作者Larbi Sadiki駁斥之前巴勒斯坦裔的Joseph Massad的論點，Sadiki不認為哈馬斯的轉型是符合美國的利益以及出賣巴勒斯坦權益。下面是該文的摘要：
「哈馬斯近來的行為，若是被認為代表伊斯蘭份子(Islamist)與美國之間的關係緩和，然而這個論調是錯誤的。Massad教授對哈馬斯的懷疑論調無法說服他人。他的論點是跟隨James Henry Breasted的『肥沃的新月』(Fertile Crescent)，透過現實主義與地緣政治角度，雖將新月視為肥沃，但卻是充滿衝突、陰謀論與國際社會的佈局。在Breasted的原來用語中，「新月」從宗教意涵代表該地區的伊斯蘭認同。如伊朗招募泛阿拉伯主義者、巴勒斯坦遜尼伊斯蘭份子以及伊拉克等，這些是美國最不希望的『禮物』。」
「Massad的論調還缺什麼？土耳其！是的，土耳其由伊斯蘭性質的AKP領導，不能簡單用美國的走狗(poodle)來論述。不能因為土耳其與以色列維持外交關係以及是北約的成員國，就被視為完全服膺於美國利益。土耳其與加薩人民站在ㄧ起，使用軟實力藉此脫離美國與歐盟的聯繫與其利益。這裡沒有所謂的『美國新月』，這是虛構的論調。我在突尼西亞與當地伊斯蘭份子領導人如當地精神領袖Rachid Ghannouch與臨時總理Hamadi Jebali對談時，他們都同意，美國不是他們的老大哥，突尼西亞伊斯蘭政黨的勝利，不是美國的贈與。另外，埃及總統Morsi對於之前『大衛營協定』（以埃和平條約）的不悅，以及最近沒有依照該協定規定，在沒有以色列同意之下，派遣軍隊到西奈的行為，也不代表與美國利益結合。Massad的論點缺乏證據支持，有許多證明在原文中並沒有提到。」
「Massad的論點乃是ㄧ種精英式的分析方式，但他忽略廣大阿拉伯群眾因素。他說的對，美國是中東地區最反民主的力量。美國與其盟友過去花數十億美元，企圖阻止伊斯蘭份子取得政權，但他們還是失敗了。這些伊斯蘭份子在阿拉伯之春後，已經成為既成事實，因此美國不會笨到再去犯下相同錯誤。他們現在有新的方式，不過伊斯蘭份子依舊不能忽略美國在中東的影響力。」
「回憶阿拉伯之春的開始，伊斯蘭份子是被排除在外。那時西方新聞記者、學者與觀察家急切描述伊斯蘭份子與阿拉伯之春無關。但在埃及，他們錯了。在突尼西亞，伊斯蘭復興黨(Nahda)在茉莉花革命中沒有扮演重要角色，但卻在2011年十月的選舉中取得領先地位。伊斯蘭份子不能只是因為反對美國而取得正當性。基於相互交流、瞭解與對等地位，不代表『出賣』巴勒斯坦人，或是仇恨猶太人。假如這種『陰謀論』，那就是美國綁架阿拉伯之春的論點正確無誤，那麼該如何解釋埃及與突尼西亞透過當地人民力量，追求尊嚴與民主的訴求？」
「Massad對於哈馬斯的論點完全錯誤。哈馬斯贏得2006年選舉，部份因素在於法塔內部分裂與其失去合法性。Massad忽略哈馬斯在政治包含國際關係上的意識形態。哈馬斯政治局主席Khaled Mishha與加薩總理Ismail Haniyya不可能憑個人之力，綁架哈馬斯決策機制。哈馬斯對美關係不是由政治局、少數領導人或是卡達政府決定。決策制定過程必須透過內部複雜協商機制，而達成多數人所同意的共識。例如哈馬斯是否要參與2006年的選舉，內部則花了2年的時間討論。」
「哈馬斯是有其紅線：不可能以務實的態度接受以色列佔領事實，或藉此與美國改善關係。即使阿拉伯之春被詮釋為與美國的調情，我並不認為哈馬斯會如此容易被美國所收買。Massad忽略了哈馬斯的意識形態面項，這是推動哈馬斯的主要來源。」
The US and its allies spent decades and billions to prevent the arrival of the Islamists to power, but have failed.
