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SINCERITY, HYPOCRISY, AND CONSPIRACY THEORY IN THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2016

Lori Allen
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Abstract

Concerns about lying and sincerity in politics are common in most societies, as are concerns about conspiracy theories. But in the occupied Palestinian territory, these concerns give rise to particular kinds of effects because of the conditions of Israeli occupation. Political theorists often interpret opacity claims and conspiracy theories as responses to social disorder. In occupied Palestine, disorder and instability are standard. Opacity claims and conspiracy theories therefore require a different kind of analysis. Through an examination of the semiotic ideology of sincerity, especially as it has emerged in the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, this article argues that opacity claims act as a form of nationalist pedagogy, at once reinforcing the basic principles of sincerity of action and word, and encouraging a wariness of political spin.

Keywords

conspiracy theoryethicsFatahHamasoccupied Palestinian territory
Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 701 - 720
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: This essay has been in the works for a long time, and I thank the many people who have helped shepherd it along, especially Amahl Bishara, Andre Gingrich, Tobias Kelly, Laleh Khalili, Sian Lazar, Yezid Sayigh, Ajantha Subramanian, Winifred Tate, and Jessica Winegar. (Apologies to those whose interactions with this piece I have since forgotten.) Funding for some of the research included in this article was provided by the Palestinian American Research Center and SOAS, University of London, for which I am grateful. I also extend my thanks to the many people in Palestine who took the time to talk with me, for the research assistance of Rana Baker, for the challenging feedback of the anonymous reviewers of this journal, and especially for the encouragement of the editors, Akram Khater and Jeffrey Culang, who saw this article through to completion.

1 Runciman, David, Political Hypocrisy: The Mast of Power, from Hobbes, Orwell and Beyond (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

2 Shklar, Judith, “Let Us Not Be Hypocritical,” Daedalus 108 (1979): 24 Google Scholar.

3 Much of the recent scholarship on the problem of conspiracy and hypocrisy in politics focuses on liberal and specifically western democracies, or makes generalizing claims regarding all political situations. Runciman claims that his book parses different kinds of hypocrisy “at work in the morally pluralistic world of modern politics using the history of political thought as a guide,” and then focuses only on English thinkers, from Hobbes to Orwell. Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 4. Philosopher Judith Shklar also considers only a western context. Shklar, “Let Us Not Be Hypocritical.”

4 Pipes, Daniel, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

5 Sayigh, Yezid, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

6 International Crisis Group, Dealing with Hamas (Amman/Brussels: Middle East Report, no. 21, January 2004), 5–6, accessed 8 January 2016, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Israel%20Palestine/Dealing%20With%20Hamas.pdf, 5-6.

7 “Hamas wa-Khawnat Fath,” n.d., YouTube video, accessed 3 June 2016, http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zV1Brrrb2xI.

8 International Crisis Group, After Gaza (Middle East Report, no. 68, August 2007), 1, accessed 7 January 2016, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Israel%20Palestine/68_after_gaza.ashx; Amnesty International, “Occupied Palestinian Territories: Torn Apart by Factional Strife,” Amnesty International, 24 October 2007, accessed 3 October 2014, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE21/020/2007; Human Rights Watch, “Palestinian Authority: Punish Imam's Death in Custody, Implement Recommendations of Legislative Commission,” Human Rights Watch, accessed 20 September 2008, http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/04/isrlpa18425.htm.

9 ICHR-Independent Commission for Human Rights, The Status of Human Rights in Palestine: ICHR 17th Annual Report (Ramallah: ICHR, 2011)Google Scholar, accessed 8 October 2014, http://www.ichr.ps/en/2/6/753/ICHR-17th-Annual-Report-ICHR-17th-Annual-Report.htm#.VDZdbec9Hgo.

10 “Isabat Tifl fi Iʿtidaʾ al-Sulta ʿala Muʿtasimin,” Al-Risala Net, 15 July 2012, accessed 7 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=55555.

