Hamas and the Arabs

[angelfalls]

Hamas and the Arabs

FOUL-WEATHER FRIENDS OR FOES?


CAIRO
No real help yet for Hamas from neighbouring Arab governments
( The Economist)


Three years ago, the Arab League’s 22 members agreed that they would all recognize Israel and declare peace, so long as the Jewish state withdrew from all the land it occupied in 1967. But Hamas, which now controls the Palestinian Authority, was elected on a platform that, at least notionally, rejects such a compromise. And Israel’s government is looking at a policy that means withdrawing to borders to be decided by Israel alone, not to the pre-1967 lines. These two awkward new factors leave surrounding states in a pickle.


Most ordinary Arabs outside Palastine admire Hamas’s defiant posture. Amid a region-wide religious revival, they tend to respect its Islamist credentials. Many saw in the electoral humiliation of its secular rival, Fatah, a useful warning to their own leaders, many of them equally venal and monopolistic. Capitalizing on such feelings, Hamas leaders have toured the region to drum up support, arguing Israel’s unilateral policies have undercut Arab peace offers. They have been cheered by a stream of editorial comment berating the West as hypocritical for demanding democratization, then balking at its results.


But in the region’s chanceries, feelings for Hamas range from distaste to hostility. Countries such as Egypt and Jordan want calm on their borders, and fear anything that might encourage their own powerful Islamist oppositions. Not many years ago, Jordan expelled four of Hamas’s top leaders. More recently, its police busted a gang of alleged Hamas gun-runners and cancelled a visit to Jordan’s capital, Amman, by Hamas’s foreign minister, Mahmoud Zahar. Egyptian officials have received Hamas emissaries, but privately endorse the view that Hamas should be cold-shouldered until it recognizes Israel and commits itself to respect previous agreements.


The rich monarchs of the Gulf feel less threatened by Hamas. Yet they too are tired of rejectionism. Saudi Arabia has been a generous patron to the Palestinians in the past and its rulers incline towards Islamist causes. But the al-Sauds prefer their own reactionary Wahhabist brand of Islam to Hamas’s more modern republican approach. Nor do they like Hamas’s closeness to Iran, the rival claimant to leadership of the Muslim World. “ Of course there is a human side to the funding issue”, says a government minister in the Gulf. “But at the same time there has been an Arab consensus on a peaceful situation, and we would like Hamas to sign onto this.”


Even Syria, which has long been host to Hamas’s exiled leaders, and loudly backs the notion of perpetual resistance to Israel, has a chequered relationship with the group. An Islamist electoral victory may be fine for Palestine but, in Syria, mere membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a branch, remains a capital crime. The exiled leader of Syria’s branch of the Brotherhood recently joined other members of the Syrian opposition to announce a front aimed at toppling President Bashar Assad’s regime.


In any case, what Palestinians need most just now is not rhetoric, but money. The issue of funding is where the ambivalence of Arab regimes shows most clearly. The West’s denial of finance to the Hamas-led government, and America’s intervention to block bank transfers, are commonly decried as forms of blackmail. While Palastenian’s misery increases, Islamist groups have campaigned for private donations. Such calls, and a $50m pledge by non-Arab Iran, have shamed some governments into coughing up: Qatar has promised $50m, Saudi Arabia has reported $90m, and the Arab Monetary Fund some $50m.


But at the last Arab summit meeting in March, governments agreed only to maintain their previous level of funding. And even so, attempts by the Arab League to find some way to transfer cash by circumventing banks, which fear retribution under America’s long-reaching anti-terrorism laws, have so far come to nought, Hamas officials say that $350m of Arab money has accumulated in this way.


At a recent meeting in New York of the Quartet group ( comprising the UN, the European Union, the United States and Russia ) that is meant to broker Palestinian-Israeli peace, diplomats from Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia did argue strongly in favour of loosening the aid blockade. Yet, for the time being, Arab rulers may feel obliged to go along with the American administration’s apparent policy of squeezing Hamas into submission.


But as distress in the West Bank and Gaza mounts, neighbouring governments are starting to feel that, whatever they think of Hamas, some way must be found to break the siege, if only to quell rising public outrage in their own countries.



Regards,
angelfalls!!

[sardarzada11]

Salam,

nice effort
very informative contribution
thanx for sharing with us.


Regards,
Sardarzada

[angelfalls]

Ws,

Thanx alot for appreciation.


Regards,
angelfalls!!