Hamas soon to be granted asylum by Teheran?

On 6 June 2017 at Paris, the Saudi Minister for Foreign Affairs, Adel al-Joubeir, laid down the conditions for re-establishing diplomatic relations with Qatar. These include expelling Hamas whose political leadership was brutally displaced from Damascus to Doha, in 2012, just before it declared itself to be “The Palestinian Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood” (a title that it subsequently abandoned).

The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, supported the saudi pre-condition.

Qatar has at last asked some, but not all, of Hamas’s leaders, present on its territory to leave.

The entire Arab world has interpreted the speech that US President, Donald Trump delivered on 21 May at Riyadh as giving them the licence to put an end to terrorism and therefore to their master, the Muslim Brotherhood. The vision that the Arab Press had of Hamas has suddenly radically changed: up until now Hamas was considered as a legitimate movement of the Palestine Resistance. The Arab Press presents it now as a terrorist organization that manipulates and exploits the sufferings of the Palestine people. It is only the media funded by Iran does not participate in this stampede.

Khaled Mechaal and a delegation of the Political Bureau went to Teheran. It seems that Iran has decided to grant political asylum to Hamas.

Hamas has a complex history. It was in 1987 that three members of the Muslim Brotherhood established it, initially at the initiative of the United Kingdom. While Hamas made no challenge to Western colonialism, it declared that the Koran prohibits a Muslim land from being governed by non-Muslims. This is why it personifies religious resistance to Israel. For years, Tel-Aviv helped it to develop so as to lessen the influence of the secular Fatah, Yasser Arafat, himself supported by the United States and France. Gradually, Iran exercised stronger and stronger influence over the armed branch of Hamas to which it provided a large number of arms. In 2012, in the context of what appeared the triumph of the British project, “the Arab Springs”, Hamas declared itself to be “the Palestinian Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood”. Despite the links between the Hamas and the MI6 and despite the anti-imperialist ideal of Imam Khomeini, Teheran decided to consider this declaration as an act, internal to Palestine.

We are currently witnessing a change in paradigm in the Middle East. The struggle against imperialism is blotted out when confronted by the struggle against clericalism. The chief supporters of “political Islam” are represented among the Sunnites by Hamas and among the Shiites by the government of Sheikh Hassan Rouhani.