Abu Marzouk and Dead Ends

Author: Akram Atta Allah

Anyone who watched the interview with Hamas political bureau member Dr. Moussa Abu Marzouk on the Al-Ghad satellite channel will understand without doubt that the movement’s stock of media ammunition has run out, and that the narrative tried over two years to accompany and justify all this destruction, to manufacture victories out of defeats that were expressed by tanks reaching every area of the Strip. It ended with an agreement in which Netanyahu boasts that he managed to recover all the hostages while retaining more than half of the territory of the Strip. This agreement reflects the balance of forces in this mad war, which Hamas failed to recognize early on in a state of denial of reality.

The matter is not so much about Abu Marzouk as it is about a socio-political phenomenon reaching its final stage: it moves burdened by the legacy of destruction caused by a shallow policy. It tries to distinguish itself from others without realizing that the course of history is a path not always determined by individuals and groups, and that one cannot manage peoples and liberate homelands by a stroke of luck, away from the calculations of political prudence and measured struggles conducted with pen and paper rather than suicidal adventures. We will keep asking: why did they bring us all this destruction? Why did they call back the Israeli army to occupy Gaza? Why did they make us lose so many of our loved ones? Why did they destroy our homes and all of Gaza? These are questions that revive a debate once confined to a few intellectuals about the suitability of religious forces to govern peoples; now it is being asked by everyone, and it is what makes Abu Marzouk and his colleagues stumble before any question and reduce an otherwise routine interview to a spectacle.

Al-Ghad has no position on Hamas, and I had the opportunity at the start of the war to observe its editorial policy up close. The channel even received criticism from many who thought it was biased toward Hamas. The editorial line, managed by professional Palestinians keen on national neutrality, was not to fall into the trap of downplaying or exaggerating, and it walked this fine line. The instructions I observed emphasized upholding the national narrative and the concerns of Gazans and their daily tragedy as a people facing an annihilation unseen in history. Ironically, those angriest at Hamas were the harshest critics of Al-Ghad. I do not say this because the man who faltered in answering the questions of the respected presenter Hazem Al-Zamili was so weak, but because it has become clear that no one from Hamas can now handle the simplest questions: the narrative did not merely crack, it collapsed, and the movement’s leaders and followers remain adamant about not retreating despite the enormity of the outcome.

From independence to tutelage or mandate — that is the bitter summary of the experience of a religious-political phenomenon that scorned everyone who worked before it in the political arena, in diplomacy, negotiations and international relations. All that produced in it a different, superficial, rudimentary culture that neither studied nor cared to understand the fundamentals of politics, its complexities, its winding paths, its streets, bends, mountains and valleys. It ends as a pitiable case when a former head of the political bureau appears to stammer, attacking a presenter who asked a simple question that required only two lines to answer. But this applies to all Hamas officials, who do not realize that roads reach their ends, that a journey’s fuel turns the light to red, and that the narrative’s reserves are on the verge of bankruptcy. There is little left to say to those who persist in seeing all this destruction and defend the operation despite any national innocence it might claim, except that it has ended in all this ruin and with Israel present in Gaza — after the movement once boasted of expelling Israel at the turn of the century, a slogan that propelled it to victory in the 2006 elections. The October 7, 2023 operation stripped it of that slogan, which it then believed and promoted without accepting any other narrative, without realizing that the decision stemmed from a desire to remove part of the demographic burden from Israel’s shoulders, to separate Gaza from the West Bank, and to block the path to a solution. Politically, the explanation is simpler than all those complexities; instead of confronting that reality, it retreated into fantasy and even held a conference to divide up Israel’s potentials among the Palestinian people.

Have we not yet sobered from the shock of the event? How could a political force go so far in an adventure that, having taken control of Gaza — a living coastal city — it handed it to us as a pile of rubble? It had taken control without any Israeli soldier present, and we received Gaza with the occupation army present, and it remains unclear what proportion of it will remain for years and decades. The movement still will not admit this; it grows angry, like its former political bureau chief, at any critical remark, and attacks a presenter, writer or activist while unleashing its electronic armies – aided by the Muslim Brotherhood – who swarm the pages, attacking in a language far removed from mosque decorum. It even poses an extremely dangerous question in this language as it attempts to write history with a vision that insists on defying reality, claiming that ideology suffices to conduct politics despite a reality so brazenly clear… My God!