11 “Semiotic ideology” is Webb Keane's term to indicate a value system that mediates, interprets, and rationalizes representational economies. The term “representational economy” refers “to the dynamic interconnections among different modes of signification at play within a particular historical and social formation.” To put it another way, Keane is expanding the notion of language ideology to include the varieties of ways that people in a society think about how representations work. Keane, Webb, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 410 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 I use “ethics” or “ethical system” to refer to the standards by which people evaluate their own and others’ behaviors and dispositions as good or bad, right or wrong, when moral principles come to the fore. I use “morality,” or “moral,” to refer more to the norms and principles that are the bases of evaluation, of ethical judgments.

13 The view that the PA is corrupt is widely shared, with one poll indicating that 81 percent of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory believe that there is corruption in Palestinian Authority institutions. Tariq Dana, “Corruption in Palestine: A Self-Enforcing System,” 18 August 2015, accessed 7 January 2016, https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/corruption-in-palestine/. The Hamas video is available on YouTube: “Hamas wa-Khawnat Fath,” YouTube video, n.d., accessed 7 October 2014, http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zV1Brrrb2xI.

14 David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, 10 March 2008, accessed 30 August 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804.

15 “Al-Wajh al-Haqiqi li-Harakat Hamas,” YouTube video, n.d., accessed 7 October 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSB00sNoubA.

16 Ibid.

17 Jackals and hyenas also appear in the first work of prose fiction in Arabic, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalila wa-Dimna (an Arabic translation of an ancient Indian book called Panchatantra), which features political allegory through animal fables. In one folk story, a hyena tricks a beautiful girl, Jibayna, and takes her to his cave.

18 Carr, Summerson E., Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4 Google Scholar. The ideology of inner reference is also described in Silverstein, Michael, “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology,” in The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. Clyne, Paul, Hanks, William, and Hofbauer, C. L. (Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society, 1979), 193–247 Google Scholar. Linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine provides the clearest definition of language ideology: “Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are pervaded with political and moral interests and are shaped in a cultural setting. To study language ideologies, then, is to explore the nexus of language, culture, and politics. It is to examine how people construe language's role in a social and cultural world, and how their construals are socially positioned. Those construals include the ways people conceive of language itself, as well as what they understand by the particular languages and ways of speaking.” Judith Irvine, “Language Ideology,” Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, accessed 7 January 2016, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0012.xml.

19 Semiotic ideology is broader than linguistic ideology, and refers to the ways that people think about how representations work generally, including meaning making through actions, not just through words. Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis,” 410.

20 While Joel Robbins attributes the importance of transparency and sincerity to the influence of “many kinds of Christianity” in “modern” or “Western” linguistic ideology, there is no evidence allowing me to identify any primary source, religious or otherwise, for the predominance of sincerity in the Palestinian context. Robbins, Joel, “God Is Nothing but Talk: Modernity, Language, and Prayer in a Papua New Guinea Society,” American Anthropologist 103 (2001): 905 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robbins, “On Not Knowing Other Minds: Confession, Intention, and Linguistic Exchange in a Papua New Guinea Community,” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2008): 421–29CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

21 Keane, Webb, “Others, Other Minds, and Others’ Theories of Other Minds: An Afterword on the Psychology and Politics of Opacity Claims,” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2008): 473–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Although I bring this variety of kinds of opacity claim making together because they emerge out of a common sociopolitical context and Palestinian concerns about them take a similar form, clearly lying, conspiratorial practice, and conspiracy theorizing are not the same. Other scholars have parsed the analysis of hypocrisy (e.g., Runciman, Political Hypocrisy; Shklar, “Let Us Not Be Hypocritical”), sincerity (e.g., Keane, “Others, Other Minds”; Robbins, “God Is Nothing but Talk”; Robbins, “On Not Knowing Other Minds”), transparency and accountability ( Strathern, Marilyn, “The Tyranny of Transparency,” British Educational Research Journal 26 [2000]: 309–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and lying ( Gilsenan, Michael, “Lying, Honour and Contradiction,” in Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, ed. Kapferer, Bruce [Philadelphia, Pa.: Institute for the Study of Humanities, 1976], 191–219 Google Scholar). Pelkmans, Mathijs and Machold draw, Rhys attention to the potentially oppressive political and ideological load of labeling something a “conspiracy theory” in “Conspiracy Theories and Their Truth Trajectories,” Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 59 (2011): 66–80 Google Scholar.

