Hamas training camps and the continuity of resistance

Israeli and other mainstream media have ignited a furore over 17,000 young Palestinians who participated in Hamas-run military training camps during a two-week school holiday in January. Although it’s a common phenomenon that has happened in previous years, especially within the context of the Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggle, the news has catapulted Gaza once more into the limelight. However, the journalists driven into a frenzy over conventional human rights expectations disregard the context of Israel’s colonisation and massacres inflicted upon Gaza, the most recent being last summer.

As if to prove the hegemonic narrative, news reports on various media, including AFP and Haaretz, have quoted a 14 year old participant, Hatem: “The Israelis killed my niece last summer. Now I want to kill them. I will become a resistance fighter.”

Anonymous Palestinian human rights activists have accused Hamas of exploiting children. “We are not disputing the right of an occupied people to resist,” they said, “but it must be done by adults, not children. The camps are making young people aggressive instead of educating them and teaching them to abide by the law.”

This “concern” on behalf of human rights activists and their condemnation of the resistance training camps is aligned with Israeli and Western impositions of what the fragmented Palestinian population should conform to. The illusion of human rights in this case creates an obscure dimension in which the violations committed by Israel, as well as those authored by compromised Palestinian factions and human rights organisations, are conveniently ignored; thus they portray the camps solely within the realm of “exploitation of children”. Eliminated from the narrative are the crimes committed by Israel against Palestinian children, including imprisonment, torture, maiming and murder; the latter was a particularly prominent feature during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. Critics also ignore the fact that Israeli military personnel committing such crimes are often not much older than the children who are the victims of their aggression.

Implementing Western concepts of what children – in this case, teenagers – should be doing, in addition to utilising references from UN documents and persisting with the annihilation of Palestinian reality, only serves to create a convenient stereotype that condemns all forms of anti-colonial struggle unjustly.

Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim countered the predictable complaints succinctly. “The Western media accuse Hamas of militarising society with the training camps, but what has the West done to stop the enemy from carrying out its crimes?”

Imperialism has not only encouraged Israel in its colonisation process by providing military, economic and financial support, but it has also promulgated the Palestinian narrative divested of its anti-colonial aspects. Efforts to consolidate the resistance to Israel’s brutal military occupation are thus reduced to mere acts of violence. In this scenario, the most common argument brought forth against the continuity of resistance would revolve around the importance of the education of young Palestinians as opposed to combat training.

There are problems with regard to Western expectations as they all too often overlook the difficulties encountered in occupied Palestine, including Israel’s destruction of school and university buildings and educational resources. There are also the irregularities in the curriculum taught in UNRWA schools, for example, in which resistance is portrayed constantly through a Western lens instead of delving into Palestinian history. It is these realities of education in the occupied Palestinian territories that have contributed to the provision of an alternative that resonates with Palestinians struggling under the occupation. They need to ensure that the requirements of armed resistance are learned and practiced as a legitimate right; it is a necessary condition forced upon the Palestinian population by Israel’s ongoing colonial violence.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.