Hamas: From Resistance to Government

 

Video and Edited Transcript
Ms. Paola Caridi
Transcript No. 365 (14 March 2012)

 

 

14 March 2012
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

Ms. Paola Caridi:

First of all, I thank you, all of you, for being here to listen to a very complicated matter; that means trying to understand the complex picture of Hamas. With [Palestine Center Executive Director] Yousef [Munayyer], we decided that I start telling you why I decided to write a book on this particular issue which is not a common issue, not a simple one to analyze. I’ve lived in Jerusalem since 2003, that means when I arrived in Jerusalem the second intifada was there. When I arrived in Jerusalem, after some weeks, there was a suicide attack in August and another one in September. And, after some months there was another one 200 meters away from my house. It was not a suicide attack by Hamas, but by another Palestinian faction. But it’s to say that I really lived in a period in Jerusalem where terrorism was there.

But, as a journalist and also as a historian, I tried to understand the reasons why somebody, especially very young men, will decide to kill himself and with killing himself, give death to others. And, I started trying to understand who are the protagonists?  Who are the men and the young men and the people? And then, because my B.A. was in history of political parties, I started to study the Palestinian politics, and especially Hamas. Why Hamas? Because I think that in the last years, really, Hamas and the participation of the Palestinian Islamist movement in the elections was really the novelty; was really the news in Palestine.

By chance, I lived in Jerusalem in that period. By chance, I lived in Jerusalem from 2003 until now, and so I saw all the steps. I saw the killing of [the late Hamas leader] Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, I saw the death of [the late Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat, I saw the transition of the Palestinian politics. In another chapter of the Palestinian history, and in this chapter, Hamas took the probably the most important decision in the existence of the movement that said to participate in the Palestinian elections. Not the municipal one because the municipal elections in 2005 were not so important as a change inside the structure of Hamas. But the decisional process inside the movement to participate in the political elections for the renewal of the PLC, the Palestinian Legislative Council—that means the parliament in the PA [Palestinian Authority] territories—meant really a big change in the way Hamas wanted to do politics.

The first change, it [Hamas] accepted one of the results of the Oslo Agreement; that means the PA. The second thing, it accepted to do politics inside an institutional framework, as the PA and the parliament. And, it tried to do politics in the PA Palestine, not in all Palestine. And I think that these were three important pillars of the change of Hamas in 2005 and 2007.

This kind of decision shows also the complexity of the structure of the movement. When we think about Hamas—me as a European, you as Americans—we think, as Yousef said, to a monolith.  It’s the suicide attacks, it’s the military wing, it’s the rockets from Gaza to the Negev and to the Israeli cities.  Hamas is also a political movement. It started from the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. It means it’s a social-religious movement also. We don’t see this part of the picture. We don’t see the political part of the picture regarding the movement. And, although it’s a bit technical, but I want to let you understand how Hamas is complex.

Hamas has four constituencies, what I call constituencies. That means, to reach a decision, it’s like a mass party in Europe. That means that all the militants [Hamas members] participate—not only to the vote regarding a precise issue—but they participate in the discussion. And, when they decide something they take the decision and the whole movement follows the decision, although the minority didn’t agree with that particular decision. That means they take the decision with the majority system, and then the whole movement—all the militants—although they don’t agree, they follow the direction that the majority decided.

And it happened with the political elections of 2006. That means that in 2005, all the movement, all Hamas, had to decide whether to participate or not. In 1996 at the first elections, parliamentary elections, Hamas decided not to participate. There was a big fight inside the movement. There were some of the leaders who decided to run as independent. And, after three days they had to step back, one of them is called Ismail Haniyeh and is the actual prime minister of the de facto Hamas government in Gaza.

The situation changed in 2005, and when I asked the leaders of the militants to let me understand that why the situation was different in 2005, comparing that situation with 1996. They told me that Oslo was dead, that there was the disengagement and that there was another kind of situation on the ground. And this was the reason many of them, the majority of them, decided to participate to run for the elections.

Who decided? The four constituencies. When I say four constituencies, I have to explain a bit. There is Gaza, and we know Gaza. We think also that Hamas is only Gaza; it’s not true. Hamas has militants in Gaza, in the West Bank and in the refugee camps abroad. So, one of the constituencies, probably the most important one, is Gaza. The other one is the West Bank and Jerusalem and East Jerusalem. The third one is the refugee camps and the diaspora.  So, not only the refugee camps, but the diaspora. And the fourth is a very strange constituency—if we look at it as westerners—that is prisons.

