 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Hamas offers truce
By Khaled AmayrehHamas, the main Palestinian opposition movement, recently reaffirmed its opposition to the Middle East peace process on the grounds that it would neither enable the Palestinian people to recover their minimum legitimate rights nor realise their national aspirations. Nevertheless while Hamas's founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin reiterated that any settlement resulting from the agreement signed at Oslo in 1993 would be unacceptable to the vast majority of Palestinians, in interviews with the Israeli and Arab media last week he also said that the movement would consider halting attacks on civilians should Israel halt settlement activities on the West Bank.
"Israel and the United States might succeed in imposing on the weak Palestinian Authority (PA) a deformed arrangement which they could call peace, but soon enough everyone will realise that this sham peace won't last, since it does not meet the basic and most elementary requisites of the Palestinian people," he told the Qatari television channel, Al-Jazira.
Explaining why Hamas has refused to join the PA in the so-called final-status talks with Israel on the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as the Popular and Democratic fronts for the liberation of Palestine are apparently about to do, Yassin said there was no guarantee that the Palestinian leadership would be bound by any collective Palestinian consensus on final-status issues.
Yassin also denied Israeli allegations that Hamas was an anti-Semitic movement, commenting that this was "simply untrue ...even if my own brother attacked me and usurped my home and land, I would fight him."
However Yassin went on to propose a moratorium on attacks on civilians by both sides. "The Izzidin Al-Kassam [Hamas's military wing] fighters are aware that Islam is against targeting civilians who are non-combatants," he said, suggesting that attacks by Hamas's military wing on Israeli civilians had mostly been in reaction to Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians, including the murder of 29 worshipers by an Israeli settler in February, 1994. The offer reiterated an earlier proposal made by the movement's military wing, which also offered a freeze on attacks against Israelis, including settlers, in exchange for a freeze on Israeli settlement building.
Yassin's proposal, however, is hardly new. Even before his release from an Israeli jail in September 1997, he had several times proposed a truce between Israel and the Palestinians in return for full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The Sheikh was released from jail in 1997 as part of a deal between Jordan and Israel following the Mossad's -- the Israeli Secret Service -- botched assassination attempt on Hamas politburo chief Khalid Masha'al.
That offer has been rejected by successive Israeli governments. The Palestinians now believe that Yassin's present proposal is certain to be ignored by the Barak government, which is interested more in weakening Hamas and corroding its standing among Palestinians than in negotiating with it.
Indeed, according to some analysts, neither Israel nor the PA are willing to initiate serious contacts with Hamas on the latter's terms at a time when the radical movement is the object of judicial proceedings not only in Israeli and the Palestinian self-rule areas, but also in Jordan, where it had for several years been given free rein by the authorities. According to these analysts, talking to Hamas now could lead only to the weakening of the PA and its leader Yasser Arafat, and this in turn could lead to changes in the peace process that would be unacceptable to Israel.
As far as Israel itself is concerned, analysts believe that it will continue its attempts to marginalise Hamas in the hope of speeding the movement's demise. For Israel a weak Hamas is an important pre-requisite for a successful peace process, and a successful peace process means a weak Hamas.
Many observers doubt however that attempts to marginalise the radical movement will succeed in forcing its demise in the foreseeable future, giving two reasons for this opinion. First, protest at the Israeli occupation of Palestine is Hamas' ultimate raison d'être, and this is not likely to change. And second, the peace process as it is developing today does not appear able convincingly to reduce Palestinian grievances, upon which Hamas thrives. Indeed, some even suggest that the opposite might be the case, and that it is acting to increase them.
