Hamas refused to go along, and the fighting continued. In January, another interfactional killing spree left dozens more dead. Abbas’s Presidential Guard stormed the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, claiming its labs and classrooms were being used to store weapons and that from its tall buildings Hamas militants had fired rockets at the nearby al-Azhar University, a pro-Fatah institution. Hamas leaders claimed that Fatah gunmen were firing at the Islamic University from Azhar. Spilling both ways, violence and kidnapping became the order of the day.
In a surprise initiative, Saudi Arabia invited the two warring factions to the holy city of Mecca to hammer out a deal. According to reports, the Saudi offer included a promise to bankroll the Palestinian government to the tune of about $1.2 billion should the West not resume aid to the PA, a thinly veiled attempt to counter the influence of Iran. Neither side could afford to retreat from such an offer, and they agreed to pursue a unity government.
Cautiously heralded as a blueprint for Palestinian reconciliation, the Mecca agreement could also be analyzed as Hamas’s first step in distancing itself from national leadership. In many respects, the next election will be a referendum on Hamas’s willingness and ability to deliver what most Palestinians want: an independent state free from occupation. Should Hamas win again, it would be forced to accept being a governing body responsible to an electorate which, this time, would demand that promises made be kept. Faced with this proposition, and with having to disavow ideological positions seen as unworkable, is Hamas reconsidering its options? And if Hamas retrenches, if it returns to being an oppositional force gaining street credibility by providing services but opts out of Palestinian national politics, will Palestinians accept a return to a corrupt Fatah-run PA as their formal representative?
In the 1970s, Yasser Arafat’s embryonic Palestine Liberation Organization (plo), far away in Amman and later in Beirut and Tunis, brought international recognition to the Palestinian struggle but did little to manage the continuing poverty and despair brought about by the Israeli occupation. Filling the vacuum on the ground was the Islamic Center, a network of institutions under the leadership of a refugee cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Islamic nationalist group, the Islamic Center’s agenda was redemption through Islamic societal reform. Where few others would help them, Palestinians found that the Islamic Center provided education, health care, agricultural land, food, donations, and, most importantly, hope. More concerned with battling the insurgency and terrorist threats from the plo, Israel tacitly approved of these activities. However, between 1967 and 1987, the number of mosques in the West Bank grew from 400 to 750, and in the Gaza Strip from 200 to 600. Both regions became more radicalized, and there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of dynamic leaders and activists to advance the cause. Beneath Israel’s preoccupation with the plo, a new phenomenon was emerging.
Then came Hamas itself, born of the first intifada, when popular revolt demanded a more active resistance to Israel. On December 9, 1987, a wheelchair-bound and quadriplegic Sheikh Yassin invited a small group of senior Islamic Center officials to his Gaza City home. The previous day, a traffic accident involving an Israeli military jeep had killed four Palestinians and touched off riots across the occupied territories. Many Palestinians believed that the killing was intentional—army payback for the earlier stabbing death of an Israeli settler while he was shopping in Gaza City’s market. The uprising spread quickly, fanned by collective frustration at Israel’s occupation, and the revered and religious public figures in Sheikh Yassin’s home sought to capitalize on the public’s rage by vying for leadership of the intifada. By the end of the day, the humanitarian ideologues (educators and doctors, in fact) had sketched the blueprint for the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Although constituting itself as part of a global jihad, the movement was careful to maintain strong ties to the local struggle. It appropriated the name of Izz al-Din al-Qassam—a Galilean peasant who led a revolt against the British in the mid-1930s—for its military wing, the Qassam Brigades, and called its homemade mortars and rockets, used ever since to kill scores of Israeli civilians, Qassam rockets. And yet, despite its leadership role in the first intifada, by 1993 Hamas had reaped no real political reward. The Oslo Accords, signed that year, had delivered a rival movement to Palestinian soil—Arafat’s Fatah-led plo.
“We have always believed that for people to become convinced to join Hamas, the plo should fail by virtue of its own policies,” said Haniyeh’s foreign minister, Mahmoud al-Zahhar, then a Hamas spokesperson, in 1994. “Hamas is not in a hurry. We know that the plo’s practice will inevitably lead to its downfall. There is no need therefore to bring this about through confrontation.” At the time, Hamas was foundering beneath the optimism of Oslo, which it opposed, and Sheikh Yassin was in an Israeli prison. But in late 1997, a botched Mossad assassination attempt of Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashal forced Israel to release Sheikh Yassin to save face. The frail leader’s triumphant return to Gaza bolstered Hamas’s popularity.
Throughout the 1990s, Arafat’s plo failed to deliver a state, and the rampant corruption of his government became common knowledge on the Palestinian street. While Arafat gained global headlines, he did little to improve local conditions, and Hamas set about the business of providing services. (The second intifada began as another collective expression of Palestinian frustration, this time spurred by the failure of peace talks, for which Arafat and his Fatah party were as responsible as the deepening Israeli occupation or then prime minister Ariel Sharon’s provocative moves.)
Between September 2000 and January 2006, Fatah became less and less effective and finally imploded, much as al-Zahhar predicted. And yet, despite the reserves of goodwill and public trust that it cashed into electoral success, and despite the generous political honeymoon afforded it last year by a public wary of Fatah, Hamas is now at the helm of the worst internal strife in Palestinian history. For this, the movement’s leadership cannot escape blame for long.
“Civil war is not the goal of Hamas and was not started by Hamas.” Ayman Daragmeh, forty-three, is a former chemistry professor, a lifelong political activist who spent thirteen years in an Israeli prison, and now a Hamas member of parliament. In his spartan office on the seventh floor of a Ramallah shopping centre, we drink cinnamon tea on a cool November day as the entire region awaits the results of unity government negotiations. Ramallah has seen its share of the recent violence, but it remains the distinctly cosmopolitan cultural and economic hub of the Palestinian territories. From here, one can grasp the striking smallness of this land still waiting to be carved into two states. The beaches of Tel Aviv are visible not thirty kilometres to the west; to the east, beyond the Israeli settlements of Psagot and Bet El, the arid Jordan Valley spreads out into a narrow, tan landscape. Squalid refugee camps are within view—vivid reminders of the occupation and of Palestinian destitution—but in Ramallah thousands of middle-class Palestinians go to work in government ministries, telecommunications firms, and the vast network of foreign and local ngos. At night, restaurants pour pints of Taybeh, the local brew, and cinemas showcase slightly delayed Hollywood films. Ramallah’s mayor is a Roman Catholic woman, and church bells ring out alongside Islamic calls to prayer.
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