A Bad Week for the Muslim Brotherhood

Ben Cohen / JNS.org

Ekrem Imamoglu, ousted Istanbul Mayor from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), speaks during an interview with Reuters in Istanbul, Turkey, May 9, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer.

It’s not been a good week for two of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most prominent affiliates. In Gaza and in Turkey, the final days of the holy month of Ramadan have been marked by angry demonstrations calling for an end to the rule of, respectively, Hamas and the Justice and Development (AKP) Party.

The demonstrations are not connected and are not referencing each other. Their targets, however, are intimately connected—through their ideological fealty to the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Islamist movement that emerged nearly a century ago seeking to impose Sharia law, and, more immediately, through the energetic backing for Hamas provided by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime.

In the Turkish case, the protests were sparked by the regime’s arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu—the mayor of Istanbul who had planned to challenge Erdoğan for the presidency—on fabricated charges of corruption. A member of the secular Republican People’s Party who has said that he considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization, Imamoglu has been vilified by the regime, to the point of having his Istanbul University degree annulled. Under Turkey’s constitution, presidential candidates must possess a college degree, so Erdoğan’s move was an effective if slimy way of shifting his most credible opponent out of the running—for now, at least.

The Turkish authorities have responded violently to the protests, arresting nearly 2,000 people. Such behavior is consistent with Erdoğan’s record, particularly since he overcame an alleged coup attempt a decade ago. According to the US State Department’s most recent report on the woeful state of human rights in Turkey, Erdoğan’s regime is guilty of such crimes as torture, enforced disappearance, pursuing and harassing opponents based abroad, gender-based violence and persecution of the Kurdish minority. Media freedom is heavily restricted, with Turkey prominently listed among those countries where journalists are routinely imprisoned.

Despite its dreadful domestic record, its support for terrorist proxies in neighboring Syria and its lionizing of Hamas, Turkey remains a member of NATO and a candidate member of the European Union. Should the threat posed by Iran to the Middle East eventually be neutralized, Turkey stands ready to assume Tehran’s mantle, with the notable advantage that, unlike Iran’s rulers, Erdoğan shamelessly participates in the institutions created by Western democracies while decrying and undermining the values and policies these same institutions represent.

Over in Gaza, Hamas—lauded by Erdoğan as a “resistance organization that strives to protect its lands”—is separately facing the wrath of its own people. During its long reign in Gaza since 2007, Hamas has periodically faced local opposition over its corruption and the brutal character of its rule. Yet the current demonstrations, which began after Israel issued evacuation orders for the northern part of the enclave following the resumption of rocket attacks against Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza border, are unprecedented. Protestors are calling for an end to Hamas rule during a time of war no less. Their chants include “Out, out Hamas,” “Our children’s blood is not cheap” and the simple “Stop the war.”

As I noted on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, a distinct sense of war fatigue was already settling in among many ordinary Palestinians. Even so, fatigue at being relentlessly bombed by Israel has not translated into serious regret for the Oct. 7 atrocities, during which thousands of Palestinian civilians crossed the border alongside Hamas to take part in the slaughter and the mass rapes. Quite a few commentators have pointed out that, even under Nazi rule, there were many Europeans who risked their lives to save beleaguered Jews, yet in Gaza—as borne out in the testimonies of some of the freed hostages—not a single Palestinian has done the same on behalf of the abducted Israelis. Even now, as the current wave of protests highlights widespread dissatisfaction with their Hamas rulers, Palestinians have refrained from demanding the release of the remaining hostages and a definitive end to terrorist provocations and attacks upon Israel. Doing so would, of course, secure an end to the war that has destroyed their homes and livelihoods.

Even at this stage, it’s possible to draw two conclusions from the Gaza protests.

First, the very fact that they are taking place at all demonstrates the degree to which Israel’s military campaign has degraded Hamas’s enforcement capabilities. As a result, Hamas has been compelled to issue contradictory messages regarding its view of the protests. On the one hand, Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim tried to spin them as demonstrations of anger against Israel. But on the other—and perhaps this is a more truthful reflection of the terror group’s view—a statement issued by the “Factions of Resistance,” which includes Hamas, claimed that the protests “persist in blaming the resistance and absolving the occupation, ignoring that the Zionist extermination machine operates nonstop,” threatening that “these suspicious individuals are as responsible as the occupation for the bloodshed of our people and will be treated accordingly.”

Second, the protests are an acknowledgment by the exhausted Gazans that Israel cannot be defeated militarily and that any future attempts at a pogrom will be met with a similarly devastating response. If Israel cannot be defeated on the battlefield, then how will Hamas fulfill its goal of eliminating the Jewish state as a sovereign entity? Through democratic means? It’s hard to see many Israelis voting for the dissolution of their own state to live under the rule of those who would rape their daughters and murder their babies.

The realization is dawning among Palestinians that the Oct. 7 pogrom was a tactical success but a long-term failure. Israel isn’t disappearing. And maybe that’s the best we can hope for at this juncture—a peace based on grudging acceptance of Israel’s reality, combined with the fear that any attempt to undo that reality will result in the kind of military campaign that we have witnessed over the last 17 months. In a Middle East without Hamas and without Erdoğan—neither an easily attainable prospect, but far more so than the aim of wiping Israel from the map—that cold peace could blossom into something with more meaningful value.