The price of the lack of a secular alternative in Hamas, Palestine, and the Middle East

The "humanitarian tragedy" unfolding in the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation, particularly in the Gaza Strip—to use a cliché—is one of the problems inherited by the present day from the twentieth century, which we left behind long ago. The issue is so multi-layered that it extends from how the knot that European powers called the "Eastern Question" or, in older language, the "Şark Meselesi" was attempted to be untied at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the problem that Europe itself posed as the "Jewish Question," and has finally taken the form of the "Palestinian Question" and now the "Gaza tragedy."

The killing of over 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and the taking of 212 Israelis hostage during the attacks launched by Hamas forces on October 7, 2023, by crossing the Israeli border under the name of the Al-Aqsa Flood, emerged both as a serious blow to the prestige of the current Benjamin Netanyahu government, which has already drifted to the far right, and as a justification for increasing the intensity of the oppression against the Gaza Strip, the source of the attacks, and all of Palestine in general, to unprecedented levels.

In this article, I will first attempt to provide a history of how the Palestinian issue and, specifically, the power of Hamas in the Gaza Strip reached this point, and then I will try to draw attention to some lessons that can be learned from this issue and the form it has taken today.

A HISTORY OF OCCUPATION

Since the Gaza Strip has been under the "exclusively" Hamas control since 2007, it is referred to entirely separately from the other remaining part of Palestine, known in English as the "West Bank" and in our language as "Batı Şeria."

The Gaza Strip, which consists of a short coastline extending along the Mediterranean from the Sinai Peninsula towards Israel, has no land connection with the region known as the West Bank, as it remains on the west bank of the Jordan River, which separates Israel from Jordan.

While one was under the indirect control of Egypt for a period and the other was under the direct control of Jordan, they were lost to Israel along with the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War, which was initiated against Israel in 1967 with the leadership of Egypt and the participation of Syria and Jordan, and which resulted in a disastrous defeat for the Arab side, as its name suggests.

In 1973, although supported by other Arab countries, the second attempt, initiated this time only by Egypt and Syria, also failed, and Israeli control over these regions became permanent.

The only exception to this situation was when Egypt, attempting to overcome the economic difficulties that compounded the 1973 defeat with pro-market "infitah" or opening policies, finally sat down at the table with Israel in 1979 to establish diplomatic relations, officially ended the state of war with this country, and, in parallel with these conditions, regained control of the Sinai Peninsula from Israel.

Thus, with the exception of Sinai, three of these four regions, which are also subject to the call for "withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" (UNSC Resolution 242, 1(i)) by the United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which are accepted as binding for states according to classical international law doctrine, remain under Israeli occupation today.

FROM THE OSLO ACCORDS TO HAMAS RULE IN GAZA

With the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 and 1994, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to establish a Palestinian National Authority that would have a certain level of control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

This situation did not end Israel's military control over these regions; in fact, Israel continued its policy of building new Jewish settlements in these areas.

The basic reasoning that convinced Israel of the Oslo Accords was that with a Palestinian administration to be established as a result of these agreements, the hostility among Palestinians towards Israel would decrease, and Israel's "right to exist" would even gradually be recognized. Of course, although the PLO declared that it recognized Israel, feelings towards Israel among Palestinians remained hostile.

On the other hand, Israeli leaders contributed significantly, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, to this not happening, and in fact, to the hardening of these hostile feelings. One example is that the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority was never equipped with the powers to fully serve Palestinians and provide a sense of self-governance, and its budget was constantly subjected to cuts; another example was the toleration and even covert support for Hamas to develop and flourish, and furthermore, to take control in Gaza from Fatah, the dominant faction of the PLO, in order to prevent the PLO from gaining a power that could truly challenge Israel and thus approaching the ideal of independence.

