“The Blood flowed and covered the land – and daylight filled the world” - Spatial discourses within Hamas’ terrorist violence
“It occurred when the Palestinian, from the isolation of his world, asked another world that stood with its back to him: who am I and what am I in the scheme of things that seemed to govern other people's lives but not mine?” Fawaz Turki
“The world is a Paradise for the infidel, but a prison for the believer” Hadera Bus bomber, Ammar Armaneh’s will, 1994
There is no country for the Muslim except where the shariah of God is established, where human relations are bonded by their relationship to God” Sayyid Qutb
Spatial conceptions are a mainstay of Hamas’, and other groups’, terrorist ideology and the violence it manifests. Each act of violence constructs an alternative “…terrain of social utopia” . When added to the temporal and psychological aspects of forcing history via seemingly aimless acts of violence, this spatial dimension might well produce a more nuanced cartography of the terrorist and extremist worldviews. Whilst each “atlas” must be particular to each imagined geography, the primordial commonalities of a human-wide phenomena such as terrorism count as much as the specifics. Indeed, what is unique to Hamas and its attacks serve to highlight the supra-species universals, their limits and their extent, of the Muqawama’s geography of messages and discourse. As such, it is possible to highlight a tentative taxonomy of certain spatial processes, messages, contradictions and ideas within ideologically loaded violence
Using a single attack and its symbolic “topia” as a structural guide, this essay seeks to use several sociological and geographic constructs to examine the act, it’s importance in spatial terms and how it connect to wider spatial discourses in Palestinian Islamist thought. The first conception is that of Heterotopias, taken from Foucault’s essay Of Other Spaces . Here a space is created where ideological discourse shapes the space, its rules, norms, rituals and meaning, marking it out from other more homogenetic spaces, a space “…of deviation” . Secondly, Soja’s idea of thirdspace , i.e. a place both real and imagined, both solid and air, will be applied in its most extreme reading to recombine and consider the internal world of struggle and the actual existing conditions of the conflict. Here, there is “[a] site where one’s radical [identity] and subjectivity can be activated” . Finally, by using a form of Bhabha's concept of mimicry , this essay will examine the messages and symbolism within the spatial conceptions underlying Hamas’ resistance. Hamas power, in relation to Israel’s “…is at once resemblance and menace” . In addition, a conception of differential frames of temporality in violence, Griffin’s “Dreamtime” , provides another dimension to this tentative analysis .
Hamas and its progenitor, the Muslim Brotherhood, are deeply attached to discourses of space. Hamas goal of resisting Israel and leaving “not one Jew in Palestine” combines with the goal of remaking Palestine as “Islamicized space” . It is a campaign of rejecting the Jewish “….cancer expanding in the land of Isra and Mi’raj” combined with regenerating “Islamic observance in the public sphere inside Palestine” and the nature of the Pure Muslim. Cathartic expulsion with regeneration is Hamas’ re-formulation of its varied intellectual ancestry. This mixture of Palestinian Nationalism and the Supra-nationalism of Qutbish ideas of Caliphate and Ummah gave Hamas a symbolic mental geography. This stretches from the micro-scale of the refugee camps of Gaza or Jenin, the “Palestinian Street” to the macro-scale of cosmic struggle and history being “corrected”.
On the evening of March 27 2002, Abdel Baset Odeh, a 25-year-old Palestinian from nearby Tulkarem, blew himself up in the Park Hotel function room in Netanya. In the explosion, 30 others were killed, mostly elderly Jews celebrating Passover . Such was the force of the blast, a butter knife was found stuck two inches into the concrete ceiling. The overt intention of the Al-Qassam brigades who had sent Odeh to die and kill had been to overshadow the recently announced Saudi peace plan. In the words of the Hamas communiqué after the attack, it was “a message to the summit convening in Lebanon that our Palestinian people’s option is resistance and resistance only” . Yet an attack on a Seder consisting of family-less Holocaust survivors clearly had a symbolic significance. This knot of messages and meaning is intrinsically geographic, intrinsically spatial.
