"Why Hamas is no ‘extremist’"

Alastaire Crooke, in Open Democracy via Conflicts Forum, here

"...On the one hand, Mahmoud Abbas is left discredited, lacking the legitimacy to take forward any political solution: on the other, the ‘extremist’ branding of Hamas has enabled the West to block Hamas’ and other factions’ access to the Palestinian leadership institutions. Palestinian leadership institutions remain captive to one section of Fatah in Ramallah. In short, western policy has brought about a void in which no Palestinian leader, and no Palestinian movement, now has the potential to achieve a credible mandate - or to move forward politically.

The prospect of a Palestinian state has been sacrificed to a flawed political model, thus only serving further to radicalise the region. Hesballah, Syria and Iran have not been weakened: they have emerged stronger. The region has become more polarised and less stable. But the conceptual failure of the moderate/extremist template extends well beyond Palestine. In essence, the West has got it wrong: It has the wrong Islamists cast as ‘moderates’ and the wrong movements cast as ‘extremist’....

Hamas and Hesballah are not literalists or fundamentalists. We have it the wrong way around. They could not be more different in their thinking from those described above....

Israel’s re-configuring of its own template from ‘moderate periphery’ versus ‘extremist Arab vicinity’ to one defining Iran and political Islam as the new ‘extremists’, and certain states of the Arab vicinity as the ‘moderates’, inexorably led to Hamas’ branding as ‘extremist’ by the West too. It is no coincidence, therefore, that it is Israel’s own particular ‘enemies’ who have become the West’s ‘extremists’ also - and perhaps no coincidence that the outcome of this conceptualising is a Palestinian state pushed beyond reach...."