The Palestinians are being awkward again. They've elected Hamas, the wrong party (USAID was funding Fatah). It's a surprise because exit polls indicated a victory for Fatah. Which makes you wonder how much to trust exit polls.

Supporters celebrate Hamas victory

Now media commentators are morose, wondering how their democratic process led to terrorists being elected. The Guardian's diplomatic editor, Ewen MacAskill, sees a silver lining: this is the first step towards incorporating Hamas in the political process, with the caveat that "All this is dependent on Hamas stopping sending suicide bombers into Israel." But Henry MacDonald takes a dim view, suggesting that electoral power nudging Hamas towards peace is unlikely. Hamas is a group of extremists, and "its enduring ideology, which predates even the state of Israel, is all or nothing." Cautious optimism or pessimism, the message is the same: Hamas is the problem. Ergo, the Palestinians are the problem. We face dark days ahead.

Suicide bombings aren't political

MacAskill makes a telling comment about Hamas:

The organisation, the most violent of the Palestinian factions, a decade ago showed no interest in politics, shunning the first election after Oslo. That it took part in this week's election represents a remarkable shift: a move towards politicisation of a hardline violent organisation.

Think about that. An organization that runs social services for the entire occupied territories, and fights a 25 year military battle with the Israeli state, is somehow not political. Hamas may be many things, but I'd argue politics is the very reason for their existence. They're inconceivable without the political entity called Israel.

Child of Hamas. This is impossible...

Yet you wouldn't know that from the commentaries, because they're missing one tiny detail: they don't mention the Occupation. The 50 year campaign of displacement and military aggression disappears, and analysts are left flailing to find causes of political violence. Either Hamas is likened to an Islamic Amway in its ceaseless quest to sell its questionable products; or it promises "martyrs [sic] paradise and sex with dozens of virgins", as if Islamic Palestinians were sex-starved, brainwashed occultists. Hamas becomes a burst of feral rage, far worse than the IRA:

Throughout three long decades of armed conflict, and the fatal hunger strike aside, there was never a single suicide bombing... The lack of a suicide bomb cult in an enduring armed political culture indicates something radically different to the pathology and psychology of Hamas.

Hamas becomes just Islam + suicide bombing, rather than a military response to occupation.

... without this: Amid Abu Sayr, 7 year old victim of the Israeli army, who "died... from cardio-respiratory arrest due to a bullet injury to the chest."
Born of desperation

Once you start talking politics again, the situation is simultaneously simpler and more complex. It's simple because Hamas is not the group equivalent of Paul Bernardo, reducing to the psychopathology of ravenous brown hordes. And it's complex because you have to understand geopolitical realities. Hamas exists because of Israel. Mossad funded Hamas as a bulwark against communism (just like the CIA created the Taliban). But Israel is also Hamas' justification. Not only because of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, though those are insulting enough. The entire state of Israel is an occupation of historic Palestine, an act of ethnic cleansing that continues to this day.

Hamas' tactical differences are dictated by the very politics MacDonald and MacAskill deny. Those politics are not incidental; as Edward Said wrote,

for over 53 years, we have been oppressed by Israel and continue to be oppressed with blockades, sieges, aerial bombardment, missile and helicopter attacks, and that our refugees have not received one penny of compensation or even the hope of repatriation from the state that dispossessed them and has punished them ever since

The military defeat of the first intifada; the mass arrests, tortures and killings of the indigeneous population; the forcible implanting of settlers - it all plays a part in Hamas' success. The IRA had to deal with British patrols and political rule; it never had to deal with mass house razing, nor daily jet sorties over Irish cities, nor the mass displacement of its people into refugee camps. Hamas is the brutal logic of power, minus the U.S.-funded jet planes and nuclear arsenal of its Zionist opponents.

Anti-wall activists being beaten by Israeli troops. From Keld Bach

But the western media and political powers refuse to acknowledge any of this; and Hamas' goals are reduced to "the unlikely prospect of wiping Israel off the map." The irony of this is that, had the west not been such staunch supporters of the Zionist project, anti-Zionism wouldn't have fallen into the hands of political Islam. "Wiping Israel off the map" is a deliberate evocation of Holocaust language, and a hysterical response to what could be a democratic, secular, political project: a binational state, in which Israelis and Palestinians determine rights by citizenship and historical redress, not ethno-political identity.

The Palestinians are not the problem. The Israeli state, army and settlers - the entire project of Zionism - is. If the west doesn't want a Hamas, then it has to acknowledge the political realities of Palestine, stop relying on racist stereotypes and take a hard look at its own actions.

What will happen to Hamas?

I'm cautiously optimistic about the prospects for the Palestinian left. The leftist factions were tarnished by their association with government, managing the realities of occupation rather than resisting it. Hamas will have to deal with the corruption and power politics of running a Bantustan; as a Fatah official says, "Let Hamas alone bear its responsibilities if it can." This is a chance for the independent left, like Mustafa Barghouti and the Palestinian National Initiative, to establish itself on a firm footing.