A few days ago, the former Secretary General of the Islamic Jihad movement, Dr. Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, died after a coma that lasted about two years. May God Almighty have mercy on him, he visited Doha in August 2011, and he called me and found me in Cairo, the conversation between us by phone about the position of the Islamic Jihad movement regarding the Syrian revolution, and that it considers it an "internal matter", and then it affected the silence; Although the Syrian regime - as he reported to me - resents his silence and does not tolerate it either.
At that early time, he disclosed to me the information that the Syrian regime had prepared itself for a "long-running battle," and that the Syrians had a long battle ahead. I told him: You certainly meet the security leaders in Syria, to what extent does the sectarian dimension dwell their minds? He replied: "One hundred percent," then added: The Syrians must remain "in the box of peace, and if international intervention occurs, we will not be able to remain silent."
I remembered this conversation when I received the news of the death of the Palestinian leader, freedom fighter, academic and intellectual, who loves poetry and was organizing it in his youth. He had deposited his poems with a friend, and the latter later burned them, for fear of occupation!
The Arab Spring revolutions in general, and in Syria in particular, have put the Palestinian resistance movements in front of an ethical problem represented in defining a position on what is going on
The previous dialogue brings us back to a complex and complex issue at the same time, which is the problematic relationship between politics and ethics. It is common for Hamas to have a pragmatic nature like the Brotherhood in general, while the jihad movement is predominantly ideological, and it is the element that was the cornerstone of its establishment, and the reason for which its founder, Dr. Fathi Al-Shikaki, separated from the Brotherhood in the late seventies after he was among them. The Palestinian Brotherhood considered the priority to education and psychological and material preparation, while Shikaki and Shallah saw that the priority was the military resistance to the occupation. Although Hamas policy changed later, as it engaged in military resistance, this did not change the relationship between the two movements.
Shallah expressed more than once the vision of the jihad movement and its ideology (he did not see a defect in the word ideology), and he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera in 2003: We "perform our duty and our legitimate mandate, and we cannot choose an approach that depends on the calculations of profit, loss or damage that can To return to us personally from this affiliation, "the movement - as defined -" a fighting movement, and not a political movement in the mounds of negotiations and ticking in complete darkness with foreign powers. " The "Islamic Jihad movement" has the mission to fight, and this is a legitimate assignment, because jihad in Palestine - the jihad of the enemy - is an imposed obligation for us, such as prayer and fasting. "
But the Arab Spring revolutions in general, and in Syria in particular, have put the Palestinian resistance movements in front of an ethical problem in defining a position on what is going on. Here everyone will be forced to leave the ideology and practice the policy of balancing interests and corruption and calculating the gains and harms.
And the combination of ideology and politics is an inevitable matter, so how can a movement or organization be established in today's world without possessing capabilities and capabilities (provided by states)? The question then becomes: How can we balance the sources of support on the one hand, and achieve the project / ideology on the other hand? That is, it is imperative to establish linkages and balances to ensure existence first and to achieve the project secondly, and then there is no purely ideological movement or organization without practicing a degree (narrowing or expanding) of pragmatism, which is imposed by the concept of "movement" which means making connections and exercising a role or Doing an action, and it is in the nature of the act to clash with other parties and engage in classifications of friend, ally and enemy.
Moral norms do not exist in the case of supporting Palestine or what is called the "axis of resistance"; Because this support may be just verbal gibberish, or political gain
However, the complicated problem here is that if these movements support the revolution, their main supporters, Iran and the Assad regime, will lose, and if they take a positive attitude towards their policies and actions, they will be in a moral dilemma for the people. How will this position be justified politically and morally?
The jihad and Hamas movements established their work on the basis that they are Palestinian movements, which means that "Palestinian" here includes two meanings: The first: the goal and the project, and then to give legitimacy to their work, and the alliance with everyone who agrees with them in this goal as a criterion for governance and distinction between positions, And a statement of what is legal or illegal. The second: The scope of their work is exclusively the land of Palestine.
But does this basis fit an ethical standard? It is certainly a political principle based on considerations related to the ideology upon which these same movements were based, and to the complexities and coercions of reality that impose itself on any political or military activity in today's world (countries, borders, alliances, ...). That is, it is not an ethical standard, in the sense that it is - alone - not sufficient to determine what is right and wrong, as well as to turn into an absolute principle valid to justify all other acts and measure the extent of its ethics near and far from it, even though support for the cause of liberating Palestine is an unquestionable moral issue.
