Hamas condemns the Holocaust

        We are not engaged in a religious conflict with
        Jews; this is a political struggle to free
        ourselves from occupation and oppression

by Bassem Naeem

Guardian Unlimited (UK) - May 12, 2008

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bassem_naeem/2008/05/hamas_condemns_the_holocaust.html

As the Palestinian people prepare to commemorate the
60th anniversary of the Nakba ("catastrophe") - the
dispossession and expulsion of most of our people from
our land - those remaining in Palestine face escalating
aggression, killings, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing
and siege. But instead of support and solidarity from
the western media, we face frequent attempts to defend
the indefensible or turn fire on the Palestinians
themselves.

One recent approach, which seems to be part of the
wider attempt to isolate the elected Palestinian
leadership, is to portray Hamas and the population of
the Gaza strip as motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment,
rather than a hostility to Zionist occupation and
domination of our land. A recent front page article in
the International Herald Tribune followed this line, as
did an article for Cif about an item broadcast on the
al-Aqsa satellite TV channel about the Nazi Holocaust.

In fact, the al-Aqsa Channel is an independent media
institution that often does not express the views of
the Palestinian government headed by Ismail Haniyeh or
of the Hamas movement. The channel regularly gives
Palestinians of different convictions the chance to
express views that are not shared by the Palestinian
government or the Hamas movement. In the case of the
opinion expressed on al-Aqsa TV by Amin Dabbur, it is
his alone and he is solely responsible for it.

It is rather surprising to us that so little attention,
if any, is given by the western media to what is
regularly broadcast or written in the Israeli media by
politicians and writers demanding the total uprooting
or "transfer" of the Palestinian people from their
land.

The Israeli media and pro-Israel western press are full
of views that deny or seek to excuse well-established
facts of history including the Nakba of 1948 and the
massacres perpetrated then by the Haganah, the Irgun
and LEHI with the objective of forcing a mass
dispossession of the Palestinians.

But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the
Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi
Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against
humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern
history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of
humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis
of religion, race, gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the
crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of
Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the
Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and
harness international acceptance of the campaign of
ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging
against us - to the point where in February the Israeli
deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the
people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of
them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in
a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime
against humanity continues to be perpetrated against
the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed
after Hamas won the legislative elections in January
2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe
shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians
have lost their lives.

It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the
British in particular maintain a virtual silence toward
what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians, let
alone supporting or justifying their oppressive
policies, under the pretext of showing sympathy for the
victims of the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people aspire to freedom, independence
and peaceful coexistence with all their neighbours.
There are, today, more than six million Palestinian
refugees. No less than 700,000 Palestinians have been
detained at least once by the Israeli occupation
authorities since 1967. Hundreds of thousands have so
far been killed or wounded. Little concern seems to be
caused by all of this or by the erection of an
apartheid wall that swallows more than 20% of the West
Bank land or the heavily armed colonies that devour
Palestinian land in a blatant violation of
international law.

The plight of our people is not the product of a
religious conflict between us and the Jews in Palestine
or anywhere else: the aims and positions of today's
Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its
leadership, for example in Hamas's 2006 programme for
government. The conflict is of a purely political
nature: it is between a people who have come under
occupation and an oppressive occupying power.

Our right to resistance against occupation is
recognised by all conventions and religious traditions.
The Jews are for us the people of a sacred book who
suffered persecution in European lands. Whenever they
sought refuge, Muslim and Arab lands provided them with
safe havens. It was in our midst that they enjoyed
peace and prosperity; many of them held leading
positions in Muslim countries.

After almost a century of Zionist colonial and racist
oppression, some Palestinians find it hard to imagine
that some of their oppressors are the sons and
daughters of those who were themselves oppressed and
massacred.

Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust but
find themselves punished for someone else's crime. But
we are well aware and warmly welcome the outspoken
support for Palestinian rights by Israeli and Jewish
human rights activists in Palestine and around the
world.

We hope that journalists in the west will begin to
adopt a more objective approach when covering events in
Palestine. The Palestinian people are being killed by
Israel's machine of destruction on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, we still see a clear bias in favour of
Israel in the western media.

The Europeans bear a direct responsibility for what is
befalling the Palestinians today. Britain was the
mandate authority that handed over Palestine to Israeli
occupation. Nazi Germany perpetrated the most heinous
crimes against Jews, forcing the survivors to migrate
to Palestine in pursuit of safety. We, therefore,
expect the Europeans to atone for their historic crimes
by restoring some balance to the inhuman and one-sided
international response to the tragedy of our people.

[Bassem Naeem is the minister of health and information
in the Hamas-led Palestinian administration in Gaza.]

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