Hypocrisy seems inherent to politics. And the conviction that most politicians are duplicitous is as universally shared a belief as there may be.Footnote 1 This belief finds its most elaborate form in conspiracy theories, which also appear throughout history and across the globe. Although many are critical of the negative effects of this kind of cynical thinking and hypocrisy, political philosophers have recognized that hypocrisy itself may serve some slight positive function. For in pretending to be good, hypocrites may be a bit better than if they wore no mask of virtue. Political theorist Judith Shklar has suggested that, in condemning hypocrites, antihypocrites may scare politicians into improving their behavior.Footnote 2 But the nature of political hypocrisy, the widespread fears of and beliefs in political conspiracy, and the effects that accusations of political lying have on a society and its political relations are clearly variable.Footnote 3
The case of the occupied Palestinian territory shows the limitations of universalizing theories of political philosophy. In a place where disruption, arbitrariness, violence, and extreme disempowerment have become the norm, the effects of antihypocritical discourse have come to produce both more and less than the mild disciplining of politicians that Shklar halfheartedly recognized. This article details how notions of hypocrisy, ideas about sincerity, and suspicions of conspiracy shape political engagement among Palestinians. I argue that talk of lying, sincerity, and conspiracy in occupied Palestine ultimately express concerns about social bonds and social solidarity, and convey lessons about whether and who to trust, with whom to have solidarity, and whom to believe and rely on.
My understanding of these dynamics is based on years of fieldwork conducted primarily in the West Bank over the last two decades. I draw on my interviews with people from both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip who are of a variety of political persuasions and socioeconomic backgrounds. I also analyze Arabic media that circulates throughout the occupied Palestinian territory. Especially since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, I have observed a consistency in antihypocrisy discourse, through which Palestinians share their analyses of political talk and action, and evaluate each others’ intentions and actions. This kind of discourse about (in)sincerity, which is ubiquitous, is a means of asserting shared values. It manifests a common habit of critical thought toward the political realm that can act as a shield against demagoguery and dictatorship. It also provides a language for political point scoring against internal rivals, and reveals the fragility of a national movement that has failed to attain its goal of full statehood and genuine independence. But most of all, in demanding sincerity from their own politicians, Palestinians reassert the principle that political character, conviction, and action should be unitary, that nationalist word and deed should be sincere.
Political skepticism and conspiracy theorizing in the occupied Palestinian territory are not products of “Middle Eastern culture,” as some (such as Daniel Pipes) have claimed.Footnote 4 Rather they are a result of the insecurities and uncertainties of life under military occupation, in which those Palestinians with the most power within the broad framework of Israeli control are most shielded from scrutiny. The way in which the 1993 Oslo Accords were developed in secret and to the detriment of most Palestinians, and the desultory performance of the Palestinian Authority since then, have also fueled a widespread sense among Palestinians that hypocrisy and insincerity are the default positions of politicians. The long-running power struggle between the two main nationalist factions, Fatah and Hamas, which has split the occupied territory and the Palestinian Authority since 2007, has greatly deepened Palestinians’ cynicism and suspicion towards politics. So much so, in fact, that it threatens to undermine the expectation of sincerity in politics, and to unravel the framework of values in which the national movement was based for well over half a century.
HAMAS VERSUS FATAH: RATS AND HYENAS AGAINST TREACHERY AND DUPLICITY
The Palestinian national movement has always been dynamic, the product of multiple, sometimes contesting forces and interests. The 1980s experienced one of the movement's biggest challenges with the PLO's expulsion from Lebanon.Footnote 5 The politicization and popularity of the Palestinian Islamist movement grew in the context of this crisis.Footnote 6 After the establishment of Hamas during the first intifada, the Islamist movement's influence expanded. From the beginning, the relationship between it and the secular nationalism of the PLO was characterized by competition. The more that Fatah, the major political party in the PLO, moved towards some kind of accommodation with Israel, the more bitter the internal Palestinian conflict became. The surprising victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections intensified the rivalry.
Partially an outcome of the elections, the enmity between Hamas and Fatah took on a new character in the summer of 2007, when brutal confrontations between the two parties broke out and left over one hundred dead—with several men having been thrown off rooftops—and 1,000 wounded in the Gaza Strip. Among the wounded, many were hurt in particularly violent ways apparently intended to cause maximum pain.Footnote 8 Since then, Hamas has governed Gaza, while Fatah continues to rule the West Bank. The political and physical separation of these two parts of the occupied Palestinian territory has remained entrenched.