Odeh grew up in a classic anomic space. Tulkarem exists just within the boundaries of the Palestinian authority and is ringed with Israeli checkpoints, “a demonstration of power” . The ritual and daily humiliation of passing these combined with a lack of any other mundane opportunities provided an environment where firstspace, the physical material world, was constricted. Though the eyes of Hamas, this world offered only “...the dispossession, deportations, prisons, tortures, travel restrictions, the dissemination of filth and pornography, the corruption and bribery… a life of suffering and degradation” . As waves of violence and insecurity mounted for the Palestinians,”… the more they have supported martyrdom operations and even demanded more” . There were no grand meanings outside of Jihad, no heroic arena beyond that of the resistance.
In the words of Odeh’s father, people were “…frustrated and they don’t want to live any more”. Odeh, in particular, had only “…. a bitter life” . This arena was severely contracted when Odeh was denied a visa to visit his potential in-laws in Jordan 9 months before the bombing. After this he retreated into more and more ostentatious displays of piety before going underground as the Israeli military began to take an interest. Odeh’s firstspace had been not only become painfully anomic but had become impossible.
To this push towards his act of violence, the pull of the promise of a meaningful thirdspace was present. By marking the “unjust” world with a murderous example of Islamic resistance, Odeh was transported and transformed in both space and time. He brought a cosmic struggle, one of a manichean and eternal nature, a truly heroic mythos, into a comfortable, complacent Jewish reality. Qutb explicitly takes up this reforming and transporting notion of violent struggle, of violent Jihad. The Jihadi “….remains busy to strive against others, really strives against his own self also” , released from “…the bonds of earth and soil, the bonds of flesh and blood” . Ridden from corruption within, the Jihadi creates and enters a sacred space, combating “…existing power relations at the source” , one in which their actions had cosmic and dialectical significance.
This space is one of war, truly a Dar es Harb, house of war. In every action of violence, Hamas re-declares war and creates a topography of a cosmic battlefield. The function room at the Park Hotel was the site where Hamas proclaimed it’s power, it’s force and it’s struggle, “….a war of religion and faith” . In an asymmetric conflict, the smaller party increases its challenge by extending the reach of the struggle. The possibility of causing great harm to Israel by the launching of the Al-Qassam rockets from the Gaza strip is small. Yet the extension of uncertainty over a wide area of the realm of the “other” extends the war, its importance, it’s central meaning to all history, “The hour of Khaybar has arrived” . This reaffirmation of struggle into the space of the “other“ declares “We are at war”.
The acting out of this thirdspace of cosmic struggle; of war, a heterotopia ruled by the ideology of Hamas, occurred in the setting of an intensely sacred space for Jews; a Seder. This collision of spatial conceptions, of meaning was central to the symbolism of the act. The reception of the Israeli public of the attack as an invasion and attack on their own seder was it’s aim. This was not chance. To the manager of the Park hotel, Pauline Cohen, (who lost a son-in-law), the desecration was acute, “…they come on this holy holiday, they have crossed a line” . Suicide operations are not opportunistic events, they require planning, reconnaissance, strategic thinking. The Seder is the ultimate space of sanctuary and safety within Jewish culture, a place of refuge with family. Into this retreat, the bombing shattered all these assumptions. And it did so without warning or explanation. It was an arbitrary act par excellence.
This can be understood as an act of mimicry and of communicating control. In Palestinian nationalist discourse, Israel violence and influence is arbitrary, indeterminate and invasive. This invasion of Palestinian society, into the family home, demonstrates a stark disparity of power and reach. Hamas has yearned to “share” this insecure and fraught existence with Israel society, punctuated by state and non-state violence like the Hebron Massacre by Baruch Goldstein. In another communiqué after the Afula bus bombing on 6 April 1994, “Hamas vowed to make the Israelis pay for the pain and harassment”. Al Husseini warned even of Jewish culture that might “enter our houses and courtyards like adders, where they kill morality and demolish the foundation of society” . Onto the conceived complacency of Israeli society, Hamas’ violence mimics the seemingly arbitrary nature of the Israeli occupation, “…Treating like for like is a universal principle” to quote one Hamas communiqué. Regarding the Hebron massacre, Hamas was clear about the symbolism of violence, space and sacred days, “…You turned Eid’ al-fitr into a black day so we swore to turn your independence holiday into hell” .
