Hamas in context

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

[This is scanned from an article by Chris Hedges titled "A Gaza
Diary" that is in the latest issue of Harpers Magazine. Hedges was a
New York Times reporter during the 1980s who covered Central America.
While he was a gifted journalist, he tended to promote the
anti-Communist agenda of the newspaper's brass. In this
article--perhaps because the cold war is over--the ideological
component is less pronounced. Unfortunately, the article is not
online. Although Harpers has a website, they never make any articles
available. I have been reading the magazine myself for over 20 years
now and recommend it highly. It is much more useful than the Nation
Magazine.]

Wednesday, June 20, Khan Younis
The mosque dominates camp life. Five times a day, including calls
before dawn and after sunset, the amplified chant of the muezzin
lends a coherence and rhythm to existence here, Islam has squeezed
out the secular, urban-educated Palestinian leadership in Gaza. In
places like Khan Younis, Arafat's Palestinian Authority bows to the
militant's interpretation of Islam. There is no alcohol sold in the
camp. There are no cinemas. Women, even those who are not religious,
find it prudent to walk the streets with their heads covered. Special
Islamic reconcilers settle disputes and blood feuds. The militants,
imbued with religious zeal, are intolerant of anti-Islamic practices,
but they are also widely respected for being honest, in stark
contrast with Arafat's bloated and bribe-ridden government. Shop
owners complain of having been forced to pay kickbacks to local
Arafat officials in order to do business. Landlords say that
Palestinian Authority officials rarely pay rent on stores or
apartments. Many of Arafat's officials have set up lucrative
businesses importing duty-free goods, including cars, and selling
them at huge profits.

In the afternoon we visit the cramped office of an Islamic charity
that provides food to families in Khan Younis. The room is filled
with young bearded militants. A truck has backed up lo a warehouse
next door, and men are unloading sacks of flour, sugar, and rice, as
well as red lentils, tea, macaroni, tomato paste, and corn oil. The
charity, which raises its money in the Gulf states, is not officially
tied to the militant Islamic group Hamas. But it is here, I have been
told, that I will meet Sheikh Younis al-Astal, the camp's senior
Hamas leader.

He enters dressed in a white robe. The men in the room fall silent.
He speaks, as so many Hamas leaders do, in an even, gracious tone. He
offers me tea or coffee.

Arafat loyalists in the camp, such as Faqawi, concede that Hamas is
ascendant. If Oslo had led, as many had hoped, to a two-state
solution, and thereby given Palestinians some glimmer of a better
life, it is a fair bet that Hamas would be a marginal force in Gaza.
But Israel's occupation and Arafat's mismanagement have made it only
a matter of time before the militants come to power. They already
rule the street. If Sharon unleashes Israel's might, as he did in
Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority will be his first victim.

"What has happened since the Palestinian Authority came to power?"
the sheikh asks. "Everyone is poorer. The Israeli occupation has not
ended. Hardship always brings people back to God. It is like
sickness. To quote the Prophet, peace be upon him, a believer should
never be afraid of being poor but of being rich. When you become rich
you think only of things.-,This kills your soul. Islam has given
Palestinians cohesion. We feel as one body, in our dreams and our
agony. And Islam distinguishes us in that it prepares people to die
for the sake of Allah. They are always ready to die for Allah. They
are ready to spread the message of Islam, ready to rescue someone
weaker than they, even animals."

Hamas is primarily known outside Israel for its suicide-bomb attacks
against Israeli civilians. The sheikh tells me that Hamas orders
suicide bombers, under its military wing, the Iz al-Din al-Qassam, to
attack Israeli civilian targets because Israeli troops and armed
settlers routinely attack Palestinian civilians.

"As long as the target our civilians we will target their civilians,"
he says. "When they stop we will stop."

>From 1987 to 1993, during the first intifada, Hamas targeted only
Israeli soldiers and settlements. It began to attack individual
Israeli civilians after a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, gunned
down twenty-nine Muslim worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.
But these attacks have had the added benefit of discrediting and
weakening Arafat's authority, of exposing his helplessness in the
face of settlement expansion, closures, and the shooting of unarmed
Palestinians. Still, even the sheikh has used his time during Friday
prayers to implore the young boys not to go out on the dunes.

"I know that every father tries to keep his children away from the
fence," he says. "The teachers and the imams tell the children not to
go. When I preach in the mosque I tell them to stay away. But these
kids have no place to go. The only place to play is in the alleys or
the dunes."

The gun battles on the rim of the camp at night have fused the
various factions. The Fatah Hawks, who once battled Hamas activists
for control of the street, now swap weapons and ammunition with their
old foes. The factions march together at funerals. We meet next with
one of the leaders of the gunmen who fire on the Israeli positions at
night. Mohammed Abu Rich, thirty-one, leads the Ahmed Abu Rich
brigade, which is made up of a couple dozen men. The group is named
for Mohammed's brother, shot in November 1993 by the Israelis. He
meets us in his house, a huge painting of his brother on the wall
surrounded by three Palestinian flags.

He tells us that he spent six years in an Israeli prison. His parents
died while he was incarcerated. He has no family left. He swings from
polite conversation to a thinly veiled hostility. I am uneasy. For
the only time in Gaza, I hand over my Swiss passport when asked for
identification to avoid being judged as an American. He writes down
our names and our passport numbers-Joe uses his Maltese passport-in a
school notebook.

I have seen his type before in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Congo, and Central
America. Driven by rage and somewhat intoxicated with the authority
carrying an automatic weapon can bring to the dispossessed, these are
the combatants I fear the most. They are always looking for hostages,
sure we are all spies. During the first intifada, a group of Fatah
Hawks hauled New York Times photographer Rina Castelnuovo and myself
into a room and accused us of working for Israeli security. We were
lucky to talk our way out.

As often happens in such encounters, I am soon the one being
interviewed. He asks me what I think of the conflict, which
Palestinians I have met with, where I have been in Khan Younis, and
what I think of Israel. I mutter brief and tepid answers. Odds are
that the next time I arrive in Gaza I will hear that this man has
been killed.

"I can't stand to see the children get shot," he says as we stand to
leave. "I don't care about the others. But when the children get shot
I cry. I can't; take it. I feel like I am sixty."

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 10/13/2001

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