The acrimonious competition between the two camps has been evident in the policies each has pursued, such as the exclusion from government of those affiliated with the opposing party, and the repression of their activities within civil society.Footnote 9 It has also played out in news and party-affiliated media, where each side accuses the other of antinationalist behavior and secret plots and plans.Footnote 10 Within this bitter exchange of denunciation and countercondemnation, a shared semiotic ideology—the culturally relevant and generally shared ideas about how words, language, and meaning should function—is evident.Footnote 11 Sincerity is at the core of this semiotic ideology, and serves as a fundamental principle undergirding the ethical structure of Palestinian politics.Footnote 12
The Fatah–Hamas rivalry played out in two dueling animated videos that were circulated on the Internet in 2008. These videos exemplify the shared perception among these political contestants that duplicity is tantamount to antinationalism. A Hamas cartoon entitled “Hamas and the Treachery of Fatah” expressed the view that Fatah is corrupt and indecent, using the guns of nationalist fighters to oppress and swindle its own people.Footnote 13 It depicts Fatah as a bunch of armed rats led by a cigar-smoking Muhammad Dahlan, the Fatah strongman in Gaza who was accused of collaborating with the CIA to orchestrate a failed coup to topple Hamas there.Footnote 14 At the end of the cartoon, a calm, sage lion representing Hamas stomps on the fearful rats who scuttle away. With the Fatah rodents cleared, the scorched earth sprouts green anew (Fig. 1).
FIGURE 1. Still from a cartoon depicting Hamas as a lion seated between the West Bank and Gaza.Footnote 7
An animated video that Fatah produced in response, entitled “The True Face of Hamas,” begins with the text, “Removing the mask from the hyenas’ faces: the true face of the Hamas movement,” as ominous music plays in the background.Footnote 15 As the video proceeds the lion representing Hamas roars and its outer skin splits down the middle, exposing a psychotically laughing hyena. Terrorizing children and stealing their food, the evil-looking animal moves through the streets of Gaza, lights going out as it passes. It tears up the flag of national unity as it heads to the West Bank. The video resonates with Palestinian folklore and mythology, in which hyenas are portrayed as malicious tricksters, capable of hypnotizing people to make them follow.Footnote 17 At the end of the Fatah video, the hyena, after wreaking this path of destruction, returns to its lion mask, its green, flaming eyes glowing through (Fig. 2).
FIGURE 2. Still from a Fatah YouTube video depicting Hamas.Footnote 16
Hypnotizing duplicity, sparkling slogans hiding a bleaker reality, monstrous hyenas in lion's clothing: these condemnations are not merely utilitarian, partisan attempts to discredit the competition (although certainly they are partially that). In the contests of representation between Hamas and Fatah there is also an implicit exhortation for sincerity in politics. Such representations are examples of how national values, standards of political ethics, and the meaning of Palestinian identity are continually reaffirmed, even as faith in the people who are supposed to enact these values erodes with the growing evidence that they are not maintaining them in practice.
SINCERITY AND SEMANTIC IDEOLOGY
As revealed in these animations and other media circulating in the occupied Palestinian territory, there is a broad concern that words should be sincere (ṣādiqa or mukhliṣa), that they reveal an honesty of intention and express a correlation of word and action. Sincerity is at the core of Palestinian semiotic ideology, evaluative ideas about how things represent other things.
Any semiotic ideology encompasses ideas about what kind of moral subject uses language in particular ways. These ideas are the substrate for value judgments that people make about each other as individuals or groups. Understanding semiotic ideology is therefore key to understanding an ethical system, the standards by which people evaluate their own and others’ behaviors and dispositions as good or bad, right or wrong. Attention to semiotic ideology and ethics also provides insights into what animates conflict and forms the glue of political allegiances. It sheds light on ideas about what political actors are and should be, about how political actors should act and talk. Semiotic ideology in Palestine is a part of nationalist ideology. Nationalist ideology frames ideas of who the moral subject is, and nationalism sets the parameters against which the ways people speak are gauged.
In Palestine, according to nationalist ideology, people should be willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater social, national good, in solidarity with conationals and guided by nationalist and pure intentions. Individuals express themselves, judge, and are judged within that normative, idealistic framework. But once they are in the realm of politics, actors are more often regarded as amoral, individualistic, and power seeking. The rodents, lions, and hyenas of the sparring videos illustrate the shared concern with duplicity in the political realm, especially the duplicity of political elites (such as Dahlan).
If sincerity and related values have not been consistently enacted in the occupied Palestinian territory, there is still a common concern there about sincerity of word and deed. This concern has remained a predominant theme of discourse related to the interfactional battle between Hamas and Fatah. The value of sincerity at play in the Palestinian political realm is akin to the linguistic ideology that anthropologist Summerson Carr has termed “the ideology of inner reference,” or “an ideology that presumes that (1) ‘healthy’ language refers to preexisting phenomena, and (2) the phenomena to which it refers are internal to speakers.”Footnote 18 In other words, this ideology holds that people have true feelings and beliefs in their inner self and consciousness, and that when language and speakers are functioning properly (according to this value system, or ideology), people put those inner states into words that refer directly and transparently to them. Language does not produce or have an effect on those states, it simply expresses them.
