by Robin Wright
“We should follow a style of reform that will not undermine stability and encourage the forces of radicalism and fundamentalism to direct the course of reform toward their objectives,” opined Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. “What would happen if extremists won a majority in Arab parliaments?”27
After the election, I went to see the Hamas leadership outside the Palestinian territories—the men who had not participated in the historic vote—to get a sense of their vision of the future. The Palestinians faced two immediate challenges: First, developing their nascent democracy amid one of the fiercest political rivalries in the Arab world. And second, achieving statehood after many false starts. The way ahead was not clear because Hamas, like the Palestine Liberation Organization during its years in exile, has both inside and outside branches. Unlike the PLO, Hamas has a binding ideology. Yet views still differ within the movement.
My ultimate goal was to see Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas. Getting access to him in Syria was hard enough. But security around Mashaal had also been tightened after an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997, which followed a series of suicide bombs in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister at the time, called Mashaal the “preeminent figure responsible for the murder of innocent Israeli civilians.” Israel came close to getting its revenge when two Israeli agents disguised as Canadian tourists tracked down Mashaal in Jordan and injected poison into his ear. The operatives were captured, and an enraged King Hussein demanded the antidote from Israel to save Mashaal’s life. As part of the deal, Jordan freed the two Israelis in a prisoner exchange that included Israel’s release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founding father of Hamas who had been imprisoned for eight years. Jordan later expelled Mashaal. He ended up in Syria.
Seven years later, Mashaal became head of Hamas by a process, literally, of elimination. In 2004, Israeli helicopter gunships swooped down over Gaza and fired a missile as Sheikh Yassin, who was partially paralyzed in a childhood sports accident, was being wheeled out of morning prayer services. Yassin, his bodyguards, and nine bystanders were killed. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a cofounder of Hamas, succeeded Yassin. Less than a month later, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a car carrying Rantisi, his bodyguards, and his son. It was incinerated. Mashaal then assumed leadership of Hamas.
To get to Mashaal, I went first to Beirut in search of Osama Hamdan, whom I had met in the mid-1990s when he headed the Hamas office in Tehran. As a primary supplier of aid and arms to Hamas, Tehran was an important posting. Nevertheless, Hamdan once grumbled about how hard he had to lobby the Iranian government. “It’s not as easy a job as you might think,” he once told me. As a Sunni Arab, he also felt somewhat out of place among the Shiite Persians. He spoke Arabic and English, but he needed an interpreter to speak to the Iranians.
From Tehran, Hamdan moved to head the Beirut office in 1998. He also became a member of the Hamas politburo. In 2003, he was one of six senior Hamas leaders named by President Bush as a “specially designated global terrorist,” which automatically froze personal assets in the United States and prohibited business transactions with Americans. I found his office in Beirut’s poor southern suburbs, which is also the stronghold of Hezbollah, another Iranian ally.
Born in 1965, Hamdan still had youthful eyes, even as he had grown from the leanness of youth in 1994 to the heft of middle age in 2006. His brown beard and hair had not changed; they were both cropped short and neat.
We had a long conversation about the election and the future. I asked him if Hamas might modify its position on Israel, perhaps under an arrangement where President Abbas continued peace efforts as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO was the signatory to earlier agreements committing the Palestinians to peace in exchange for their own state. The compromise widely proffered after the election envisioned Hamas running day-to-day government, while Abbas brokered a solution for a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel.
“No,” Hamdan replied, shaking his head with certainty.
“The Jews have the right to return to the places they came from, or they can live in the region as citizens, with their rights as Jews and as humans—but not in a state on our occupied land. Why did the French resist the German occupation during World War II? Why didn’t the Afghans let the Russians occupy their country? The Israelis know they are occupying our homeland.
“So they will have their choice: They can accept that they are Jewish Palestinians, or they can go back to their homelands. It’s their choice. No one will be forced to take one decision or the other.”
Hamdan’s answer was like going back thirty years in time, to the aggressive rhetoric from the days Yasser Arafat waged his campaign against Israel from the same southern suburbs of Beirut. Ironically, Hamdan invoked Arafat as justification for his view.
“In 1988, Arafat believed that recognizing Israel would win back part of our rights—and that he could get a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders. We met him several times after 1988, and he really believed that,” Hamdan said. “But what happened? The Oslo agreement in 1993 called for a Palestinian state by 1998. It didn’t happen. Since then, big chunks of West Bank lands have been taken by the Israelis. And the numbers of settlers tripled.
“It was all a grave mistake,” he said, shaking his head. “No one will think to do that again.”
On every issue, Hamdan represented the toughest positions within Hamas. His ideal state was a caliphate, ruled by a caliph, God’s representative on earth, which would incorporate several Muslim countries as well as modern Israel. I asked him if he really thought a caliphate was viable in the twenty-first century.
