by Robin Wright
Sheikh Nayef is a towering man with a full beard accented by gray wisps under the lip. He has strikingly large hands and long eyelashes. He was born five years after his older brother and has a fraternal twin named Yasser. We sat on worn velvet couches in a receiving room in front of the house. The sheikh was dressed informally in a V-neck sweater and a tan jacket with a zipper. He was as low-key as his brother was intense.
Sheikh Nayef was running on Hamas’s Change and Reform ticket. It was a low-budget campaign. He had to borrow his twin brother’s dented, secondhand car to drive around Hebron.
“Jibril is part of the Palestinian Authority, so he has tremendous assets available to him,” the sheikh told me, as the youngest of his eight children waddled into the room and over to her father. The two-year-old was wearing a green Hamas baseball cap and green Hamas sash over a pink sweater. “Our campaign is so modest that I had to borrow one thousand dollars to register as a candidate. I have yet to pay it off.” To supplement his income, the neighborhood sheikh was also a beekeeper. He was well known around Hebron for his honey.
Hamas underplayed its assets, however, and its strategy. Before the election, the party signed an election code of conduct not to exploit places of worship to win votes. But the younger Rajoub had an edge simply by preaching at the mosque every Friday. His campaign was also staffed by the faithful, including several women in conservative Muslim dress. And Hamas’s technologically hip campaign did not shy away from invoking higher powers.
“Vote for the green crescent of Hamas. Forward this message and you will be blessed by God,” was one of several text messages sent to cell phones throughout the territories, including my rental.
Like his brother, Sheikh Nayef had a checkered past. He had been arrested four times by Israel—and once by his brother.
Educated in Jordan, he joined Hamas when it emerged in 1987 out of the first intifada. Detained four times by Israel, he and his twin had been part of a mass expulsion in 1992 after the deaths of six Israeli soldiers, including one who was kidnapped and later found bound and stabbed. More than 400 Islamists, mainly from Hamas, were rounded up, blindfolded and handcuffed, and driven to the Lebanese border. When Lebanon refused to allow them to cross, the deportees ended up living in tents for a year in a no-man’s land between the two countries. Jibril Rajoub had visited his younger brothers; Sheikh Nayef had a picture in his receiving room of the three of them standing along the border. The deportees were eventually allowed to return as a by-product of the Oslo Accords. Seven of the nine Hamas candidates in Hebron had been among those deportees.
The sheikh and his twin were arrested by their big brother during Arafat’s 1996 crackdown on Hamas.
“It was nothing personal,” the sheikh said, smiling. Neither was held very long.
Ironically, Hamas and Fatah have the same roots. Both emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt. Arafat had been a member of the Brotherhood as a student in Cairo in the 1950s. Hamas had been created by the crippled but charismatic Muslim preacher Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who headed the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood in Gaza.
Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Arab organizations often look for double entendre in their titles. Hamas means “zeal.”
The Hamas charter lauds the PLO, since it “contains the father and the brother, the next of kin and the friend” who share a common enemy and a common fate. But it scolds the PLO for its secular platform. “Whoever takes his religion lightly,” the charter declares, “is a loser.” The Koran is the movement’s constitution. Its goal is to see “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”
The Hamas charter is venomous about Israel, which it charges is trying to consume territory from the Nile to the Euphrates. It echoes the Palestine Liberation Organization’s original covenant in its pledge to obliterate the Jewish state.
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day…. It, or any part of it, should not be given up…. There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…. These conferences are only ways of setting infidels in the land of Muslims as arbiters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?…All [are] a waste of time and vain endeavors.
Since it rejected the peace process, Hamas boycotted the Palestinian Authority that the Oslo Accords had produced. The movement did not run in either the 1996 election or the 2005 presidential election to replace Arafat. Participating in national politics would have compromised its mission and goals. Arafat had never been keen to include Hamas anyway. His strategy was a mix of squeezing, confronting, and clamping down on potential rivals, especially the Islamists.
But the post-Arafat era changed the dynamics—and the strategy of both Fatah and Hamas.
After he was elected to replace Arafat, President Mahmoud Abbas opted to try to integrate Hamas into the political process.20 He had few choices. The white-haired Fatah cofounder, who had just turned seventy, did not have the political leverage to contain Hamas, even though Israel had eliminated its founder, Sheikh Yassin, his successor, the chief bomb-maker, and other top leaders in a string of “targeted assassinations.” Hamas simply had too much local legitimacy. Its autonomous armed wing was too much of a threat both to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. And its institutions were on the verge of creating a parallel state.
Abbas could no longer establish order in the territories or negotiate with Israel without an arrangement with Hamas.
The turning point was local elections. Hamas, a grassroots movement, had long pressed for a vote in towns and cities; local councils had nothing to do with the Oslo Accords. Arafat had stalled, even after he agreed to hold them, aware that Hamas might gain further legitimacy.
After Arafat’s death, Abbas reversed course in an attempt to co-opt Hamas.