Thousands of militants of Hamas and not only Hamas, but all the militants of all the Palestinian factions are inside Israeli prisons: from Fateh to the Islamic Jihad, to the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine], to Hamas. But, they continue to be militants [members] inside the prison. That means that if the movement has to take a decision, all of the movement has to vote for that decision. There is also the prison constituency. That means the militants inside the prison, with a very difficult system of voting, they vote for the decision. And for example, regarding the participation in the elections in 2006, they voted—the majority of them—voted for the participation. It means that also many other decisions were taken by the whole organizational structure.  I guess also the decision to stop the suicide attacks inside Israeli cities; I have no evidence.  I tried to let the militants tell me that they had a vote on the matter. They didn’t say explicitly. One of them told me, of course we decided on all the very decisive and important issues; also, the level of the resistance. This is their language. So, when I asked them, what does it mean? [He said,] “We decided to raise or to lower the level of resistance.” If I have to analyze the sentence, I will tell you that they decided to lower the level of resistance. That means not to do suicide attacks inside Israeli cities. And from 2005 until now, there have not been anymore suicide attacks inside Israeli cities.

What had happened, there was a sort of militarization of the resistance, what I call muqawama. And then they started to increase the rocket launches from Gaza to the Israeli cities in the Negev, which is a different tool. We look at what had happened with the suicide attacks, not because it’s not terrorism, I mean it’s not, how do you call it, colpire in Italian.  You reach civilians, so your targets are civilians also in the Israeli cities in the Negev. But they don’t use very tragic and powerful and bloody tools as the suicide attacks.  In terms of wounded people and killed people, for luck there are very, very, very, very few in the last ten years. And the suicide attacks were terrible.  They were terrible for the number of deaths inside Israeli cities and for the psychological pressure on the Israeli society. The rockets are a bit different.

So, they decided also on this issue. They decided on the issue of having relations, for example, with the European Union, to try to be accepted because Hamas is considered a terrorist organization not only in the U.S., but also from 2003 in the European Union. Until 2003, only the military wing was considered—the [Izz al-Din] al-Qassam Brigades—was considered a terrorist organization.  After 2003, also Hamas, that means the political branch of the movement.

It was, I think, really very important the decision to participate in the elections, not only because of this decision, but also for the theoretical aspects of the ideology of Hamas. When we study Hamas or analyze Hamas’ behavior, we think, for example, of the Hamas Charter, the Mithaq. And this is the only document that we know about Hamas. The Protocols of [the Elders of] Zion are inside the Mithaq, the Hamas Charter. It’s a very ideological document.  But, there were other documents. Of course, we don’t know them because it was a clandestine organization. So, we don’t know many of the documents. But, there was a very public document and it was the [Hamas] Electoral Manifesto of 2005/2006. And, if you read the Electoral Manifesto and you compare the Electoral Manifesto of 2006 with the Mithaq, you will see that even the language changed inside the documents. The Electoral Manifesto was discussed by the Hamas leaders and militants. And that the Mithaq was sort of, in a way, a revolutionary manifesto that had to deal with the intifada in 1989. And then, the Electoral Manifesto had to be a political program, really a political program, because it had to deal with all the sectors of society: women, youth, health, education, political representation, individual rights, even individual rights.

And, it is very strange because in some of the parts, as a European, I see, let’s say, a European language in this document, which I don’t see at all in the Charter. I think that they tried also, Hamas tried to be accepted by the West through this manifesto, this Electoral Manifesto. They didn’t reach that point; although, if it’s true that Hamas was ambiguous regarding Palestine, the ’67 borders, and not ambiguous regarding the existence of Israel as a state.  Also, the West was ambiguous regarding Hamas in the sense that the West accepted the participation of Hamas in the Palestinian elections of 2006, and it didn’t accept the electoral success of Hamas through those elections. And I consider it contradictory and many diplomats, European diplomats, with whom I spoke, they told me that they made a big mistake not to try to find a room for negotiating with Hamas. Because what they understood—and, I have to say as an analyst and as a journalist there, I understood in that period—is that the pragmatists, I don’t call them moderates, I call them pragmatists because they are not moderate they are conservative and in the meantime pragmatists, they controlled the majority of the movement. And, helping them to be accepted by the West, with the negotiations of course regarding the Quartet conditions, it would have helped Hamas to moderate itself.

