Power shifts in Palestine
Inside Hamas: the untold story of militants, martyrs and spies
By Zaki Chehab
Published by IB Tauris, 2007, £16-99
Reviewed by
Manny Thain
THIS IS a fascinating insight into Hamas, the
Palestinian Islamist movement which has taken control of the Gaza Strip.
Zaki Chehab, a leading Palestinian journalist, has closely followed its
emergence over the last 20 years into a pivotal player on the
Israel-Palestine stage. Hamas is the main rival to the Palestine
Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Fatah (the faction of president
Mahmoud Abbas and former leader, Yasser Arafat).
Chehab begins with Hamas’ victory in elections to
the Palestine Legislative Council on 25 January 2006. Hamas won 74 of
the 132 seats, with 45 going to Fatah, three to the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), two each to the Democratic Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and Third Way, and several
independents.
The result was not what the polls had predicted, or
Israel’s intelligence services expected, a source of anger in the
Israeli press: "If they don’t know what’s happening in the Palestinian
territories, how are we going to rely on them for what’s happening in
Iran?" railed an editorial in the daily, Yedioth Ahronoth. It was
revealed that the ‘intelligence’ was largely gleaned from the internet.
Hamas had boycotted the previous elections in 1996
in protest at the Oslo peace accords signed by the PLO and Israeli
government in 1993 and 1994. This time, Hamas had decided to stand nine
months in advance, its election name translating as ‘For change and
reform’. Hamas highlighted Fatah’s inability to tackle poverty,
unemployment and corruption. According to Chehab, Hamas "omitted any
reference to their ambitions to destroy Israel, even hinting at a
measured rapprochement". (p5) It does stand for the introduction of
sharia law and the eventual destruction of the Israeli state, although
that does not necessarily preclude short-term deals.
On 26 January 2006, Gaza City was festooned with
green flags: ‘Islam is the solution’. On 29 March, the US severed
diplomatic and financial ties with the newly sworn-in government. And
within two months, the Israeli state had arrested ten Hamas ministers,
24 MPs, several council leaders, and a large number of other senior
figures.
The Hamas leadership had accepted the need for a
coalition government with Fatah. An 18-point ‘prisoners’ document’ gave
the Palestinian Authority overall power to negotiate on behalf of its
people and was signed by imprisoned leaders from Fatah, Hamas, PFLP,
DFLP and Islamic Jihad on 26 May 2006. It called for the establishment
of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East
Jerusalem, with the right to return for all refugees. It aimed to unite
the military factions under one umbrella, and included a cautious
mention of Israel’s right to exist.
The agreement between Hamas and Fatah crumbled as
fighting broke out between their armed wings. The Gaza Strip was taken
over by Hamas and is currently under economic and diplomatic siege from
the Israeli state and US-led ‘international community’. Fatah controls
the West Bank and is negotiating with Israel’s government.
The story behind how Hamas got to this point is
remarkable. It is a story of poverty and desperation, oppression,
commitment, organisation and charismatic leadership. Hamas’ most
important leader was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Born in 1938, he was moved to
a refugee camp near Gaza City in 1948. After he damaged his spinal cord
in an accident in 1952 he was quadriplegic. By the 1960s, he was
attracting large crowds to his weekly sermons.
At this time, Gaza was under Egyptian control. In
1966, in an operation against the Muslim Brotherhood, Yassin and others
were arrested and accused of trying to overthrow the Egyptian state.
Because of his health, Yassin was put under house arrest on condition he
did not preach – a condition he broke immediately.
The six-day war in June 1967 saw Israel take control
of the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordon, and occupy
Syria’s Golan Heights. The PLO grouped together a number of
organisations, carrying out military operations against Israeli forces
and Jewish settlers. It had training camps in Syria and Jordan.
