No Irish model for Palestinians

[mora]

Let's set aside the fact that its success in the Palestinian elections took many by surprise. More relevant is the fact that the organisation was treated as if it were a Middle Eastern version of Sinn Fein. OK, some commentators remarked that it has an armed wing, but suggested that once in power it may well compromise with Israel. It took a long time for news programmes to wake up to the fact that Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, that it is committed to the elimination of the state of Israel and a restoration of the Caliphate. Its religious beliefs do not allow it to compromise on the recognition of Israel, only on the timetable for its removal.

No Irish model for Palestinians

The pathology and psychology of Hamas are radically different to the IRA, writes Henry McDonald

Thursday January 26, 2006


Twenty-five years ago this month, Bobby Sands and his comrades were contemplating a fresh hunger strike aimed at restoring political status for republican inmates in the Maze prison. Their eventual decision to go on the fast resulted in Sands and nine other republicans (six IRA and three INLA prisoners) dying in the H-blocks.
In tandem with the prison protest, the Provisional republican movement began the first tentative steps towards involvement in electoral politics.

Previously, Sinn F?in had called for boycotts in Northern Ireland elections, both to Westminster and local government. But when Sands won a by-election - he was elected as MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone prior to his death after 66 days on hunger strike - the republican leadership realised there was much to be gained by standing for elections in the north.

Thus began the twin track strategy of "Ballot Box and Armalite". By the end of the 1980s there were Sinn F?in chairmen of local district councils and ex-IRA prisoners sitting on committees administering the burial of the dead and the collection of rubbish. By the mid-1990s the Armalite was ditched and the strategy was now on a single track.

Even before Hamas' stunning success in the Palestinian elections, media commentators and some elements of the Foreign Office close to the Arab world were drawing a comparison between the Islamist movement's entry into electoral politics with Sinn F?in of the 1980s.

The parallels certainly appear benign: from the perspective of early 1981 the IRA's "long war" was still raging, there seemed no end in sight to the violence and yet, following the decision by the terrorist group's political wing to stand for elections, the trek began on the road to the 1994 ceasefire.

In other words, the prospect of electoral gain and the trappings of power both at local and national level tempted the IRA and Sinn F?in out of the armed struggle cul de sac. If it worked for the republican movement, the same might go for Hamas who, like Sinn F?in and the IRA, would be brought into the real world via the imperfect, deal-making necessities of constitutional politics.

In theory, the parallel appears plausible, but in reality it is entirely false and misleading. Surprisingly perhaps, the 1981 hunger strike illuminates the glaring difference between a relatively secular, ultimately pragmatic and power-obsessed Sinn F?in and the cast-iron fundamentalist certainties of Hamas.

When talking to ex-IRA prisoners who were locked in H-block during that momentous year, they all agree that the hunger strike was not an act of collective suicide. They all insist that there was always a back door to life, that the fast could have been ended earlier and lives been saved.

These prisoners laugh off suggestions that there were ever any volunteers willing to pull the pin and blow themselves apart at a British Army checkpoint.

Throughout three long decades of armed conflict, and the fatal hunger strike aside, there was never a single suicide bombing. Moreover, as pointed out in a controversial book published last year by Richard O'Rourke, the IRA's press officer inside the Maze during the hunger strike, there was every chance by early July 1981 that six of the ten hunger strikers could have been saved. In Blanketmen, O'Rourke alleges that the republican leadership on the outside prolonged the strike; riding the wave of emotion generated by dying prisoners in order to advance Sinn F?in electorally.

The lack of a suicide bomb cult in an enduring armed political culture indicates something radically different to the pathology and psychology of Hamas.

Modern Sinn F?in started out as a party of no compromise, splitting from the Official Republican Movement because the latter moved to a historic compromise with unionism, and accepted the existence of partition and the reality of two states on the island of Ireland. Just over 30 years later, and with thousands dead, the Provisionals adopted more or less the same position as their old republican rivals. They had decommissioned the uncompromising parts of their ideology.

In this life, Hamas offers its supporters (despite some verbal tricks) the unlikely prospect of wiping Israel off the map. In the afterlife, it offers its martyrs paradise and sex with dozens of virgins.

In Ireland, republicans have settled for far less, including the continuation of partition in return for a few ministerial seats in a power-sharing government based on the same lines as the one they wanted destroyed in 1974.

Hamas and its enduring ideology, which predates even the state of Israel, is all or nothing. By sharp contrast, the republican leadership opted for compromise and a major dilution of its core belief system. The vain hope that Hamas might follow the Sinn F?in path is like whistling the Soldier's Song in the Khamsin or desert wind.

· Henry McDonald is Ireland editor of The Observer.

[Seán a' Chóta]

The project of constructing a Jewish state in Palestine is morally equivalent to the failed project of constructing an Afrikaaner state in South Africa. For their success, both projects required the most fundamental human rights of the native populations to be set aside.

The proposed "two state" solution would leave the Palestinians with a ghetto in Gaza and a bantustan is the West Bank. Even if the Zionists were to withdraw completely from the territories they conquered in 1967, something that they have absolutely no intention of ever doing, the Palestinians would still be left with only 22% of their country in two non-contiguous sections.

As in South Africa, the only viable and just solution is to transcend the politics of ethnicity and to establish one pluralist state. That won't happen anytime soon, but it will happen. And it will be brought about by the same unstoppable force as in South Africa: not negotiations, not armed struggle, not foreign public opinion, but demographic realities on the ground. "La revanche du berceau" will be decisive in the end.