23 Hellinger, Daniel, “Paranoia, Conspiracy and Hegemony in American Politics,” in Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, ed. West, Harry G. and Sanders, Todd (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 205 Google Scholar; Silverstein, Paul A., “An Excess of Truth: Violence, Conspiracy Theorizing and the Algerian Civil War,” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (2002): 644 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 646.

24 Anderson, Jon W., “Conspiracy Theories, Premature Entextualization, and Popular Political Analysis,” Arab Studies Journal 4 (1996): 96–102 Google Scholar; Hellinger, , “Paranoia, Conspiracy and Hegemony,” 206; Jane Parish, “From Liverpool to Freetown: West African Witchcraft, Conspiracy and the Occult,” Culture and Religion 6 (2005): 357 Google Scholar.

25 Marcus, George E. and Powell, Michael G., “From Conspiracy Theories in the Incipient New World Order of the 1990s to Regimes of Transparency Now,” Anthropological Quarterly 76 (2003): 325–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Silverstein, “An Excess of Truth,” 650; Jay, Martin, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville, Va. and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 8 Google Scholar; Robbins, , “On Not Knowing Other Minds”; and Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. I am making a very different argument from those of scholars who tie the normative ideal of sincere speech to Christianity, or to the formulation of modernity and Protestantism's role in it. Whereas Protestantism entails “a project of fostering and authorizing autonomous, individual selves,” Palestinian metadiscourse about sincerity and duplicity circulates in an environment in which nationalism is hegemonic; rather than religion, it is nationalism and the occupation that overcode life. Keane, Webb, “Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants,” Cultural Anthropology 17 (2002): 69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 West, Harry G. and Sanders, Todd, ed., Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 This is what much anthropology of knowledge production has aimed to do since Evans-Pritchard showed how magic made sense to the Azande. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

28 Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” New York Review of Books, 18 November 1971, 6.

29 Nelson, John S., “Politics and Truth: Arendt's Problematic,” American Journal of Political Science 22 (1978): 274 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Fliegelman, Jay, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 140 Google Scholar.

30 Hamoked, “One Big Prison—Freedom of Movement to and from the Gaza Strip on the Eve of the Disengagement Plan,” Hamoked, 29 March 2005, accessed 30 August 2012, http://www.hamoked.org/Document.aspx?dID=12800; Hamoked, “Arbitrary and Unreasonable Directive as a Precondition for Appeals to the Erez DCO Principal Correspondence,” Hamoked, 21 January 2007, accessed 30 August 2012, http://www.hamoked.org/Document.aspx?dID=8801; B'Tselem, “Background on the Restriction of Movement,” B'Tselem, 15 July 2012, accessed 30 August 2012, http://www.btselem.org/freedom_of_movement.

31 See, for example, B'Tselem's explanation of Israel's use of “administrative detention,” by which Palestinians are imprisoned without charge or trial for an indefinitely extendable length of time. B'Tselem, “Administrative Detention,” B'Tselem, n.d., accessed 29 August 2012, http://www.btselem.org/topic/administrative_detention.

32 Hamoked, “One Big Prison”; Hamoked, “Arbitrary and Unreasonable Directive”; B'Tselem, “Background on the Restriction of Movement.”

33 Yizhar Be'er and Saleh Abdel-Jawad, “Collaborators in the Occupied Territories: Human Rights Abuses and Violations,” B'Tselem, January 1994, accessed 7 January 2016, http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/199401_collaboration_suspects; Ron Yaron, “Holding Health to Ransom: GSS Interrogation and Extortion of Palestinian Patients at the Erez Crossing,” Physicians for Human Rights—Israel, August 2008, accessed 8 January 2016, http://www.christianaid.org.uk/images/PHR-I%20-%20Holding%20health%20to%20ransom.pdf.

