Muslim Fundamentalists of Hamas Challenge PLO for Palestinian Support

By Donald Neff

It was 11 years ago, on Sept. 9, 1988, when fistfights broke out among a crowd of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. While there were no fatalities, the melee was memorable because it marked a serious challenge to the Palestine Liberation Organization by a relatively new Islamic militant organization, the Islamic Resistance Movement—Hamas, meaning Zeal.¹ In the following years, acts of terrorism against Israel by Hamas would make the PLO’s efforts to find peace more difficult and ultimately directly contribute to the election of hard-liner Binyamin Netanyahu as the prime minister of Israel on his promise to provide security.

Hamas emerged out of the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab nationalist group. A branch of the Brotherhood was founded in Israeli-occupied Gaza in the 1970s by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a fiery, wheelchair-bound quadriplegic and Gaza clergyman. At the time, the Gaza Brotherhood devoted itself to grassroots work in mosques, clinics and social work. It abstained from all forms of the anti-occupation struggle. By 1986 it controlled 40 percent of all the mosques and the 7,000-student Islamic University in Gaza.

Israeli authorities saw the Brotherhood as a useful counterbalance to the largely secular PLO. Israel began secretly to contribute to the Brotherhood’s cause through favors and donations to mosques and schools.² Israeli donations to the Brotherhood were reported in the millions of dollars, considerably strengthening Yassin’s organization.³

Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinian uprising, the intifada, which began Dec. 9, 1987, traumatized Yassin, who was 51 at the time. Within three months, he created Hamas as a militant organization devoted to violent opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. Hamas’ first official communiqué came in February 1988 stating that “the Islamic Resistance Movement is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood chapter in Palestine. The Brotherhood is an international organization...[that] professes a comprehensive understanding...of the Islamic precepts in all aspects of life.”⁴

On Aug. 18, 1988, Hamas published its Covenant, a sternly confrontational document calling for a religious war against Israel.⁵ The Covenant said: “The Islamic Resistance Movement considers the land of Palestine to be an Islamic trust for all generations of Muslims. It cannot be given up in part or ceded; no one has the right. The only solution to the Palestinian problem is by jihad. All initiatives, conferences and proposals are a waste of time.”⁶

After publication of the Covenant, Israeli forces began quietly arresting Hamas leaders. Dozens of scholars, preachers and others making up the middle and lower ranks were detained by mid-October 1988. Many of those arrested were staff members of the Islamic University in Gaza, which had been closed since the day after the start of the intifada the previous year. These included Dr. Atef Adwan, dean of student affairs; Majdi Aqil, director of the university’s service department; Attallah Abu Subah, lecturer on Islamic law; Abdel Kareem Jaabir, director of finances; Salah Eshradi, director of student affairs, and Yasser Harep, secretary of admissions.⁷ Yassin was finally arrested in May 1989.

On Oct. 3, 1989, the Israeli Defense Ministry declared Hamas an illegal organization, making anyone belonging to it, participating in its meetings or rendering it a service subject to arrest and prosecution. On Oct. 16, 1991, Yassin was sentenced to life in prison, after pleading guilty to planning the killing of four Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.⁸

Despite these Israeli actions to suppress the group it once cynically supported, Hamas now had a martyr in its imprisoned leader and other Hamas members locked up in Israeli prisons. The result was not the withering away of Hamas, as Israel presumably hoped, but rather its further radicalization. It stepped up its bloody attacks and continued to vie for popularity in the occupied territories with the PLO. It also continued to reject negotiations with Israel and to advocate the military, meaning terroristic, overthrow of the occupation.⁹

Hamas justified its attacks by claiming they were against military personnel, although they soon involved many civilians, and that the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2649 had affirmed the legitimacy of armed struggle by Palestinians.¹⁰ Hamas rejected recognition of Israel or a two-state solution, rejected the PLO’s 1988 declaration recognizing Israel and rejected the 1991 peace process begun at Madrid.

The degeneration of relations between Hamas and the PLO reached a nadir in July 1992 in Gaza, when supporters from the two sides waged street battles that resulted in 4 dead and 55 injured. Still, Hamas’ attacks against Israel went on. After a series of killings of four Israeli soldiers in 1992, Israel took even more draconian measures against Hamas. The Gaza Strip was sealed off, depriving the area’s one million residents from access to jobs in Israel, the area’s main source of livelihood at the time. Israel also deported 413 Hamas supporters in December 1992. And Israel increased extrajudicial executions and arrests, including a roundup of 124 Hamas suspects on June 4, 1993.¹¹

Hamas lashed back in fury. A rash of increasingly bloody suicide bombings soon followed. Seven Israelis were killed and 44 others wounded, many of them schoolchildren, when a suicide bomber blew up his car near a bus in Afula on April 6, 1994.¹² The next day a Palestinian killed an Israeli and wounded four others at a bus stop at Ashdod.¹³ On April 13, five Israelis were killed when a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up in Hadera.

Worse was in store. On Oct. 19, 1994, a bomb carried by a Hamas member exploded on a bus in crowded downtown Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, killing the bomber and 22 Israeli commuters and wounding 45 others. It was the worst terrorist attack in Tel Aviv’s history.¹⁴

Attacks Help Elect Netanyahu

Hamas went on to launch even heavier suicide attacks, the largest ever aimed against Israel. In the months leading up to the 1996 Israeli elections, between February and March, its suicide attacks killed 56 Israelis, mainly in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The attacks scared and infuriated the Israelis, and certainly directly contributed to hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu’s election over relatively moderate Shimon Peres in May. Netanyahu’s campaign slogan was “peace with security.”¹⁵ Still, the bombings did not stop.

