The rise of Hamas, by John Cherian
The Hamas victory in the Palestine elections, facilitated by the corruption in the Palestinian Authority run by the Fatah, promises a dramatic change in West Asian politics characterised by an Islamist upsurge.
THE resounding victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections in the last week of January could be the precursor to dramatic political changes in the region. Already, several Arab commentators have compared the result to an electoral "tsunami", whose effects are yet to be felt. Hamas won 76 seats in the 132-member PLC. The ruling Fatah came second with 43 seats. The remaining seats went to leftist parties and independents, some of whom were supported by Hamas. Half of the 132 seats were contested in constituencies and the other half through "electoral lists". Hamas, which contested under the banner of "Change and Reform" in the electoral list, led the tally in both segments. About 77 per cent of the 1.34 Palestinian voters exercised their franchise in the January 25 elections.
Apparently, what helped Hamas most was the perceived inefficiency and corruption of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (P.A.). "We now have a vibrant democracy and contradictions in national relations that will bring the Palestinians to a new stage. I think these elections will have strategic, direct and indirect consequences on Palestinian and regional and international politics," Talal Awkal, a Palestinian analyst in Gaza, told the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera.
Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat, Palestinians have only witnessed growing misery and violence. As the Israeli state went about diluting the peace accord and increasing the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the Palestinian leadership was virtually reduced to a mute spectator. As successive Israeli governments undermined the Palestinian economy, the P.A. increasingly became dependent on international donors for its survival.
To make matters worse, the P.A. administration's blatant cronyism and corruption played a big role in the alienation of the Palestinian people from the Fatah. In the last couple of years, the Fatah split. The militant Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed wing of the Fatah, has been openly siding with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the confrontation with Israel. In the elections, prominent PLO activists such as Hannan Ashrawi preferred to distance themselves from the Fatah. Hannan Ashrawi, who won a seat on the "Third Way List", said that she did not believe that "religion should be the basis of government" and hoped that Hamas would not set up a "theocracy". She said that Hamas won because of a variety of factors that included the mobilisation of "the angry vote and the rejection vote and the protest vote and, of course, the reform vote, and not necessarily all the ideological vote. Part of Hamas' victory was made by the Fatah".
In fact, it was a divided Opposition that gave Hamas such a sweeping victory. The divided Fatah and four other secular parties together won 55 per cent of the popular vote. According to pollsters, the most important issue before the voters was corruption and law and order.
However, it was the Israeli and the U.S. factor that contributed significantly to the Fatah's decline. The refusal of successive Israeli governments to implement the Oslo Accords and negotiate honestly with the P.A. impacted negatively on the latter's image. Hamas and other militant Palestinian organisations had rejected the Oslo Accords as a "betrayal" of Palestinian interests. Many in the Fatah also acknowledged that the Oslo Accords were fundamentally flawed.
The beginning of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) five years ago and the rise of Ariel Sharon in Israeli politics complicated the situation for the Fatah-led P.A. The terrorist strike in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, further loaded the dice against the Palestinians. George W. Bush accepted his "good friend Ariel Sharon's position on Palestinian terrorism". Arafat's political credibility was further undercut when Sharon demolished his office and residence in Ramallah. Arafat died, virtually a prisoner, confined to a room and a half in his bombed-out presidential palace. The international community stood aside and watched.
After the death of Arafat in Paris under mysterious circumstances, the decline of the Fatah accelerated under the leadership of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was one of the main negotiators involved in the Oslo talks. Many Palestinians on the street view Abbas as an apparatchik with close links with the West. Immediately after the Hamas victory, many Fatah activists held rallies calling for the resignation of Abbas as P.A. President.
As the Fatah's monopoly over Palestinian decision-making started eroding, Hamas started filling the gap. Along with other militant groups such as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and the Islamic Jihad, Hamas have been given credit by the public for expediting the withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza.
On the other hand, the construction of the separation wall in West Bank by the Israeli government, with the connivance of the Bush administration, did little to boost the Fatah's image among Palestinians. For instance, Qalqilya, a Palestinian city of more than 50,000, is today almost entirely surrounded by the wall. Before the construction of the wall started, the Fatah used to sweep the polls in Qalqilya. Today, it has become a Hamas bailiwick.
Hamas' victory is being justifiably interpreted as reflecting the determination of the Palestinian people to fight the Israeli occupation. Bush's open endorsement of Abbas' leadership did not help matters either. As the results showed, it only convinced many Palestinians to reject the Fatah.
The scale of the Hamas victory astounded not only pollsters but also the Israeli and United States security agencies. A "blame game" has already started within the Bush administration. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice professed shock at the outcome. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming. It says something about us not having a good enough pulse," she told mediapersons in Washington. The Bush administration had, in fact, rushed financial aid to the beleaguered Fatah-run P.A., weeks before the elections, in an effort to speed up development projects. But the help came too late and was too little to make any significant difference to the electoral outcome.
In the West Bank town of Hebron, an election banner shows an array of Hamas leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (front row, left) and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi (front row, right), who were assassinated by Israel.