34 Jonathan Cook, “Spotlight Shines on Palestinian Collaborators,” Al-Jazeera, 17 February 2014, accessed 7 January 2016, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/02/spotlight-shines-palestinian-collaborators-201421611151157762.html.

35 Kelly, Tobias, “In a Treacherous State: The Fear of Collaboration among West Bank Palestinians,” in Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building, ed. Thiranagama, Sharika and Kelly, Tobias (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 169–87Google Scholar; B'Tselem, “Collaborators in the Occupied Territories: Human Rights Abuses and Violations,” B'Tselem, January 1994, accessed 29 August 2012, http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/199401_collaboration_suspects.

36 Hamoked, “Behind Closer Doors: The Role of the Israeli General Security Service in Preventing Medical Treatment for Palestinian Patients,” Hamoked, 1 October 2006, accessed 30 August 2012, http://www.hamoked.org/Document.aspx?dID=8213; B'Tselem, “Knesset Enacts Racist Law,” B'Tselem, n.d., accessed 30 August 2012, http://www.btselem.org/page/knesset-enacts-racist-law.

37 B'Tselem, “Administrative Detention in the Occupied Territories,” B'Tselem, 1 January 2012, accessed 30 August 2012, http://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention/occupied_territories.

38 Allen, Lori, “Getting by the Occupation: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada,” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 453–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Adam Hanieh, “The Oslo Illusion,” Jacobin, April 2013, accessed 2 August 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/04/the-oslo-illusion/.

40 Fliegelman, Declaring Independence; Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 30; Melley, Timothy, Empire and Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

41 Misty L. Bastian, “Diabolic Realities: Narratives of Conspiracy, Transparency, and ‘Ritual Murder’ in the Nigerian Popular Print and Electronic Media,” in Transparency and Conspiracy, 65–91; Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart, “Anxieties of Influence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic Culture in Millennial America,” in Transparency and Conspiracy, 258–86; Todd Sanders, “Invisible Hands and Visible Goods: Revealed and Concealed Economies in Millennial Tanzania,” in Transparency and Conspiracy, 148–74.

42 Cf. Keane, “Others, Other Minds,” 481.

43 Zigon, Jarrett, “Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities,” Anthropological Theory 7 (2007): 131–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 The ban on “shedding Palestinian blood” was written into the 2007 Mecca Agreement between Fatah and Hamas.

45 B'Tselem, “Severe Human Rights Violations in Inter-Palestinian Clashes,” B'Tselem, n.d., accessed 29 August 2012, http://www.btselem.org/English/Inter_Palestinian_Violations/Index.asp; International Crisis Group, Ruling Palestine I: Gaza under Hamas (Gaza, Jerusalem, Brussels: Middle East Report no. 73, March 2008), 10, accessed 29 August 2012, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/israel-palestine/072-ruling-palestine-i-gaza-under-hamas.aspx.

46 Todd Sanders and Harry G. West, “Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order,” in Transparency and Conspiracy, 7.

47 Boyer, Dominic, “Conspiracy, History and Therapy at a Berlin Stammtisch,” American Ethnologist 33 (2006): 328 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Harding and Stewart, “Anxieties of Influence,” 260.

48 Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 140–41.

49 Butt, Cf. Leslie, “‘Lipstick Girls’ and ‘Fallen Women’: AIDS and Conspiratorial Thinking in Papua, Indonesia,” Cultural Anthropology 20 (2005): 412–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hellinger, “Paranoia, Conspiracy and Hegemony.”

50 Boyer, “Conspiracy, History and Therapy,” 328.

51 Hammami, Rema and Tamari, Salim, “The Second Uprising: End or New Beginning?,” Journal of Palestine Studies 30 (2001): 5–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allen, Lori, “Palestinians Debate ‘Polite’ Resistance to Occupation,” Middle East Report 225 (2002): 38–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 In his widely cited and influential book Sincerity and Authenticity, American literary critic Lionel Trilling defined sincerity as necessarily a matter of the relationship between words and interior states. With a similar focus on words, anthropologist Webb Keane considers sincerity a matter of words matching thoughts, and has argued that “a full-fledged and explicit concept of sincerity cannot be disentangled from the speech practices by which it could be pragmatically internalized and which would give public evidence for it.” But sincerity can be a dimension of any social practice, whether linguistic or behavioral. It is thus useful to expand the notion of sincerity to incorporate nondiscursive actions. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity; Keane, “Others, Other Minds,” 476; Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007), 209 Google Scholar.