This turning of the tables involves the creation of spaces of Palestinian power deep within Israeli social life. Out of this affirmation, two concentric zones are discernable, that of the explosion itself, full of chaos, suffering and the siren lights and that of a wider near existential space imbued with threat and insecurity. This “sharing” of experience, “sharing” of warning-less violence and all-pervading cultural insecurity communicates power, “…. proclaim to them: Allah is great, Allah is greater than their army, Allah is greater than their airplanes and their weapons” . This aping of the power of an occupying or colonial force thus produces spatial mimicry.
Such heterotopia can be described by Bhabha’s conception of mimicry. Here the powerful “other”, it’s rules, it’s forms and it’s behaviours are taken as exemplars for those contesting the existing situation. Hamas takes on the mantle of the colonial arbitrary power, it “…appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power” . Indeed, within Palestinian Islamist discourse, this is considered a re-establishment of the proper order of things. As people of the book, Jews should be under the power of Islamic grace. Without Islam in command, “…fighting and oppression will break out and corruption flourish. Obstinacy and war will break out” . The elusive nature of peace seems to confirm this prejudice. In the words of Qutb, “Whenever the Children of Israel reverted to evil-doing in the Land, punishment awaited them” . Thus the spatial mimicry of violence is given restorative power, recreating a “just” order geographically. Mimicking Israeli power and “sharing” insecurity, it declares “We are in control”
Netanya and Tulkamen each represent, for Hamas, spaces where spatial ideas clashed with the reality. Netanya, founded in the late 1920 from purchased land, is a successful sea side town, bustling with tourists and wealth. This is not how it should be in the minds of Hamas. In the dichotomy of “truthfulness” and ”falsehood” , Israeli material plenty is explained by a divine trick, lulling them into defeat. The crowded poverty and boredom of Tulkamen, haunted by the “…the plague of collaboration” and “…the existential antagonism of occupation” seemed paradoxical. How could the followers of the last Prophet fall so low; indeed, it seemed the entire glory of Islam“….totally unravelled in modern Palestine” . This set of contradiction is over-come by a total belief in prophetic and historic inevitability, “…history must confirm faith” and a reliance on Qur’anic examples.
The Nakba of 1948, which cleared the Arab villages around Netanya and swelled the slums of Tulkamen was re-imagined in the geography of the early Islamic community. To Hamas, the Nakba might well be a disaster and a personal one at that, it’s deputy leader, Rantissi, lamented “Our home still exists and is occupied by Jews from Yemen” . Yet it could also be represented as a modern hijra, where Muhammed fled Mecca in 622. The retreat leading to eventual victory, this “Mohammedan Paradigm” is clearly an attractive analogy for a people in exile, but it is further rewarding to Islamists. Before exile, “Islam had not yet fully existed in Mecca” , only the trauma of the hijra had created the world conquering faith. Exile could purify Palestinian Islam too, eventually leading to the day where “…the Jews shall drink what they have given our unarmed people to drink” . Here, despite the fitna and struggle of exile, victory was inevitable.
This inevitability provides more sacred sources of strength, making this worldly conflict “…a living lesson of the eternal sacred exemplars” . As well as the aforementioned battle of Khaybar, the battle of Badr in 624 gave an example of miraculous victory of a minority over a seemingly invincible majority and is a favourite of Hamas literature . What was needed was enough faith and enough piety. In this exile, true Muslims could be built, those “…who are willing to sacrifice the precious and the dear in the Cause of Allah” . Violence recall this heroic age, it positioned itself as a repetition of the victory of the Prophet, “States built upon oppression last only one hour”…” . It claims “We will win”
To this end, Hamas encouraged, in both Intifadas and beyond, local campaigns that contributed to these dual ends. Attacks on public impiety and secular influences violently re-asserted the narrow Islamic nature of the space Hamas wished to create. Collaboration with Israel, the ultimate sin, lead Palestinians in the first Intifada to kill “…at least 800 of their own” . After defeating the Fatah in the Gaza strip in the brief 2007 civil war, creating “Hamastan” , the new authorities declared the “…end of secularism and heresy” . There was to be an end to the PLO “..debauching themselves, drinking, singing, carrying on” . Hamas had taken on from the beginning of the first intifada the nationalist tradition of using wall murals commemorating the dead and ambushes on lost Jews, cathartically clearing and marking their new space. One such piece of graffiti mused, “Ah, O time of prostitution, O time of betrayal, You will be conquered by the heroes of the stones, No matter how slow is history” .
