A
New Kind of Killing
Charmaine
Seitz
(Charmaine
Seitz is a journalist writing from Ramallah.)
March 30,
2004
The killing
of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, was a new kind
of killing, even in the midst of the protracted conflict that
began in the fall of 2000 and has claimed some 2,800 Palestinian
and some 900 Israeli lives. Viewed by most Israelis as a kind
of godfather of terror, in death Yassin has become the personification
of all aspects of Palestinian loss -- even for those Palestinians
who hold no brief for Hamas and its long-term program of Islamizing
Palestinian society. The final crippling of his aging and withered
limbs evoked the Palestinian innocents who have died; the last
silencing of his declarations of resistance dealt a blow to Palestinian
national pride. Even many secular Palestinians appreciated Sheikh
Yassin for his continual invocation of Palestinian rights to all
of historic Palestine, and saw him as an ideological backbone
of today's insurgency against the Israeli occupation. Perhaps
these sources of popular appeal, more than the sheikh's likely
role in authorizing suicide bombings, explain why Israel signed
his death warrant.
It was to
be expected, then, that after three Israeli missiles struck down
Yassin, his two sons and five others leaving a Gaza mosque after
dawn prayers on March 22, the outpouring of Palestinian grief
would be widespread. Hundreds of thousands participated in the
Gaza funeral that day, mourners crowding around the wooden bier
to touch it, or perhaps testing the air for the sweet smell said
to rise from the swaddled and bathed corpses of those considered
to have been martyred for God and country. In the towns of the
West Bank, where most Hamas leaders have been arrested by Israel
or driven underground, a chorus of Quranic verses issued forth
from the minarets of the mosques and burning tires enveloped the
streets in black smoke. The Lebanese group Hizballah offered its
own salute -- a volley of missiles into northern Israel.
But once
the three days of official mourning declared by the Palestinian
Authority (PA) had passed, life returned to what has come to be
called normal in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Shuttered
businesses reopened their doors, and the streets once again filled
with people. The resumption of quotidian existence seemed to reflect
a widespread sense that, the gloating of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon and the vengeful polemics of Hamas notwithstanding,
the assassination of the paraplegic sheikh has changed little
in the strategic picture. What Israel has likely done by killing
Yassin, the most popular figure in Hamas, is simply to entrench
the dynamics that have characterized the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation
since late September 2000. The assassination has further marginalized
the PA and its improbable pursuit of a negotiated two-state solution,
while providing a ladder for the climbing fortunes of Hamas and
its politics of armed resistance. It may also stymie yet another
initiative that held out the faint hope of a modicum of Palestinian
self-determination.
DISENGAGING
THE DISENGAGEMENT PLAN
Since December
2003, when Sharon announced plans to "unilaterally disengage"
from the majority of the Gaza Strip, possibly dismantling more
than a dozen Gaza settlements and several in the West Bank, the
Palestinian Authority has been at a loss as to how to greet the
proposal. On the one hand, the PA cannot oppose any evacuation
of settlements or withdrawal from occupied land, since it has
been calling for exactly that as the necessary prelude to a comprehensive
peace. On the other hand, it was eminently clear that Sharon's
plan was being crafted in a manner intended to further humiliate
the PA, in keeping with Israel's insistence since the outbreak
of the current intifada that it has no "partner" on
the Palestinian side.
A recent
poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
Research illustrated further reasons for the PA's ambivalence
about the "disengagement" plan. Sixty-one percent of
Palestinians responded that they do not believe Sharon is sincere
in his stated intention to pull out of Gaza, and instead is only
trying to aggravate Palestinian infighting, consolidate Israeli
control of the West Bank, scare the PA with the strength of Hamas
and, finally, calm the increasing Israeli Jewish fears of losing
a Jewish majority inside the borders of Israel. Reports that Sharon
will not submit a completed withdrawal proposal for his cabinet's
approval until after the US presidential elections in November
2004 add to the suspicions of some that the plan is little but
a tactical gimmick.
While the
dominant explanation on the Israeli left for Sharon's conversion
from settlement advocate to pragmatist is that Sharon suddenly
understood that the need to maintain a Jewish majority inside
Israel required the abandonment of the Occupied Territories, a
historical view suggests a more circumspect interpretation. The
territories that Sharon is now working to place on the "Israeli
side" of the wall-and-fence complex in the West Bank closely
follow the lines of a 1973 map illustrating future annexation
of these lands to Israel. Sharon's idea, say some analysts, is
to use the barrier conceived by his Labor Party predecessors to
isolate Palestinians within disconnected cantons, Gaza being one
of these, and thereby fragment the geographical basis of a unified
Palestinian national identity. So-called negotiations surrounding
the "disengagement" plan, which has yet to be detailed
three months after being announced, are giving Palestinians additional
pause.