Last Modified: 23 Aug 2012 10:07
It is fallacious to argue that Hamas is somehow driven to ride the wave of Islamist-US "détente" or hypothesised rapprochement.
To argue thus, as intimated by the learned professor, Joseph Massad, is to sacrifice nuances, subtleties and complexities that dilute the “stories” we all narrate and make about how we interpret Islamism’s many permutations in the context of the Arab Spring.
What Massad leaves out in his take on the "New American Crescent" is a story that may necessitate a constructivist lens to re-read the unfolding scene heralded by the Arab Spring élan. Identity, ideology and agency are all ditched as if the Arab Spring is an American invention.
It seems to me that Professor Massad's understanding of the assumed collusion across the Arab Spring between the diverse Arab brotherhoods and Islamists of their ilk can additionally be reproached on grounds for haste in passing judgment on events, actors and socio-political phenomena that are far from determinacy. Eighteen months of uprisings and elections coupled with flirtations with the Western powers amount not to stable phenomena; the short-span histories in which they are incubated render them incomplete and provisional to draw generalised and certain conclusions, desiderata for all searchers of truth such as in the social sciences.
Points and pointers
On this occasion, I beg to differ almost on most of the assumptions and arguments advanced in Massad's article. This is not for the sake of difference. The real value in interrogating some of the points made by Massad, one of the most authoritative writers on Palestine today, lies in opening up a forum for collective reading of how, on the one hand, Arab Islamisms have been swept off their feet by the political tsunami that is the Arab Spring, and, on the other, how Islamist forces from Egypt to Libya and discourses embraced and helped, amongst others, shape the Arab Spring.
It is not Massad's use of quotation marks when referring the Arab Spring that hint at lingering doubt, quite common amongst many Western observers, which call for explanation. Rather, it is his misplaced doubt when doubt is due that begs questions the article's answers may have not convincingly addressed.
The "crescent" is Americanised. James Henry Breasted's term "Fertile Crescent" has been rendered vacuous. This cannot be blamed on Massad. Breasted’s crescent oozes with fecundity, including in terms of civilisational know-how and continuity. In its reconstituted Realist and geostrategic forms, all variations of the said "crescent" are fertile but in conflict, conspiracy and international subterfuge and counter-subterfuge. Massad’s article somewhat follows this deviation.
The "New American Crescent" reads as if the previously assumed and totalised rival "crescents" are at an end. We all recall the "Shia Crescent", the axis stretching from Tehran via Damascus all the way to the Southern suburbs of Beirut, and which for many today stretches to Baghdad where Iranian Islamism reigns high.
In Breasted's original usage, depending how elastic it is made, the crescent includes lands extending from the Euphrates and Tigris (Iraq) area to encompass Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, parts of Palestine and Israel, and even Egypt. Religiously, the "crescent" hints at the Islamic identity of the region. One somehow hears "the cross and the crescent" or "the crescent and the star-spangled banner" as the eminent Africanist Ali Mazrui wrote in the mid-1990s. Geo-strategically, this is the territory where US foreign policy has since the 1950s (the Baghdad Pact) traditionally sought to "semi-encircle" their former Soviet rivals.
After the Shah and Sadat, the "crescent" is halved. Buoyed by its Islamic revolution, Iran no longer played second fiddle to what the Americans schemed for the region when the Shah was anointed policeman in the Gulf region. To this end, Iran recruited Pan-Arabist and secular Syria, Lebanon’s Shiite Islamists, Palestinian Sunni Islamists, including until recently, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and to a large extent, Iraq, the US’ unintended biggest "gift" to the Islamic republic.
So what is left? Turkey: yes Muslim, Sunni and led by the Islamist AKP and can hardly be oversimplified as an American "poodle". The Turks maintain relations with Israel and their NATO membership does not translate into complete subservience to US interests. There is no denial the AKP (Justice and Development Party) is pragmatic, but its pragmatism ends where Turkish sublime interests begin. One interest is to re-enliven ties with the Arab and the Islamic worlds: Turkey stands by Gazans, endorses Hamas, and uses its own brand of soft power to carve out for itself a sphere of influence independent of US and European ties and interests.