53 Isra Saleh el-Namey, “Gaza Remembers PFLP Activist Slain by Israel during Protest,” Electronic Intifada, 26 December 2015, accessed 10 January 2016, https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-remembers-pflp-activist-slain-israel-during-protest/15096.

54 Nadir al-Safdy, “Kharisha: Azamat Sultat Ramallah Tuqarrib Rahilaha,” Al-Risala Net, 15 July 2012, accessed 7 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=55542; “Ishtayya: Hadha al-Iʿlan Yasubb fi Maslahat Israʾil. Hamas Tunaqish Iʿlan Qitaʿ Ghazza Muharraran fi al-Qahira,” Fateh.org, accessed 22 July 2012 http://www.fatehorg.ps/index.php?action=show_page&ID=8827&lang=ar. Document on file with author.

55 An example of accusations of lying that circulated in news media is “Abu Layla: Wafd Hamas ʿAtila Kull Muhawalat al-Ittifaq wa-Saʿa li-Tahwil al-Mubadara al-Yamaniyya ila Mujarrad Bunud li-Hiwar Lahiq,” Wafa, 21 March 2008, accessed 8 October 2014, http://www.wafa.ps/arabic/index.php?action=detail&id=4572.

56 “Fadiha Mudawwiyya li-Nadi al-Asir al-Fathawi,” Al-Risala Net, 15 July 2012, accessed 7 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=55575.

57 Peteet, Julie, “Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23 (1997): 103–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity, 45.

59 Bishara, Amahl A., Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 71 Google Scholar.

60 Ibid., 238.

61 “Hal Hall al-Sulta Huwa al-Hall?,” Al-Risala Net, 12 July 2012, accessed 11 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=55390.

62 Kamal ʿAliyan, “Man Yarsum Kharitat al-Tariq li-l-Musalaha?,” Al-Risala Net, 1 June 2012, accessed 7 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=52688; Ashraf al-Hurr, “Hamas Tattahim al-Sulta wa-Fath bi-Wadʿ Mukhattat Musbaq li-Ikhrajiha min <al-Mashhad al-Siyasi> bi-Ijraʾ al-Intikhabat fi Ajwaʾ <Ghayr Sihhiyya>,” al-Quds al-ʿArabi, 3 July 2012, accessed 7 October 2014, http://www.alquds.co.uk/index.asp?fname=data\2012\07\07-03\03qpt946.htm; Al-Risala Net, “Qarar Saʾib bi-Tariqa Khatiʾa,” Al-Risala Net, 5 July 2012, accessed 8 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=54907.

63 Muʾmin Bisisu, “al-Tariq ila al-Shiraka al-Wataniyya,” al-Quds al-ʿArabi, 14 June 2012, accessed 8 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=53484.

64 Ibid.

65 ʿ Shammakh, Amr, Mudhakkirat al-Shahid al-Duktur ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Rantisi (n.p.: Dar al-Tawziʿ wa-l-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 2004)Google Scholar.

66 Nadir al-Safdi, “Kharisha: Azamat Sultat Ramallah.”

67 Mustafa Sawwaf, “al-Sulta wa-Malaff Ightiyal ʿArafat,” Al-Risala Net, 9 July 2012, accessed 8 October 2014, http://alresalah.ps/ar/index.php?act=post&id=55151.

68 “Masdar Amni: Barhum Tajawaz al-Khutut al-Hamraʾ ʿabr Tashwih al-Muʾassasa al-Amniyya wa-Ittihamiha bi-l-Taʿawun maʿa al-Ihtilal,” Wafa, 12 July 2012, accessed 8 October 2014, http://www.wafa.ps/arabic/index.php?action=detail&id=135085.