The main influence for Yassin and many other
Islamists was the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 in Egypt
by Hassan al-Banna to oppose the creeping secularisation and
westernisation of Egypt after the fall of the Ottoman empire. It became
a political organisation in 1936, and set up groups in Palestine, Jordan
and Syria. In Egypt under Gamal Nasser, thousands of Muslim Brotherhood
activists were imprisoned and executed. The movement was forced
underground, "… leaving the 1950s and 1960s to the Arab nationalists,
communists and others on the left of the political spectrum", says
Chehab. (p19)
There was a bit more to it than that. Following the
second world war, mass movements erupted all around the world: from Cuba
to Algeria, France to Czechoslovakia, Vietnam to Mozambique. There was
also a general acceptance that there is a viable alternative to
capitalism – socialism – even though the only existing models were based
on the Stalinist former Soviet Union. In spite of the severe repression
and economic mismanagement caused by top-down bureaucratic ‘planning’,
the Stalinist states provided healthcare, education and infrastructure;
the Soviet Union rose from an impoverished dependent state to a
superpower.
The dominant feature of that post-war period was the
leftward radicalisation of workers and the poor. It was the failure of
these movements to fundamentally improve the lives of the masses which
created the fertile ground for a later revival of right-wing political
Islam. The regimes became increasingly authoritarian, living and working
conditions became increasingly harsh. Then, when the Stalinist system
disintegrated in 1989-90, many people proclaimed the death of socialism.
It is into that political vacuum that the Islamists have stepped.
Yassin set up an Islamic organisation in 1976,
helping to form the Islamic Compound, of which he was president from
1978-83 (when he was imprisoned). Chehab shows that the Israeli state
contributed to the growth of Hamas: "The Israeli government perceived
its staunch enemy to be the nationalist and secular PLO and, by allowing
Islamist rivals to flourish, believed that opposing Palestinian groups
would do its work on the ground in a way that did not necessitate active
Israeli involvement". (p20)
By the early 1980s the Islamic Compound was the
largest foundation in Gaza. By the beginning of the first intifada in
December 1987, the Islamist groups which were to form Hamas were well
established.
The intifada had erupted in Jabaliya refugee camp
where 60,000 people lived in urban squalor just north of Gaza City. The
funerals of four Arab workers on 8 December turned to confrontations
with Israel Defence Forces (IDF) positions. (All Palestinian groups
claim the credit for starting the intifada which was, in reality, a
popular uprising.)
Hamas was set up on 8/9 December at an emergency
meeting called to discuss the situation. It made its first statement on
14 December, calling for an escalation of action throughout the Gaza
Strip. It was named the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al Mokawama
al Islamiya – HMS). Hamas (zeal in Arabic) was chosen as the acronym.
Hamas has a number of wings: political,
communications, security, youth, intifada, prisoners. The youth wing,
predominantly men under the age of 18, mobilise strikes and demos,
graffiti, support bereaved families, organise education for students
locked out of colleges, etc. The precursor of the military wing now
known as the al-Qassam brigades (Ez Ed Din al-Qassam) was set up by
Yassin and headed by Salah Shehada in 1983. From the beginning, Hamas
launched daring, even foolhardy, attacks and kidnappings.
Yassin was arrested again on 18 May 1989, his
year-long trial providing great publicity for Hamas. He was charged with
establishing a mujahedeen organisation with the aim of eradicating
Israel and replacing it with an Islamic nation. He was sentenced to life
but was released on 1 October 1997 in exchange for two Mossad (Israeli
secret service) agents who had bungled an assassination attempt on
another Hamas leader, Khalid Mishal, in Jordan.
Hamas’ first suicide bomber, Raed Zakarneh, struck
on 6 April 1994, killing eight Israelis at a bus stop. This was in
response to Baruch Goldstein who had killed 29 worshippers at the al-Ibrahimi
mosque in Hebron with a hand grenade and automatic rifle.
By October 1994, Hamas’ leading explosives expert,
Yehia Ayyash, was responsible for the deaths of 70 Israelis with over
400 injured. His family members were rounded up and tortured. The
electricity to his village was cut off in collective punishment. Ayyash
was killed by an explosive device in a mobile phone he was using on 5
January 1996. Kamal Hammad, the informer who had led Israeli forces to
Ayyash, was reportedly paid a million dollars and moved to a safe house
inside Israel.
Salah Shehada was killed when an Israeli F-16
fighter jet fired a one-ton ‘smart’ bomb at the apartment block he was
in. Sixteen civilians were also killed, nine of them children (Ra’ed
Mater was 18 months old, Diana Rami Mater two months). Then prime
minister, Ariel Sharon, considered the operation a great success.