Setting aside the allegations, which are very difficult to prove, that Hamas was specifically founded under Israeli surveillance, while the Ariel Sharon administration kept PLO leader Yasser Arafat under isolation in his residence in Ramallah throughout 2002 and 2003, eventually forcing him to migrate to France and causing his death there in 2004, it suddenly withdrew its military forces and about nine thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and after this withdrawal, it chose not to conduct any negotiations with the Palestinian Authority regarding how relations between the Gaza Strip and Israel would proceed.

Hamas participated in the 2006 legislative council elections held shortly after this withdrawal, marking the first time it had entered any election organized in Palestine after the Oslo Accords. Hamas's slogan in these elections was "Four years of resistance defeated ten years of negotiation!" referring to its leading role in armed attacks targeting Israel during the Second Intifada, which began with a reaction to some actions of Israeli leaders after the Camp David Talks held in 2000 between the delegations of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO leader Yasser Arafat under the auspices of US President Bill Clinton failed.

It seems the slogan caught on, and Hamas won seventy-six seats of its own in these elections, supported by four independent members, while Fatah could barely win forty-three seats in the same elections. Hamas, which sprouted as the Gaza branch of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood but preferred to walk separately because it was hesitant to embrace the violent actions of the former, was now playing for higher stakes.

GAZA AS AN OPEN-AIR PRISON

Hamas was recognized as a "terrorist organization" by many Western countries, including Israel and the US, and when it won the elections, it was intended to be overthrown by a coup attempt that Israel wanted to carry out with US support and replaced by Fatah.

From 2006 to 2007, the friction and clashes between Hamas and Fatah, as well as Israel's operations in the Gaza Strip, only served to further strengthen Hamas, and eventually, the removal of all Fatah-affiliated officials from the Gaza Strip led to this region coming under Hamas control internally.

Under conditions where the external control of the region was absolutely in the hands of Israel and it was kept under a very strict blockade against any outside aid or intervention, the political discontent of Gazans was accompanied by a growing anger stemming from increasing deprivation, and in the words of famous expert Ian Lustick, Gaza resembled a kind of "open-air prison."

Setting aside whether the "prison riot" metaphor used by Lustick for Hamas's recent attacks is accurate, although he finds them unacceptable, the contribution of the open-air prison conditions that exacerbate this hostility among Palestinians and especially Gazans, as much as the hostility towards Israel, cannot be denied at the point reached.

SECULAR CHALLENGES ARE TAKEN MORE SERIOUSLY THAN ISLAMISTS

In fact, the fact that Israel remained a spectator to, and even supported, the development and flourishing of Hamas to some extent as an organization rival to Fatah is a familiar story in our region, which extends from Rumelia or Anatolia to Mesopotamia, the Levant, and the Maghreb, instead of the "Middle East" concept that should not be liked.

It emerges not only in terms of the "divide and rule" logic that has become a cliché, but also as a more sophisticated necessity. The reasons can be discussed at length, but a short reading of regional history reveals that for Israel, as well as for Euro-Atlantic hegemony in general, the most serious threats come from movements that construct politics within the circle of worldly and universal principles.

Even if it seems worthless as a lost war when viewed from today, the dynamics that directly mobilized three Arab countries against Israel were Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ba'ath dynamics as secular nationalist forces.

On the other hand, the crisis that Euro-Atlantic hegemony could only overcome later, first with a neoliberal restructuring in the Western hemisphere and then on a global scale, was the 1970s, when socialism in the world constituted a secular and therefore universal systemic alternative, and the Soviet Union, as the embodiment of this alternative, pushed the limits of the military balance, if not economic, with its nuclear submarines in the Pacific.

It is difficult to say that even the 2008 global financial crisis, which is compared to the 1929 depression, has reached this level of hegemonic crisis yet, despite the frequently cited rise of China. Famous critical social scientist Alfredo Saad Filho argues that this crisis, far from being a crisis of Euro-Atlantic hegemony, is still proceeding as a "crisis within neoliberalism" rather than a "crisis of neoliberalism."

