SCHIZOPALESTINIA:

-INTERVIEW: The nail in the wood: an interview with Ismail Abu Shanab: Ismail Abu Shanab was a moderate by Hamas leadership standards. A ceasefire negotiator, he was prepared to consider the two-state solution. openDemocracy’s Paul Hilder interviewed him at his home in Gaza in July 2002, days after the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, leader of Hamas’s military wing. In this disturbing conversation, they talk about peace, violence, democracy, the US, bin Laden, and colonialism. One year on, Shanab shared Shehadeh’s fate. (Open Democracy, 9/04/03)

Paul Hilder: You’ve said in the past that for this generation, it is time to start building a state along the 1967 borders, beside Israel. This has been considered quite radical within Hamas. Is this still your belief?

Ismail Abu Shanab: We cannot speak for the next generation, but for our own. That is what we know. We do not know what the goals of the next generation will be. We have suffered from Israeli occupation and from Israeli attacks for more than half a century. Since 1948, we Palestinians were kicked off our land and left in refugee camps. We now have 4.5 million Palestinian refugees. The Israelis continued in 1967, occupying the rest of the Palestinian land with all the pain and suffering involved in that.

But today’s generation, with all of these sufferings, wants to build and keep the Palestinian identity. This identity can be symbolised by this Palestinian state. This generation will be busy building this state, and making a better living for our children.

What the next generation will think, nobody speaks about. It is hard, anyway, to speak about the next generation’s thoughts while we are not achieving our own generation’s goals.

You get that far and you think: gee, he sounds reasonably moderate and sensible--why'd the Israelis have to whack him? Then you get to here:

Paul Hilder: So you don’t have hope in the Americans…?

Ismail Abu Shanab: No, this would be too much. Maybe at the beginning, when President Clinton tried to put the parties together and bring pressure to bear on them, we thought there was an American effort toward a solution. But with the Bush administration, we see things differently. It tends toward securing the Israelis and giving them a green light to attack. And the Israelis have played the game very well.

They – this is what we believe – they are behind the 11 September on the New York towers. The Americans got involved in fighting terror in Afghanistan, and the Israelis began to create the same picture in Palestine as in Afghanistan. The Americans are fighting the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, and the Israelis are fighting the Palestinian Authority as their Taliban, and Hamas and Sheikh Yassin as their bin Laden… “we will act likewise”, they say. The Americans killed thousands of innocent Afghanis. So they cannot talk to the Israelis if they killed fifteen or so.

Paul Hilder: You don’t think that bin Laden was involved in 11 September 2001?

Ismail Abu Shanab: No, totally, he was. It was a plot by some Zionist lobbyists outside, handed to bin Laden. I’m totally sure about this. What happened was much bigger than what bin Laden could do. A French writer wrote a book about this. Up to this point, the FBI is not telling the truth.

...and you wonder what exactly it means to be a Hamas moderate if it includes believing in manifest lunacy.

Posted by orrinj at September 5, 2003 10:33 AM