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Article Excerpt
The following is an edited transcript of the fifty-second in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held on Friday, April 11, 2008, in the Gold Room of the Rayburn House Office Building with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., presiding.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR.: president, Middle East Policy Council
Today's topic is very timely. "Hamas: Villain, Victim or Missing Ingredient?" Obviously, this is a question that is crucial for peace in the Holy Land and, more broadly, in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the core issue that radicalizes the region and energizes anti-Americanism into terrorism in the broader Islamic world. So there's a great deal at stake.
Many see Hamas as a pure villain. It has been branded by Israel, the United States and some others as a terrorist organization rather than a legitimate movement for Palestinian independence or resistance against occupation. It is widely seen as extremist; yet, in many instances, it has shown principled and disciplined restraint.
This is an organization that is Islamist, Sunni Salafi in orientation. Is it morally absolutist or is it, as it claims, a democratic party that is prepared to accept electorally determined alternation in office? It won the Palestinian elections rather decisively and remains very popular, but it is seen in neighboring countries--autocracies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia--as a major threat, in that it appears to unite Islamism and democracy. It does not accept Israel's right to exist, but it does accept that Israel does exist and has repeatedly stated that it is willing to deal with Israel.
Is Hamas, the elected government of the Palestinians, a victim? It has been assiduously isolated and sought to be overthrown by Israel and the United States. It has, oddly for a Sunni Islamist movement, been driven into the arms of Iran, having nowhere else to go. It is now the subject of a siege in Gaza, with many implying that the siege will soon blossom into a full-scale war. In any event, Hamas's ascendancy as an elected government in Gaza has been accompanied by new extremes in suffering for the Palestinian people.
Is Hamas the missing ingredient in peace? Can a peace process that excludes the elected majority government of Palestine work, or is it dead on arrival? If llamas is not included somehow in whatever peace may eventuate, will it not have the capacity to wreck that peace? By what right do those who are not elected claim to speak for and negotiate on behalf of Palestinians?
These are not easy questions, and they are all in play. Former President Jimmy Carter is preparing to go to Damascus next week to meet with the exiled leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who may in fact have quite different views than some of the Hamas people within Palestine. There was a theory that the two parts of the movement are not in sync and that they may be pursuing different agendas. This raises, finally, the question of the role of Hamas more broadly in the very large Palestinian diaspora, whose acquiescence in any peace must also be obtained if it is to be secured.
SHERIFA ZUHUR: research professor of Islamic and regional studies, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College; director, Institute of Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Diasporic Studies
I'm expressing my own views and not those of the Army or the Department of Defense.
The Movement of the Islamic Resistance--Hamas--reflects the unique circumstances marking the Palestinian experience, namely, Palestinians' lack of sovereignty, the occupied territories' Bantustan status, the deplorable condition of the Palestinian refugee communities throughout the Middle East, and the factionalization of their leadership. It is also one of the Palestinian responses to the Islamic awakening or revival that took place throughout the Muslim world. I will reflect on certain continuities in Hamas's history, but I will also point out that the movement has evolved and has been very flexible indeed.
Emerging from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, Hamas bears all the hallmarks of the Muslim Brothers, or Ikhwan, who call for dawah, reform, an Islamization of society, adala, social justice, and hakmiyya, the sovereignty of God, which can only be realized through the sharia. And like all Ikhwan, they accept any Muslim who calls himself or herself a Muslim. In other words, they are not a Takfirist group. They are not like al-Qaeda; they are not like the Daghmoush-led Islamic army in Gaza and some other smaller groups. They do aim for consensus; they do have and have always had a democratic process in their organization intended to inhibit factionalism. They are pragmatic. They have avoided conflict whenever possible with countries other than Israel, meaning non-interference in the internal politics of those countries. It hasn't always been possible.
Hamas both embodied the vision of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brothers, of an Islamic populist movement, and developed a revolutionary Palestine-first approach. So whatever its relationship has been to the political process, it has set about serving the economic, social, spiritual and political needs of the Palestinians and those of prisoners, a very large segment of the Palestinian population.