The predominant semiotic ideology in Palestinian politics shapes worries about how representations reflect aims, whether actions accord with pronouncements, how words reveal inner intentions, and how words indicate what kind of person has uttered them.Footnote 19 This ideology is marked by a concern with transparency and opacity, with determining which words and actions are true and substantive or duplicitous and empty.Footnote 20 The shared focus on sincerity among Palestinians, and their critique of opacity and duplicity, indicates that, even amidst the violent melee and bitter divisions, they possess a shared clutch of ideals.
OPACITY AND CONSPIRACY UNDER OCCUPATION
These shared ideals, often expressed in “opacity claims” about lying, sincerity, and conspiracy, all relate to a belief “that it is impossible to know what is in the mind of another person,” but that what is in the other's mind should be reflected directly in the person's words and actions.Footnote 21 Conspiracy theories are a particular kind of opacity claim. Conspiracy is generally defined as harmful action enacted deliberately and through secret planning. Scholars often analyze conspiracy theories in isolation from the broader context of opacity claims and without reference to the regnant semiotic ideology. They do not view them in tandem with the ways that people in a society think about how representations work or should work. But their insights into the functions and effects of conspiracy theory can shed light on semiotic ideology and political ethics more broadly.
Scholarly attempts to understand the role of conspiracy in politics and society are diverse and far ranging.Footnote 22 Anthropologists have interpreted conspiracy talk as a form of resistance and a means of popular empowerment, a method of ethical critique, or a means of sustaining a “transnational imagined community” that paradoxically legitimates state power.Footnote 23 They note the prevalence of conspiracies in contexts where political decision making is very hierarchical and have analyzed indictments of politicians’ duplicity as being a means of challenging elites, and of understanding “the invisible workings of the global marketplace.”Footnote 24 Some scholars argue that the ironic stance that is typical of postmodernism leads to conspiracy theories, while others identify Christianity or Puritanism as sources for mass worry about duplicity and the fetishization of sincerity.Footnote 25
It could be that conspiracy theorizing is a universal human penchant and that the tendency to equate politics with lying is transhistorical, but their prompts, purposes, and results can only be identified by considering their specific historical, political, and social contexts. Indeed, most anthropologists insist that the stimuli for conspiracy talk and opacity preoccupations are varied and specific, as are the social and political functions that they serve.Footnote 26 While ethnographic examinations highlight the apparently “nonscientific” and distinctive ways that people try to make sense of a world full of extreme disempowerment and violence, their basic goal is to grasp the underlying logic by which, in context, these seemingly paranoid perspectives make sense.Footnote 27
The anthropological approach, which draws attention to the situations in which certain beliefs about duplicity and opacity emerge, stands in contrast to that of some political philosophers. Ignoring the particulars of specific contexts, Hannah Arendt, for example, believed that conspiracy theories are based on assumptions that the world is somehow ordered and orderly, and result from “reason's aversion to contingency.”Footnote 28 They emerge, in this view, from the need of “the masses” for consistency.Footnote 29 Political lies are efficacious and accepted, she argues, because so often they can make the world seem more sensible and reasonable than does the truth.
For Palestinians who have lived only under the arbitrary rule of military occupation, however, it is most reasonable to expect disruption. For people whose routines are regularly obstructed, but in completely arbitrary and nontransparent ways, the only constant in daily life is lack of consistency.Footnote 30 So if a hankering for reasonableness is universal, but one that is not experienced the same way everywhere, how does this affect our understanding of the nature and function of political lies and conspiracy talk? In what follows I offer some examples of how and why people living under Israeli occupation expect a certain level of uncertainty and duplicity as a norm. Israel's arbitrarily imposed and overwhelming physical control of the occupied Palestinian territory and its use of collaborators are key reasons. I go on to show how public assessments of others’ (in)sincerity, and attempts to make sense of and see beneath duplicity, are also continuous features of life under occupation. In the context of the occupied Palestinian territory, Israel's pervasive, but capricious control incubates a widespread wariness and political suspicion.
