NOVANEWS
I understand and respect the reasons for which Palestinian leaders have refrained from interfering in the internal politics of the states of the Middle East. Yet here is Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas visiting Bahrain as part of a regional tour and blithely accepting the “principled stance” of the Bahraini leadership regarding its “support for the Palestinian people in its struggle for its inalienable rights and the establishment of its independent state, with Jerusalem as its capital.”
This is the Bahrain that has spent months murdering its people and destroying the second most important regional revolt, after Egypt. Bahrain also just co-sponsored a Security Council resolution on Syria – vetoed by Russia and China – and included in that resolution was a clause calling on the Syrian government to “withdraw all Syrian military and armed forces from cities and towns, and return them to their original home barracks,” yet without calling on the mujahedeen running amok in Syria to “withdraw.” Of course, not being responsible to anyone except their paymasters, including most likely co-sponsors of the resolution like France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and U.A.E, and Saudi Arabia, there is no way to get them to withdraw. Which all of those forces know very well, especially as they most likely are slipping them funding and weapons through third parties.
Syria is also Hamas’s safe harbor, and they are unlikely to find a better one at the moment in the Arab world. Meanwhile the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which has fully accepted both neo-liberal and normalization with Israel, has been leaning on Hamas to leave Damascus. This is the trap of Hamas and Fateh’s strategy of bourgeois nationalism as the form of the Palestinian national liberation struggle: they find themselves making alliances with regimes which hold them up with one hand while slitting their throat with the other.
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