State of Failure

by Jonathan Schanzer

  In the end, the most effective weapon the PA had against Hamas was force. In March 1996, after four Hamas suicide bombings killed 57 Israelis and threatened to destroy the peace process, Arafat’s strongman in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, made “frequent raids on homes” of Hamas members.21 As one Hamas leader described, it was a campaign that involved “pursuit, arrests, assassinations, dismantling of institutions, and so on.”22 The PA security services, with the aid of Israeli and US intelligence, rounded up and jailed hundreds of Hamas operatives.23 One journalist reported that some Palestinians “were held for two, three, four months or more, without seeing a lawyer, without being tried, without charges being brought against them.”24 This gave rise to the popular notion that Arafat’s government was collaborating with Israel against Hamas and others as a means to ensure that the international donor funds continued to flow.25

  This dynamic came to an abrupt halt in September 2000, when Arafat launched the second intifada. After rejecting an American-brokered peace plan, he released hundreds of Hamas operatives whom PA security services had previously held in PA jails.26 Once they were back out on the streets, Arafat’s forces carried out joint operations with them.27 The PLO’s “Radio Palestine” called on Palestinians to take to the streets, while Hamas dropped leaflets with the same message.28 It appeared that the two factions had finally found common ground: violence against Israel.

  But this was not an alliance. As Hamas saw it, the intifada had created more favorable conditions for its continued growth. As one Palestinian journalist noted, “Hamas had no intention of recognizing the PLO, and what was really going on was that it was trying to blaze its own trail to power.”29 As the violence raged, even in the fog of war, one Israeli journalist warned that the “strength of the radical Islamic organization Hamas seems to be growing.”30 Another journalist reported “concerns among senior PA officials over the possibility that Hamas [was] trying to reap political capital among traditionally-minded Palestinians.”31

  Against the backdrop of the intifada, internal tensions continued, with regular reports of internecine violence on the Palestinian streets. In October 2001, clashes between PLO loyalists and Hamas led to the deaths of five Palestinians.32 PA security forces continued to conduct raids against Hamas assets in Gaza. Arafat placed Yassin under house arrest, prompting even more street violence.33

  According to documents seized in the Gaza Strip by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Hamas appeared to welcome these developments. Leaders noted that the PA had “collapsed, its infrastructure has been destroyed, and it suffers rifts and divisions . . . in short, the PA has been dismantled and must be reassembled according to new conditions.”34 Hamas also appeared to have realized that every time it attacked an Israeli target, the violence elicited an Israeli military response. To be sure, the attacks often weakened Hamas. But, just as often, Israel retaliated against Arafat and the PA infrastructure, such as police stations and government buildings. In other words, Israel’s military responses weakened the PA more than it weakened Hamas.

  It is also important to note that the PA lost control of parts of the government. Notably, Hamas had an iron grip on the charity committees in the Religious Endowments Ministry.35 Reports also indicated that Hamas had penetrated the PA’s education ministry and even the PA’s security services. Hamas was even able to gain critical intelligence about the PA’s counterterrorism operations by bribing several officials, helping Hamas operatives escape arrest. According to one PA intelligence document, Hamas had “begun to constitute a real threat to the PA’s political vision, its interests, presence, and influence.”36

  With the PA in crisis, Arafat’s decision to reject peace with Israel had clearly backfired. Realizing this, he attempted to seize on the proposal by the Middle East Quartet that was to jump-start the peace process with the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in 2005. The key to putting the roadmap in play, however, was a cessation of violence. As Palestinian legislator Ziad Abu Amr noted, Hamas soon realized it could “play the role of the spoiler.”37 In November 2002, Hamas carried out a suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 50 others. The roadmap was immediately derailed.

  In Gaza, tensions reached new heights as clashes continued between the two factions.38 Arafat issued warnings to Hamas in the form of leaflets, but Hamas appeared unconcerned.39 By 2003, Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal gloated, “The PLO met Hamas in the beginning with total disregard, then cast doubt on its authenticity, then it endeavored to belittle it and refuse to recognize it, then it went into a state of open confrontation followed by an attempt to contain it.”40 Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar went a step further, boasting that his faction was poised to take over leadership of the Palestinians, “politically, financially, [and] socially.”41

  Whatever gains Hamas thought it might have made were short-lived, however. Israel soon embarked on a systematic campaign designed to weaken Hamas. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound founder and spiritual guide for Hamas, was killed on March 22, 2004, when an Israeli helicopter launched an air strike while he was leaving a Gaza City mosque.42 The attack came as no surprise. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon called Yassin the “mastermind of Palestinian terror” and a “mass murderer who is among Israel’s greatest enemies.”43

  The Israelis then assassinated Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. In December 1992, Israel had deported Rantisi to southern Lebanon, along with some 400 other Hamas members. After his return the following year, PA security forces regularly detained him for his outspoken criticism of the ongoing peace process with Israel. Rantisi went into hiding after Yassin’s demise, fearing his own assassination, but on April 17, 2004, about four weeks after he had been named the leader of Hamas, an Israeli helicopter killed Rantisi with missiles shot at his car.44 Other Hamas leaders were forced underground, fearing for their lives.45