While it is debated whether China can emerge with an international-popular political program of a similarly universal nature against the universal hegemonic capacity of today's liberal international order, which laid its foundations after 1945, it is, to put it mildly, very difficult for any Islamist movement to reach such a capacity.

As the post-2010 Arab popular uprisings, known as the Arab Spring, have shown, it has been seen that even an organization that transcends national borders like the Muslim Brotherhood does not have the capacity to evolve into a transnational dynamic, and it deepens identity-based divisions within societies.

Moreover, when resorting to forms of violence that are not accepted as legitimate by established international and national legal norms, through concepts such as jihad, for which there is no consensus on exactly what kind of struggle forms it covers, as in the Palestinian example, the gains of the struggle already achieved can be lost in an instant, and furthermore, a kind of massacre campaign becomes possible, and this situation can be met with indifference by the international community.

Israel or the Euro-Atlantic elites know this. Nevertheless, this policy leads to a vicious cycle where, rather than a stable world, secular social segments in our region, which could be considered natural allies of Euro-Atlantic hegemony in a different kind of conjuncture, are decimated, and therefore, this hegemony is constantly "terrorized" by its weak but fundamentalist opponents.

Of course, as long as it can be managed, such instability must be considered preferable in the face of a hegemonic crisis and a counter-hegemonic challenge.

THE ARAB WORLD FROM THE OBAMA DOCTRINE TO THE TRUMP DOCTRINE

Apart from this structural preference, another more conjunctural preference is among the sources of Hamas's rise. It might be meaningful to think of Hamas's rise as a Muslim Brotherhood "offshoot" that was allowed, as a preparation phase for the strategy of providing transformation from within with Muslim Brotherhood "revolutions," not "exporting democracy" from the outside, as a way to get rid of both the anti-Americanism created by US military occupations in this region and many Arab administrations considered collaborative and corrupt in the eyes of the region's peoples, which we can roughly call the Obama doctrine.

Following Hamas's election victory in 2006, many calls were rising from the West to "give Hamas a chance." Turkey and Qatar emerged as the two countries that most aligned with the Obama doctrine, which was inclined to support transformations from within, not from the outside, in the attempts and processes of regime change led by Hamas first and then the Muslim Brotherhood in general in the region.

Even when the Obama doctrine had long since vanished and there was talk of an Islamist Winter in the West rather than an Arab Spring, these two countries continued their insistence on this line. The Obama administration, with the contribution of the motive to strengthen the hand of new administrations in Arab countries, distanced itself from Israel, while Turkey's attitude towards Israel, in particular, was considered less disturbing.

Until the Al-Aqsa Flood attacks, the conjuncture had shifted in a completely different direction, and with a fait accompli approach that we can call the Trump doctrine, leading Arab monarchies were brought side by side with Israel, and for better or worse, mutual diplomatic recognition steps known as the Abraham Accords were taken.

The recklessness of this process was that these steps were taken while there was no improvement in any of the problems voiced by the Arab world against Israel.

Hamas now looks more out of place in this picture, and perhaps these recent attacks also reflected the deep disappointment experienced by Palestinians in the face of this recklessness.

Thanks to Israel's recent total punitive attacks on the Gaza Strip, this move by Hamas, even if indirectly, caused the Abraham Accords process to freeze, at least for a while, with the renewal of the sense of outrage felt by Arab peoples against Israel.

We are living in a period where even King Abdullah II of Jordan, who has a British mother and can be considered one of the most pro-Western Arab monarchs, avoids meeting with US President Joe Biden, let alone Israeli officials.

HAMAS AND "TERROR"

It might be more accurate to think of President Erdoğan's recent party group speech in the Turkish Grand National Assembly, where he claimed that Hamas is "not a terrorist organization," together with the combination of the conservative voter base that has sensitivity about Palestine before the upcoming local elections and this rising anti-Israel trend in the Arab world, in addition to his sincere thoughts.

