The final refuge of hasbara, Israel’s propaganda apparatus, is no longer primarily military or diplomatic. It is now intellectual.
This refuge lies in the continuing inability of a large part of the West, as well as part of the Arab world, to recognise the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance when it expresses itself through the language of political Islam.
As the crude pillars of Israeli propaganda collapse and their falsehoods become increasingly visible to the world, slogans such as “a land without a people for a people without a land”, “the only democracy in the Middle East”, “the most moral army in the world” and the alleged secularism of the Israeli state have lost much of their credibility.
Yet one final deception has survived this wider collapse. It remains influential not only in the West, but with alarming effectiveness elsewhere.
This deception helps answer several pressing questions. At what point does fragile Western solidarity with Palestine systematically disappear? What lies behind the deep contradictions in the positions of many Arab rulers towards the Palestinian cause? Why do so many regional observers remain indifferent to the absurdity of the surrender agreement imposed on Lebanon?
The answer lies in the emotional, irrational, indiscriminate and sectarian demonisation and criminalisation of Hamas, or of similar movements classified as “Islamist”.
Hamas, like any political organisation, may be criticised. But making such criticism a precondition for recognising the fundamental rights of Palestinians amounts to suspending the universality of those rights.
The Limits of Western Solidarity
Why has this distorted image endured while the credibility of most other Israeli narratives has collapsed?
A French journalist and essayist whom I met in Cairo in 1990 offered an revealing answer. He had written a biography of Ho Chi Minh and had sought to challenge his demonisation in French public opinion.
When I referred to the repression directed against Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front after its electoral successes, he replied: “François, I have travelled the whole road as far as Nasser. Do not ask me to go any further.”
By “further”, he meant the transition from Nasser, the Baathists and the Algerian National Liberation Front to their Islamist rivals or successors. He had accepted the generation of Arab nationalists described as “secular”, but was unwilling to extend the same understanding to those who came after them.
This attitude reveals that many European intellectuals and activists still fail to fully recognise the “other” when approaching the Palestinian cause.
French progressives, for example, may readily express sympathy for Arabs and claim to “love” them, but often on an unspoken condition: that Arabs do not display a serious attachment to their identity as Muslims.
Across the Western political spectrum, from the centre to the far left, many appear prepared to support Palestinians only if they are equally, or even more, committed to “liberating” them from Hamas than from Zionist occupation.
This contradiction shows that such circles may have partially freed their thinking from colonial assumptions when dealing with Arab nationalism, yet remain unable to overcome those assumptions when confronting political Islam.
For them, the Palestinian remains acceptable and worthy of support as long as he speaks in leftist, Marxist or nationalist terms. The moment he grounds his cause in religious language, that acceptance and support begin to disappear.
When the Same Aspirations Are Expressed in Islamic Terms
This failure among Western intellectual elites, particularly in France, has been identified and condemned by some of those who experienced it directly.
In Cairo in 1992, the prominent Egyptian thinker and judge Tariq al-Bishri drew my attention to the issue. His intellectual and political journey had begun with Nasserism before gradually bringing him closer to the Muslim Brotherhood.
He told me:
“When we expressed our national and liberation aspirations through the language of Marxism or nationalism, there was always a political current in the West, whether Christian, communist or otherwise, and sometimes even on the right, that was willing to engage with us, understand us and perhaps support us. But once we used the vocabulary and literature of Islam to express precisely the same aspirations, the rupture became complete, and we found ourselves alone.”
The same aspirations, including the most worldly and political ones, become inaudible when expressed through Islamic concepts.
As a researcher, and while recognising the differences between my position and that of the movements under discussion, I experienced similar exclusion. Like others who defended the legitimacy of Islamic political discourse, I was stigmatised for years under the accusation of sympathising with an “Islamist” ideology that I refused to criminalise.
Political Islam and the Colonial Imagination
What explains the persistence of this blockage?
Paradoxically, the answer is relatively simple. The exaggerated hostility towards Islamic movements is deeply rooted in the colonial imagination of Western societies.
Islamists are considered “worse” than the first generation of Arab nationalists because they reject not only the consequences of Western-managed “independence” and “nationalisation”, but also the vocabulary that the West believed it had successfully imposed as the only legitimate language of universal political expression.
The Islamic current therefore represents a declaration of independence that the West finds impossible to accept.
In the sensitive and entirely legitimate field of women’s rights, Islamists are also made solely responsible for preserving conservative social values, even though so-called Westernised elites have often distanced themselves from those same values only selectively and symbolically.
Another central explanation is that Western hostility towards political Islam receives powerful external support.
Unsurprisingly, much of that support comes from Israel, which is hardly treated as foreign to the West. Israel has long relied on a highly effective method of discrediting resistance to its expansion by stripping that resistance of its political nature and reframing it as a sectarian phenomenon.
The message is simple: Palestinians resist Israel not because they live under occupation, but because they are Muslims.
The weakness of this argument is obvious. Israeli racial supremacy did not wait for the “Islamisation” of Palestinian resistance before criminalising it.
The comparison made by General Ariel Sharon in 2001, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, is instructive. Addressing Western audiences, he said: “You have bin Laden, and we have Yasser Arafat.”
Arafat, of course, was not the leader of an Islamist movement. Yet Israel’s attempt to place him within the same framework demonstrated that its criminalisation of Palestinian resistance was never truly dependent on the religious identity of its leadership.
Arab Regimes and the Criminalisation of Islamic Opposition
Perhaps the most serious aspect of this hostility is that Western obsession with political Islam receives strong support from within the very societies where Islamic movements are rooted.
The superficial and emotional anti-Hamas or anti-Hezbollah discourse produced in the Arab world is no less irrational, and no less committed to stripping political struggles of their context, than its Western and Israeli equivalent.
Structural hostility towards political Islam has become a universal remedy for authoritarian governments confronting popular resistance.
Within the French political class, reductive Islamophobic narratives summon hostility towards the Eastern foreigner. Yet in Arab authoritarian settings, the same hostility serves another purpose. It is not primarily deployed to confront what rulers describe as the spectre of populism, but to prevent the emergence of a democratic alternative capable of threatening their authority.
Under Arab dictatorships, branding any opponent or resistance figure as “Islamist” has become a mass-produced political tool. It is used domestically to discredit opposition and externally to communicate with European governments.
A few months ago, I was received by a senior Arab official who apparently wished to demonstrate his affinity with a Western interlocutor he did not know. I was astonished to hear him describe Hamas leaders as “the greatest criminals in history”.
Palestinian Rights Are Not Conditional
Hamas can be criticised, as can any political organisation. But making such criticism a precondition for recognising the fundamental rights of Palestinians amounts to suspending the universality of those rights.
No people should be required to select leaders acceptable to neighbouring states or foreign powers before their right to exist is acknowledged.
Palestinians are no exception.
Their political representation is a matter for them alone. Our responsibility is to defend their right to choose their representatives freely and, more urgently, to defend their right to exist.
