This Hamas official has said a couple of interesting things:
- He doesn’t want Sir Tony Blair (former UK prime minister) involved in the governance of Gaza, despite Trump’s plan for the region proposing this.
- Hamas doesn’t plan to disarm, unless they are giving their weapons to a future Palestinian army.
Quote about the first point:
“When it comes to Tony Blair, unfortunately, we Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and maybe others around the world have bad memories of him… We can still remember his role in killing, causing thousands or millions of deaths to innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq… We can still remember him very well after destroying Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Quote about the second point:
Dr Naim said Hamas would not completely disarm and that weapons would only be handed over to the Palestinian state, with fighters integrated into the Palestinian National Army… “No one has the right to deny us the right to resist the occupation of armies,” he said.
Thoughts on this?
Anyone who knows their Middle Eastern history will know Sykes-Picot the agreement between the British and French government from midway through the first world war.
Most of the current mess goes back to that agreement.
Also, the British then ruled Mandatory Palestine for another 25 or so years after the end of WW1.
So yeah, aside from everything else, there’s still lingering resentment for the British.
I mean, let’s also just listen to what Naim is saying here, this isn’t about a bunch of stuff that happened a hundred years ago, it’s about stuff that happened 20-25 years ago. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were devastating events that killed tens of thousands of people and were administered in the most careless and corrupt ways possible, enriching a bunch of the douchiest westerners and empowering a lot of corrupt and violent as fuck Iraqis and Afghanis as well (like, paying bribe money to shitheads and looking the other way when they murdered their opponents was just how western companies did business there). We don’t talk about those things like we should because the people who carried them out are still alive and connected to powerful people, but they were horrific crimes that affected many many many lives and are going to be remembered for generations.
*Hundreds of thousands for these two wars alone, millions for the broader war on terror. Iraq alone killed 300 thousand.