How Hamas Rose From Wild Card to Power

[DevilDog#1]

By JOHN KIFNER
Published: January 29, 2006

HAMAS, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that pulled off a stunning victory in last week's parliamentary election, sweeping aside Fatah's decades-long dominance of Palestinian politics, first came to public notice in the summer of 1988. That was when it challenged the secular leadership of the first intifada against Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza.

Founded in Gaza the year before, the group is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in Egypt in 1928 with the slogan "The Koran Is Our Constitution." An acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas is also the Arabic word for "zeal."

From the start, the group has been a wild card in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the early years, Israeli authorities appeared to tolerate Hamas in the hope that it would be a counterweight to Yasir Arafat's leadership.

After the Israelis and Palestine Liberation Organization reconciled themselves to the terms of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Hamas continued to reject efforts to negotiate peace with Israel, and its attacks on Israeli civilians, particularly suicide bombings, helped stymie progress toward a final settlement.

Mr. Arafat resisted confronting the group, even in the face of Israeli demands that he crack down, and its attacks increased in the sustained violence between Israel and the Palestinians after peace talks broke down in 2000.

What became clear last week, when Palestinians finally could choose between Fatah and a Hamas slate that chose to compete rather than boycott the voting, was that the vast majority of Palestinians were fed up with the corruption, cronyism and lawlessness of Mr. Arafat's heirs in Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. This frustration was directed at old guard figures like President Mahmoud Abbas, who returned with Mr. Arafat from exile in North Africa and are known as "the Tunisians."

The election results — a clear majority of 76 seats in the 132-member Parliament — surprised even Hamas leaders.

To the outside world, Hamas was known primarily for the suicide bombers of its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, who became active in the early 1990's. In February and March of 1996, a particularly bloody series of suicide bombings killed nearly 60 Israelis in retaliation for the assassination of their chief bomb maker, Yahya Ayyash, known as "the Engineer."

The bombings hardened Israeli public opinion against the Palestinians and contributed to the victory of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader who had opposed the Oslo accords but warily continued negotiations with Mr. Arafat once in office.

Palestinians often trace the appeal of Hamas to its network of social services, which largely supplanted the crumbling and feeble institutions of the Palestinian Authority. Thus a poor Palestinian family in the West Bank or Gaza might send a child to a Hamas school on a Hamas bus, use a low-cost Hamas medical clinic, play soccer at a Hamas sports club and perhaps rely on a ration of Hamas rice.

In addition, Hamas candidates in local elections presented themselves as honest, practical and austere, often in contrast to displays of wealth and inefficiency by the Fatah hierarchy.

When Hamas chose to participate in this general election, its campaign focused not on the conflict with Israel, but on the slogan "change and reform."

Still, its constitutional position on dealing with Israel remains. In the 40-page covenant adopted in 1988, Hamas said: "The land of Palestine is an Islamic trust left to the generations of Muslims until the day of resurrection. It is forbidden to anyone to yield or concede part or all of it. The solution of the problem will only take place by holy war."

That language has led most Israelis to dismiss any possibility of dealing with Hamas on grounds that its goal is to wipe out Israel as a Jewish state.

After the election, debate raged in Israel and the West over the chances that inclusion in a government might moderate Hamas' position. In a BBC interview in 2002, two years before he was killed in an Israeli missile strike, the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi suggested how much — or little — maneuvering room there might be. "The main aim of the intifada is the liberation of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, and nothing more," he said. "We haven't the force to liberate all our land."

"It is forbidden in our religion to give up part of our land, so we can't recognize Israel at all," he continued. "But we can accept a truce with them, and we can live side by side and refer all the issues to the coming generations."

Source: New York Times

The title of the article says it all ...

[BADDOG]

A very interesting article again DD and the last part of that report which mentions a possible truce with Israel could be hopeful if there are the people willing to sit down and talk with each other.


Warm Regards