Further away, the focus of Hamas spatial discourses rests in Jerusalem, the “…central point of the struggle between faith and unbelief”” . The al-Aqsa Mosque and the site where the Hadiths claim Muhammad ascended heaven is intrinsically contested space. The Dome of the Rock lies on top of the remains of the Temple of Solomon and was the background to Odeh’s martyrdom video as part of Hamas’ insignia. Anxieties and fears over the al-Aqsa and narratives strengthening Islamic prior claims to the area are of vital importance to Hamas. It is the lynchpin to their religious claim to the land.
The threat is not wholly imagined, as Jewish extremist groups such as Gush Emunim have sought to carry out plans to destroy the mosque. Yet even the presence of Jewish power around the al-Aqsa is taken as a desecration. The Hamas charter of 1988 remembers when Israeli troops captured East Jerusalem in 1967 “…they shouted with joy ‘Muhammed is dead, he left daughters behind” . Violent tussles over control of the Dome were to provide both sets of Nationalists pre 1948 with a rallying point of support and identity, creating ”… two well defined camps opposing each other, Jews and Arabs (or Muslims)” . Contested ownership and a sense of control over this cosmic pivot provided the occasion for the 2nd Intifada (2000-ongoing). The primacy of this locale to Hamas’ and the wider Palestinian National movement’s symbolic topos is manifest
To compromise on the status of Jerusalem or indeed a single inch of “the land between the River and Sea” is an impossibility for Hamas. Palestine is taken to be a Waqf, a divinely sanctioned endowment to the Muslim nation till the day of retribution , the cosmic “Day of Anger” . To compromise over this would mean “…renouncing part of the religion” in the words of Hamas’ charter. To the eyes of Palestinian Islamists, their heterotopian project of an Islamic space is the mirror and opposite of that of the Zionists who they consider to have realised “...their religious thought on Muslim soil” . They seek to ape this effort.
This combination of cosmic struggle with the particular firstspace geography of Palestine relies of narratives of despoliation and desecration understood via historical topography. By the Zionist nationalist project, the Jew had over-turned a righteous order of things and “…indeed done evil in the Holy Land” . This evil is clad in the darkest historical connotations, “…this despicable Nazi-Tartar invasion” From these larger spatial narratives, the choices within violence attacks “…aimed at controlling and redefining public space” .are clearly drawn, they give a manual of symbolic tactics and targets. These “…cartographies of fear…” remake the world, “…enter directly into its construction”.
In sum, we have three concepts, three overlapping heterotopias caused by violence, “…how destruction creates spaces for new rounds of landscape reproduction” . Firstly, there is a space of war. Here dichotomies, be it jahiliyya and Qur’anic revelation, Truth and Falsehood, believer and Kufr, are reasserted and their inevitable confrontation renewed. In the second concept, a space of control is discernable, underpinned with by a notion of “shared” insecurity. In “…a form of the tragic” , pain is returned to the presumed source and a mimicking control, aping the arbitrary nature of the dominant power played out. These “sharing” spaces have to feel “…like existential crisis, like hopelessness, like loss of the future” . Finally we have a space of inevitability, the victorious space. In this zone, the end of history is predicted. Historical precedent, prophetic prescience and the self-will of the perpetrators rush into the space created by the violence; giving a dialectical importance, shaping its meaning.
Combining spatial and temporal understandings of violence pushes deeper into the lived and imagined experience of violence. Just as space can be remade, so time can attain a different quality to the tick-tock Chronos of mundane time. As the Jihadi enters a thirdspace where the dimensions are now governed by a historic cosmos of ideas, so they also carry “…the experience of ‘dying’ to ‘this’ world in order to be ‘reborn’ in a higher, more substantial reality” . As “….projective narratives…”, mythologies, religious exegesis, ideologies combine and wax in front of circumstance, so they “…can imbue the time with transcendent collective values” . I suggest this is just as true for space.