Moral norms are not available on the issue of supporting Palestine or what has been called the "axis of resistance". Because this support may be merely verbal gibberish, political gain, or specific job purposes of the supporter himself, without any positive outcome to the same principle that is fundamentally political and if it contains moral value.
Hence, we find that Islamic jurisprudence involves clear pragmatism in the field of practical application of rulings, as Shariah rulings are divided into assignments and status provisions, and that each mandate is mandatory (duty, forbidden, delegate ...) must be located in a specific context and through a specific person. At the moment of the transition from abstract judgment (for example, the duty) to the specific verb (in the case of Zaid or Amr, for example), we will have to consider various considerations related to the potential of the subject and the complexities of the context in which the verb is revealed (reason, condition, inhibitor, ...), and then the The analogy of "Shallah", the cause of liberating Palestine, with the obligation of prayer and fasting is true on the one hand, but it is a problem on the other hand, and that the obligation to pray is only fulfilled according to time, place, people and possibility, and they are all due to the positive provisions.
It is true that prayer does not in any way negate its hypothesis, but its provisions vary between performing, spending, collecting, and shortening, and praying standing, sitting, or a passenger, but even praying with eyes only in the event of complete disability. That is, the principle principle is not a closed one when we move from the abstract to the point of implementation and implementation. Hence, Islamic jurisprudence has acquired its central characteristic, which is that it is "practical", which balances the normative standard of abstract principle and its multiple applications that fall within a specific time and place, and then acquires these. The applications have practical provisions that suit the complexities of each situation and situation.
The criterion of "Palestinian" does not fit an ethical standard based on the foregoing, and involves internal contradictions represented in matters:
The first : The resistance movement (whether jihad or Hamas) depends on external support, and then the management of this relationship with the external support is subject to a set of balances and accounts, which means that the Palestinian movement has become part of the external equation, and that the determinants and interests of the external support impose some restrictions and considerations on The movement of the Palestinian actor and his moral assessments of what is going on. This means that there is a complex relationship between the inside and the outside, and that these complications will affect the divorce of the Palestinian criterion. Because it will become diversified according to the budgets of each movement separately, and the Palestinian will find himself facing the standard metrics - which he considers absolute - in a complex reality, and in front of accounts in which he will weigh interests and spoilers according to the perspective of his own ideology, and all these accounts are not subject only to moral considerations but to political and pragmatic considerations It may belong to the movement only or Palestine in general.
The second internal contradiction: is that the Palestinian standard is subject to the logic of the Qatari state (the idea of patriotism), but at the time it expresses an internal patriotic position, it requires others to support its "patriotic" issue as an issue that transcends the patriot to the Islamic! That is, he again fell into the dilemma of the dual definition of his role and the determination of his internal and external duties, as he will - no doubt - clash with the Syrian who is involved in a national liberation movement from tyranny, and here the Palestinian national act - according to the resistance movement's perspective - will be opposed to the Syrian national act. Here, the Palestinian militant may resort to the trade-off between the act of liberation from colonialism and the act of liberation from tyranny, and we will move to another kind of controversy; As it is not valid to invoke the legal mandate only in the duty to be free from occupation without the legal mandate to be free from tyranny and tyranny.
The third contradiction: is the argument that is usually presented by several parties (not only the resistance movements but some left calculated on the resistance line), which is the centrality and priority of the Palestinian issue. But the question here is: Is this priority national or Islamic? If it is patriotism, the rhetoric of these movements is self-consistent, and if they are Islamic, then this means that we will fall into a new contradiction implied by the criterion of “Palestinian”, and that the priority for Syria will differ from the priority for the Palestinian, and that the problem will only get worse when the resistance movements support these two regimes in Iran and Syria against the people Rebel against their criminality (in the case of Iran the issue includes several countries); Because we will leave here the idea of "centralization" to the option of "either or", an option that will challenge the morality of the two issues together: freedom from tyranny and freedom from occupation. How can an ethical character of the cause of Palestinian national liberation be supported by the enslavement of another people? The support here does not only take the form of statements or political alliances, but is further afield as the Palestinian issue is used as an excuse to legitimize Iran's policies and the Syrian regime; On the pretext that they are systems that support the resistance, and then her guilt and delay are forgiven!
