Hamas has every right to smuggle weapons into Gaza

By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

[ 10/04/2011 - 10:19 PM ]

Hamas has an absolute moral, legal and human right to defend the people of Gaza against incessant Israeli aggression. But in order to carry out this most ethical task, Hamas must smuggle weapons of various types into the Gaza Strip. Otherwise, Gazans will be setting ducks for the Israeli death machine as we have seen in the course of the past few days and also during the Israeli blitz on the coastal enclave more than two years ago.

Since April 7, Israeli forces have killed as many as 20 Palestinians, the bulk of whom are innocent men, women and children as shown by the gruesome images that keep coming from Gaza.

Israel often seeks to portray the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip as an ultimate red line or an inviolable taboo that must never be allowed to happen. Israel has gone too far in asserting this policy. Last week, Israeli warplanes reportedly hit a car in the Sudanese Red Sea town of Port Sudan, killing two Sudanese nationals. Israeli sources suggested that the criminal attack targeted a Palestinian who was involved in smuggling weapons to Gaza. However, all signs indicate that the targeted Palestinian was not in the doomed car.

More to the point, Israel had carried out criminal raids and assassinations of Palestinians and others suspected of smuggling weapons into the blockaded enclave.

None the less, Israeli arguments and justifications to this effect must be rejected with the utter contempt they deserve since the ultimate implication is that the people of Gaza have no right to self-defense against Israel 's most sophisticated arsenal of death.

This rationale is as unacceptable as it is immoral.

We all know that the Jewish defendants at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943/44 had to smuggle weapons and food into the ghetto in order to enhance their steadfastness in the face of SS forces. Needless to say, Hamas and other Palestinian factions are very much doing the same thing.

Hence, the world should stop viewing efforts by Hamas to defend Palestinian lives against the deadly Nazi-like aggressions by Israel as an oddity or something that is abnormal and anomalous since doing so amounts to swallowing the Israeli narrative, hook, line, and sinker.

Israel, the terrorist regime par excellence, is utterly unfit to lecture the world, let alone its victims, about terror. Israel itself is based on terror, ethnic cleansing and land theft, and as such is bereft of any moral credentials that would qualify her to complain about whatever resistance efforts the oppressed Palestinians are trying to put up in order to earn their freedom and secure survival.

More to the point, neighboring Arab states have an absolute moral and religious obligation to help Gazans defend and protect themselves and their children from the Nazi-like aggression.

That is why one may argue that it is no longer acceptable that the new Egyptian regime keeps preventing weapons from reaching Gaza through Egypt. Indeed, the ideal thing to do is that the Egyptian revolution, which toppled Hosni Mubarak, the Zionist agent, should offer active assistance to the blockaded people of Gaza . This would be no more than doing Egypt's Arab and Islamic duty. However, since it is unwise, as many prudent voices would argue, to rush into a premature confrontation with Israel, it is imperative that the new rulers in Cairo do their utmost to make up for years of Mubarak's collusion and complicity with the Zionists against the unjustly persecuted and savaged people of Gaza.


Undoubtedly, there are a thousand ways through which Egypt can help the people of Gaza provide at least primary defense and protection against Israeli Nazism.

To be sure, Hamas and other Palestinian factions don't seek military parity with Israel. This is obviously out of question. However, failing to achieve parity with the Zionist entity should never mean reclining on our chairs, doing nothing while watching Israel slaughter our innocent civilians. Certain deterrence must be established to convince the Nazis of our time that there is a price to be exacted every time Israel launches a new aggression on our virtually helpless people.

Perhaps we can borrow an example from the Second World War. At one point, the Nazi leader Adolph Hitler contemplated using the chemical nerve agent Sarin, which attacks and paralyses the nervous system, against the Allies' cities and population centers. However, the Fuhrer was eventually convinced that using the lethal chemical agent would eventually boomerang and that millions of Germans would perish in retaliatory chemical raids on German cities.

So deterrence works.

It is well-known that a huge gap exists between Israel's massive firepower and anything Hamas and other Palestinian factions could mobilize. But this gap should never make Palestinians succumb to the Zionist will which is based on mendacity and oppression.

The Palestinians don't have to have F16 jet fighters and apache helicopter gunship to deter Israel . But they need some other sophisticated but mainly defensive weapons to make Israel realize that any aggression will have a price.

It is the responsibility of revolutionary Arab states to help provide the ultimate freedom fighters in Gaza with the wherewithal that would help them stop Israel 's killing machine from killing more Palestinian children and women and men.

Arab states can carry out this most noble and most moral task as discreetly as possible, but it must be done anyway since not doing it would only play into Israeli hands and encourage Israel to murder more innocent people.

Again, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions don't want to trigger an all-out confrontation between states such as Egypt and the Zionist regime. After all Palestinians do realize that these Arab states have first to put their houses in order and restore stability.


But at the very least, Arab regimes must show Israel the "red eye" and do away, once and for all, with the Mubarak-era complacency.

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