“It’s the right of people to dream that this may happen one day,” he replied. “If someone had talked in the fifteenth century about France existing without a kingdom, no one would have believed it. If I had said eighty years ago that there will be a European Union, no one would have believed it. If someone had talked about unifying Germany twenty years ago, no one would believe it. But they all happened.
“Understand, I’m not talking about going back to living in old times. It doesn’t mean riding camels or living in tents. It’s only the principles we want to revive.”
He was also dismissive of the American commitment to democracy for the Palestinians, even as he claimed Hamas was willing to talk to Washington’s envoys.
“The United States is like the prince in search of Cinderella,” he told me. “The Americans have the shoe, and they want to find the kind of people who fit the shoe. If the people who are elected don’t fit into the American shoe, then the Americans will reject them for democracy.”
Before leaving, I asked Hamdan if he would give me a contact to see Mashaal in Syria. Hamdan knew I disagreed with him, quite profoundly. I once told him that my father had been an officer in the U.S. Third Army unit that seized Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp to be liberated by American troops. Ohrdruf was part of the Buchenwald network of camps. I had grown up on my father’s stories about what the Nazis had done to Europe’s Jews. Hamdan always argued with me that the Palestinians should not have to pay the price for Germany’s atrocities. Neither of us ever got anywhere with the other on the subject of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Hamdan pulled out his cell phone and called Damascus.
A week later, I was in a large room filled with green overstuffed chairs at Hamas headquarters in Syria. On one wall was a large poster of Sheikh Yassin surrounded with smaller pictures of fourteen other Hamas officials who had died in Israeli “targeted assassinations.” A television tuned to al Jazeera was in one corner; a large model of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock was in another.
Khalid Mashaal is a beefy man with silvering hair and penetrating dark eyes; his short beard is still black except for two silver streaks under the two sides of his mouth. He was wearing a light blue shirt, open-necked, and a navy suit. He greeted me when he strode into the room, but before we began talking he paused to intone, “In the name of God the compassionate and merciful.”
“I’m from Ramallah,” he said when I told him that I been at the Palestinian election. “I can’t go there. But you, an American, just came from there.”
Mashaal had spent half his life, almost a quarter century, in Kuwait. At Kuwait University, he studied physics and founded an Islamic student movement called the List of the Islamic Right to counter Arafat’s Fatah. In the late 1980s, he was one of the original members of Hamas. He led the branch in Kuwait. Mashaal taught school until the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, after which he fled again, this time to Jordan. In 1996, he became political director of Hamas.
Mashaal, a serious man not prone to smiling, was almost gleeful about the election results. “I was confident of winning, but not by this much,” he told me. “Our people in the West Bank and Gaza said a week before the election that they thought we would do well. But it was much more than I expected.”
What Hamas had not counted on was forming a government alone. The widespread assumption among many Palestinians, whatever the election outcome, was that Fatah and Hamas would end up in a coalition government. After Hamas’s decisive win, however, Fatah opted to become the formal opposition. The result was a political mish-mash: Fatah still controlled the presidency, while Hamas won the right to pick the prime minister, form a cabinet, and run the day-to-day government.
The rivalry between the two parties only deepened. Both sides violated the spirit of democracy.
Fatah refused to heed the message of its electoral defeat. In a preemptive move during the old legislature’s final session, Fatah transferred many of the prime minister’s powers to the president’s office—effectively from Hamas to Fatah. Fatah ministers also filled vacancies and promoted followers in the civil service so it would be top-heavy with Fatah loyalists. President Abbas assumed control of lucrative border crossings from the interior ministry, and transferred authority over the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and the Palestinian News Agency from the information ministry to the president’s office.28 He also failed to clean up rampant corruption. After promising to rebuild the party from the ground up, Abbas instead allowed the old-boys’ network to largely remain in place. Adding to the political tensions, Fatah’s militias roamed the streets as if they still owned them.
At a rally in Damascus shortly before my visit, Mashaal condemned Fatah as “traitorous” for “robbing us of our powers as well as our people’s rights.”
Hamas, in turn, used the network of mosques to lambaste Fatah. The Islamic party, which already had the largest Palestinian militia, the al Qassam Brigade, mobilized a new government security force loyal only to its officials. It used tunnels, some almost 100 feet deep, dug by profiteering Gaza clans under the eight-mile border with Egypt, to bring in arms.29 It also refused to recognize Israel, renounce violence, and accept either past peace deals or future negotiations—even though every public-opinion poll before and after the election showed the majority of Palestinians favored peace with Israel and a two-state solution.
Mashaal tried to straddle the divergent views within Hamas about how to achieve a Palestinian state. In an op-ed piece in Britain’s Guardian newspaper a week after the vote, Mashaal invoked the old rhetoric opposing a Jewish state while at the same time proposing a long-term truce with Israel.
Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us—our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.
