'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'

According to legend, the famous Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was giving a speech on his theory of personality at a meeting when the subject turned to the oral stage of childhood development.

Based on the knowledge that the mouth and its surrounding area are the primary sources of pleasure for a person during this stage, Freud suggested that those who constantly eat, suck their thumbs, bite their nails, or frequently smoke cigarettes, cigars, or pipes may generally have remained fixated in the oral stage.

A sharp journalist watching the meeting, not wanting to miss what we might call an easy goal today, asked Freud—who almost never had a cigar out of his mouth—"Well, if we take your cigar as a starting point, can we assume that you, too, are fixated in the oral stage?"

Freud's response went down in history:

- Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

We do not know if, after giving this answer, Freud muttered to himself, "but sometimes it is not."

However, let us call this a good "story" in terms of how it illustrates how people can sometimes miss the naked truth in the face of life's complexity, and let us connect the subject to the hot agenda of the Middle East.

With Hamas's attack on Israel and Israel's disproportionate retaliation, which reaches the scale of a crime against humanity, the agenda has focused entirely on developments in Gaza.

For the past 10 days, the comments, evaluations, and projections regarding the future made by experts in the field, filling almost 24 hours of the day, seem to have confused ordinary people trying to understand the issue more than they have clarified the crisis between Hamas and Israel that has turned the Middle East into a bloodbath, answered questions, or offered sound predictions about the future of the region and the global system.

Let us underline that assertive rhetoric on news channels and social media, even if hollow, baseless, and often nonsensical, has contributed significantly to this, driven by ratings concerns.

After the long introduction above, let us clear our minds and put on our close-up glasses to look at recent history, saying "those who do not know their history cannot understand the present, nor can they foresee the future."

During the Cold War, the Islamist movements supported by the US through the "Green Belt" project had reached a position to politically influence the countries they were in following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the same time, they were demanding power.

Seeing this as an opportunity, Western countries adopted a new approach based on "identity politics" to establish a new world order after the Cold War.

Since the Soviet Union had collapsed, there was no obstacle left to making neoliberalism dominant in the world.

Islamist movements demanding power were highly useful apparatuses for the new world order.

The "Greater Middle East and North Africa Project," or BOP by its well-known acronym, was put into practice for countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are almost entirely Muslim, rich in hydrocarbons, and also located on energy resources or energy routes.

Most of the countries in the region were not following the lead of global powers, and leaders like Saddam in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria could openly challenge the US and the countries led by the US.

The goal was to politically surrender these countries and open them up to the exploitation of the neoliberal system.

"Political Islam," presented as an antidote to radical Islam, could be the most important element of this process.

However, there was a significant problem.

Political Islam did not have an institutional structure that would serve the interests of Western countries.

The game-makers developing strategies for global powers thought of the "Muslim Brotherhood" (Ikhwan al-Muslimin), which Britain had designed in 1928 to curb the Arab nationalism that was beginning to sprout in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood organization...

The Ikhwan was founded in Egypt, but it organized in Lebanon in 1936, Syria in 1937, and Jordan in 1946, taking on an international character.

In the following half-century, it was accepted as the oldest, most influential, and largest opposition political structure in the Arab world.

Its instrumentalization in the context of political Islam occurred after the early 1990s.

Just before this, Hamas was founded in Palestine.

In 1987, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, and Muhammad Taha formed the Palestinian wing of the Egyptian Ikhwan, naming this structure Hamas, which consists of the first syllables of the Arabic name for the Islamic Resistance Movement.

The organization won the elections held in Palestine in 2006. Then it took control in Gaza and began to rule the region with an iron fist.

With the Arab Spring, which was the implementation method of the BOP, the Ikhwan came to power first in Tunisia in 2011 and then in Egypt.

In Libya, where Gaddafi was overthrown by NATO intervention, it gained influence in a significant part of the country through jihadist gangs.

But it was defeated in the subsequent elections.

The Ikhwan project was not successful in Syria, just as it was not in Libya.

Despite all the material and moral support of the AKP, it could not seize power in Damascus. The country suffered great destruction with the civil war.

But things were not going well in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. Large masses of people took to the streets against political Islamists.

With the overthrow of President Morsi in Egypt in 2013, the Ikhwan project reached a dead end. It was slowly emerging that the most important source from which political Islam was fed was radical Islam, which created anxiety in Western countries.

Shortly after, the people in Tunisia removed the Ikhwan from power through elections.

Yet, in many respects, Tunisia was being marketed to the international public as a model political Islamist country.

In this process, the West had shelved the project of "bringing the Ikhwan to power in the Middle East and North Africa," which it had started with the Arab Spring, and had changed its strategy regarding the Middle East and North Africa.

To put it briefly, the West no longer needed the Ikhwan to shape the Middle East as it wished, to exploit the region's hydrocarbon resources, or to bring the trade route coming from the East under its own control. Moreover, there was a risk of them throwing a wrench in the West's works.

The new players of the new strategy were Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, and India.

However, despite having been politically defeated in many countries from Tunisia to Libya, from Egypt to Syria, and from Sudan to Iraq, the Ikhwan project would not yet take its place on the dusty pages of history.

All the Ikhwan regimes established after 2011 had collapsed, but Hamas had managed to maintain its power in the Gaza Strip.

In other words, there was no failure in the Palestinian leg of political Islam like there was in the others. Hamas was a symbol of resistance that was appreciated in the Arab streets against Israel. Moreover, despite being a Sunni organization, it had the unconditional support of Shiite Iran behind it.

This was of critical importance for the survival of Israel.

In short, even though the Ikhwan had been removed from the political equations in all countries of the region one way or another, Hamas continued its existence as an important actor in Palestine.

For the West, for a period to close, the actors of this period also needed to step aside until the next game.

Hamas had fulfilled its mission for the West, had Islamized the Palestinian cause, divided and fragmented it, and created a legitimate justification for a religious/racist political figure like Netanyahu to remain in power in Israel for years.

However, its "expiration date" had also passed for the West.

The button was pressed for the necessary action to be taken.

With the crisis that broke out on October 7, it seems that this last point of resistance of the Ikhwan in the region will be eliminated by a large-scale military operation that Israel has carried out/will carry out. Israel's goal is to bury Hamas's name and existence in history; at the cost of the lives of women, children, and innocent people!

When viewed through the window of recent history, this very simple truth lies in the background of Israel's intention to virtually level Gaza with the support of Western countries behind it.

Let us end our article by saying let us leave the answer to the question "Why did Hamas pave the way for this process that will destroy itself?" for Thursday.