While Israel's total punitive attacks on Gazans could be opposed without taking sides in the debate on whether Hamas is a "terrorist organization," it is not difficult to foresee that such a statement will make relations with Arab administrations, other than Qatar, that do not look very warmly at Hamas and even the Muslim Brotherhood in general, unpleasant, if not derail them, as much as Western countries, especially the US, that define Hamas as a "terrorist organization."

On the other hand, it is likely that all these countries will also question and criticize Turkey's fight against terrorist organizations that target it.

DIFFERENT "PALESTINIAN CAUSES"

Setting aside the "terror" issue, when it comes to Hamas and its attacks on civilians inside Israel, the main factor causing confusion is, in fact, the existence of those who pursue different "Palestinian causes," not those who pursue the Palestinian cause.

Alongside the advocates of the famous "two-state solution" in the form of a Palestine next to Israel, those who argue that Israel and Palestine should be a single state, although very few in number, and those who can be estimated to be definitely more numerous than the latter, who argue the thesis that "Israel should be completely destroyed," show that there are at least three different "Palestinian causes."

The difference in approach to Hamas and its recent attacks that also target civilians stems from these differences in approach that are not clearly stated. The previously mentioned UN Security Council resolutions regarding the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation have been the most basic legal anchor point for those who defend the Palestinian cause.

However, the same Resolution 242, which states that Israel's withdrawal from these territories "requires the fulfillment of the principles of the UN Charter, the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East," counts this withdrawal condition as one of the two principles that such a peace must include in its implementation.

This second principle, which is not often mentioned by those who claim the Palestinian cause, is concretized as "Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force" (UNSC, Resolution 242, 1(ii)).

In addition to freedom of navigation in international waters and the resolution of the refugee problem, it also mentions the need for "guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area, including through measures such as the establishment of demilitarized zones" (ibid., 2(c)). Of course, if international law is rejected entirely, then there is no ground left to negotiate.

SECULAR LACK OF ALTERNATIVES AND THE PERSISTENT SECULAR OPTION

Finally, explaining the decline of secular politics on a regional scale, which also embodies the rise of Hamas in the absence of Fatah, only with the structural and conjunctural preferences of a number of elites can lead to an analytical error such as neglecting the subject or agency status of both Hamas and Fatah cadres, while on the other hand, it can also bring with it ignoring the fact that secular politics on a regional scale has not been able to put forward a meaningful alternative in the face of neoliberal policies that sometimes appear and sometimes are imposed as a hegemonic option on an international and then global scale, following the crisis they faced as a result of relatively more public or national developmentalist economic policies reaching their natural limits within capitalism.

Turkey is not exempt from this situation.

Secular politics, throughout the region, to the extent that it is the subject, partner, or tool of policies in favor of the market and against lower social classes, whether under the name of "infitah" or "structural adjustment" or "stability programs," has tried to produce the relationships it could not produce through these policies via instruments such as corruption, and ultimately, as one of the leading causes of the loss of prestige of the Palestinian Authority led by the PLO and in many regional countries, it has caused losses of trust and respect that are very difficult to compensate for in the eyes of lower social classes towards secular politics.

Today, the fact that Hamas and other militia groups allegedly supported by Iran have gone this far is due to the Euro-Atlantic hegemony led by the US through the neoliberal globalization program at the global level showing signs of stumbling with the global financial crisis and giving the impression of losing altitude against China, as well as this deep and sad secular lack of alternatives on a regional scale.

Nevertheless, as clear as it is that secular politics on a regional scale, including Turkey, cannot put forward an alternative program against neoliberal Euro-Atlantic hegemony, it is just as clear that it harbors a much more serious counter-hegemony potential that can be woven through popular political programs based on worldly and universal values at national and international levels, in the face of political styles with much more limited hegemonic capacities that define themselves through identities and, moreover, risk the gains already achieved in certain areas of struggle with illegitimate forms of struggle, as in the Palestinian example.