What the Hamas election win means

Hamas has been building its power for decades now, and the election merely exposed what already existed. The New Yorker has an excellent (and short) essay on what happened last week when the Hamas took control of the Palestinian Parliament. Here are a few excerpts:

[When everyone else was watching the Hamas celebrate the election wins last week, Shalom Harari, a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer] "had tuned in to a seemingly tedious military ceremony on Egyptian state television. “Look at the wives of the generals,” he said. “Many of them are wearing traditional head scarves. This was not so ten years ago. And this tells you where we are heading. When the women of Egypt’s pro-Western military élite are dressed like that, you know that the Hamas victory is not about Palestine. It’s about the entire Middle East.""

[Snip]

Harari said that he first took note of the Palestinian Islamists in the early nineteen-eighties, shortly after the Iranian revolution, when Islamists won student elections in the prestigious universities of the West Bank. A decade later, Islamists won elections in chambers of commerce in the occupied territories and, more recently, started to win in municipal elections. Now Hamas has taken control of the parliament, he said, and is sure to challenge Abbas for the Presidency.

[Snip]

Throughout the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood [of which Hamas is an off-shoot] is the main power with grassroots support. The Islamists are less corrupt. They are the ones with integrity and compassion. They are of the people and they speak for the people. Today in the Arab world, the choice is clear between democratically elected Islamists and Western-leaning dictators.”

[Snip]

The issue, of course, is whether this revolutionary movement, whose charter is devoted to the elimination of Israel, could develop into a ruling party interested in territorial compromise. On that Harari is doubtful. “It would take years before real negotiations could resume,” he said. “An over-all peace agreement is out of the question for a long time. ”

Yet the impact of the Hamas victory, he said, is not local but regional. “As we speak,” he said, “there are growing fears not only in Israel but in Jordan, Egypt, and even Syria. The Hamas victory is a Middle East earthquake. Its shock waves will be felt in every town between Casablanca and Baghdad.”

Harari is saying that we are now seeing clearly the conflict that is facing us in the Middle East.

It is my opinion that if we stick to a strategy of doing nothing more than supporting the pro-Western dictators with their corrupt regimes, we will watch the Muslim Middle East go the same way China did in 1949 when we supported the corrupt right-wing dictator Chiang Kai Chek against the honest and reforming peoples party run by Mao Tse Tung.

The many implications for the corrupt right-wing regime in the United States are staggering. How can they be expected to develop a strategy for dealing with the clear conflict facing the West? Our right-wing failed in China and again in South Viet Nam. They simply can't get handling this kind of social movement right. They are the source of many of the problems rather than the providers of the solutions.