While concepts of national liberation appear eclipsed by the shadow of the war on terror, the march of history inevitably heeds the cry of freedom, writes Ayman El-Amir* Israel's furious military campaign against the population of the Palestinian Gaza Strip has exceeded its rationale and unveiled its true design -- the liquidation of the Hamas-led government and its supporting infrastructure. Hamas is not just the democratically elected popular government of the Palestinian people that came to power in accordance with international standards of free and fair elections. More importantly, it is a national liberation movement quite similar to those that appeared on the international political scene in the 1950s and 1960s, and evolved into newly independent states. To Israel and the US, Hamas's ascent to power is the equivalent of a nightmarish vision of a ghost from the past in this era of neo-colonial domination. For various regional and international political reasons, the Palestinian people missed the train of the national liberation movement. When the pageantry that accompanied the 1960 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples passed from the scene, albeit with flying colours, the newly independent states became embroiled in post- independence political and socio-economic problems and eventually slumped into military coups, autocratic one-man rule and civil wars. What the Palestinians missed most was the mutually reinforcing spirit of revolutionary fervour that put the old colonial powers on the defensive and fostered international moral standards for decolonisation. The Palestinian resistance movement, though, retains and employs the same techniques, tactics and political ends of the bygone national liberation movement despite the drastically changed international environment. One of the recognised tactics of the national liberation struggle was revolutionary violence. Curiously enough, that was borrowed from colonial powers themselves who employed it during their internecine wars. La Resistance in France during World War II was legitimised as rightful in fighting back Nazi Germany's foreign military occupation of French territories. A decade later, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) used the same tactics of armed resistance against French occupation during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and drew brutal reprisal. Armed resistance-cum-terrorism was judged according to one's position, the common saying being that, "today's terrorist is tomorrow's (revered) freedom fighter." Whether the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 by the Irgun -- then headed by terrorist-cum-Prime Minister Menachem Begin -- was an act of terror or a feat of national liberation is still debatable. The legitimacy of the national liberation struggle shifted from cause to cause and from country to country, depending on superpower interests and regional alliances. The decade-long nationalist resistance of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, which involved Muslim fighters of all colours and nationalities, was ardently supported and supplied by the US. Two decades later, the homegrown nationalist resistance of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq is being fiercely fought back as part of the so-called global war on terrorism. Likewise, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is consistently condemned as terrorism. For almost three decades, UN member states debated but failed to reach consensus on a binding, universal definition of terrorism. Differences raged over politics, not semantics. Most developing countries, which invariably owed their independence to some form of national liberation struggle, wanted the definition to legitimise the struggle of those still striving to attain similar status. Big power politics, however, precluded that possibility. At the peak of the debate in the late 1980s neither the US nor Israel wanted any recognition of the legitimacy of the Palestinian people's right or, for that matter, the right of the African National Congress of South Africa, to armed resistance for national liberation. Debate slogged on inconclusively until 11 September 2001 changed the paradigm. The shock of 11 September was a defining moment for many undefined situations. For one thing, it arbitrarily ended the debate over the nature and definition of terrorism. In the post-9/11 environment, all acts of non-state violence were defined as acts of terrorism. State violence, including foreign military campaigns like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, became legitimate acts of self- defence or pre-emptive deterrence. Nothing could have made Israel happier. Ariel Sharon convinced George W Bush that Israel hunkered down in the same trench as the US in the fight against global terrorism and its offshoot, Palestinian terrorism. Thus, the universal right of national resistance, including the Palestinian cause, was confiscated and branded as terrorist. It is under this loose definition that the US is now giving sanction to the murderous Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, taking the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit in a military operation by Palestinian resistance organisations as an excuse. The hue and cry of the worldwide war against terrorism also provided a golden opportunity for a few countries and enterprises to piggyback on the new state of global frenzy. In the name of fighting international terrorism, many brutal dictatorial regimes used the environment of global fear and foreboding to enact new measures aimed at tightening their strangulating grip on national opposition forces struggling for democratic change. However, it was neither New York's 9/11 nor London's 7/7 alone that triggered the backlash against beleaguered national liberation struggles. Many more developments contributed to the degradation of that once exalted mission. There are now splinter groups of separatist movements of ethnic, religious, cultural, economic, ideological and anti-state orientation. The US State Department has 41 organisations on its official list of terrorist groups, in addition to seven humanitarian relief organisations suspected of being fronts for Al-Qaeda. A little-known non- governmental organisation, the Federation of American Scientists, published a list of 385 armed resistance groups, most of them credible, although some have receded into oblivion. Too many players on the scene have confused the definition, the purity of the original cause tainted; "resistance" no longer restricted to the once universally recognised right of armed struggle against foreign military occupation on the territory of a given indigenous people. Some of the proclaimed armed resistance movements, such as the Chechens, the Kurds and Basque separatist rebels -- the latter have now stood down -- pose a problem for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the states in which they make their claims as minorities. The collapse of the former Soviet Union also undermined international support for the cause of national liberation and independence. The weakening and polarisation of the Non-Aligned Movement was also a contributing factor, although the group usually acts in consensus on many issues before the UN. By 2001, the original cause of the struggle against colonialism and foreign military occupation had lost much of its lustre, any remnant justifications taken over completely by the global war on terror. That and the US's unjustifiable support of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians is not much different from the Algerian war of independence 50 years ago. For the US, it is sowing more hatred and fundamentalism against its presence in the Middle East. For Israel, Palestinian resistance retains all the characteristics of the classical national liberation struggle in its purest form. The immediate future may look bleak for the Palestinians, but the arrow of history has never missed its target of freedom and dignity for mankind, at least for the past two millennia. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of the United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