SHADES OF
BALFOUR
While the
United States met word of unilateral disengagement with muted
noises of disapproval, by the time Israeli and US officials had
met to discuss the plan, the Palestinian Authority was cut out
of the process. On the two occasions that US envoys bothered to
include chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on their itinerary,
they responded to his queries bluntly, saying that the terms of
Israel's withdrawal from Gaza were to be hammered out between
Israel and the US alone.
Resigned
Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, speaking recently to
reporters, gave voice to the bitterness that diplomatic niceties
prevent his former colleagues from expressing. "What will
happen in the future and [what will be] the guarantees?"
he asked. "All of this reminds us of the Balfour Declaration:
a promise from those who do not own made to those who do not deserve.
What is the place of the US to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians
with the Israelis?"
Recent reports
suggest that the Israeli-US negotiations are based on principles
that bear no resemblance to the prescriptions of UN resolutions
for resolving the conflict. Israeli representatives are reportedly
pledging to withdraw from Gaza if the US agrees to accept that
key West Bank settlement blocs, Ma'ale Adumim, Gush Etzion and
Ariel, will be annexed de facto to Israel. Another stipulation
is that Israel not be required to negotiate with the PA as long
as that body remains led by Yasser Arafat. Egypt is being brought
on board to rally Palestinian security forces for the job of policing
Gaza in the event of an Israeli move. "The only negotiations
between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are happening via
the United States and then via Egypt," said one Palestinian
official. "That is a very long trail."
"UNDER
FIRE"
In the midst
of this horse trading, Hamas claimed victory. Not only is Israel
fleeing Gaza, the group contends, but Israel cannot guarantee
its citizens physical security. On January 14, Hamas' armed wing,
the Izz al-din al-Qassam Brigades, sent its first ever female
suicide bomber to the Erez border crossing. Faking a handicap,
she killed four Israelis, three of them soldiers. On March 6,
the military wings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah dispatched
three cars to Erez laden with two bombs, only succeeding in penetrating
PA lines and killing two Palestinian officers before being summarily
shot by Israeli soldiers. Eight days later, two young Palestinians
from Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp smuggled themselves into Israel
behind a false wall in a shipping container and blew themselves
up in the Ashdod port, killing ten Israeli workers. Hamas officials
avowed that the shift towards joint operations and away from "soft"
civilian targets was intended to demonstrate that Israel's construction
of a barrier in the West Bank would not deter attacks (Gaza already
has an electrified fence) and that a partial or unilateral withdrawal
would not end hostilities. (During this same period, 177 Palestinians
were killed by Israeli troops.)
One of the
major Israeli military criticisms of the Gaza withdrawal plan
is that, in departing the Gaza Strip "under fire," Israel
would repeat the experience of leaving southern Lebanon in May
2000, when Hizballah declared that it had ousted Israeli troops
by force of arms. Would the weakened PA be able to constrain Hamas?
How, the generals have asked, would Israel maintain strategic
control of the territory?
Hamas spokesperson
Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, anointed on March 28 as the group's new "internal"
leader, took offense at the Israeli generals' implications in
an interview with the Jerusalem-based Palestine Report. "It
is very clear that [these criticisms are] directed at the Palestinian
Authority to incite it against Hamas, as if Hamas is preparing
itself to carry out a coup against the Palestinian Authority and
grab the reins of power. This is a clear call to the Authority
to crack down on Hamas, as if they want to say that the Authority's
refusal to confront Hamas will lead to Hamas taking control over
Gaza." But Rantisi's objections elide the tensions that underlie
internal Palestinian relations. With every suicide bombing, Hamas
undermines the political base of its stated ally.
Iyad Barghouti,
author of two books on political Islam in Palestine, questions
the premise that Hamas is indeed vying for control in the Palestinian
areas. He says that the Muslim Brotherhood movement, on which
Hamas is based, believes that it should not assume power in weak
Arab states that rely on outside funding to survive. "They
know that one day after taking control, they would be bankrupt,"
he explains. In Barghouti's assessment, it is enough for Hamas
to control the Palestinian street. For Israel's purposes, in any
case, the specter of 1.2 million Gazans doing the bidding of Israel's
arch-enemy has been a useful public relations tool.