One of the justifications for the invalidity of "Palestinian" is an ethical criterion: that the act associated with an end is evaluating its morality in view of the purpose for which the act occurred, so the image of the act may be moral but immoral in view of the intent in it and in view of its actual consequences and effects, and it is strange that the leaders of the resistance movements The purposes of the Iranian and Syrian regimes are well known to support the resistance and they are a functional issue, but they turn a blind eye to the gains of these two systems in order to achieve gains for the two movements related to their ideology and calculations of what is priority and central, while if we invoke ethical standards, freedom from tyranny and liberation of homelands go hand in hand, It is difficult to separate them in today's world, and this has been evident from the events of September to the Arab Spring revolutions. As internal despotism cannot bear the cause of national liberation, then the actions of authoritarian regimes must be weighed against the balance of their interests; When a system lacks internal political legitimacy (the free popular will), it resort to attracting external legitimacy (supporting the Palestine issue), which means that the issue itself has turned into an excuse and a tool of washing tyranny and extending the Persian national project in the Arab region, which is a matter of veto The Arab national issues themselves, however, have not made any real progress in favor of the Palestinian liberation project.
If you consider the Palestinian issue to be exceptional, you can support the policies of Iran and Assad just because they support the cause of Palestine, without seeing any imbalance in your engagement with the same principle.
Rather, the issue from an ethical point of view goes beyond the idea of the priority of the Palestinian issue to the idea of its exceptionalism, which is exceptional, similar to the Arab democratic exception of some Arab and Western intellectuals; The exception means isolating the issue itself from major moral principles (such as right, justice and freedom), that is, it does not upright according to his logic on the pretext that it has its own law, and this is a dangerous logic Because it would upset the moral cause of Palestine itself; Because it is based on its legitimacy on these same principles, and this is one of the reasons for which we said that "Palestinian" is not - in and of itself - an ethical standard, as its ethics stems from something outside it and it is the grand abstract principles in which the occupation intersects with tyranny but may be two sides of the same coin.
If you consider the Palestinian issue to be exceptional, you can support the policies of Iran and Assad just because they support the cause of Palestine, without seeing any imbalance in your engagement with the same principle; Because you brought it out of the principles and treated it by itself as an absolute principle that transcends everything. On the other hand, you have to bear the responsibility for the opposite reaction that might result from this situation, such as who considers his local national issue as the absolute principle for him, and thus we will succumb to pluralism in the absolute principles according to each party, which will return to the standardization of major principles with great harm.
The question of Palestine should not turn - in the consciousness of Palestinian organizations as well as others - into a "personalized issue" on specific land and actors, and thus become an exception; Because this will - first harm - the issue itself, and this is the essence of the current problem, morally and politically.
It is clear that the question of Palestine is no longer central to the world after the Arab revolutions (so to speak), and this may be due to several considerations, among them: The resistance movements themselves contributed to their positions on the revolutions in this regression when they took positions ranging from silence to reliance on the matter The internal, and between statements supporting at least the opponents of the Syrian revolution, and then isolated itself from its Arab and Islamic depth. Another reason is that he may have revealed to us that that centralization was not real. Because systems supporting its decentralization were trading in it and now it has been busy with other internal and regional priorities.
Moral resistance movements lose their cause by limiting the standard of their evaluation of actions and situations to looking at the world only from the standpoint of their own support and their own perceptions of their cause. Because the moral stance towards injustice, occupation and criminality is indivisible, whether this is with Israeli or non-Israeli hands, and whether it is on the land of Palestine or outside it. The balance in which actions and policies are weighed has ranks in terms of impact, corruption, numbers, and effects. The weight of criminality is not a closed doctrine that is unreasonable in meaning. Closed beliefs, and whoever selects or builds his stances from a partisan or partisan interest perspective sacrifices the ethics of his cause first.
It seems to me that the resistance movements need to establish a discourse that mixes between moral and political, and establishes its major cause on moral grounds first, specific scales on which to build the position and make decisions, and balance between the value of the human (non-Palestinian) and the value of the land (Palestinian and non-Palestinian); Because the resistance is not an "unreasonable doctrine of meaning" and is not a theology as portrayed by "Hezbollah" and its party to gain it and terrorize others; Rather, it is a moral issue with a reasonable meaning, and we can discuss and discuss those responsible for it and govern all of us to principles, not to systems and people. Movements and people are not the principle, and this is a central issue that we must insist on to protect ourselves from tyranny in the name of resistance, religion or politics.