Comment by Hanschri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hanschri | Hacker News Reader

Seeing as this is a topic where the discussion often derails into a flame war, I thought I'd leave a comment to clarify some things. Please try to avoid interpreting other comments in the worst sense, most people come from a place of good intentions.

While I cannot speak to the specifics of Ireland and Spain, I suspect their position is quite similar to Norway. Norway recognizes Palestine's right to exist based on the borders from before the 4th of June 1967. Even though Hamas controls the Gaza strip today, Norway is not recognizing Hamas as the goverment of Palestine, or is in any way rewarding them for the terror attacks they committed on the 7th of October last year. Currently it is Mahmoud Abbas, the party leader of al Fatah, who is recognized as the president of the palestinian people. Most countries refer to the Palestinian Authority when talking about Palestine and its future.

For a long time, the promise of recognition as reward for a lasting peace has been the strategy used by Norway, but now a Palestinian state is seen as a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East. Prime minister Støre says, among other things, the following about the recognition of Palestine as a state:

>When we recognize Palestine, we can more strongly encourage other countries to support the building of a Palestinian state and we can hold the Palestinian state accountable

>Recognizing a state is not about giving the green light to every policy a state pursues. We will not support a state that uses violence. The Palestinians must see that there is another hope than the path of violence.

Source in Norwegian: https://www.nrk.no/urix/noreg-anerkjenner-palestina-1.168916...

It's an interesting theory, to force a two-state solution on Israel by treating it as a fait accompli. It's worth a shot.

They need to use that to put pressure on both sides. Israel has been building settlements outside those 1967 borders. Arguably, that's an even worse violation of international law than the attack on Gaza. The latter is part of a war, where the enemy is routinely putting its own civilians at risk. The former is a pure land grab, lacking any fig leaf to the contrary.

Unwinding that is going to be ugly. Settlers will either become part of Palestine, or be forced to leave. (Which they should, but they'll be rightly angry at the Israeli government.)

On the other hand, Fatah has no idea how to prevent Hamas in Gaza from conducting attacks against Israel. That would make the October 7 attacks an act of war. Countries recognizing Palestine as a country can use that to apply pressure to prevent such a war, but that is also going to be deeply ugly.

Perhaps Fatah could call on its new allies to help police itself, as it tries to establish itself as a first-order country?

I would be deeply grateful to these countries if they could find ways to meaningfully help resolve this conflict -- as opposed to just declaring sides, which sadly is all too often what's happening on the world stage. There's a lot of bad blood and a lot of meddling from outside pushing violence, including both the US and Iran.

so what happens when Palestinians inevitably elect Hamas representatives to parliament and /or presidency ?

Norway will not reward them again with even more money :)

Newly independent states electing their resistance movement to government is quite common actually and seldomly a major issue (relatively to pre-independence). In recent history we had FLN in Algeria and ANC in South Africa. In Northern Ireland Sinn Féin just got elected to government without issues, and they are likely to win a major electoral victories in the Republic of Ireland as well, nobody is worried about that.

An independent Palestine will likely have democratic institutions which protects tyrannical movements from misusing their powers. Most resistance movements obey these structures as long as they are fair.

Now if Israel continues their interference (which is very likely) we may expect violence to continue regardless of how the Palestinian government is composed. This happened after Irish independence (which saw British interference in Norther Ireland) despite Sinn Féin not entering government.

i dont think Sinn Fein had quite as radical a worldview tbh

Also,unlike Hamas, Sinn Fein never had the goal of taking over UK or that of establishing a global Khalifate, as Hamas and their Muslim Brotherhood peers do

I’m not sure neither Hamas nor the Muslim Brotherhood want to establish an global Caliphate. Both organizations are explicitly anti-imperialist. I think you are putting them in the same boat as another organization who is explicitly fascist that has this goal, and I suspect many people put them in the same boat for the only reason that they share a religion or ethnicity.