Even the pliant Saudis and rent-seeking Jordanians follow foreign policy agendas, which are shaped by fragments of identity, ranging from political conservatism, or religious orthodoxy, geographical neighbourhood and economic necessity (oil rent for the Saudis and aid for the Jordanians). They do not get their foreign policies designed in Washington, DC. Many Saudis wish Iran bombed for different reasons from those Americans who favour the same policy. In the 1990s, Jordanians devised an election law to downsize their Islamists; they still do and this member of the American crescent may not favour the US' endorsement of Islamists in the context of the Arab Spring.
The point is that there is no fixed and single way of painting the so-called "new American crescent", which may turn out to be a fallacy. I have been in Tunisia and audience with its seminal Islamist ideologue, Rachid Ghannouchi, and interim prime minister, Hamadi Jebali. Agreeing with the US is not a "given".
Massad may care to note how the draft Tunisian constitution criminalises "normalisation of relations" with Israel. This does not fit the view he has blown out of proportion about US-Islamist ties. As we speak, the Muslim Brotherhood through President Morsi are subtly recording displeasure with the Camp David Accords - and sending troops into the Sinai without prior Israeli approval as stipulated in the terms of the Accords is not the kind of détente the US brokers wish to have with the Islamists.
Massad's line of argument lacks the kind of evidence only long-time span political practice and consolidated trends deliver. They are in shortage in this article.
Arab masses
Massad somehow follows an elitist analytical itinerary. He overlooks the Arab masses: they authored the Arab Spring. His "story" ignores that the US, perhaps more hastily than the Europeans, rushed to salvage its foreign policy failure in the Arab Middle East. It often sided with dictators; excluded Islamists, only intermittently and sporadically, from its management of relations in the region; and as he notes correctly deserved the epithet "most formidable anti-democratic force".
The US and its allies spent decades and billions to prevent the arrival of the Islamists to power. They have failed. The Islamists are a fait accompli and it would be stupid for the Americans to keep on repeating the same mistake. They face a new learning curve; but so do the Islamists who cannot ignore the US. It is a case of many an elephant in the room.
We all recall how when the Arab Spring began, Islamists were actually excluded from it. The who's who of Western journalism and a number of scholars and observers hasted in stating Islamists had nothing to do with the Arab Spring. Where? Which version of the Arab Spring? In Egypt, they are wrong. In Libya the role assumed by the Islamists cannot be denied, a space to be watched over the coming years. Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, including its youth branch, are amongst the key actors in the Syrian uprising and now tragic civil war. In Tunisia, Nahda Party had no role in the revolution- and nor did any other liberal, leftist or secular party - but the first democratic poll in October 2011 favoured the Islamists.
The Islamists should not make sense only when they oppose, fight or exclude the US. Mutuality, reciprocity and equality, if ever achieved, should not mean "selling" Palestine, hating the Jews or shunning dialogue. Islamists live in a world where membership of every club, financial, political, cultural, technological or diplomatic, has both a degree of American lineage and leverage.
All we can trust is that the Arab citizenries who vote Islamists into office ensure they are represented with the same zeal, professionalism and dedication Americans represent their own interests. Nascent democracy will ensure this is the case: gone the days when single rule surrenders all in the name of external legitimacy or political survival. At least, one expects this much the Egyptians, Libyans and Tunisians where the Arab Spring's democratic debut look promising - despite the travails expected in such a process.
The Arab Spring (in quotation marks) is treated with a tinge of disdain - and the peoples who made it are excluded for the history Massad narrates in his article. Even the US has bowed to the Arab Spring. Enough of the kind of self-flagellation that in everything positive we find "conspiracy", as if the US is hijacking the Arab Spring, truly the most single emancipatory moment in modern history - in the case of Egypt and Tunisia entirely home-grown and driven by people's power and quest for dignity and freedom. It is one aspect of Arab history with which the International Misery Fund has nothing to do. It is not made in the US.
Hamas, ideology and constituency
The erudite Massad gets his Hamas story completely wrong.