Opacity has a particular significance for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Those who govern the occupation make decisions behind closed doors, and those who control many aspects of daily life do so seemingly arbitrarily. Even the normal travels of daily life—from town to town, from job to home—may be disrupted without warning or reason. The Israeli army erects “flying checkpoints,” for example, which are temporary and erratically placed. During the height of the second intifada, the haphazard nature of the blocks, and the randomness with which they were erected or monitored, kept Palestinians in a constant state of uncertainty. The occupation makes seizure and destruction of property an ever-present threat that is unpredictably implemented. As is the seizure of person. For those subject to a justice system in which administrative detention can leave one in prison without stated reason, charge, or trial, reasonableness may be universally preferred, but is hardly the expectation that Arendt believed to be universal.Footnote 31 The only real constant in daily life is inconsistency.Footnote 32
Pressure to collaborate and actual collaborators penetrate and seep into everyday life under occupation. Israel has relied heavily on coopting Palestinians to work with them, especially as spies who provide information to facilitate the assassination or arrest of other Palestinians by Israeli forces. Israel recruits Palestinians into this role through extortion, threat, and trickery. In Israeli jails, collaborators extract unwilling confessions from unwitting prisoners. Outside of prison, Israel demands information from ill Palestinians seeking permits to get health care abroad.Footnote 33 The widespread knowledge of Israel's power to coerce, and the frequency with which Israel assassinates wanted Palestinians based on inside intelligence, means that the prevalence of collaborators is a well-known fact among Palestinians. As one Palestinian civil society activist declared, “We are an infiltrated society.”Footnote 34
In everyday life under occupation, local mysteries are profusely speculated upon, and the hypotheses generated to explain them often involve the controlling hand of the Israeli occupation authorities. Because the decision makers who govern the occupation are almost entirely inaccessible to Palestinians, and because they are in fact involved in manipulating people in secret ways, such as through the deployment of collaborators and undercover agents, it is perfectly logical and reasonable to suspect or assume the occupation's involvement in mysterious happenings.Footnote 35 During my fieldwork in the West Bank, several perplexing neighborhood events were discussed in this way. There were questions, hypotheses, and presumptions about who broke in to a youth center, who spread scandalous rumors about an aerobics class in a refugee camp, why a random youth suddenly attacked his neighbor, and why someone swiftly received a rare permit to travel out of the country. For my interlocutors, possible explanations for some of these events included the occupation's deployment of collaborators sent to disrupt the empowering social and educational activities of civic activists. Given that actual conspiracies are inherent to the occupation, such explanations were as likely as any other.
Being forced to live under a wholly nontransparent, seemingly erratic regime of a foreign military power has produced a generalized wariness among Palestinians marked by unique kinds of expectations about access to the truth, and unique assumptions about how the world is being organized. The right to health care or the right to reside with one's family can be revoked based on arbitrary, secret grounds that cannot be appealed.Footnote 36 Arrest and imprisonment can happen on the basis of secret evidence.Footnote 37 Palestinians living under occupation are acclimatized to, although not accepting of, the inconsistencies and whims of an oppressive system.Footnote 38 Their attitudes towards political power, political discourse, and the possibilities of opacity and likelihood of conspiracy are thus distinctive. The unwillingness to accept the declarations of, or expect the truth from, those in power has been ingrained through the experience of almost five decades of radical contingency and capricious power. What politicians and the powerful really mean and what they are actually doing behind closed doors is always a cipher, understood to be nontransparent, a mystery to be unraveled, potentially if not already malicious in intent and effect.
CONSPIRACY THEORY AS NATIONAL BOND
The national enemy—the Israeli military authority—cannot be trusted, and its plans, actions, and intentions can neither be known for certain nor reliably predicted. The view among Palestinians that lying and obfuscation are part of what the occupiers do has been extended to their view of their own rulers, the Palestinian Authority, as well as political factions. Many Palestinians consider the Palestinian Authority to be untrustworthy. Thus, the political entity that came into being after the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 and that is supposed to incarnate Palestinian nationalism, is seen to be full of craven compradors clinging to whatever privileges they can at the expense of the national good.Footnote 39
Such analyses, discussions, and judgments occur all the time in public discourse, news media, and everyday conversation. Political discussion is a fact of everyday life, involving young and old, teachers and taxi drivers, activists and observers. Speech and the inner intentions it conveys or obscures, actions and the claimed or true motives that drive them, the workings of the powerful and the secret or revealed plans they are implementing—these are all subjects of public and private analysis in the occupied territory. Sometimes the extent of such discussion increases.
As the ethnographic record shows, conspiracy talk arises and the volume of opacity claims increases during periods of social upset.Footnote 40 Whether by war, assassination, revolution, or large-scale changes in economic structures, interruptions to the ebb and flow of normal relations tend to produce a need in people to make sense of their new conditions by pulling back veils and seeking out what really underlies things.Footnote 41 When people perceive their conditions as negative, catastrophic to a way of life, or almost beyond imagination, anxiety about understanding and believing others is expressed in opacity claims.Footnote 42
The fighting between Hamas and Fatah in 2007 provoked an intensity of opacity claims. The violence of the conflict and the extent to which it contrasted with previous phases of in-fighting marked it as particularly acute. During the internal clashes of 1983 between PLO and anti-Arafat forces in Lebanon, for example, the fighting was bitter but never went beyond “ordinary” battles and some assassinations by “conventional” means (guns, bombs). In the wake of the Hamas takeover of Gaza, few could recall internal violence between these adversaries reaching such a personalized level of sadism. It was thus a period in which values were intensively assessed and reasserted. Crises can provoke conspiracy talk and opacity concerns because of a perceived moral breakdown in society, but they also can precipitate a time of collective moral or political contemplation, when principles of right living become an explicit focus.Footnote 43 The Hamas–Fatah fighting prompted an unusual number of opacity claims because it was such a stark shattering of any pretence to national unity, and such a blatant violation of the (rarely written but often stated) Palestinian prohibition (taḥrīm) on shedding Palestinian blood.Footnote 44
During their takeover of the Gaza Strip, Hamas forces killed tens of Fatah-associated members of the PA security services. Among the Fatah-associated members of the PA who were in Gaza at the time and survived, many left with severe and disabling injuries. Some had one or both legs amputated after being shot in the knees at point blank range by members of Hamas's Executive Force.Footnote 45 One survivor from Gaza explained the resulting social rupture to me by suggesting that the Hamas leadership gave their members drugs that allowed them to kill for twenty-four hours straight. I sat with this young man, an amputee in a wheelchair, in the cafeteria of the rehabilitation center where approximately twenty of the men who had found refuge in the West Bank were receiving treatment. I expressed my doubts about this theory, but he and the other disabled young men who were gathered around the table insisted it was true. What else could explain the venomous fury and brutal violence with which Hamas members acted?
