Hamas is a Figment of Your Imagination

What is Hamas? Fuck if you know.

Yes, it’s true. Hamas is a figment of your imagination.

I understand that your impulse is to ask about decapitated babies and mass rape and bearded men hiding in the treetops, but it will do no good. Those are also figments of your imagination.

Now, I don’t necessarily blame you for these fever dreams. Hamas is all you hear about from aggrieved Zionists and corporate media (two groups with no meaningful distinction). Of course you’re fixated on Hamas. That’s the point. The fixation stops you from thinking about everything else.

(“Everything else” includes wholesale slaughter of civilians, shelling of schools and hospitals, arrest and murder of medical personnel, chemical warfare, ethnic cleansing, homicidal rhetoric, forced starvation, and systematic dehumanization. In short, a genocide.)

I’m not here to explain what Hamas is or how Hamas operates. I can tell you that it is in fact real even as it is also a figment of your imagination. How is that possible? Because Hamas is mythical and tangible at the same time. It is an actual organization with a structure, purpose, ideology, and membership. It is also one of the greatest red herrings of the modern age—part rhetorical device, part hobgoblin, part delusion.

How can we separate image from reality?

Doing so is nearly impossible from the outside in part because outsiders are apt to misapprehend resistance groups. This is especially true of Palestine. Because it supplies the main rationale for Israel’s war on civilians, Hamas is a perpetual cipher and simulation. People outside of Palestine know Hamas mainly through layers of discourse appended to Israeli points of view. Palestinian liberation rarely figures into the process. Palestinian society is completely abstracted. Journalists and intellectuals of the imperial core mediate discourse according to age-old prejudices about swarthy creatures of the Islamic world, operating from the assumption that Hamas exemplifies a peculiar and unknowable Palestinian savagery.

Hamas is one of the most complex formations of the past few decades. We know it exists by the rockets streaking through the nighttime sky, the soldiers adorned with green headbands, the theatrical destruction of Merkava tanks. It has a leadership, a command structure, a stash of weapons, a rank-and-file. It offers policy proposals and position papers. It negotiates with various state actors. Yet popular understanding of Hamas largely derives from its apocryphal position in the colonial imagination. The settler has transformed Hamas into a manifestation of his own paranoia and violence.

And so Hamas is removed from history and history itself is divested of material properties. This form of invention plays well to Western audiences, who are conditioned to view anti-colonial movements of the Global South as inherently senseless. The Hamas that Zionists invented isn’t hermetic, though. It has generated an irresistible momentum that exposes the oppressor’s illusions and anxieties. Zionists are terrified of both Hamas and the idea of Hamas. In turn, they transfer responsibility for their barbarism onto the victim.

Israel blows up a school? Hamas!

Israel gets caught lying? Hamas!

Israel wipes out an entire family? Hamas!

Israel murders a journalist? Hamas!

Israel besieges a neonatal unit? Hamas!

Students march against genocide? Hamas!

A Zionist farts at the dinner table? Hamas!

The absurdity doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It only works in spaces of deep-seated racism. The demonization of Hamas comes to life through the audience’s demented impression of Palestinians.

This element of racism gives Zionists license to express hideous, genocidal sentiments from a supposedly defensive position. Settlers can act out fantasies of conquest and displacement by feeding themselves visions of a superior civilization.

Zionists say they want to rid the world of Hamas but are ironically beholden to Hamas’s endurance. Which other pretext could better facilitate Israeli ethnic cleansing? More than that, Zionists talk up Hamas to the point of mythic proportions and have thereby entered into a state of what Baudrillard called hyperreality. The world wouldn’t make any sense to Israelis if Hamas suddenly went away. Their own identity would go away, as well.

Hamas is everywhere in the Zionist psyche. It is an untreatable condition.

Yet it is the Palestinian people onto whom the Zionist displaces this obsession. All Palestinians are Hamas. Therefore, no Palestinian has a right to live. The conflation deracinates Palestinians and erases Palestine’s long and distinguished history. The process also grants to Zionists a type of rhetorical control in the public sphere: they get to determine the culture of the native; they get to prescribe (and proscribe) the contours of resistance; they get to adjudicate the work of national liberation. Palestinians are entrapped by the crude and self-serving imagination of the oppressor.

It is with an unironic sense of generosity, then, that Zionists offer us the chance to enter into humanity if only we condemn Hamas (other terms and conditions apply). Condemnation is a precondition of speaking, of working, of educating, of being educated—in other words, a precondition of accessing any kind of civic life (which will naturally occur under their supervision).

Palestinians recoil at this demand to condemn Hamas not out of any particular political loyalty, but because we recognize the disparity of power that Zionists want us to affirm. We recognize that Zionists are in no moral position to ask anyone else about violence. In any case, we cannot condemn Hamas because we don’t know what exactly we’re being asked to ratify or disavow. We don’t know what Hamas even means in their insidious lexicon.

We only know that what the Zionist really wants is for us to condemn our own existence.

Source: Steve Salaita