  The New York Times speculated in 2004 that “each Israeli killing only seems to enhance the popularity of Hamas on the street.”46 But what would buoy Hamas even more was a plan, hatched by Ariel Sharon in December 2003, for a unilateral “disengagement” process that would extricate Israel from the hostile Gaza Strip. The former IDF general believed that Israel stood to gain little by protecting some 9,000 Jews living in the coastal enclave. Sharon was also certain that Israel would face a demographic threat, particularly if the Jewish state one day included the densely populated Gaza Strip, then home to some 1.5 million people.47

  In a public speech, Sharon announced, “The purpose of the Disengagement Plan is to reduce terror as much as possible, and grant Israeli citizens the maximum level of security. The process of disengagement will lead to an improvement in the quality of life, and will help strengthen the Israeli economy.”48 Nearly two years later, in August and September 2005, Israeli troops evacuated the Gaza Strip.

  In retrospect, unilateral separation was a strategic mistake for the Israelis. It only made Hamas stronger. The group could manufacture explosives and procure weapons more easily without needing to worry about possible raids by Israeli troops. Moreover, as then Israeli Likud party figure Benjamin Netanyahu noted, the withdrawal amounted to a defeat for Israel and an overall victory for Hamas because “it could claim that terror works.”49

  Hamas leaders also realized that their fighters could easily continue to kill Israeli civilians and damage property by launching rockets and mortars into Israeli territory. As such, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza indiscriminately launched some 3,400 Qassam rockets into Israel between 2005 and 2007. Many hit the Israeli town of Sderot, killing a few people, wounding many others, and causing millions of dollars in damage.50

  Finally, disengagement strengthened Hamas vis-à-vis its secular PLO rivals. With the Israeli security barrier surrounding Gaza, and with the Palestinian territories separated from one another, it’s possible that the Israeli withdrawal planted the seed among Hamas leaders that the Islamist group had
the potential to govern Gaza on its own. After all, Hamas’s social infrastructure had already helped the organization establish dominance there.

  Another major boost for Hamas was the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004. He had been the unquestioned leader of the Palestinian people since 1967, if not before. Mahmoud Abbas, by contrast, was not a born leader. He failed to capture the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people. He attempted to assert himself but was instead weakened by “incitement waged against him by Hamas and several other groups.”51

  More to the point, Abbas had a mess to clean up. The Palestinian territories were in disarray after five years of low-level conflict and a decade of financial mismanagement. The PA, under his leadership, was officially responsible for the well-being of its inhabitants. And all was not well in the Palestinian territories. Thus, as Abbas struggled to gain a grip on the apparatus that Arafat had craftily controlled, Hamas took the opportunity to rebound from its losses, stock up on its weapons, and train its ranks for future battles. This dynamic undoubtedly benefited Hamas for the challenges ahead.

  Hamas also appeared to have recognized that despite the military defeats it had suffered at the hands of the Israelis—or perhaps because of them—its popularity was still strong. Thanks to an impressive welfare system of mosques, charitable associations, sports clubs, and other services, Hamas was in an advantageous position to take part in the Palestinian elections planned for early 2006. And while Hamas had refused to enter into the political process in the past—citing a rejection of the Oslo process that had created the PA—it appeared that Hamas had decided to jump in.52

  There are many theories as to how Hamas positioned itself for the electoral victory that followed. According to Palestinian journalist Zaki Chehab, after Hamas announced its intention to compete in the election, the group instructed voters to trick pollsters by not revealing their electoral choices.53 According to this strategy, if Hamas were not forecast as the winner of the elections, Fatah would not work as hard to compete, feeling safe in the belief that another electoral victory was at hand.

  Hamas also sought to influence the Palestinian people through its media network. In addition to its print and Internet publications, Hamas broadcast its message through its Gaza-based terrestrial channel, al-Aqsa Television. Programming on this channel included messages from Hamas leaders calling for jihad, songs of incitement to murder, glorification of “martyrdom,” videos of Hamas gunmen, and even promises of Israel’s destruction.54

  But the most obvious explanation for Hamas’s success at the polls was the economic mismanagement that the PLO and Fatah had presided over for years. As journalist Khaled Abu Toameh noted,

  For many years the foreign media did not pay enough attention to stories about corruption in the Palestinian areas or about abuse of human rights or indeed to what was really happening under the Palestinian Authority. They ignored the growing frustration on the Palestinian street as a result of mismanagement and abuse by the PLO of its monopoly on power.55

  Similarly, Bassem Eid, head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, noted that “everybody knows that Hamas is just climbing on such corruption of the Palestinian Authority. . . . I think that Hamas is getting more and more supporters, while the Palestinians start in the street talking about the Palestinian corruption.”56 Rashid Khalidi also noted that “the PA itself, thoroughly dominated by Fatah, was widely accused of corruption, featherbedding, and nepotism, accusations that have much substance in fact.”57

