23 - 29 August 2001
Issue No.548
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 23 - 29 August 2001 Issue No.548 |
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In for the long haul -- and winning
Israel's recent assault on Hamas has brought it increased popularity among Palestinians and deeper unity with Fatah. Graham Usher in Gaza looks at the rise and rise of Palestine's premier Islamic movement
The history of the Intifada is sprayed on Gaza's walls. From another age -- almost another country -- the tattered flags and broken plaques of this or that dead Palestinian Authority Ministry. From the first rush of the uprising, the script of "official". PA slogans, urged "steadfastness" and "national unity," written perhaps as much to ward off mutiny as to rally the "sons of Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad." Both were top Palestinian leaders who were assassinated by Israeli commandos in Tunis in 1985.
But deluging all, over every whitewashed wall and crumbling terrace, there is the black, white, red and especially green wash of the Islamic movements of Hamas and Jihad. Murals, montages, collages and caricatures of exploding Israeli buses, the Dome of the Rock and, above all, martyrs, from Nabil Al-Arrir (killed outside Gaza's Kfar Darom settlement on 26 October) to Izzadin Al-Masri (who killed himself and 15 Israelis in a West Jerusalem pizza restaurant on 9 August).
If strength is to be measured by pints of aerosol, then Hamas has Gaza covered. "That's an exaggeration," laughs Hamas political leader, Ismail Abu Shanab. "It's true Hamas has increased its support in the Intifada but the real draw is the resistance."
And the resistance, increasingly, is equated with Hamas and Jihad, their "martyrdom" operations, and the enormous kudos these generate among all strata of Palestinian society, rich and poor, Christian and Muslim. Nor is its only expression Gaza's latest coat of graffiti.
Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Yassin during a Friday prayer in Gaza earlier this month
(photo: Reuters)
According to Palestinian opinion polls, Hamas and Jihad now command more support in Gaza than Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and draw perilously close to parity in the West Bank. Popularity can also be gauged by the constant stream of supplicants to the house of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in Sabra, one of Gaza's poorer neighbourhoods.
Flush from a fresh injection of funds from the Gulf countries, Hamas welfare committees have dispatched cash and food aid to over 250,000 families in Gaza during the Intifada's ten months, says one "secular" NGO Palestinian source. "We've supplied 3,000," she shrugs.
But alms and the "dignity of protecting one's people" cannot alone explain Hamas and Jihad's climb. As important were the astute political decisions the Islamists made at the outbreak of the uprising last October. One was to mix with the "Palestinian political salad" -- rather than stand aloof -- by participating in the National and Islamic Forces, the grassroots body led by Fatah that serves as the popular tribune of the Intifada.
It has reaped dividends ever since, says Abu Shanab. "The NIF has protected those factions opposed to the Oslo accords, helped prevent internal conflict among Palestinians and organised proper relations between the Palestinian groups. It has also set a Palestinian national consensus for the uprising that Arafat cannot ignore.
Moreover, it has extended Hamas's political and ideological influence, not so much against Fatah as through Fatah's grassroots cadre, as they search for a strategy in the hole left by Oslo." This incremental "Islamisation" of mainstream Palestinian nationalism is evident everywhere.
One measure is the increasing agnosticism Fatah leaders have toward military operations inside Israel, including suicide bombs. As recently as June Fatah leaders like Marwan Barghouti opposed suicide attacks inside the Green Line because of their "negative impact on Israeli public opinion."
But after Israel's killings of Hamas political leaders Jamal Mansour and Jamal Salim in Nablus on 30 July -- and the attempted hit on himself four days later -- Barghouti's changed tack. Attacks like the 9 August blast in West Jerusalem are now "the only way to end the occupation of Palestinian territories," he said in its aftermath.
A similar change is evident over the question of who are Palestinians' allies in the uprising. For much of the peace process Fatah -- together with the other pro-Oslo Palestinian factions -- saw the "Israeli left" as a crucial political constituency, bound by the apparently common belief that peace would come with Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories. For Hamas and Jihad any dialogue with the "Zionist left" was tantamount to apostasy.
Twelve months after Camp David apostasy is now the received wisdom. Following Israel's take over of Orient House in occupied East Jerusalem on 10 August, the NIF called on "every Arab and Muslim to face this blatant aggression against our people." It made no call to the Israeli "peace camp," including those hundred or so who did take to the streets in protest.
Given such shifts, is Hamas' ascent irreversible? "O yes," says Abu Shanab. "Arafat could still move against us. But he needs political achievements. Without these he would fall on his neck."
Among the achievements the Palestinian leader has touted are the dispatch of an international protection force to the occupied territories, a settlement freeze, even the small fry of a withdrawal of Israeli forces to the positions they occupied prior to the uprising on 28 September 2000. Abu Shanab is not the only Palestinian who believes none will be forthcoming as long as Ariel Sharon is Israel's prime minister.
"I really don't know why Sharon refuses to give Arafat even a chink of hope," he says, with genuine puzzlement. "Perhaps Sharon simply does not want a solution, even one on Israel's terms."
But Sharon's intentions are of little matter. Abu Shanab's task is to keep Hamas on a rising curve. In the short term this means sustaining the Intifada as a "popular-military" struggle that will "convince" Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders. In the long term, it means convincing the Arab and Islamic worlds that Israel's "very existence is harmful to the region" and that the sanctity of the holy sites in Jerusalem is their responsibility, "not Yasser Arafat's."
Abu Shanab is aware such a path requires slow, arduous struggle. But then Hamas is one of the few regional players not interested in a quick fix on Palestine. It is in for the long haul.
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