69 Al-Hayat al-Jadida, “al-Shubaki: Ma Yajri fi Ghazza Huwa Harb min Hamas did al-Nizam al-Dimuqrati al-Filastini,” al-Hayat al-Jadida, 17 December 2008, accessed 11 October 2014, http://www.alhayat-j.com/details.php?opt=3&id=46743&cid=1361; “Fath: Tasrihat al-Ramahi Dalil ʿAqliyyat al-Iqsaʾ,” Wafa, 19 July 2012, accessed 25 July 2012, http://www.wafa.ps/arabic/index.php?action=detail&id=135085; “ʿAssaf: Qiyadat Hamas bi-l-Diffa Tadʿu li-l-Fitna wa-l-Inqilab Badala ʿan Tadʿu li-l-Musalaha,” Wafa, 16 July 2012, accessed 8 October 2014, http://www.wafa.ps/arabic/index.php?action=detail&id=135286.

70 “Abu Layla”; “Masdar Amni”; “Fath: Tasrihat al-Ramahi”; “Al-Ahmad: Mustaʿiddun li-l-Tawqiʿ ʿala al-Mubadara al-Yamaniyya Nassan wa-Ruhan lakin Wafd Hamas Jaʾ li-Taʿdiliha wa-Laysa li-l-Ittifaq,” Wafa, 22 March 2012, accessed 8 October 2014, http://www.wafa.ps/arabic/index.php?action=detail&id=4645.

71 “Fath: Tasrihat al-Ramahi.”

72 Palestinian Muslims are overwhelmingly Sunni. This term taqiyya is typically used to describe Shiʿa, and may underscore the otherness of Hamas. Adam is a pseudonym, as are all references to interlocutors. Quotes are from interviews conducted during the winter of 2007–8, through the summer of 2009.

73 In the religious thought of Shiʿi, Ismaʿili, and Sufi Muslims, the Qurʾan has an apparent meaning, and bāṭin refers to the inner meaning or esoteric sense of the Qurʾan. Like the term taqiyya mentioned above, the Shiʿi connotation of bāṭin and its use to describe Hamas may imply that the Islamist group embodies a dangerous kind of otherness.

74 Austin, J. L., How To Do Things with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

75 See, for example, Bate, Bernard, “‘To Persuade Them into Speech and Action’: Oratory and the Tamil Political, Madras, 1905–1919,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (2013): 142–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bielo, James S., “‘How Much of This is Promise?’ God as Sincere Speaker in Evangelical Bible Reading,” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (2011): 631–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jackson, Jennifer, “‘God's Law Indeed Is There to Protect You from Yourself’: The Christian Personal Testimonial as Narrative and Moral Schemata to the US Political Apology,” Language and Communication 32 (2012): 48–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Rich Wiles, “Palestinian Intellectuals Demand ‘Unity’ in Actions, not Words,” Middle East Eye, 17 July 2014, accessed 5 August 2014, http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestinian-intellectuals-demand-unity-actions-not-words-1698298533#sthash.3fGJE2wd.dpuf.

77 Robert Blecher, “Hamas and Fatah Are Both Taking On Water,” Foreign Policy, 3 June 2010, accessed 8 January 2016, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/israel-palestine/blecher-fatah-and-hamas-are-both-taking-on-water.aspx.

78 These opinions are largely echoed in these Palestinian political analysts’ views: Jamal Jumaʿ, Jamil Hilal, Nijmeh Ali, Khalil Shaheen, Jaber Suleiman, Mjriam Abu Samra, Belal Shobaki, and Alaa Tartir, “Palestinian Youth Revolt: Any Role for Political Parties?,” al-Shabaka, 23 November 2015, accessed 7 January 2016, https://al-shabaka.org/roundtables/palestinian-youth-revolt-any-role-for-political-parties/; and Haidar Eid, “Dis-participation as a Palestinian Strategy?,” al-Shabaka, 9 December 2013, accessed 10 January 2016, https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/dis-participation-as-a-palestinian-strategy/.

79 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, 25 February 1967, 78; Nelson, “Politics and Truth,” 273.