We didn’t accept the result, we as the West, and it was very difficult for Hamas to control the government with an embargo; with a financial, economic and political embargo. And that helped the more conservative part of the movement, especially in Gaza, to regain a consensus inside of the movement. What they told me for example was, it was impossible to have control of the movement, if we were going to the West, for example, not accepted in the airport, or we couldn’t meet with western organizations, or institutions, or diplomatic circles, etc. And the others said, okay we tried the participation option and it didn’t work. So, we came back to the military option of the resistance or to a more confrontational option.  And this was considered, really, not only by me but by many analysts I met and diplomatic circles, a mistake because, it was a window of opportunity, and we have lost this window of opportunity. I think that now there is another, thinner window of opportunity because Hamas, and we saw it in the Doha Declaration and the reconciliation agreement in May 2011 and with the Doha Declaration some weeks ago, wants to be part of what we call the wave. That means the political Islamic wave in the Arab world after the Arab revolutions.

In Tunisia, the party whose origins are from the Muslim Brotherhood, won.  It won in Egypt, it has a good position inside Jordan; they want to be part of this picture. If they want to be part of this picture, they have to do various things. And, some of them, they did. First, they abandoned Damascus [Syria] and they moved in different places. They moved some of them to Jordan but they can’t do political work in Jordan. They moved to Egypt, [Moussa] Abu Marzouk, strategic mind of Hamas and [Khaled] Meshaal in Qatar.  And this is one of the first steps.

They met, for example, with King Abdullah of Jordan and this meeting was a sort of small turning point in the history of the relations between Hamas and Jordan because Jordan decided to let the leadership go away from Jordan and settle in Damascus. After the, not only the peace agreement with Israel but especially after the very tragic and bloody season of the suicide attacks inside the Israeli cities in 1996 and 1997. And this high-level meeting of the leadership with King Abdullah meant that something changed, and it was something very important in the balance of relations between Hamas and some of the states. Of course, Egypt has, again, a very important roll because the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is now electorally gaining ground in Egypt. So, they had relations before, and now their relations are better than the period before 2011 and the Egyptian revolution.

The Doha Declaration, however, underlined that there is a problem inside the structure of Hamas. That means that there is a profound, I think, transformation inside the structure because history’s facts and, at least in the last five years, there was a big change. Gaza is controlled by Hamas. Hamas is the regime in Gaza. That means that the Hamas constituency in Gaza is more important than before. It’s, I would say, not radicalized but is more conservative than before because to be in a closed area like Gaza—40 kilometers by ten [kilometers], closed and circled—it doesn’t moderate anybody. So it’s more conservative than before and controls the territory.

The military wing is more important than before.  And we saw its importance in the negotiations that we saw in the last months with the exchange of prisoners and the liberation of Gilad Shalit, and the liberation of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The military wing was part of the negotiation, was the most important part of the negotiation. It means it has a political voice now, and we have to understand which importance and which weight it has in the internal structure of Hamas. It’s still a very confusing picture because the military wing is clandestine, completely clandestine. So, we know some of the divisions inside of the political wing.  We know the position of Meshaal we know the position of Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the old guard leaders in Gaza. We don’t know the ideas of Ahmed al-Jabari, who is considered the head of the military wing, what he thinks about the future, what he thinks about being part of a more regional picture as part of the political Islam in the Arab world.

I think this is one of the important things to analyze: what is changing inside the structure? Because it will tell us what we will have to expect from Hamas in the following months, especially regarding the elections and the national unity government, and which kind of government and which ministers do we want to have inside a national unity government.  Which elections do they want to run? The elections for the PLC, that means the parliament inside the PA, or the PNC [Palestinian National Council], that means the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] parliament. It will be very interesting to understand if they prefer, for example, to put pressure on the elections regarding the PLO parliament because it means to have a representation of the whole Palestinian people. It means that they want to have a voice, for example, regarding the agreements that the PLO signed with Israel regarding the peace and the peace process.

 

Paola Caridi is an Italian journalist and has been living in the Middle East and Jerusalem since 2001. She contributed to the founding of the press agency Lettera22 and has worked with L’Espresso, Sole 24 Ore, La Stampa and Famiglia Cristiana.

This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.