Yassin was killed by camera-guided missiles on 22
March 2004. He was replaced by Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, a doctor who was
also brought up in a Gazan refugee camp. He was a co-founder of the
Islamic Compound and Hamas. Rantisi was held under house arrest in 1981
for refusing to pay taxes and calling doctors out on a general strike.
The Israeli state sold off his medicines and equipment. In 1986 he was
barred from working as a doctor because of his political activism, after
which his political activity increased.
Rantisi was the first to be arrested as a Hamas
leader, on 15 January 1988. He was jailed for 21 days for trying to stop
IDF soldiers breaking into his room. On 4 March he started a
two-and-a-half year sentence for launching Hamas and editing its first
statement. He was released on 4 September 1990 but was detained three
months later for a year, before being deported to Lebanon in December
1992. He then coordinated operations between Gaza and those in exile.
Rantisi was assassinated on 17 April 2004, his car
hit by rockets fired from an Israeli helicopter. Khalid Mishal, head of
the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, took effective control.
Israel’s deportation policy helped Hamas’ influence
spread. From the end of 1999, nearly 500 Hamas members were deported to
southern Lebanon. Chehab notes a shift in the camps: "Previously, the
PLO had been admired for spending generously on these community projects
but, following the first Gulf war when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Gulf
states punished the PLO for supporting Iraq, depriving it of the funding
it had received since the 1960s. Islamic charities in the Gulf region
began switching their financial generosity and allegiances to Hamas".
(p130)
Maintaining the cohesion of the movement was not
easy, especially treading the tightrope of international relations. The
importance of this task was illustrated when Yassin was released in 1997
and toured the Arab Emirates, Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South
Africa, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Hamas gained as a consequence of antagonisms between
the Iranian regime under Ayatollah Khomeini from 1979 and Arafat.
Firstly, the PLO tried to intervene in the Tehran US embassy hostage
crisis from November 1979. Then the PLO backed Iraq in the Iran-Iraq
war, which began on 22 September 1980! In November 1994, Iranian
Revolutionary Guards and demonstrators broke into the Palestinian
embassy in Tehran, demanding the replacement of PLO staff by Hamas and
Islamic Jihad. Iranian media described the PLO as agents of Israel and
the US. The PLO also fell out of favour with the Syrian regime in the
mid-1990s, while Hamas opened a bureau in Damascus.
On the other hand, the links between Hamas and the
Muslim Brotherhood stoke up the suspicions of the regime in Egypt. And
Jordan attempts a precarious balance between deals with Israel, close
geographical, cultural and economic ties with the West Bank, and strong
links with the Muslim Brotherhood, which helped defend the regime from
left-wing Palestinians trying to overthrow the monarchy in the 1970s.
The concluding paragraph of this book sums up
Chehab’s approach: "The facts on the ground are that, whatever Hamas’
political fortunes, they are not just going to melt into the background,
nor will any military action succeed in eradicating them… Hamas is not
some alien guerrilla force. It is someone’s brother, neighbour, or the
guy who gives your son money for his education. For as long as these
people represent the Palestinian people at the ballot box, the west and
any future Palestinian Authority will have to accept it for what it is –
a leopard that is unlikely to change its spots – and negotiate with
Hamas". (p227)
At first sight that seems to be a perfectly
reasonable view to take. But there is an unbridgeable gulf between the
positions of the US-backed Israeli state and Hamas. The only meaningful
discussions will take place when Palestinian and Israeli working-class
people come together to try to resolve questions of economic
development, resource sharing and borders.
Unfortunately, that looks a long way off at present.
It would require mass action and democratic control of the movement by
the mass, as opposed to small-scale terrorist acts such as suicide
bombings, which reinforce the grip of the Israeli state on its own
population and give it the excuse to bulldoze homes, kill and round up
civilians. It would require class appeals to fight against poverty and
exploitation.
The desperate plight of the Palestinians is
reflected in their struggle. They have seen peace deals come and go.
They have been lied to and betrayed by their own leaders. The question
is not whether they wholeheartedly support Hamas. But what alternative
is there? The policies of the Israeli state are designed to
systematically humiliate, criminalise and brutalise the whole of the
Palestinian population. Zaki Chebab sums up the current impasse (p101):
"Israel’s quest to ghettoize the Palestinians served to radicalise the
population. The desire for vengeance and the resulting cycle of blood
and death have created the ideal conditions and fertile recruiting
ground for Hamas".
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