I wonder which scenario is more believable: Hezbollah and Hamas are the defensive offspring of Israel’s Zionistic forty-one-year-old occupation? Or, a group of people whose agenda is to cause terrorism and bring about the destruction of Israel? Whichever way you look at it, the truth can always be found on the ground. In this case, Palestine. Or whatever is left of Palestine. So, in order to understand – and comprehend – from whence these two organisations came from, we must look at how they were conceived.
Sabra and Shatila. These two words either evoke condemnation or praise. Condemnation in the Arab-Muslim-humane world; praise from the sympathisers and apologists of Zionism. Which, frankly put, calls for the destruction of Palestine so that a supremacist state only for Jews can exist in a nation called Israel. And this ideal, conceived in 1879 by Theodor Herzl in the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, is sadly coming to fruition.
In 1982, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), headed by Ariel Sharon, orchestrated a crime against humanity in southern Lebanon. With IDF assistance and complicity, Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, where they systematically butchered, castrated, raped and murdered men, woman and children. A refugee camp! And out of the burning ashes of Sabra and Shatila rose Hezbollah.
Would you expect anything less? If your town was murdered, raped and pillaged, would you not expect an organisation to band together to not only seek revenge but to prevent such a massacre from happening again? Or would it be more realistic to feel sympathy towards your murderers? To be almost apathetic in seeing your very people - brothers, sisters, mother and father - die before your eyes? I leave these simple questions to be answered not only by your mind but also with you heart. For they are the same questions the founding members of Hezbollah asked themselves in Southern Lebanon on that most despicable of days in 1982. They remain the same questions they ask themselves today.
Even though Hamas was formed in 1988, its roots can be traced to 1948. That year saw the displacement of a quarter million Palestinians from their homeland from which they would never return, despite countless UN resolutions opposed, violated and blocked by Israel and the US. The year before, with pressure from Britain and the US, the UN brokered a Partition plan, which amounted to Palestinian geo-political suicide. The Jews, who accounted for 7% of the population, were offered 55% of Palestine; while the Palestinians, who accounted for 93% of the population, were offered 45% - of their own land!
If your nation, city, town or village were given the same offer, by someone who had no right to offer your land away, would you accept it? A simple question often has a simple answer. The continuous loss of historical Palestine is illustrated in any atlas or map – for those willing enough to make a comparison between 1948, 1967 and today. Therefore, is it any surprise that a resistance group - whether its called Hamas or the Palestinian Liberation Army – did and do everything they can to end a now four-decade-old siege?
The word Hamas is an acronym for Zeal. 2000 years ago, the Romans laid waste to Jerusalem when the Jewish “zealots” wanted to end their “occupation”. The Romans called these zealots “terrorists” since they did not respect Roman presence or law. Sad how history can often repeat itself in such coincidental, yet ironic, circumstances. Do you think the Jews of Jerusalem 2000 years ago considered the zealot a terrorist? Do you think those same Jews had the same right to live in peace without Roman occupation? More importantly, did the zealots rise before or after Roman occupation? Again, simple questions beg simple answers.
It is unfortunate my conclusion states the obvious: that Hezbollah and Hamas were and are the direct responses to Israel’s neo-colonialist empire that began in 1948 and its continuing illegal occupation initiated in 1967. The fact such truisms are seldom heard, said or known speaks volumes of much of the media’s contempt for truth and obedience to its masters. However, as long as the US funds and supports the world’s second worst rogue state, itself being number one, there shall be no peace in the Middle East. Hezbollah and Hamas, whose sole purpose is to free their people from a tyrannical force - as did their Zealot counterparts in Rome - shall remain “terrorists” in the eyes of those who cannot see and in the ears of those who will not listen.
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