Whether or not Hamas fueled their fighters in this way, the theory contains a number of insights. It is a moral condemnation of the Hamas leadership, which is seen to be capable of exploiting people and manipulating them with illegal substances that are generally believed to be immoral, if not religiously forbidden. It implies a deplorable level of hypocrisy on the part of Hamas, given the group’s religious roots and reputation for uncorrupt behavior. It also signals the extent to which Hamas's violence was perceived to be truly excessive and shocking.
The belief that the Hamas leadership was tricking its fighters into inhumane acts was a certain kind of conspiracy theory. However, unlike most conspiracy theories, in which “ordinary people may articulate their concerns that others, in possession of extraordinary powers, see and act decisively in realms normally concealed from view,” part of the focus in this story is the powerless: Palestinians duped by the Hamas leadership in Gaza.Footnote 46 For the Palestinians who held this theory, which circulated beyond these injured Gazans, it was only unnatural circumstances or foreign substances that could explain this inhuman behavior. Such explanations of the national split are a form of popular political theory and ethical commentary. They reflect a mass sentiment that Palestinian nationalist politics is faulty, and that the political elite is to blame.
Many social analysts understand conspiracy theories as being symptomatic of an age in which knowledge that is perceived to be necessary, or that should be available, is hidden and controlled by those in power. Conspiracy theories are an expression of the human will to order and understand in conditions of social and political alienation. Anthropologist Dominic Boyer has pronounced them to be “a therapeutic mode of sheltering a positive sense of selfhood in the shadow of a dread historical burden.”Footnote 47 Similarly, conspiracy theories during the American Revolution have been described as rationalizations allowing people to hold on to the belief that “events are the conscious consequence of specific intentions and efficacious wills” rather than chaotic contingency.Footnote 48
Conspiracy theory in Palestine, however, is not merely an index of some psychological state or an expression of fears about chaos. It also performs productive political work.Footnote 49 West Bank accounts of the conflict in Gaza suggest that the world is not as it should be, and confirm a moral ideal in the process. This dysfunction that the conflict represents is seen to be rooted as much in the goodness of the busaṭāʾ (simple people, sing. basīṭ) as in the maliciousness of the manipulators. Conspiracy theory is also moral theory.
The quality of being simple, which is how Palestinians in the West Bank regularly describe Gazans, is often considered a positive attribute in Palestinian society. Time and again, West Bankers told me that “simple people,” those perceived to be uneducated, unsophisticated, easily persuaded, especially in isolated Gaza, were being duped by Hamas politicos. Even if the label implies a sense of West Bank superiority, West Bankers use the word basīṭ to describe someone who is simple in a good-hearted way. Someone who is basīṭ is not necessarily simple minded, but rather, innocently straightforward, never scheming. It is just that transparency, that concordance of intent, action, and belief, which those who have lost faith in politics see as deficient in politicians. They accuse both factions of lacking sincerity. What the West Bank discourse about Gaza does have in common with other attempts to comprehend power through conspiracy theory is the presumption that there is a “surface to power that can be seen through and an interior that can, as a result, be seen.”Footnote 50 Conspiracy theory conveys an ideal of sincerity, reinforcing a moral preference for political action in which the surface action and words are transparent and accord with interior intent.
SINCERITY: CONFORMITY OF FORM AND CONTENT
Although the Fatah–Hamas conflict was a popular topic in Palestine around the time of the “coup” in 2007, conversations about insincerity had already been common throughout the second intifada, which began in 2000. Everyone I knew supported the active opposition to the Israeli occupation that the intifada represented, but debates about the best means for doing this were continuous, and they highlighted the importance of sincerity in Palestinian politics. These deliberations were partly prompted by the highly controversial deployment of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians inside the Green Line.Footnote 51 The militarization of the intifada was under scrutiny. Among the major concerns were issues of morality, military impact, and political effectiveness. Questions about the nationalist sincerity of the uprising's participants also spread.