AFTER YASSIN
In weighing
Yassin's contributions to the Gazan community, Barghouti calls
him "the Arafat of Hamas." People asked the sheikh to
mediate their disputes; he was close to the common person, Barghouti
says. Ghazi Hamad, editor of the Islamist newspaper al-Risala,
emphasizes Yassin's pan-Islamic significance. "Sheikh Yassin
was a symbol of resistance and dignity, strength and Islam, even
[a symbol] of Iraq against the American invasion." On March
22, the pan-Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera broadcast interview
after interview with Arab politicians, secular and Islamist, making
the same point.
Born in 1938
in the village of al-Jawra in what is now Israel, Yassin was paralyzed
in a sports accident in his youth. But the injury did not preclude
political involvement. In 1983, Yassin was arrested by Israel
on charges of weapons possession and forming a secret organization;
he was sentenced by an Israeli military court to 13 years imprisonment.
Two years later, he was released in a prisoner exchange deal.
By 1987, Yassin and other members of the Muslim Brotherhood had
decided that it was time to change the Brotherhood's profile in
Palestine and establish a group expressly commissioned with fighting
Israel's occupation. The birth of the Islamic Resistance Movement
(Hamas, according to the Arabic acronym) coincided with the start
of the first intifada. Yassin was rearrested in 1989 and sentenced
to life imprisonment, but he was released again in 1997 at the
behest of Jordan, angered by the botched attempt of Israeli agents
to assassinate Hamas figure Khalid Meshaal on Jordanian soil.
His release was a public relations coup for Hamas, but he exited
prison into a state of turmoil in the Occupied Territories, after
a Palestinian Authority crackdown on Hamas and open confrontations
between Israel and the PA. One year later, he was arrested by
the PA after he demanded that several of its officials resign.
Israel previously tried to kill the sheikh in September 2003.
But by all
accounts, Yassin was a pragmatist among Hamas leaders. His ability
to provide religious justifications for political goals lent him
credibility and won him respect. In recent months, he often chose
a route that subordinated Hamas goals to the Palestinian Authority,
in the name of national unity. Barghouti says Yassin once told
him, "If I was offered the seat [of leadership] by President
Arafat himself, I wouldn't take it."
His final
statements largely concerned the need for a unified Palestinian
political plan in the event that Israel does depart from Gaza.
"This proposed agreement will focus on the relations between
the Palestinian factions and the Palestinian Authority and how
to control the Gaza Strip, and to protect the stability and security
of the Strip after the possible withdrawal," Yassin said.
While the proposal was certainly a swipe at the Authority and
its inability to supply "security and stability," the
force of the jab was blunted by conciliatory language. In many
ways, these are the qualities that have endeared the political
network of Hamas to the average Palestinian: a reputation for
honesty, humility and commitment to Palestinian cohesiveness,
as well as the ability and desire to avenge mounting Palestinian
loss.
The question
is how Hamas may change under the new Gaza leadership of Abd al-Aziz
Rantisi. While the pediatrician and father of six is known as
a firebrand, Barghouti believes that the pressures of leadership
will tame his style. "At the top of the movement, he must
become more diplomatic."
Ali Jarbawi,
a political scientist at Birzeit University, dismisses any suggestion
that Hamas' fortunes will now decline. "Hamas is solid and
well-organized. I believe that the popularity of the movement
will rise," he says. "If anything, this marks a new
era in the conflict, one where talk of a peace process is not
valued anymore, and where there is an open period of escalation."
Another open
question after the killing of Yassin is whether Hamas will embark
on a new front, expanding its operations for the first time outside
of historic Palestine. The Bush administration's failure to condemn
the missile attack highlighted its policy of including Hamas within
its global "war on terrorism," a policy that draws increasing
Palestinian ire. "The Zionists didn't carry out their operation
without the consent of the terrorist American administration,
and it must bear responsibility for this crime," Hamas said
in a statement released after the aerial strike. "All the
Muslims of the world will be honored to join in the retaliation
for this crime." According to Israeli analyst Reuven Paz,
Yassin was among the Hamas leaders who opposed opening this new
pan-Islamist front. Hamas has since backtracked from these statements,
denying that it considers American interests a legitimate target.