Sinn Féin wanted (and still want) to take over the whole island of Ireland, including Protestant majority areas in Northern Ireland. IRA—Shin Féin’s armed wing—went to civil war because they explicitly didn’t want a two state solution. IRA did numerous terrorist attacks even in England. I’m sure many Protestants in Northern Ireland were also afraid of loosing their state (or country rather), and when they got to keep their country, they promptly used it to oppress Catholics for another 75 years, or until the Good Friday Agreement gave Catholics equal rights. Sinn Féin ultimately cited with the Good Friday Agreement even though it kept the partition. What Sinn Féin ultimately settled for was equal rights. In Palestine, this would translate to the right of return and political and civil rights for Palestinians in Israel.

> so what happens when Palestinians inevitably elect Hamas representatives to parliament and /or presidency ?

They probably will (though Palestine's existing ICC membership and the top leadership of Hamas already having ICC warrants being sought and the ICC investigation continuing would likely have a substantial impact on which Hamas voices even have that opportunity, which eventuality, as much as the potential to embarrass Israel [I don't think they expect any Israeli target to actually see justice] was quite likely a factor in the more moderate Fatah leadership of Palestine joining the ICC and actively seeking their investigations of international crimes in Palestine in the first place.)

But since independence will have been established, they'll have to deliver on boring day to day stuff, without constant Israeli abuses like the cross-border sniping and the vetoing of all-Palestine elections that would include places currently administered by Israeli occupation authorities, etc., etc., etc.

New states formed by regional/ethnic separatist/independence movements often elect the political wing(s) of the group(s) that fought the prior government/occupier if independence is acheived after substantial armed struggle. This is usually far less of a problem than in actually revolutionary regimes that overthrow amd replace a central government, because there is usually less ongoing struggle against those invested in the old regime to justify post-victory war government, providing a pretext for repression and deprioritization of economic progress and QoL improvements for the citizenry.

I raise North Korea as a counterexample. You can apparently be an independent country, totally fail to deliver on the boring stuff, have your people starving for multiple periods, and still blame it all on "them" for at least 70 years.

I also question whether Hamas would recognize some other party winning the West Bank, or accept another party's authority over Gaza, so it might have to be a three state solution, not two state.

And I'm not optimistic that, faced with trying to govern Gaza, Hamas would turn the "wipe Israel off the map" parts of their charter into "eh, that's just talk from the old days".

Worse: Could Israel trust that Hamas would do that? After October 7?

So I think that you are being more optimistic than data warrants.

North Korea is a good counterexample, but it is hardly a relevant comparison (nor is it realistic) to Hamas. The Workers’ Party of Korea was funded after liberation from the Japanese Empire. Though it included many members of the resistance fighters (notably Kim Il Sung) the movement it self was not a direct continuation of the pre-independence resistant movements.

World War 2 is also a weird time in history to gain independence as external forces (particularly the Soviet Union and Western Allies) played a large part of the resistance. If you compare instead with Vietnam, which also was liberated from the Japanese Empire, but was promptly re-colonized by the French, where the same liberation movement that fought the Empire, also fought and won the French, and became the legitimate government of first North Vietnam and finally all of Vietnam. The Communist Party turned out to be a much more functioning government than the South Vietnam Government which had a series of Monarchs, military dictators, western imposed dictators, etc.

Finally I’d like to turn to FLN which is probably the most relevant comparison. FLN consolidated Algeria as a one party state for the first decades after independence, and it took a whole other rebellion for democratic reforms. But the terrorist activities of FLN (which were much more numerous and destructive than Hamas’) almost completely stopped (I don’t remember any post-independence terrorist activities of FLN actually).

I actually think that Hamas’ rule would be far more democratic than FLN’s. Hamas has a wide support among the people in Palestine, and they would easily win a fair and free election. If they would engage in undemocratic activities, it would cost them more then they could gain (granting international recognition [which honestly is unlikely]). All of this would be void though if Israel would continue interfering with an independent Palestine.

> I raise North Korea as a counterexample.

North Korea is not the result of a country electing the leadership of an independence movement after an armed struggle.

It would also be very bad if. say, an outside power occupied and imposed a totalitarian regime on all or part of Palestine, and continued supporting it for decades.

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