With despair radicalizing Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Hamas is also beginning to dominate the political agenda. According to Palestinian analysts, the strength of hard-line Islamists is at a record high. Hamas, which called on Muslims everywhere last week to “threaten Western interests” if Washington goes to war against Iraq, is already thought to be more popular in Gaza than Fatah, the mainstream and more moderate bloc. In the West Bank, its militants set the tone for fighting against Israel. But while Hamas has always had guerrilla might, some of its leaders now talk about translating the group’s successes into political power. Mahmoud Zahar, one of the Hamas’s leaders in Gaza, asserted last week that Hamas had the infrastructure to take over Palestinian leadership “politically, financially and socially.” Even people who think Hamas is overestimating its strength still believe the group has enough support to block any return to peacemaking by Arafat, much the way it blocked the truce proposal in Cairo. “I think we’re in a new era,” says one European diplomat involved in the diplomacy. “It’s no longer possible for any one faction to dominate and to impose its program on the others.”
Nowhere is the group’s strength more evident than in Gaza, where Hamas men routinely patrol neighborhoods dressed in military fatigues and armed with AK-47s. Ahmed Yassin, the group’s ailing spiritual leader, said in an interview last week that Hamas has no beef with the Palestinian Authority but that Arafat’s administration does not represent the majority of Palestinians. “Whoever wants to know the real strength of Hamas should just talk to people on the street,” said Yassin, wedged in his wheelchair and swathed in blankets. “That’s how you can measure how much support we have.”
Arafat is worried about Hamas’s ascent. His isolation in Ramallah and his failure to lead Palestinians to some concrete achievement–either in peacemaking or in fighting with Israel–has eroded his popularity. He asked Israel recently for permission to move back to Gaza, presumably to deal with Hamas. But Israel prefers to keep him in his largely demolished West Bank compound, where Arafat has been confined for more than a year. He’s even offered Hamas membership in the Palestine Liberation Organization, already a fractious assembly.
Mashaal, who has wandered from one Arab country to another since his family fled the West Bank in 1967, says Hamas will weigh Arafat’s offer to join the PLO but has strict conditions. He wants Arafat to toughen the PLO’s national covenant, which had called for Israel’s destruction until it was amended in 1998. Other Hamas leaders want the PLO to drop its reference to a “secular democratic” Palestinian state–Hamas envisages something more like Iran. For Mashaal, any political achievement would be sweet revenge against Israel, which tried to assassinate him in 1997. For two days in September of that year, Mashaal lay dying in a hospital in Amman after Mossad hit men accosted him on a busy street and injected his ear with a mysterious poison. Mashaal would not have survived had his bodyguards not chased down the Mossad men and turned them over to police. Jordan ended up trading them for the antidote and for Yassin, who’d been languishing in an Israeli jail.
Mashaal says the Egyptian proposal is no longer on the table. Drafted by Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, it called for Palestinians to stop attacking Israelis for one year while the United States pressured Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to freeze settlement expansion and withdraw troops from parts of the West Bank and Gaza. In a surprise move last week, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak invited Sharon to Cairo for talks, apparently hoping to secure reciprocal Israeli measures. Sharon, who had been shunned by Mubarak during his first two years as prime minister, accepted the invitation. Some people involved in the conference say Egypt has even threatened to impede Hamas’s fund-raising in Arab countries if it doesn’t accept the ceasefire. But Hamas doesn’t seem concerned. “No one can pressure us because we get most of our money from our long list of supporters,” said Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, a Hamas figure in Gaza. The more misery Palestinians face, the longer the list becomes.
