History teaches us that yesterday’s terrorist can become today’s political leader
To make progress on the Israel / Palestine dispute, we need to put the claim that Hamas is a terrorist organisation into some sort of context.
Hamas was founded in Gaza to oppose the Israeli government and also the Palestinian Authority, which at that time ran Gaza and the West Bank under the Israeli occupation.
Every group that has opposed the Israeli government has been described as a terrorist organisation, from the PLO, Yasser Arafat in particular, to the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah etc.
Israel is no stranger to terrorism, of course. The reason Clement Attlee’ s Labour government gave the Palestine mandate back to the UN in 1947 was the ongo - ing civil war between Arabs and Jews, going back 20 years or so.
In 1946, the militant right wing Zionist terrorist group Irgun blew up the King David hotel, the British administrative HQ in Palestine, killing 91 people including 60 British service men. One of the leaders of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, became prime minis- ter of Israel in 1977. The father of Tzipi Livni, former Israeli Foreign Minister and now coleader of the Zionist Union party, was another.
Nelson Mandela was also, of course, described as a terrorist by the leaders of apartheid South Africa. It is unfortunate that one of the leaders of the Palestinians, Mar wan Barghouti,w ho could be as influential in this dispute as Mandela, is languishing in an Israel jail for what was also described as terrorism.
Closer to home we must, of course, not forget the IRA, where M art inMc guinness eventually joined with Rev Ian Paisley to become “the Chuckle Brothers”.
It is time to drop the terrorist label from Hamas as history shows this is clearly counter productive. They were elected to represent the people of Gaza as the least worst option. Instead it is time to recognise that the people of Gaza are living in an open prison with few of life’s necessities, and the world should come together to end this suffering.
PHIL TATE Craiglockhart Road, Edinburgh