They culminated, however, on July 30, 1997, when two Hamas suicide bombers blew themselves up in Jerusalem’s crowded Mahane Yehuda market, killing 13 other people and wounding at least 150. They left behind a note demanding the release of all Palestinian prisoners, including Hamas founder Yassin.¹⁶

Then, with historic irony, Netanyahu gave Hamas its biggest victory ever—freeing Yassin from his life sentence, an enormous boost to Hamas’ morale.

Netanyahu’s hand was forced when two Israeli Mossad agents bungled the attempted assassination in Jordan of a leading Hamas official, Khaled Meshal, 41, on Sept. 25, 1997. The agents were caught by Meshal’s security guards and soon exposed as Israeli agents carrying Canadian passports. King Hussein, the Arab leader closest to Israel, was furious and demanded retribution. He warned Israel that unless Yassin and a number of other Hamas members were released from Israeli prisons, Jordan would try the two Mossad agents in public and hang them.¹⁷

Netanyahu quickly capitulated. In return for getting back his two agents, the Israeli leader released Yassin six days later along with about 70 other Palestinians.¹⁸ Rather than turn Yassin over to Arafat, and thereby inflate the Palestinian Authority’s reputation, Yassin was flown to Jordan. On Oct. 6, Yassin was flown back to the Gaza Strip on a Jordanian helicopter for a hero’s welcome by about 10,000 supporters. He was as hard-line as ever, as he showed the next day.¹⁹

Yassin said he had told Israeli officials that Hamas militants would stop targeting civilians if Israel would do the same and also halt the confiscation of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements. “Israel is confiscating and killing,” said Yassin, surrounded by supporters and well-wishers in his home. “If Israel stops its attacks against our civilians, we will not do a thing against civilians....If Israel would withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and leave its settlements there and in Jerusalem, I will have a cease-fire with Israel. I am ready to sign a cease-fire agreement with them.”

Netanyahu aide David Bar-Illan called the conditions “unacceptable,” and said Israel would not pursue a cease-fire agreement as long as Hamas as a group did not formally abandon its policy of attacking Israelis and vowing to destroy the Jewish state.²⁰

In mid-February 1998, Yassin traveled to Egypt for medical treatment because of failing sight and hearing, in addition to his other frailties. Soon after, he was invited to Saudi Arabia to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and was feted by King Fahd. That prompted a wave of invitations and visits to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Yemen, Syria, Iran and the Sudan, during which he maintained his hard stance against dealing with Israel. The visits and Yassin’s militant stance were prominently reported in the Arab press and gave him increased stature throughout the Arab world. Reports had it that Yassin was pledged tens of millions of dollars by the leaders he met, though neither he nor his hosts ever confirmed any donations.²¹

On his return to Gaza on June 24, Yassin said to a small but enthusiastic crowd: “We are determined to continue the struggle. We will never accept the occupation of our homeland, and we will use all our means until we remove the occupation and our people go back home.”²²

Yassin’s triumphal tour confirmed his status as a popular alternative to Yasser Arafat. In response, Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, under prodding by the United States and complaints from Israel about lax efforts against terrorism, increased its arrests of Hamas members and even briefly placed Yassin under house arrest. Arafat’s efforts against Hamas were so successful that they won repeated U.S. praise.²³

For whatever reason, whether it was Arafat’s tough actions or the Palestinians’ dwindling zeal for the struggle or a new strategy by Hamas, there have been no major Hamas terrorist attacks in nearly two years. That, and Arafat’s tough measures, may be in large part the reason Hamas’s popularity was down to 10 percent in Gaza by mid-1999.²⁴

In the murky and secretive world of internicine Palestinian struggles, it is nearly impossible to follow the twists and turns of relations. But one thing seems certain despite Hamas’ current disarray. Yasser Arafat must constantly look over his shoulder to see what an aging quadriplegic in failing health is up to.

FOOTNOTES

1Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, 9/18/88. Also see John Kifner, New York Times, 9/17/88; Daoud Kuttab, “The Brothers Join the Fray,” Middle East International, 9/9/88.

2Graham Usher, “The Rise of Political Islam in the Occupied Territories,” Middle East International, 6/25/93. Also see Andrew Whitley, London Financial Times, 9/8/88; John Kifner, New York Times, 9/17/88.

3Haim Baram, “The Expulsion of the Palestinians: Rabin Shows His True Colors,” Middle East International, 1/8/93; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Washington Post, 12/21/92. Also see Alan Cowell, New York Times, 10/20/94.

4Graham Usher, “The Rise of Political Islam in the Occupied Territories,” Middle East International, 6/25/93.

5The text is in “Special Document,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 1993, pp. 122-34.

6Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, 9/6/88 and 9/18/88.

7New York Times, 10/21/88.

8 Washington Jewish Week, 10/5/89.

9New York Times, 10/17/91.

10Ahmad J. Rashad, “Hamas: The History of the Islamic Opposition Movement in Palestine,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs , March 1993.

11Graham Usher, “The Rise of Political Islam in the Occupied Territories,” Middle East International, 6/25/93.

12Clyde Haberman, New York Times, 4/7/94.

13Associated Press, Washington Times , 4/8/94.

14Barton Gellman, Washington Post, 4/6/95.

15Don Peretz and Gideon Doron, “Israel’s 1996 elections: A Second Political Earthquake?” Middle East Journal, Autumn 1996, pp. 545-46.

16Barton Gellman, Washington Post, 7/31/97.

17Ibid., 10/6/97; Alan Cowell, New York Times, 10/15/97.

18Serge Schmemann, New York Times, 10/2-3/97.

19Barton Gellman, Washington Post, 10/7/97.

20Associated Press, 10/7/97.

21Serge Schmemann, New York Times, 6/25/98

22Ibid.

23See for instance, Martin Indyk’s remarks in Reuters, 2/2/99.

24Associated Press, 6/18/99.