Some rejected how the nationalist zeal of some of its participants was being expressed, dismissing it as tāfih (superficial, silly). When I asked my closest interlocutors, men who had been leaders during the first intifada and were now keeping to the sidelines, about the goals and motivations of the second intifada's militants who shot at tanks with rifles, they derided them for being more interested in showing off (istiʿrāḍ) with their guns than actually putting them to effective use in resisting the occupation. They surmised that while the gunmen pretended to be stirred by nationalist commitment, some of these men were motivated more by the hope for personal gain than collective liberation. Men hiding behind the guise of “nationalist militant struggler” (munāḍil) were involved in making money off of gun running, I was told, or using threats of violence in protection rackets that targeted Palestinian shopkeepers. Whether as a member of Hamas, Fatah, or any other faction, a fighter who used his gun for individual profit was engaged in self-serving behavior that ran counter to nationalist ideals of self sacrifice.Footnote 52 A political leader’s words of praise for a political activist killed by Israel illustrated the converse. Admiring the martyr's generosity, he emphasized that he was a “defiant fighter . . . and an eloquent orator whose deeds matched his words.”Footnote 53
HAMAS VERSUS FATAH
The self-serving actions of political officials was also a common target of criticism. Hamas-affiliated legislators accused the West Bank government of lying about budgets for the personal gain of individual members, and Fatah members accused the Hamas government in Gaza of hatching secret plans to “liberate” Gaza and unite it with Egypt.Footnote 54 Although obviously a means of political contest, these exchanges, and specifically their emphasis on deceitful surfaces hiding inner malevolent intention, are just as much a form of political pedagogy as they are rhetorical barbs. With every denunciation of what is improper in a political foe, with every reference made to lies circulated in news media, ideas about what is correct behavior are reinforced and the audience is reminded of the importance of being wary of false promises and pronouncements.Footnote 55
Those affiliated with Hamas regularly point to the insincerity of Fatah and the PA, and to the problem of being deceived and exploited by those who wear a nationalist façade that hides ulterior motives. In one instance discussed in an article posted on the Hamas-leaning news site al-Risala (The Message), a festival organized by a Fatah organization for the mothers of political prisoners, ostensibly to show support for them and their imprisoned sons, was revealed to be a sham. The article reports that when the women arrived carrying photographs of their sons, they discovered the event was being staged for a film, and they felt deceived. “We became nothing but advertising material for a film,” one of the mothers complained. So the women left, lest they “become a mere device for petty amusement in someone's hand.”Footnote 56
While in this case the filming was literal, the Arabized English verb of “to film” is also used metaphorically to indicate a genre of not telling the truth—it is a euphemism for lying. To say that someone has filim ʿalayk or bi-yisawī filim (do a film on you, make a film) means that he has told an untrue story, has “pulled one over on you,” is making something up in order to deceive. In the al-Risala article, the author accuses Fatah of trying to pull something over on the mothers of political prisoners, a particularly egregious offense given their importance as nationalist icons in Palestine.Footnote 57 The nationalist form of this ceremony, complete with mothers holding the photos of the absent nationalist heroes, betrayed a different, propagandistic intent, the article suggests, threatening to make those who have sacrificed their sons and their freedom for Palestine into a laughing stock.
Beyond the dishonorable exploitation of these women, the public denunciation focused on the Fatah club's aestheticization of politics, what historian Martin Jay usefully glosses as “the domination of rhetorical or figural over literal and sincere modes of speech.”Footnote 58 In Palestinian public discourse there is a constant effort to push back against any attempt to let politics be turned into a public relations exercise, to ensure that the images floating in front of citizens match the reality of actions and intentions behind the scenes, and to call attention to the gap between the two.
The importance of the form–content distinction in Palestinian linguistic ideology is most expressively captured in the Palestinian colloquial phrases ḥakī fāḍī, empty talk, and kalām fī al-hawāʾ, words in the air. The phrase ḥakī fāḍī refers to meaningless talk, words without substance. An idiomatic American English translation of ḥakī fāḍī might be “hot air.” Just as someone full of hot air may speak in a puffed up way of great exploits and promise grand things, someone whose talk is ḥakī fāḍī is easily dismissed, not to be taken seriously, because there is no reality or truth to what that person is saying. Kalām fī al-hawāʾ, like ḥakī fāḍī, are words so light that they can float away, making no difference in the world that they claim to represent or influence.
Anthropologist Amahl Bishara, commenting on a New York Times interview with a Palestinian child in the Gaza Strip, captured a perfect example of how such semiotic ideology functions in the context of political-ethical judgment. The New York Times journalist quoted the boy: “‘Peace,’ he said with scorn, ‘is a word that flies in the air.’” One of Bishara's interlocutors interpreted the newspaper quote, saying: “I can imagine a fourteen-year-old boy talking . . . and saying ‘peace is just talk in the air’ . . . It means it is not tangible. All of them talk about peace, but for him, for the boy, it is all in the air.”Footnote 59 As Bishara observed, “‘peace’ as a theoretical term had little currency for many Palestinians.”Footnote 60 It is a nice word promising great things. But many consider the so-called peace process to be just a farce. Peace has no reality on the ground.Footnote 61 This skepticism is a result of many years of periodic negotiations coming on the back of the vague and unfulfilled promises for sovereignty that the Oslo Accords offered, which have only seemed to buy time for Israel's expanding settlement project.