Five months after Arafat’s death and two months after Abbas took office, Egypt negotiated an agreement between the new Palestinian leadership and thirteen political groups. The Cairo Declaration in March 2005 called for all sides to honor a tahdiya, or period of calm, and to hold local and legislative elections without delay.21
In staggered votes over the next nine months, Hamas surprised even Hamas. By the final vote in December 2005, the Islamist party had won full or partial control of councils in most major towns, including historically Christian Bethlehem and other former Fatah strongholds. The one exception was Ramallah. In contrast, Fatah proved strong mainly in the politically marginal rural areas.22
A month later, Hamas was running for the first time in national elections.
In both votes, Hamas ran on a twenty-point platform of everyday issues—more health care, better education, improved infrastructure—though not piety. Like many of the Middle East’s rising Islamist movements, Hamas was moving deliberately, but practically.
“We need to change many things, but step by step,” Sheikh Nayef told me.
“We have two big priorities,” he explained. “The first is corruption. Betraying the people’s trust is one of the main reasons for people’s disenchantment with Fatah and why they are turning to Hamas.
“The second is dealing with the chaos and lawlessness in the territories,” he continued, in Arabic, relying on a reporter from aljazeera.net who said he had studied at the University of Oklahoma and Southern Illinois University. “Those responsible for this insecurity are the Palestinian security agencies. We have to reconstruct them. They are entirely bloated and yet they have utterly failed to end the chaos. Over half of the 58,000 on the payroll draw a salary but never leave their homes. It is nepotism and graft and cronyism.”
I pointed out that his brother had controlled the West Bank security force.
“I am aware,” he said, with a bemused grin.
To a lot of ears, the security-force issue was doublespeak for peace with Israel. Whoever controlled Palestinian security determined whether the Palestinian forces were used for peace or to pressure Israel.
On election eve, the big debate among both Palestinians and Israelis was over whether a democratically elected Hamas would moderate its position—specifically by implicitly honoring the principles and agreements made by the PLO even if it did not formally sign on. In other words, would Hamas be willing to repeat what Fatah did in 1988 in formally renouncing terrorism and accepting Israel’s right to exist? Hamas had launched its first suicide bomb in 1993. Since the second intifada began in 2000, the militant movement was linked to more than 400 terrorist attacks—including over fifty suicide bombs—in which hundreds of Israelis had died and more than 2,000 had been injured.23
Some Hamas leaders hinted at the possibility of an indefinite hudna, or ceasefire, if Israel returned all territory occupied in the 1967 war. But none of them suggested that Hamas would accept a permanent peace.
I asked the sheikh—who had been released just four months earlier after eight months in Israeli detention—how far apart he was from his older brother on peace with Israel. “We agree when diagnosing political problems, but we differ on how to treat them,” he replied, as his fingers flicked through a large set of worry beads. “Jibril’s approach is based on negotiating with Israel. The Islamic movement’s experience in negotiating has been dismal and disastrous. The Palestinian Authority was eventually reduced to a vanquished supplicant begging Israel for everything. This giant fiasco will not be repeated by us.”
I noted that he had not totally rejected negotiations with Israel. For decades, Arafat had deftly skirted the same issue. Time and again, he came close in deliberately suggestive but ambiguous language, only to back off again when asked to clarify. Only when Arafat began to lose his political grip did he formally cave.
“What you said is true,” Sheikh Nayef replied. “If negotiations have the potential to serve the interests of the Palestinian people or improve the lot of average Palestinians, yes, there is room for that. But it should not be conducted under conditions reflecting Israeli insolence and arrogance of power and blackmail and so on.”
“Look,” he said, “I am a moderate. There is a Koranic verse that says ‘Allah has made you a moderate nation, so that you may be witness upon mankind and so that the prophet will be a witness unto you.’ And I believe this.”
I asked the sheikh if he would allow his own eight children to become suicide bombers. Hebron had gained fame as the hometown of several suicide bombers. Eight members of a local soccer team, including a coach, had all become suicide bombers.
“You have a totally gruesome picture of us that is inaccurate,” he replied, his fingers flicking faster through the worry beads. “Martyrdom operations are not a fixed feature of the Islamic movement. They are not a pillar of our policy. They should be viewed instead as a reaction to Israeli oppression. We earnestly appeal to the Israelis to refrain from murdering Palestinian civilians so that we can put an end to martyrdom operations once and for all. We can not get rid of the effect unless we get rid of the cause.”
I repeated my question about his children.
“Yes, I would allow them to carry out martyrdom operations, but I would much rather focus on ruling out the causes of what has made this inevitable,” he said. “Martyrdom operations are the result of Jewish Nazism. The Israelis have presented us with two choices—either we die submissively like meek sheep or we die in suicide bombings in the streets of Tel Aviv or Netanya.”
For the first time, the sheikh’s voice rose. “We might forgive the Israelis for murdering our innocent civilians,” he said, “but we will never forgive them for forcing us to kill their civilians.”
Before I left, I pressed Sheikh Nayef for his election predictions. All public-opinion polls indicated Fatah was in the lead, but Hamas was pulling closer—anywhere from two to ten percentage points behind Fatah. The day before, both parties had held large rallies in Hebron. Some 4,000 had turned out for Jibril Rajoub and Fatah, but 35,000 had turned out for Sheikh Nayef and the Hamas candidates.