Some questions arose about Hamas. Why is it that modern Islamism belatedly emerged among Palestinians? This really has to be answered by looking at the Arab nationalist orientation of the PLO and the control that Egypt, Jordan and Israel exerted over religious institutions and discourse. Certainly, Egypt tried quite hard to destroy the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brothers, who were jailed, or exiled, or living underground. By the 1960s, they had very little prestige in Gaza. And the strong personality shaping the organization, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and educator, returned from Egypt to Gaza and decided to focus on his own field, education, and to create in it a response to the spiritual and psychological devastation of the Palestinian community after 1967.
He really faced an uphill task. The Ikhwan of the West Bank were, if anything, perceived even more negatively than the Ikhwan of Egypt. So Yassin's efforts in the Islamic society and later in the organization called the Mujama al-Islami were deemed nonpolitical by the Israeli authorities, who licensed these groups (then withdrew and reinstated the license). That was serendipitous for him, but the policy had its background in the Israelis' prior devastating destruction of Islamic institutions and education within the Green Line, and some contrasts, so long as organizations were nonpolitical, in the West Bank and Gaza. While providing social, economic and medical aid, he and his supporters tried to awaken an Islamist vision through the printing and distribution of segments of Sayyid Qutb's book, Fi Dhil al-Quran. Maybe you've heard of Maalim f-il-Tariq, which was Qutb's more pessimistic, later book. This book is a remarkable, elevated discussion of the artful holistic meaning of the Quran (fann al-Quran).
As this happened, a lot of other things were going on. Both in Egypt and Kuwait, young Islamist Palestinians began to disengage from the other Palestinian nationalist groups and form their own organizations. This also happened later abroad, in the UK and elsewhere, providing a much-needed layer of external leadership. In Gaza, the Ikhwan were able to increase their presence in many mosques and began the project of the Islamic University, the first institute of higher learning in Gaza, where this pattern of rivalries with Fatah and manipulation by Yasser Ararat was very much in evidence. This type of endeavor--student parties in Palestinian universities and secondary schools--was very important to Hamas's mobilization and growth throughout the '80s.
According to insiders in the organization, the group began planning for armed resistance long prior to the first intifada, but they knew they weren't ready. They began facing competition with another new group, Islamic Jihad. When the intifada began, Hamas announced its existence and proclaimed jihad as the vehicle for liberation. That was really novel and a complete break with the Muslim Brothers' policy at that time. This was a period of trial and error for the organization; arrests by the Israelis, in 1988 and 1999 particularly, caused its leadership from then on to be mostly directed from outside. The real outcome of the intifada was a profound uncertainty and existential crisis for Hamas, because it caused the Arab governments and the PLO to seek resolution in Madrid and then in Oslo.
In the Oslo period, the group had a mixed experience. The deportation of 413 Hamas members to Lebanon in 1992 actually boosted the group's legitimacy, as did the Meshal affair, when the Israelis tried to poison Hamas's leader Khaled Meshal in Jordan, and Sheikh Yassin's tour of the Arab world. At the same time, Hamas faced virulent opposition from the PLO because Israel demanded that the PLO contain Hamas. This was aggravated by a number of incidents testing Hamas's generally stated philosophy that it is a fraternal organization, that ultimately it does seek reconciliation with Fatah. After all, they have basically the same aim, which is to alleviate the Palestinian situation.
In the Oslo period, Hamas grew many services and attracted many educated groups to join it, for example, an entire women's movement. Then, with the second intifada and Hamas's increased actions against the Israelis and the inter-Palestinian strife and corruption prior to the elections of 2006, Palestinians looked to Hamas as an antidote for everything that was going wrong.
Its seemingly contradictory statements about a political solution are similarly rooted in its history. It has, at many different times going back to 1988, offered a truce to Israel, an interim peace, but at the same time its discourse also concerns an ultimate solution, meaning a solution to the situation of both 1948 and 1967 Palestinians. There are members who support a two-state solution and members who do not. Many people say that the issue of negotiation with Israel is possibly modifiable by popular referendum (because Hamas would not stand in the way of the popular will), but that a solution cannot exclude the rights of refugees or the status of Jerusalem.