  In the lead-up to the January elections, Hamas hammered home that it was the clean governance ticket. It was a matter of message repetition. The movement ran ads that accused Fatah of corruption, nepotism, bribery, chaos, and stealing.58 Leaders of the movement held dinners during which they promised their constituents that they would battle corruption.59 In December, when Hamas announced its list for the West Bank town of Tulkarem, one of the candidates explicitly vowed to fight corruption.60 At an event in Gaza, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said his organization had three primary intentions in the election, one of which was fighting corruption.61 Another Hamas leader, Sheikh Said Siyam, said that Hamas “will enter the PA process in order to make decisions, fight corruption and fix PA institutions.”62 A statement released by Hamas in late December 2005 said that “lawlessness, illegal operations, and corruption do not represent the Palestinians, but they are an exterior phenomenon that aims to benefit Israel.”63

  In January, down the final stretch, one Hamas candidate said that the movement was seeking to “develop civil society institutions and combat corruption, government favoritism, and unemployment.”64 Similarly, a spokesperson for the Popular Resistance Committees called on Palestinians to vote for Hamas because it would change the “ten years of corruption and bring honest and good people to the PLC.”65

  According to the Congressional Research Service, “Hamas’ anti-corruption message during the parliamentary election was apparently successful and many reports and exit polls cited anti-corruption as a motivation to vote for Hamas.”66 Polling conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) on the second day of elections found that “71 percent of those who considered corruption the most important consideration in voting voted for Hamas and only 19 percent for Fatah and 11 percent for the other lists.” According to the PCPSR, 25 percent of voters made corruption the number one issue.67

  One Fatah activist, Nasser Abdel Hakim, railed against Fatah’s old-guard leadership, as he said that the “people punished us because of mismanagement and the corruption by the mafia that came from Tunis.”68 Interestingly, just weeks before the elections, Abbas ordered the suppression of an internal report which revealed that the PA had possibly lost billions of dollars as a result of financial mismanagement.69

  The lack of proper management and transparency had caught up with the PA. More to the point, it had caught up with the leaders of the PLO and Fatah, marking a decline in power and leaving a leadership vacuum that would not easily be filled.

  9

  Civil War

  “I have made it very clear,” George W. Bush stated solemnly on January 26, 2006, “that a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal.” He added, “I don’t see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform.”1

  The American president’s position was not a surprise. The Hamas victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections was an embarrassing black eye to US democratization efforts in the region. The election results were also a black eye for the Bush Doctrine, which was designed to promote democracy throughout the Arab world. The US president viewed free elections and transparent governance as a means to combat the ideology of Islamism, which continued to spread unabated and inspire violence against the United States and the West. Obviously, this was not the outcome the administration had been hoping for or expecting.

  The US decision to back the Palestinian elections was a calculated one. It was due, in no small part, to polling data that essentially guaranteed a Fatah victory. The data were gathered primarily by pollster Khalil Shiqaqi’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), which conducted studies of Palestinian opinion in June, September, and December 2005. The data indicated that Fatah’s support among Palestinians ranged from 44 percent to 50 percent, while Hamas support was said to range from 32 to 33 percent.2 “With each new Shiqaqi poll,” wrote analyst Martin Kramer, “U.S. policymakers grew more lax when it came to setting conditions for Hamas participation.”3

  In retrospect, US reliance on these polls was a grave error. The notion that Palestinian voters would simply ignore the mounting governance problems that had been dogging the Fatah leadership was simply not realistic. There had simply been too many scandals. The PA was in bad shape. In even worse shape was the Fatah faction that ruled it.

 
Another grave error was to ignore the implications of the elections. Elliott Abrams recalls that the elections made it abundantly clear to Washington of the “need to clean up Fatah or they’re doomed. But we didn’t. We didn’t get out the broom and have a big, organized program to force, to lead, to persuade Fatah to clean itself up. . . . It’s really striking that we did not adopt that as a significant policy goal.”4

  Fatah managed to win just 45 seats out of a possible 132. These dismal results were a clear sign that without Yasser Arafat, the party had little appeal to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. To be sure, Hamas’s unwavering “resistance” ideology was appealing to some, but there could be no doubt that many Palestinians simply wanted change.

  One thing did not change, however. Hamas and Fatah continued to challenge each other. Indeed, the contest did not end with the elections. In late January 2006, Fatah and Hamas members clashed in front of the Palestinian parliament building in Ramallah.5 Tensions between the two factions soon spread, continuing regularly in the weeks and months that followed. According to a 104-page report issued by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), immediately after the elections, there were reports of “attacks on public institutions; armed personal and clan disputes; attacks on international organizations . . . armed conflicts between security services and armed groups; and attacks on officials.” Over 15 months, according to the PCHR, 350 Palestinians were killed, including 20 children and 18 women, while 1,900 were wounded. The nongovernmental organization also estimated that 248 Palestinians were killed “by an escalation in the state of lawlessness.”6

  The first serious clashes, which foretold the real possibility of a civil war, were reported in mid-April 2006, when hundreds of Fatah activists marched to Gaza’s parliament compound, throwing stones and shattering windows in a government building. Elsewhere in the territories, tens of thousands of Fatah members marched through the streets, denouncing Hamas, setting tires ablaze, and waving the Fatah party’s flag.7