what hamas wantsTHE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.
(...) From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.
(...) Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people.
(...) Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side's true intentions.

engage with hamas: we earned our support
The Palestinian National Authority apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist in the fiction that the United States is following a "road map" to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building. Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and Hamas is stronger than ever.
(...) Some critics raise the red flag of "al-Qaeda" and say that Hamas and parliament are a stalking horse for Salafi jihadists. I defy them to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas's military structure has struck against any force outside the theater of the occupation. The struggle has always been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and nationalism -- Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one's creed?
(...) Likewise, those who demean resistance to the occupation as little more than a proxy for Iran, Syria or Hezbollah are ignorant of history. The long-suffering Palestinians have gratefully accepted assistance from neighbors both near and far, Arab and Western, Muslim or otherwise. Slighting the generosity of those who sympathize with the Palestinians is hypocritical given America's billions of annual aid dollars for Israel, money that has only purchased tragedy.
(...) Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals -- the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a unified front against the occupation.
(...) Allow the Palestinian people to chart their own course, free from the influence of those who seek little more than to perpetuate the status quo. The alternative is unacceptable.