AMB. FREEMAN: In Saudi Arabia when I arrived as ambassador in 1989, the Saudis were severely restricting donations to Hamas on the grounds that it was a Shin Bet (Israeli internal security) front. And you reminded us that, in fact, the Israelis had a role in the beginning in facilitating, if not sponsoring, the growth of llamas in order to build a kind of religious firebreak against the secular PLO. That's a great irony for which I hope heads have rolled in Shin Bet; it didn't work out too well.
This brings me to the point that you mentioned, the attempted assassination of Khalid Meshal in Jordan with a biological agent. I think it was the first time that biological warfare on an individual level had been practiced, and Prime Minister Netanyahu had to apologize and provide the antidote to save his life. This illustrates another point: it is hard to get a life insurance policy if you're a Hamas politician. I mention this because, if you go on the Middle East Policy Council website, you will find interviews with a fairly large number of Hamas leaders, all of whom are now dead. Over the years, we have interviewed them through professional interviewers, and I'm sorry to say that, essentially without exception, they've all since been murdered.
ALI ABUNIMAH: fellow, Palestine Center; journalist; founder, Electronicintifada.net
I also am speaking for myself and not for any organization. But I would like to acknowledge and thank the Palestine Center, where I'm a fellow, for their support, which allows me to do my research.
I just returned two days ago from a visit to Jordan and Lebanon. I wasn't able to go to Gaza, but since I was in the area, I wrote to a friend of mine in Gaza just to see how he was doing and to tell him that I wished I could be there. He replied with a few lines that I want to share to you. He is an academic and a peace activist born and raised in Gaza:
Dear Ali, it's so nice to hear from you and know that you are just around the corner. I really wish you could visit us here in Gaza. I know that it is wishful thinking, but one day we will see each other in person. I don't need to tell you how bad it is here. Things have deteriorated so rapidly. In addition to all the shortages you know about, now we have no fuel. The last time I drove my car was two months ago. I really don't know what more is needed for the international community to intervene; how many more dead bodies, I wonder. Anyway, my friend, they will not break our spirit.
It's so easy to forget that we are talking about entire human communities, cities, people, and it is hard to talk about solutions when the freedom to travel, to dialogue, to exchange ideas is so restricted. Thus the importance of events like this in allowing us to begin to break taboos.
Since Hamas won the legislative elections in the occupied Palestinian territories in January 2006, the United States has attempted to isolate the movement in Gaza while propping up the leadership of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his electorally defeated Fatah faction in Ramallah, in the hope of reversing the election result and restoring Fatah to power. This has fit in with an overall U.S. strategy of fostering so-called moderate regimes in the region. These are regimes that are not defined by any democratic or human-rights criteria; they simply are allied with the United States and dependent on it to a greater or lesser extent. And the United States is, at the same time, determined to confront indigenous forces such as Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the United States portrays not as indigenous movements with deep social roots, but merely as puppets of regional rival Iran.
This strategy has backfired spectacularly. Hamas has withstood an extraordinary military, economic and political campaign waged against it by Israel with the encouragement of the United States. After Hamas's breach of the border wall with Egypt last January, allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to obtain basic supplies, Hamas is arguably more popular than ever. Meanwhile, the U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations between Israel and Abbas's U.S.-recognized Palestinian Authority have gone nowhere. There is a growing realization that the policy has failed and must change, but as to how it must change, the discussion is only beginning.
Within weeks of the January 2006 election, Israel and the Quartet--the ad hoc group representing the United States, the EU, Russia and the United Nations--had agreed to the complete isolation of Hamas unless it met certain conditions: renounce armed struggle, recognize Israel's main political demand that it has a fight to exist as a Jewish state, and agree to abide by all signed agreements. No reciprocal conditions were imposed on Israel, which did not have to recognize Palestinian political demands a priori, was free to continue military attacks on Palestinians in the occupied territories, and could violate signed agreements with total impunity.
It appears that these conditions were specifically tailored to be unacceptable to Hamas. The United States, in collaboration with Israel and elements of the Fatah leadership in Ramallah, put in place a siege to squeeze Hamas and the civilians in Gaza in the hope that the population would turn against Hamas and back to Fatah. The United States also sponsored what amounted to an attempted coup against Hamas by Contra-style...
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