We shall never recognize the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognize the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins or solve somebody else’s problem. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice.30
I asked Mashaal what “peace based on justice” really meant: Was Hamas willing to explore an arrangement that would effectively allow a permanent peace, or was it just positioning itself until demographics, regional support, and the military balance were more in its favor to claim all of old Palestine?
“Wars and struggles have favored Israel. These are historical facts,” he replied. “The issue is complicated, so that’s why we in Hamas have announced that we’re ready to establish a Palestinian country on the borders of 1967, with the right of Palestinian refugees to come back to the cities they came from, then there can be an agreement for a truce. After that, the coming generations will decide the future.”
His terms—the 1967 border and return of Palestinian refugees—were unacceptable to Israel. And, like Arafat at his slipperiest, Mashaal dodged the question—for ninety minutes—of recognizing the Jewish state.
“Israel does not recognize my rights. Who needs to be recognized—me the victim, or the killer and occupier?” he said.
Hamas’s immediate crisis, however, was governing the little Palestinian Authority. Unwilling to deal with a violent extremist movement, the outside world suspended foreign aid needed to develop the nascent state, from building schools and paving roads to fostering civil society. Israel also withheld some fifty-five million dollars a month in Palestinian tax revenues that it collected—and that paid one-half of the Palestinian government’s payroll, from teachers and police to medical staff and utility workers. Mashaal had been scrambling to raise tens of millions of dollars from a limited number of Muslim countries willing to help pay the Palestinian government’s bills.
As revenues and aid dried up, Fatah loyalists agitated unpaid government workers to organize sit-ins and protests, deepening tensions. Within months, Fatah politicians urged Abbas to call early elections, ostensibly to end the political deadlock but also because they were unwilling to wait until 2010 to have a shot at ruling again.
“All these measures are to make the Hamas government fail,” Mashaal told me.
The Palestinian Authority suffered from a political vacuum and rumbling disorder. The most vocal supporters of Hamas were other extremists. The day before I saw Mashaal, al Jazeera had aired a new audiotape from Osama bin Laden. The al Qaeda chief raged at the West for cutting off aid to the Palestinians after Hamas’s victory.
“The European and American rejection of the current Palestinian government is a Zionist-Crusader war against Muslims,” bin Laden said.
To the outside world, al Qaeda and Hamas fell into the same camp of militant groups built around a zealous religious ideology that justified suicide bombers and called for societies built strictly around Islamic law. With the rise of political Islam, cells of al Qaeda affiliates or wannabes had also emerged in Gaza. The Swords of Islamic Righteousness was one of the shadowy new renegade groups that attacked music stores, recreational clubs, Internet cafés, and cultural centers. “Get back to Allah and away from all those dirty, corruption things, because you will never withstand the fire of hell and the torture at the end of your life,” the Swords warned after an Internet café attack.31 The new cells were widely linked to the mysterious deaths of three prostitutes.
Hamas and al Qaeda, however, were often also at odds. After the Hamas election, Ayman al Zawahiri, the second-in-command, issued a statement from hiding that scolded Hamas and appealed to the Palestinian movement not to work with the “secularist traitors” of Fatah.
How come they did not demand an Islamic constitution for Palestine before entering any elections? Ar
e they not an Islamic movement?…Accepting the legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas…is an abyss that will ultimately lead to eliminating the jihad and recognizing Israel.32
Mashaal struggled to distance himself from al Qaeda. “Hamas has very different policies,” he told me. “Bin Laden thinks it’s wrong to participate in elections, while we participate. We also limit our struggle against the Israeli occupation to Palestine. We don’t take our attacks outside Israel. The world must make a clear distinction between us and al Qaeda.”
Before leaving, I asked Mashaal to look at the Middle East a decade down the road.
“There will be a general escalation in the region, because of the Israeli occupation, the war in Iraq, and the expected American war in Iran over its nuclear program,” he offered. “So the region in the coming years will have no real stability.
“But despite the difficulties in the coming years,” he said, “the Palestinians will get their own state.”
Over the next year, however, Palestinian politics instead drifted deeper into a dysfunctional political deadlock. Talks between Hamas and Fatah repeatedly collapsed; rival security forces and militias increasingly attacked each other. Deaths from factional violence mounted.
Tensions with Israel also escalated. On June 25, 2006, Hamas gunmen and militants from two other groups sneaked through a tunnel under Gaza and attacked an Israeli army post. Two Israelis were killed, three were injured. The gunmen seized nineteen-year-old Corp. Gilad Shalit, then fled back to Gaza. They then demanded freedom for 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the lone Israeli soldier.
Israel blamed Mashaal personally for the kidnapping. It also pledged not to succumb to extortion. Three days later, Israeli troops launched Operation Summer Rains, invading Gaza and launching raids across the West Bank to arrest Hamas members of parliament—thirty-eight in all, including the speaker of parliament and several cabinet ministers. Among them was Sheikh Nayef Rajoub.