Hamas and the Syrian regime: Old friends

The Syrian regime's closure of Hamas' offices in Syria should be happy news for Hamas. But Hamas earned this through opportunistic behaviour, not by sticking to its political or ethical principles. Hamas has benefited from the Syrian regime in its application of a strategy aimed at worsening the nature of the Israeli society. And as it has recently found that its alliance with the Syrian regime will be no more useful, it decided to give up on this regime and search for other parties from which it can gain benefits. Unlike the Iran-associated Lebanese party, Hezbollah, Hamas showed it couldn't go on supporting the Syrian regime; the regime that used to despise the Palestinian people and to deal with them only as a high card in Syria's political manoeuvres. If Hamas was really that honest, it should have cut all its relations with the Syrian regime long ago, instead following a regime that called the Palestinians’ right to independence a "fad", as late president Hafez al-Assad was quoted as saying. If Hamas had any courage, it would have apologised to the Palestinian people for its alliance with a regime that always worked on foiling the Palestinian national project. It would have also apologised for its obedience to Syria’s agenda, Iran and even Israel; this obedience peaked when Hamas accepted to hinder efforts to establish an independent Palestinian. The Palestinian national project was represented in the PLO’s political programme, which was endorsed by diverse Palestinian factions in the National Council's meeting November 1988, held in Algeria. This programme was based on the two-state solution and insistence that eastern Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian independent state. It was a reasonable solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and that is why it was rejected by Israel. Hamas also allied with the ruling regimes of Syria and Iran in a united front that was intended to hinder the Palestinian national project and to keep the state of "no peace no war" in the Middle East as long as possible. This is so Syria and Iran -as well as the Israeli right-wing- could have the time they needed to implement their plans. Nobody can deny the severe effect of Hamas' suicide attacks on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process since it was launched in 1993 when signing the Oslo Accord. This process received another blow when an Israeli right-wing radical called Yigal Amir assassinated the late moderate Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. With Rabin's assassination, the Middle East peace process lost a man who believed the best answer to the extremists on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides was the peace process. This peace process was eventually terminated when Israeli extremists began to carry out terrorist attacks against the Palestinians: An Israeli terrorist killed Palestinian worshipers in the Ibrahimi mosque of Jerusalem, while another terrorist decided to kill late PM Rabin. Hamas targeted Israeli civilians with suicide attacks in Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Herzliya and other cities, to give Israel's right-wing the justification they needed to end the peace process, by claiming that they couldn't see a Palestinian partner who believed in peace. Unfortunately, most Israeli people accepted this claim thanks to the "achievements" of Hamas and its two partners, the Syrian and Iranian regimes. We can still remember the suicide attack carried out by Hamas in Netanya in March 2003, which was aimed at foiling the Arab peace initiative that was launched by then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz in the Arab League summit in Beirut. On the same day where a peace initiative was endorsed in the Arab summit, Hamas was targeting Israeli civilians who were on vacation to celebrate Jewish Easter and the aim was clear: defeat the Arab initiative. In 2012, the time came for Hamas and the Syrian regime to part ways, after the old friends reaped the benefits they wanted from each other. Now Hamas can focus on its plans to oppress the Palestinian people in Gaza; a plan which serves Hamas' true hopes in changing the nature of Palestinian people, not to get rid of the Israeli occupation as it claims. The Syrian regime as well can focus on oppressing the Syrian people, whose only sin is that they refused to remain slaves of this regime and its miserable -yet ironic- slogans about leading the struggle against the Israeli occupation. The Syrian regime forgot about the Palestinian cause and the Palestinians themselves long ago. And now, this regime sees the Palestinians only as "another Sunni group" in the region, who should kneel to Bashar al-Assad or die in one of the most brutal crackdowns this region has ever known.The Syrian regime believes that the Palestinians should be grateful to Syria for recruiting them as militia in the Syrian regime's war against Lebanon. Both Hamas and the Syrian regime have done their role perfectly in their master plans. --  The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.