 

Another line that caught my attention was this one below, suggesting that the Hamas never really had any alternative than to spend everybody else's money on turning their territory into a terror fortress. (Stevenson neglects to mention the billions siphoned off into Qatari accounts by this pragmatic "social force" apparently describing itself as a national liberation movement with a moderate Islamic ideology.)

Indeed, the very idea that a way out of the cycle could be found by using foreign aid to achieve economic independence and a better life for Gazans is haram, clearly. 

"Hamas’s main defensive response was to extend the tunnel network to alleviate the blockade and to provide shelter from air attack – the move anyone would make if placed in charge of a besieged Gaza."

Anyone would have done the same, just like the Al-Qassam zealots did when they turned up unexpectedly at Nova. 

If the whole plan on October 7 had been to take (mainly military) hostages with minimal fuss, why did they end up killing significantly more Thai seasonal workers than they kidnapped?

And if this was just a result of things getting a little out of control on the day (DeepSeek will tell you the foreign were 'tragically' in the wrong place at the wrong time), why then did the invaders learn Thai words in advance so as to lure these people into a trap? And why not recognise the tragic error, and release these Thais quickly? 

Along with the baby that was also taken hostage, accidentally.

Crucially, was the Jihadi militant who called his mum to boast of murdering ten Jews with his bare hands just a bad apple?

I would imagine that anyone who has not yet descended into an ideologically-induced state of moral turpitude already knows the answers to these questions.

Spanish Steps

Lately it has become more apparent than ever that the only history we are ever comfortable deploying analogously — or indeed oh-so-readily weaponising — in contemporary debate is that of 1930s Germany. The comparisons have become so banal that they have ceased to be illuminating.

I’ve put some alternative medieval comparisons out there recently, but there’s also something in the nineteenth century history of Spain that deserves examination when it comes to the undoubtedly knotty situation in the US right now. (In particular as this was a preamble to another notorious ‘rise of fascism’ in Europe.)

Religious conservatism had long penetrated and to some extent overwhelmed the infrastructure of the Spanish state and, sitting in suspension above the empirical reality of Spanish society, there was a pervasive and occasionally rather toxic, ultra-traditionalist notion of what it meant to be Spanish.

Against this backdrop, in the early part of the nineteenth century middle class, would-be modernisers had somewhat overplayed their hand relative to their demographic position, attempting a wholesale re-engineering of Spanish society along not just traditional liberal principles but additionally upholding some fairly ‘out there’ ideas which had come tagging along.

The backlash came in 1823 when the King Ferdinand VII, teamed up with his French counterpart Louis XVIII in forming the ‘Holy Alliance’ with the aim of dramatically rolling back liberal modifications to the Spanish way of life. They they even reinstated the Holy Office (Inquisition) as a way of extirpating all forms of ‘mad thinking’, and it’s safe to say that the liberals had not expected that.

Soon afterwards, the monarchy itself became the focus of this escalating culture war, with Ferdinand's daughter and heir Queen Isabella II literally in bed with the liberal elites in the armed forces and the reactionaries coalescing around her uncle Don Carlos.

These so-called Carlistas — as illustrated — would become especially strong in deeply-traditionalist Navarra (home today to nice folk like Opus Dei) and had their first proper war named after them in 1833. They would go on to play a key role in the next century as the various conflicts embedded in the national psyche hypertrophied into all out civil war.