Hamas’ call for a truce: Fantasy Ideology revisited
“…The Hamas Charter vows to eradicate Israel and its Jews and yet so far it has managed to achieve nothing other than increase tension in southern Israel, with the inevitable reprisals from the IDF. It got thoroughly bested in Cast Lead, in spite of its high-flown rhetoric meant to inspire the masses.
It must now seem to the Hamas leadership that their world is crumbling around them. Having set themselves up as the saviours of the Palestinian people and fallen for their own fantasy ideology, the brutal reality is that all around them the ordinary people in other Arab countries, the former props in the fantasy ideologies of their own leaders, are now refusing to play their part in shoring up those fantasies. Hamas must needs therefore perform a coup de theatre before its own people jump ship.
But Hamas is nothing if not a creature of habit and, best of all, it seems not to be able to learn from its previous mistakes. The events preceding Cast Lead did not lead to the dismantling of the Jewish state – on the contrary, they led to the laying flat of parts of Gaza, but in doing that Hamas made sure that the Israeli government could not help but act as its prop in another piece of fantasy ideology theatre – the Palestinians as victims because of Hamas’ readiness to use civilians as human shields.”