Hamas: vil aldri oppgi vold og aldri anerkjenne Israel

På en mar­ke­ring av 24-årsdagen for opp­ret­tel­sen av Hamas, lovte Ismail Hani­yeh at Hamas aldri kom til å oppgi den væp­nede kam­pen og aldri kom til å aner­kjenne Israel.

Rene ord for pen­gene. Det spørs om de brin­ger en pale­stinsk stat noe nærmere.

Tens of thou­sands of sup­por­ters watched the Hamas prime minis­ter, Ismail Haniya, speak from a large out­door stage in the shape of a ship with a model of Jerusalem’s Al Aksa Mos­que. Deny­ing spe­c­u­la­tion that Hamas would turn its atten­tion to non­vio­lent resi­stance, Mr. Haniya said: “Today we say it cle­arly. Armed resi­stance and armed struggle are the stra­te­gic way to libe­rate the Pale­sti­nian land from the sea to the river.”

He was refer­ring to all of Israel as well as to what his rivals in the Pale­sti­nian Aut­hority want to become the state of Pale­stine — Gaza, the West Bank and East Jeru­sa­lem. He said Hamas had never said that “Pale­stine is only Gaza, the West Bank and East Jeru­sa­lem.” He hinted that should those areas be han­ded over by Israel, Hamas could take a “tem­po­rary” respite “wit­hout Israel being rec­og­nized and wit­hout any con­ces­sion being made.”

Next week, Israel and Hamas are to carry out the second part of a pri­so­ner exchange in which an Israeli sol­dier was freed for more than 1,000 Palestinians.

Poli­ti­cal chan­ges in Egypt, Tuni­sia and Libya augur well for Hamas’s brand of Isla­mist poli­tics, and the flags of those countries were pre­sent on the stage. The flag of Syria, where there is a popu­lar revolt against Pre­si­dent Bashar al-Assad and where the Hamas exi­led lea­dership remains based, was absent.

At a Rally for Hamas, Cele­bra­tion and Vows

fra Inde­pen­dent:

As Mr Hani­yeh arrived on stage, a 10-man vocal group led the crowd in a chant of “We will not rec­og­nise Israel”. Ear­lier, the group had sung the prai­ses of the Hamas mili­tary wing. But the only visible sign of armed mili­tants at this year’s rally was a small con­tin­gent of mas­ked men car­ry­ing AK47s and for­ming a cere­mo­nial guard behind Mr Hani­yeh as he gre­eted the crowd.

While insis­ting that Hamas wan­ted to end the split between it and Fatah – the pur­pose of furt­her talks in Cairo between the two Pale­sti­nian factions sche­du­led this month – Mr Hani­yeh impli­citly pointed to a pos­sible obsta­cle by stres­sing that Pale­sti­nian unity could not mean sacri­fi­cing the prin­ciple of “armed resistance”.

The uncom­promi­sing ora­tory at the rally glos­sed over poli­ti­cal and mili­tary com­plex­ities which have seen Hamas lea­ders at times offer a long-term truce in return for a Pale­sti­nian state on 1967 bor­ders, and make efforts, inclu­ding for much of this year, to pre­vent smal­ler factions from firing rock­ets into Israel.