The assertion of Qatar supporting Hamas to win the 2006 elections is grotesque. In fact, the "most formidable anti-democratic force in the region", i.e. the US, had more to do with the elections than Qatar. The elections were held under the Oslo Accords framework and with EU and US endorsement and support. Pity they did not like the winners: Hamas.
That is when Qatar stepped in: when international machinations were set in motion to cancel the will of the Palestinian voters, besiege the experiment, and derail Palestinian coalition and capacity-building. Qatar poured millions to support education, especially after the unity government failed and Hamas inherited an empty treasury, courtesy of the Abbas-Fayyadh duo.
The victory has nothing to do with outside factors or actors. Fatah lost the plot on every front: rampant corruption. One recalls Mohammed Dahlan's accusations to this effect in 2003, when Arafat was down and weak. The patrimonial Arafat hit back using four words: qatil abeeh la yarith (patricide disinherits). This is the same Fatah that worked in cohorts with the Israelis, serving as the oppressor of the Palestinian people on behalf of the colonisers. In 2005, Fatah's primaries exposed the democratic credentials of Arafat's heirs: they burned the ballot boxes.
Hamas won the January 2006 elections partly on the back of Fatah's crisis of de-legitimacy.
Massad misses the ideological content of Hamas' politics, including international and foreign relations. Elites in Hamas are expendable. Neither Khaled Mishaal nor Ismail Haniyya can hijack the influence of the rank-and-file in Hamas' decision-making. Built into this ideological matrix is a religious content and education that inform the shaping of membership, political behaviour and political philosophy.
Plus, there is the democratic-shura-cratic (consultative) ethos that governs Hamas internally. Like most Islamist movements, Hamas' pragmatism has limits. Relations with the US are not something that can be decided by the politburo, a few leaders or devolved to Qatar, for instance. Such affairs are decided through arduous processes starting with surveying with opinion at the grassroots level and ending with systematic consultation involving voting by all members. Thus it took two years to get endorsement for participation in the 2006 elections. (source?) The leadership suggests ideas or policy change, and it is entitled that much in decision-making. However, it is expected, and it does, refer to the constituency for change of policy.
Hamas has red lines: it cannot in the name of pragmatism accept Israeli occupation of Palestine or relations with the US that facilitate such an outcome. It would splinter and implode. In the 2007-2009 period Hamas lived a most critical period since its inception as a result of suspending military resistance. Despite heightened discipline, many rebelled and even left Hamas, forming groups such as Jaysh al-Ummah (Ummah Army). Even al-Qaida was able to recruit from within Hamas.
However, this trend was stopped by the 2019-09 war with Israel: Hamas had a chance to renew its commitment to military resistance and restore confidence in its ideology and religious identity. There is a conservative core-leadership that always keeps Hamas on the straight and narrow as far as ideology goes. For instance, in 2007 state of disorder owing to difficulty to control the Gaza strip was easily put under control, thanks to the influence of leaders such as Nizar Rayyan, Said Siyam (both killed in the 2019-09 war with Israel), Fathi Hammad, Younes Al-Astal and Wael Al-Zird.
Hamas is deft at playing politics. It has a mini-Hamas assigned with floating balloons or trying alternative policies on the margins. For instance, Ahmad Youssef was once given some leeway in throwing ideas such as abandoning military resistance or upgrading diplomacy. However, this led to now major breakthroughs and he is today quasi isolated. He is not alone and there are others who even call for direct talks with Israel. However, majority opinion may still prevent this. In the final analysis, ideological substantiation is needed for major change of policy.
I do not see that Hamas is co-opted or easily co-optable as if the Arab Spring is some kind of charm offensive to flirt with the Americans, or vice versa.Talking, sitting at the table with the Americans, speaking to them secretly or through the Qataris or other intermediaries do not amount to shedding ideological spots that still mark Hamas, a political animal par excellence.
One cannot tell Hamas by the friends it keeps or wants to keep. One thing always tell Hamas: its ideology. On this account, Massad misses the point.
Dr Larbi Sadiki is a Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, and author of Arab Democratisation: Elections without Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia University Press, 2004).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
.jpg)
没有评论:
发表评论