But there can be no mistaking the heightened tension between the
US, which has singled out the Palestinian faction, and a popular
but internationally isolated Hamas.
IMPERIOUS
LIMITS
According
to the most recent polls conducted just before the Yassin assassination,
Hamas' support in Gaza had risen to 27 percent, alongside support
for the secular faction Fatah at 23 percent. Even if the West
Bank is included in the sample (including a three percent margin
of error), Hamas and Fatah run neck and neck in public opinion.
More interesting
is that Hamas' popularity continues to climb, even as support
for the deadly suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians that
have become Hamas' signature is showing signs of slow decline.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that while most Palestinians continue
to view the myriad checkpoints that block the roads of Gaza and
the West Bank as illegal collective punishment, some have begun
to blame the suicide bombings for Israel's tight grip on their
lives. Hence, the swing toward Hamas can be viewed, at its heart,
as a rejection of the Palestinian Authority, its collapsed peace
platform and its nagging failure to initiate significant reforms
in governance.
Many within
Fatah recognize the critical condition of the secular national
movement in the West Bank and Gaza today. For years, Fatah's grassroots
has clamored for a share in decision-making, hitching its calls
to a wider public demand for government reform and transparency.
These calls and the growing instability evidenced in violent outbursts
between various localized groups finally spurred Arafat in February
to announce a general conference, the first elections and strategizing
session to be held in Fatah in 15 years. Younger members are seeking
admission to the Fatah Central Council, an 11-member committee
through which most important decisions are vetted by Arafat before
they are taken to wider leadership bodies. Revolutionary Council
member Ahmad Ghneim, a self-described young Turk, says that "this
new generation belongs to a new world." While their politics
vis-à-vis Israel may be very similar to those of the sitting leadership,
their ideas about transparency, civic participation and women's
rights, to name a few issues, promise to give a new flavor to
the agenda of the faction that once made up the Palestinian mainstream.
But the question
remains as to how and where Fatah will gather its members from
parts far and wide, in a climate where the Palestinian Legislative
Council is unable to meet regularly, and Arafat remains confined
by Israeli fiat to his Ramallah compound. Hundreds of Fatah members
cannot really converge on Arafat's headquarters. More dubious
is the prospect of Arafat meeting them elsewhere; many days before
the assassination of Yassin, his guards had installed heavy metal
gates on the compound. They refused to open them even for the
demonstration that coursed through Ramallah's streets. Ghneim
grimaces at the challenge. "I think they chose an impossible
option," he says, shaking his head. In practice, Fatah remains
bound by the imperious limits set by the Israeli army.
WHAT IS TO
COME
Meanwhile,
the Israeli government and Hamas are locked in a death grip. After
swearing in Rantisi in a packed Gaza stadium, Hamas' political
leadership has ducked underground in expectation of more Israeli
assassinations. Sharon's cabinet has stated that more extrajudicial
executions are coming. "This is all linked to the disengagement
plan," posits Jarbawi. "Israel is doing its best to
spur volatility and aggravate the possibility of a Palestinian
feud. The only thing [this government] knows how to manage is
a conflict, and so they want a conflict."
The Israeli
public sits vigilant, waiting for the next Hamas attack. Local
assessments are that the revenge Hamas has promised for Yassin's
killing will match the crime. If the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine assassinated Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi
to retaliate for Israel's missile strike on its secretary-general
Mustafa al-Zibri (Abu Ali Mustafa) in August 2001, then Hamas
must also retaliate by striking a "high-quality target."
Hamas has gone so far as to threaten Sharon himself. The facts
of Hamas' limited capabilities and difficulties in even entering
Israel will probably mean an attack long in the planning -- certainly
not to be carried out while Israel is in its current state of
high alert.
If, in the
meantime, Israel succeeds in eliminating more of the Hamas political
leadership, analysts believe that the movement will not die. In
the West Bank, for example, Hamas activities have buried themselves
deeper in social activist causes and "preparing the mind,"
a euphemism for the politically motivated religious activities
that make Hamas such a force to reckon with. The strength of a
religious movement, says Barghouti, is its ability to reinterpret
itself. "When Hamas is put under political pressure,"
he explains, "it can easily escape to the religious playing
field, which is huge."
-----------
CORRECTION:
Due to an editorial error, the e-mail version of this article
said that Arafat's guards had installed heavy metal gates "immediately
following the assassination of Yassin." In fact, the gates
were installed several days before the assassination.