Although any peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians has been unimaginable for most in the occupied Palestinian territory for years, various leaders have promised “peace” between Fatah and Hamas intermittently since 2007. There have been six formal reconciliation agreements (and one public reaffirmation of prior agreements) between the two parties, none of which has changed matters on the ground. How to restore trust between Fatah and Hamas, and whether or not the warring factions are sincere in their desire for reconciliation, have been frequently expressed concerns in public discourse.Footnote 62 Political analyses highlight the distinction between deceitful pretense and real, unified nationalism with “strong roots deep in the society.”Footnote 63 A commentator in al-Risala condemned the PA for exploiting unity as a slogan for the West Bank government's own political purposes.Footnote 64 He warned against any attempt by PA members to ingratiate themselves with the people through “pretty slogans” and “glittering expressions” that have nothing to do with “reality.”
In contrast, Hamas has asserted about itself that there is “absolute correspondence between what we say and what we do,” as Hamas leader ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Rantisi wrote in his memoirs.Footnote 65 As a result of this correspondence between intent and action, he continued, Hamas enjoys “high credibility and the people trust us.” A consistent feature of Hamas discourse is the contention that behind the words spoken by and visible actions of other political groups lies nefarious activity designed for the benefit of select individuals. Surface talk, whether pleasing or simply obfuscating, is a shell that members of Fatah and the PA use to manipulate the people while materially benefiting themselves as individuals. In one instance, Hamas member Hasan Khraysha, the second deputy speaker in the Legislative Council, accused the West Bank Palestinian Authority of trying to create the impression that the government was experiencing a financial crisis so that the population would expect fewer services.Footnote 66 He requested that the government in Ramallah communicate in a more “transparent” and straightforward manner the truth about the PA's finances. And since the news station Al-Jazeera re-opened the question of how former Palestinian President Yasir Arafat died, with many believing that Israel had somehow poisoned him, Fatah and the PA have been accused of covering up the truth.Footnote 67 It would seem from Hamas rhetoric that the PA and Fatah are committing forms of deception, engaging in conspiracy everywhere.
MANY AGAINST HAMAS
Accusations that factional and individual interests are prioritized over the shared national good are just as prominent in Fatah's criticisms of Hamas, which is decried for its subterfuge and maneuverings in pursuit of its own party-specific political gains.Footnote 68 The focus on the “true” inner ideology of Hamas underscores the accuser's canny ability and, by extension, that of Fatah to look past the deceiving surface and see the “coup mentality which is ‘nesting’ in the heads of the Hamas leaders.” At the same time, it serves to condemn Hamas for its duplicity (izdiwājiyya).Footnote 69
In Fatah's portrayals, the antinationalist behavior of Hamas is all the worse for the duplicitous forms it takes. Fatah has repeatedly charged Hamas with agreeing to a unity deal in public and then refusing to implement its side of the bargain.Footnote 70 Because “it is easy for them to make pronouncements in the morning and negate them in the evening,” Hamas has no credibility (miṣdāqiyya).Footnote 71 Adam, a Palestinian General Intelligence officer in the West Bank whom I interviewed, invoked the Islamic term taqiyya (religiously validated dissimulation about one's faith) to describe Hamas members’ willingness to lie unabashedly to protect themselves.Footnote 72 According to this line of argument, treachery and backstabbing characterize the Islamic Resistance Movement, which has “revealed its true self to be one of coups and selfishness.” Voicing a similar sense of vindicated suspicions, a Ramallah resident and Fatah loyalist talked to me about the Fatah party conference being held in Bethlehem in August 2009, which he told me Hamas was not permitting Fatah members from Gaza to attend. He said, “There is no national unity. It's not religion or politics, but the seat of power. That's all they are after. Hamas has exposed its true self.”
Beyond the partisan editorial pages there are civil society activists and observers from among the general public who are convinced that the way Hamas's members speak publicly is different from how they actually think and “raise their people.” They believe that it is only within the Islamists’ inner circle that the truth of Hamas's motives and plans resides. A self-identified secular Palestinian analyst of Islamism told me he was skeptical of the prospects for my research into Hamas: “Hamas are bāṭiniyīn [concealers, hidden].Footnote 73 You don't know what they really believe and you won't find out.” As an example he pointed to Hamas's use of the language of human rights, which in his view they deployed merely to placate the west. He observed that it was only “when the US started talking about democracy, women's rights, and human rights that Hamas complied with a similar response.” Human rights activists and others were equally suspicious of Hamas's manipulations of liberal discourses and projects. One NGO director told me that he refused to work with Hamas on a boycott campaign against Israel, not only because Hamas is against the secular social agenda he personally supported, but also because their participation “would put a good face on Hamas.” He would have been helping them in a ruse, not in a sincere political effort.
Similar themes of insincerity on the surface and dangerous inner realities ran through the conversation I had with a Bethlehem-area preacher and former Hamas member, Shaykh Lauʾay. He talked with me about the movement and the violent confrontations between Hamas and Fatah.
