Hamas Quotes

“Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.”
― Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews?

I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too 'Western.' It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably 'extreme' nationalists—and Marxists—were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long before anyone had heard of the cadres of Hamas, or Islamic Jihad. There was an element of overcompensation involved, or so I came to suspect.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I am not one of those who believes—as Obama is said to believe—that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really does believe this, his lethargy and impotence in the face of Netanyahu's consistent double-dealing is even more culpable.) The Islamist fanatics have their own agenda, and, as in the case of Hamas and its Iranian backers, they have already demonstrated that nothing but the destruction of Israel and the removal of American influence from the region will possibly satisfy them. No, it is more the case that justice—and a homeland for the Palestinians—is a good and necessary cause in its own right. It is also a special legal and moral responsibility of the United States, which has several times declared a dual-statehood outcome to be its objective.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“To Hamas, duly elected by the Palestinians – yet subverted by Fatah – nothing short of the destruction of Israel is an acceptable final outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s in their charter. They do not hide it. They proclaim it with full candor: “Israel with exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated all others before it.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“At heart, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is actually very simple. It is not about religion. It is not about security. It is not about terrorism. It is about land. Or, to be more precise, it is a struggle that, as the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling put it, is driven by two mutually exclusive impulses within Zionism, with "one Zionist imperative--to possess the largest possible amount of sacred land--contradicting the other Zionist imperative--to ensure a massive Jewish majority inhabiting a land that was preferably free of all Arabs." The problem for Zionists is--and has always been--that the land that they want comes with non-Jews already on it.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Allon resolved the conundrum facing Israel: it wanted the land, but it did not want the people. The Allon Plan would allow Israel to accomplish both ends: controlling, and ultimately settling, Palestinian land without granting citizenship to Palestinians living under Israeli control after 1967.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“For Israel, the Oslo negotiations offered a mechanism to repackage the principles of the Allon Plan in a way that, geographically speaking, looked remarkably like the original.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“As far as the Israelis were concerned, then, the limited implementation of the Oslo Accords amounted, essentially, to little more than a new form of occupation, enabling the perpetual deferral of the core issues of the conflict.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“The international legal requirement is simple: it is that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories, end its abrogation of Palestinian human and political rights, and cease and dismantle its illegal settlement enterprise.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“It was when the terms discussed at Camp David became clear, and when it seemed obvious to the Palestinians that years of negotiation had only resulted in greater restriction, as well as the immiseration produced by the collapse of the Palestinian economy (first made dependent on the Israeli economy, then suddenly separated from it during the Oslo years), that the second intifada erupted in the summer and fall of 2000.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Privately, however, various Israeli officials acknowledged that the uprising, with all of its attendant violence, was the inevitable outcome not only of the lopsided nature of the conflict, but also of the stifling of Palestinian aspirations that was essential to the Oslo process. "Under conditions of an asymmetric confrontation, one in which Israel is many times stronger than the Palestinians, we have decisive influence on the course of events," warned Mati Steinberg of the Shin Bet. The Israeli approach, he argued, "dictates just one choice to the Palestinians: either they surrender to Israel's dictates, or they rise up against all the dictates at all costs.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“The Israeli government publicly claims that this extraordinary violence - its army fired over a million bullets in the first few days of the intifada alone - was directed against what it called "the terrorist Infrastructure." But, again, various Israeli officials privately acknowledged what was really at stake in dealing with the intifada, and that Israel's response to the uprising was directed not at armed groups but rather against the entire population.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out," is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resources, and institutions.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history, writes Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress. "Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel's interest in a peace process--other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo--has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Amir Cheshin, former Israeli advisor on Arab affairs to the mayor of Jerusalem, explains:
"The planning and building laws in East Jerusalem rest on a policy that calls for placing obstacles in the way of planning in the Arab sector--this is done more to preserve the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in the city, which is presently in a ratio of 72 percent Jews against 28 percent non-Jews.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“A similar law had been passed in South Africa at the peak of apartheid in 1980 and had been summarily rejected by that country's (white) supreme court, as an inappropriate and illegal interference with black people's right to marry and establish families. The Israeli law was extended in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, and formally endorsed by Israel's High Court in May 2006.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“With respect to pure military considerations, there is no doubt that the presence of settlements, even if 'civilian,' of the occupying power in the occupied territory, substantially contributes to the security in that area and facilitates the execution of the duties of the military," noted Israeli High Court justice Alfred Vitkon, while arguing in favor of the legality of the settlement enterprise against the repeated indictments of international law.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“For its part, the Gush Emunim regards the very idea of Arab residence in Palestine as a form of theft.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“What black greed, what unwitting hatred, has turned Israeli Jews into torturers of the innocent? The Settlers come first, violent and cruel--but above them is a vast, rabid system, official Israel, that sustains them and protects them, that corrupts our minds and our language, God's language, with vile rationalizations.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“In other words, the principle of Jewishness has priority over the principle of equality in Israel.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“What is true of the JNF is true of Israeli law in general. More than twenty seperate Basic Laws (the closest documents Israel has to a written constitution) and other forms of legislation explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Much of what the Israelis do in the West Bank and Gaza has to do with the projection of power: to remind people every day not only that their smallest actions are subject to Israeli control, but that at any given moment--even in the middle of the night--the Israeli army can break down the doors to their homes and come in looking for suspects or suspicious possessions.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“He added: "I got a real kick out of every house that was demolished, because I knew that dying means nothing to them, while the loss of their house means more to them. You destroy a house and you destroy forty or fifty people for generations. If one thing does bother me about all this, it is that we didn't wipe out the whole camp.”
― Saree Makdisi

“The inhabitants of the villages in the "seam zone" have had to apply for a document that the Israeli army calls a permanent resident permit. As its name suggests, this document is something like a U.S. Green Card, except that in this case the person applying for the permit only wants to stay where he already is, on the land where he has been living all his life.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“According to Colonel Shaul Arieli of the Israeli army reserves, the point of making life so difficult for Palestinians in the gap between the border and the wall is to push them to leave for good.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“By the end of that day, between 2,000 and 5,000 of Jaffa's original 70,000 inhabitants remained in their homes. All the others were gone. They would never be allowed to return. As had happened at Haifa a month previously, the city's Palestinian population was forced down to the port by the Zionist forces; there they were crammed onto boats, skiffs, and trawlers--and driven out to sea, to make their way to Gaza, el- Arish, even as far away as Beirut, leaving behind everything: homes, furniture, clothing, family papers, heirlooms, photographs, libraries. Much of the city was systematically demolished after the fighting. Its souks and commercial districts were entirely flattened. The famous orange groves surrounding the city were cleared away. All that remained of Jaffa after 1948 was the central district, whose homes were parceled out to new Jewish residents: European Jewish immigrants got the pick of the choicest residences in Jaffa; Sephardim and Mizrahim-Arab Jews-got the rest.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Jaffa will become a Jewish city," declared David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, a month after the city had been cleared of its Arab inhabitants; "to allow the return of the Arabs to Jaffa would be," he added, "foolish." Ben-Gurion had had it out for Jaffa long before 1948. "Jaffa's destruction, the town and the port, will happen, and it is good that it will happen," he had noted in his diary a dozen years previously; "if Jaffa goes to hell, I will not participate in its grief.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation