[WCUSP] LA Times: an official of the hamas describes its goals for all of Palestine.

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

FYI ~~
 
_http://www.latimes.http://wwhttp://www.latimhttp://wwhttp://www.latihttp://ww
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(http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-marzook10jul10,1,6983951.story)  

> An official of the movement describes its goals
> for all of  Palestine.

> By Mousa Abu Marzook, MOUSA ABU MARZOOK is the
> deputy of  the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic
> Resistance Movement. 

> July 10, 2007
>
> Damascus, Syria - HAMAS'  RESCUE of a BBC
> journalist from his captors in Gaza last week  was
> surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear
> about one  thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston 
> as some obsequious boon to  Western powers.
>
> It was done as part of our effort to secure  Gaza
> from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no
> matter  what the source. Gaza will be calm and under 
> the rule of law - a  place where all journalists,
> foreigners and guests of the Palestinian  people will
> be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported
>  attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics 
> will concede; our  struggle has always been focused
> on the occupier and our legal  resistance to it - a
> right of occupied people that is  explicitly
> supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention. 
>
>  Yet our movement is continually linked by President
> Bush and Israeli  Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to
> ideologies that they know full well we do  not
> follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its 
> adherents.  But we are not part of a broader war. Our
> resistance struggle is no  one's proxy, although we
> welcome the support of people everywhere for  justice
> in Palestine.
>
> The American efforts to negate the  will of the 
> Palestinian electorate by destroying our fledgling
>  government have not succeeded - rather, the
> U.S.-assisted Fatah  coup has only multiplied the
> problems of Washington's "two-state  solution." 
>
> Mr. Bush has for the moment found a pliant friend  in
> Abu Mazen, a "moderate" in the American view but one
> who  cannot seriously expect to command confidence in
> the streets of Gaza or  the West Bank after having 
> taken American arms and Israeli support to  depose
> the elected government by force. We deplore the
> current  prognosticating over "Fatah-land" versus
> "Hamastan." In the end, there  can be only one 
> Palestinian state.
>
> But what of the  characterization by the West of our
> movement as beyond the pale of  civilized discourse?
> Our "militant" stance cannot by itself be  the
> disqualifying factor, as many armed struggles have
>  historically resulted in a place at the table of
> nations. Nor can any  deny the reasonableness of our
> fight against the occupation and the  right of 
> Palestinians to have dignity, justice and  self-rule.
>
> Yet in my many years of keeping an open mind to  all
> sides of the Palestine question - including those I
>  spent in an American prison, awaiting Israeli 
> "justice" - I am forever  asked to concede the
> recognition of Israel's putative "right to exist"  as
> a necessary precondition to discussing grievances,
> and to  renounce positions found in the Islamic 
> Resistance Movement's charter  of 1988, an
> essentially revolutionary document born of the
>  intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20
> years  ago.
>
> The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as  
> a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have
> said before,  a state may have a right to exist, but
> not absolutely at the expense of  other states, or
> more important, at the expense of millions of human  
> individuals and their rights to justice. Why should
> anyone  concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it
> has never even acknowledged  the foundational crimes
> of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which  
> Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and
> orchards, and  made us a nation of refugees?
>
> Why should any Palestinian  "recognize" the monstrous
> crime carried out by Israel's founders and  continued 
> by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or
>  she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof
> United Nations hut?  These are not abstract
> questions, and it is not rejectionist simply  because 
> we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and
>  their descendants.
>
> As for the 1988 charter, if every state or  movement
> were to be judged solely by its foundational,
>  revolutionary documents or the ideas of its 
> progenitors, there would be  a good deal to answer
> for on all sides. The American Declaration  of
> Independence, with its self-evident truth of
> equality, simply  did not countenance (at least, not 
> in the minds of most of its  illustrious signatories)
> any such status for the 700,000 African slaves  at
> that time; nor did the Constitution avoid codifying
> slavery  as an institution, counting "other persons" 
> as three-fifths of a man.  Israel, which has never
> formally adopted a constitution of its own  but
> rather operates through the slow accretion of Basic
> Laws,  declares itself explicitly to be a state for 
> the Jews, conferring  privileged status based on
> faith in a land where millions of occupants  are
> Arabs, Muslims and Christians.
>
> The writings of  Israel's "founders" - from Herzl to 
> Jabotinsky to Ben  Gurion - make repeated calls for
> the destruction of Palestine's  non-Jewish
> inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their
>  places." A number of political parties today control 
> blocs in the  Israeli Knesset, while advocating for
> the expulsion of Arab citizens  from Israel and the
> rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish  state
> from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in 
> the  international community for Israel to repudiate
> these words as a  necessary precondition for any
> discourse whatsoever. The double  standard, as
> always, is in effect for Palestinians.
>
> I,  for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing"
> Israel's right to  exist - this is not, after all, an
> epistemological problem; Israel  does exist, as any
> Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in  
> his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual
> rejection is a  mere distraction when so many are
> dying or have lived as prisoners for  two generations
> in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli  
> forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people,
> including a  child. Who but a Jacobin dares to
> discuss the "rights" of nations in the  face of such
> relentless state violence against an occupied 
>  population?
>
> I look forward to the day when Israel can say to  me,
> and millions of other Palestinians: "Here, here is
> your  family's house by the sea, here are your lemon
> trees, the olive grove  your father tended: Come home
> and be whole again." Then we can speak of  a future
> together.



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