I asked how the sheikh thought his own siblings were likely to vote.
He chuckled. “I honestly don’t know,” he told me. “Some will probably vote for Jibril, and some will probably vote for me.”
Even during their campaigns against each other, the two men had kept in touch.
“We see each other every two or three days, and we talk by telephone every day. We’re very close,” the sheikh said. “There’s an Arab proverb—‘A difference in opinion does not corrupt friendly relations.’
“This political diversity is a sign of the sophistication and maturity that members of one family can espouse different ideologies and political views,” he continued. “Our parents’ home was the epitome of Palestinian political plurality. We’re proud of it.
“But,” he added, “I think both of us will win.”
On election night, the results were announced at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace. They trickled in district by district amid great anticipation since, for the first time in an Arab election, no one knew the outcome in advance.
In the end, Hamas swept liberal Ramallah, except for the one seat reserved for a Christian. The Islamic party won all the seats in Jerusalem, except for two reserved for Christians. It took all but one seat allocated to Nablus. Even in historically Christian Bethlehem, Hamas won all but the two seats reserved for Christians.
The outcome stunned Palestinians—including the Rajoub brothers—as well as the outside world. Mused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Certainly I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming, and I hope that we will take a hard look, because it does say something about perhaps not having had a good enough pulse on the Palestinian population.”24
In Hebron, Sheikh Nayef received more votes than any candidate in the entire West Bank. His older brother Jibril did not even make a decent showing. He lost. Hamas won all nine seats in Hebron.
Defying every exit poll, Hamas won an outright majority. It did not mop up, however. It won fifty-six percent of the seats in the legislature—and the right to form a government—but only forty-four percent of the vote. Fatah’s fatal mistake was running too many candidates, dividing its own vote. Pollsters later said Fatah could have won—with the same vote—by fielding fewer candidates.
Nevertheless, Palestinian voters had sent a decisive message. “This was the only way to stop Fatah,” said Samir Abdullah, director of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, a delegate to peace negotiations in the 1990s, and an early deputy minister of economy. “Fatah leaders showed no willingness to change.”
Added Nader Said, “If it had rained, Fatah would have lost out even more. You have to be motivated to vote.”
After a half century of dominating Palestinian politics, Fatah’s monopoly had ended. It was the first time an Arab electorate ousted autocratic leadership in free and fair elections—a message that resonated throughout the region.
Jibril Rajoub, jobless, decided to go back to school.
Sheikh Nayef became minister of religious affairs in the new government.
The coming conundrum in the Middle East is that free and fair elections may not initially produce a respectable democracy. After decades of autocratic rule, the political spectrum has become so skewed that the choices, and winners, may not all be peace-loving or tolerant moderates. The transition to stable democracy worldwide—in Russia, South Africa, and Venezuela, to name but a few still struggling in disparate ways—is a rocky process that requires time. But in the Middle East, transitions may be the messiest.
The Palestinians were the test case.
After winning several city-council elections in 2005, Hamas politicians sent mixed signals about their intentions. They often streamlined budgets, eliminated waste, and went after pervasive corruption. They also allied with Christian politicians in Ramallah and Bethlehem and did
not try to change the tradition of councils appointing Christian mayors ruling over Muslim majorities. And they did not propose adopting Islamic law—yet.
“The implementation of Sharia is not a priority at this juncture,” Sheikh Nayef Rajoub told al Jazeera. “This doesn’t mean, however, that we will not seek to amend some of the existing laws to make them more even-handed.”25
But the atmospherics clearly changed. Islam may not have become the law, but its rules were increasingly becoming the practice. In the West Bank town of Qalqilya, the city council cancelled a popular music festival because the music was too Westernized. The local sheikh said the festival violated Sharia. “There are times when the municipality acts as a brake on the Palestinian Authority decisions that are against Islam,” the mayor explained.26 In Gaza, a clampdown by Islamist vigilantes targeted shops selling liquor and pharmacies carrying birth-control pills. Traditionally more religious than the West Bank, more men in Gaza also grew beards, and more women wore head scarves, some even donning face veils, a practice virtually unknown a generation earlier.
So Hamas’s decision to run for national office in 2006 deepened the debate about whether Islamists would honor democratic principles once elected. Views differed sharply.
“I have not seen any group as willing to be co-opted and integrated into a system that is not of their own making,” reflected Nader Said, the U.S.-educated pollster in Ramallah. “The Palestinian Authority is still the umbrella of power, the Americans are still the interlocutors, and Israel is still the neighbor. So whatever they say, Hamas has to give up a great deal to participate.
“Things will never be the same for Hamas. And they have willingly accepted this change. Hamas decided that participation is part of the Muslim Brotherhood tradition. And this is the best time to integrate and compromise. They are not god-given angels anymore. They are running to fix things, not just to serve God. Their rhetoric has changed 180 degrees.”
The region’s rulers firmly believed otherwise. They have long argued that their control is the main safeguard against an Islamist political wave and potential theocratic rule.