The radical Palestinian group Hamas triggered the latest explosion of violence in the Middle East by launching an anti-Israeli suicide bombing campaign with the express purpose of derailing a cease-fire that was being negotiated by retired U.S. Gen. Anthony Zinni, President Bush’s special envoy to the Middle East.
Hamas leaders told a U.S. journalist last week that they were not so much angered by Israel’s invasion of the West Bank, as pleased by the escalation in violence – which they believe serves their strategic purposes.
Hamas is a radical Islamic group headquartered in the Gaza Strip, a small area of land along the Mediterranean Sea that is geographically separated from the West Bank but is under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
The group, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, came into being in 1967 as a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1978, the organization registered itself in Israel as a nonprofit religious organization called al Mujama. Sheik Ahmad Yassin, who was head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza at the time, led the new organization. “At first, the new organization spent most of its time promoting Islamic views and winning support for the Islamic movement in Palestinian institutions, universities and mosques,” says CRS.
The organization took on its present character in December 1987 as the violent Palestinian intifada, or uprising, began in the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war with its Arab neighbors. Hamas continues its religious and charitable activities but now has a military arm.
Reports CRS: “The goal of the founders was to become directly involved in the intifada and ultimately gain control of the Palestinian movement and bring it more in line with fundamentalist Islamic thought.”
Today, Hamas is the primary representative of radical Islam among Palestinians in the occupied territories and the greatest rival to Yasser Arafat’s secularist Fatah Party. But a December poll conducted by a professor at a West Bank university found that only 14 percent of the Palestinian people would like to replace Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority with Sheik Yassin. It found 21 percent support for Hamas as a political party.
Hamas stands for Harakat Muqawama Islamiyya, which is usually translated as “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Its goal is the establishment of a radical Islamic state throughout all of what it calls “Palestine.” According to their definition, this word is construed to mean all of the territory incorporating Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Jordan. Jordan is a moderate Arab country ruled by King Abdullah II of the Hashemite dynasty. Like Egypt, it has recognized, and made peace with, Israel.
“The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations, and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it,” says the Hamas charter, adopted in 1988.
Hamas is a terrorist group, according to the U.S. State Department’s “Patterns of Global Terrorism” published last year. It is “[l]oosely structured,” says the report, “with some elements working clandestinely and others working openly through mosques and social service institutions to recruit members, raise money, organize activities and distribute propaganda.”
“Hamas activists, especially those in the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigade, have conducted many attacks – including large-scale suicide bombings – against Israeli civilian and military targets,” says State. “In the early 1990s, they also targeted suspected Palestinian collaborators and Fatah rivals.”
In August 1999, Jordan outlawed Hamas and closed its political offices in the Jordanian capital of Amman. Hamas “receives funding from Palestinian expatriates, Iran and private benefactors in Saudi Arabia and other moderate Arab states,” says State. “Some fund-raising and propaganda activity takes place in Western Europe and North America.”
Hamas has a steering committee of five leaders, four of whom live openly in Gaza. New York Times reporter Joel Brinkley interviewed the four men for an April 4 story.
“Our spirit is high; our mood is good,” Ismail Abu Shanab, one of the organization’s leaders, told Brinkley. “By their estimation,” Brinkley reported, “the organization’s two recent attacks – the one at a Seder on Passover night in a Netanya hotel that killed 25 people and the other in a Haifa caf? that killed 15 – were the most successful they have ever made. That is true partly, Mr. Shanab said, because Hamas is now using weapons-grade explosives instead of homemade bombs manufactured using fertilizer, a fact the Israelis have confirmed.”
“Forty were killed and 200 injured – in just two operations,” Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar told Brinkley with a smile.
“What’s more,” reported Brinkley, “Hamas believes that the Palestinian Authority has given up on negotiating with Israel, negotiations that Hamas virulently opposed. That has led to a budding alliance between Hamas and Fatah. … Mr. Arafat ‘is Palestinian and I am Palestinian,'” Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin told Brinkley. “‘We have the same problem now. Israel is our enemy.'”
Wheelchair-bound Yassin’s compound is in a slum, Brinkley reported. But the other three men Brinkley interviewed are “obviously prosperous and live in large, comfortable homes here in Gaza City with big families. … Dr. [Abdel Aziz] Rantisi, who appears in public more often than any of the others, said that, to generate attacks, he makes public statements that are heard by his followers, as he did recently when he said in a television interview: ‘The gates of resistance are open totally.’ Those statements are heard by Hamas’ military wing, he says, ‘and they listen because we are the political leaders.’
“Some analysts here suggest that the leaders’ roles are actually more direct. During the 45-minute interview in Yassin’s compound, for example, aides twice brought him urgent news about developments in Ramallah, and he issued clear, direct orders.”
One of the Hamas leaders reiterated to Brinkley the demand that all of “Palestine” come under Islamic control.
“Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the four million Palestinians who live in other states,” Brinkley reported. “After that, the Jews could remain, living ‘in an Islamic state with Islamic law,’ Dr. Zahar said. ‘From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine.'”
“There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews,” said Hamas leader Shanab.
Two of the other leaders said the big Passover suicide attack was meant to torpedo Zinni’s peace mission.
“On the night of the Passover attack, Dr. Zahar released a statement saying it was intended in part to shut down the cease-fire negotiations then under way, directed by Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the American special envoy. In the interview today, Dr. Zahar explained, ‘the Zinni mission was bad for us’ because, under the proposed terms of the cease-fire, groups like Hamas would be disarmed and their leaders arrested. ‘Besides,’ Dr. Rantisi said, ‘we in Hamas believe peace talks will do no good. We do not believe we can live with the enemy.'”
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