The problem is with one who says, “I am Muslim and that is my frame of reference [marjaʿiyyatī].” But then there is a big gap between theory and behavior. I met a sample of Hamas leaders in [Israeli political] prison and I saw the contradictions between the speech I heard and reality. A person might speak the most beautiful words, and I'd see him behave in a totally different way. Hamas has no credibility. There is lying. The truth is lost. There are two kinds of development in a person: development in the style of speech, and development in thinking. Hamas has only the former. Meaning tactics and public relations. But in reality, their thinking is the same. Perhaps their structure of thought is incapable of change.
The shaykh and others in the Bethlehem area refugee camp where I met him condemned both the hypocrisy and the maliciousness that Hamas's “beautiful words” concealed. I received a similar response when I remarked to a friend, Nizar, about the effusiveness of the hospitality of two Hamas spokesmen I had just interviewed. They had been very friendly and made a show of sending someone out to get sweets to offer me. Nizar shook his head knowingly, rejecting my naïve appreciation of this cordial behavior. He had been in political prison with one of these men during the first intifada. “You should have seen him in prison,” he said. “He was the most rageful, hateful one of them all. If you weren't Hamas, you were loathed.” Nizar offered this experience as more evidence supporting his opinion of Hamas as lying and deceitful characters.
Palestinians are usually intensely wary of politicians and their untrustworthiness, and the performative effects of talk about sincerity in such a nationalist, but divisive, context are politically salient.Footnote 74 Given the ways in which the power of the Israeli military occupation is felt in Palestinians’ everyday lives—arbitrary, erratic, and obscure—one who can see beyond the surface of others’ speech and actions has a particular political value. The decriers who recognize the insincerity and fraudulence of a political contestant show themselves to be astute and, literally, insightful—able to see into the real, inner workings of another, and of others’ political plans. Such critics also position themselves as channels giving access to the interiors of conationals, bringing secrets into the open light where national unity can develop on a truer basis. In this way, anyone who demands transparency and identifies what is obscured, anyone who reveals the dangerous gap between surface and content in others’ politics, helps his or her conationals transcend the geographical, political, and even individual divisions that are a danger to nationalism and national solidarity. These powers and values are signaled through the message: “I know the inner truth of others and can help you understand, too.”Footnote 75
CONCLUSION
As the extent of the disputatious discourse I analyze here suggests, the Palestinian political arena is replete with critical thinkers who are in persistent debate about the meaning and parameters of their nation and national movement. I characterize them as critical thinkers because they continuously question each other's motives, probing why and how they resist the occupation. They challenge the claims of those who govern them, pushing back against the growing authoritarianism of the Palestinian Authority while expressing suspicion about the goals and methods of the political leadership.
This critical discourse is also a means of engaging in divisive party politics, of course, and sincerity talk and conspiracy theorizing do not always produce behavior directed toward the common national good. Nevertheless, the kinds of metadiscourse and talk about intention that I have analyzed here form a common language of political contestation. The semiotic ideology that underlies this discourse is a core feature of Palestinian nationalist ideology, and it reflects a set of shared representational and moral norms.
This much is obvious from reactions to the attempted reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas in June 2014, which generated some cautious hope that unity was a possibility, tempered by wariness that the attempt would prove merely cosmetic. Many Palestinians commented that the unity needed to be substantive, “not only a ‘paper agreement’ between Hamas and Fatah.”Footnote 76 By the summer of 2015, during my latest research visit to the West Bank, little hope was evident. Indeed, many Palestinians, especially younger ones, have turned away from politics altogether. One outside observer noted in 2010 that “neither Fatah nor Hamas is able to mobilize popular passions,” and this remains true six years later.Footnote 77 Among those who are still seeking to make a difference by opposing the occupation and trying to improve their own political systems, there was disdain for the traditional political parties.Footnote 78
Throughout all of these forms of expression, from the everyday commentary to the op-eds and animated videos, there is a consistency of concern amidst the insults and accusations. The extent of the doubt expressed about others’ intentions could be read as a politically crippling generalized distrust. It could be a “peculiar form of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything” of the sort that Arendt diagnosed as being typical of totalitarian regimes. Systems such as these are so destructive, she grimly concluded, because they destroy “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world. . . . And for this trouble there is no remedy.”Footnote 79
But in the occupied Palestinian territory, conspiracy tales are a form of popular moral theory offering political lessons. Widespread attention to duplicity as expressed through opacity claims also reinforces shared principles of an ethical system, and encourages a constructive vigilance about political actors and political spin. In contrast to the American experience that Arendt and others described, Palestinians’ attention to moments of insincerity and their accusations of duplicity are a protest against the substitution of image making for policy. Instead of questioning the very possibility of truth, the epistemology of suspicion and circulation of conspiracy theories reinforce sincerity as the moral ideal and political touchstone against which words and deeds are appraised. That the national enemy is the greatest source of uncertainty and duplicity helps account for the resilience of the ideals of sincerity in the occupied Palestinian territory.
