I haven't had the chance to read it myself, but Mondoweiss have published their response to this - thought you may want to read it as well:
Hopeful pathologies in the war for Palestine: a reply to Adam Shatz – Mondoweiss
Thanks, interesting read, and I especially agree with the assessment that Hamas’ goals on 7th October were quite rational and logical, as they always have been, although I think he overstates Shatz’s supposed neglect of this point. Much of the account of Israeli policies is on point I think.
I have some points of disagreement. The 2006 Hezbollah War and Dahiya doctrine seems an arbitrary point from which to embark on an assessment of the evolution of Israeli military doctrine, and by extension the military context in which Hamas is forced to operate to produce a moment like 7th October. Hamas had been targeting civilians with suicide bombs for over a decade before then, and while there was also a logic to those actions, and a particular military context, it wasn’t just liberal Western intellectuals who pointed out how damaging the campaign was. Here’s the greatest Palestinian intellectual of them all, Edward Said, writing in 2002 (
this book, p. 185):
"If there is one thing that has done us more harm as a cause than Arafat’s ruinous regime, it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain, no one has been able to say."
And earlier, in 1994 (
this book, p. 111):
"As to Hamas and its actions in the Occupied Territories, I know that the organization is one of the only ones expressing resistance and that the kidnapping of the soldier of an occupying army is morally less unacceptable than abducting or killing civilians riding a bus. Yet for any secular intellectual to make a devil's pact with a religious movement is, I think, to substitute convenience for principle. It is simply the other side of the pact we made during the past several decades with dictatorship and nationalism, for example, supporting Saddam Hussein when he went to war with "the Persians." A second, perhaps even more important, point is that, as resistance, such actions do us little good, and except for the intifada, resemble far too much the whole history of Palestinian resistance, full of loss, individual heroism, and no coordinated strategic goal. Bombing civilian buses, on the other hand, is criminal and useless."
There's a casual dismissal of such excesses in the piece that, to me, suggests an unwillingness to interrogate the links between this violence and the nature of Hamas as a movement beyond a context entirely determined by Israeli policies. It's unfortunate that the author doesn't really make any distinction between Hamas and the broader Palestinian national movement and resistance, or acknowledge that, while there may be a logic to Hamas actions that defies Western conceptualizations of the movement as barbaric or, more charitably, purely driven by revenge and despair, such actions may still remain disastrous for the Palestinians.
With that in mind, I am completely skeptical about the prospect of a Hamas-led Palestinian resistance emerging as the vanguard of a global movement for "a broader human horizon" or "universal struggle", whatever that may mean. That is too much of a burden for any national resistance movement to carry, and the language seems to belong to the heady revolutionary days of the late 60s and 70s. It's certainly not a mission that Hamas has ever seriously proclaimed.