Israel too tried to stymie Hamas' electoral prospects. Before the elections, Israeli troops had launched operations in the West Bank and arrested top Hamas politicians. Months before the elections, the Israeli authorities tried to incarcerate all the candidates who filed their nominations on behalf of Hamas. Many analysts and experts in the region and outside have gone to the extent of asserting that the victory of the Islamist party in an internationally monitored election is the most important development in West Asia since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Meanwhile, the victory has been characterised in some sections of the Arab media as a definitive departure from the Oslo peace process. According to many commentators, the victory of Hamas signals the rejection of the notion that only Palestinians have to prove that they are not "terrorists", while Israeli acts of terror such as targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders are rarely classified as "state-sponsored terrorism" by the international community.
At the same time, the victory of Hamas does not signal the rejection of the two-nation solution to the long-running problem. Recent polls have shown that the majority of Palestinians still support a two-state solution and are tired of the unending cycle of violence. Polls taken in the West Bank showed that 75 per cent of the population wanted Hamas to drop its call for the destruction of Israel.
Hamas, on its part, has observed a military truce with Israel for more than a year, despite grave provocations. Although the charter of Hamas states that the Israeli state is illegitimate, the organisation has in reality shown that it is quite flexible on the issue. The Hamas leadership has indicated that it is willing to extend the present truce with Israel provided the latter also does the same.
At the signing of the Oslo Accords in Washington in 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), a respected think tank, has reported that the Hamas leadership has indicated that there is no religious prohibition against negotiating with Israel and "that the provisions in its charter for the destruction of Israel are not indelible". Senior Hamas leaders have said after the victory that they want peace. At the same time they have made it clear that they will not be duped into negotiating endlessly with Israel. They have said that the "Irish model" appeals to them. The only condition they attach is that Israel recognise Hamas as a political party.
Hamas, while reiterating its commitment to "resistance" against Israel, has signalled that it will like to confine itself to the domestic agenda and let Mahmoud Abbas continue with the negotiations with the occupying power. It is also well-known that the Israeli state had informal contacts with Hamas in the 1980s. At that time the secular PLO was the main enemy of the Zionist state and some key Israeli politicians and officials were not averse to propping up Hamas as a counter-weight to it.
Israel has, however, ruled out negotiations with Hamas saying that it would refuse to engage in dialogue with any Palestinian government that includes "armed anti-Israeli groups". The Israeli government got its cue from Bush, who was quick to announce that his government would not deal with any group that advocated violence against Israel. After the election results came, Hamas leaders said that they would not disarm their cadre but would prefer that they integrate into the national Palestinian security forces. Interestingly, following Hamas' string of victories in municipal council elections held in 2005, the Israeli government had no option but to cooperate with Mayors owing allegiance to the Islamists on day-to-day issues such as the supply of water and electricity.
Israel and its closest ally Washington evidently want to use the Hamas victory as a pretext to continue with their unilateralist policies. Israeli politicians cutting across the political divide are using ominous jargon. A former Israeli Army Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon has said the victory of Hamas has brought Iran to Israel's doorsteps. Many Palestinians fear that Israel may try to dismantle the P.A. completely and create the environment for a bigger conflict.
THE resounding victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections in the last week of January could be the precursor to dramatic political changes in the region. Already, several Arab commentators have compared the result to an electoral "tsunami", whose effects are yet to be felt. Hamas won 76 seats in the 132-member PLC. The ruling Fatah came second with 43 seats. The remaining seats went to leftist parties and independents, some of whom were supported by Hamas. Half of the 132 seats were contested in constituencies and the other half through "electoral lists". Hamas, which contested under the banner of "Change and Reform" in the electoral list, led the tally in both segments. About 77 per cent of the 1.34 Palestinian voters exercised their franchise in the January 25 elections.
Apparently, what helped Hamas most was the perceived inefficiency and corruption of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (P.A.). "We now have a vibrant democracy and contradictions in national relations that will bring the Palestinians to a new stage. I think these elections will have strategic, direct and indirect consequences on Palestinian and regional and international politics," Talal Awkal, a Palestinian analyst in Gaza, told the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera.
Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat, Palestinians have only witnessed growing misery and violence. As the Israeli state went about diluting the peace accord and increasing the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the Palestinian leadership was virtually reduced to a mute spectator. As successive Israeli governments undermined the Palestinian economy, the P.A. increasingly became dependent on international donors for its survival.
To make matters worse, the P.A. administration's blatant cronyism and corruption played a big role in the alienation of the Palestinian people from the Fatah. In the last couple of years, the Fatah split. The militant Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed wing of the Fatah, has been openly siding with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the confrontation with Israel. In the elections, prominent PLO activists such as Hannan Ashrawi preferred to distance themselves from the Fatah. Hannan Ashrawi, who won a seat on the "Third Way List", said that she did not believe that "religion should be the basis of government" and hoped that Hamas would not set up a "theocracy". She said that Hamas won because of a variety of factors that included the mobilisation of "the angry vote and the rejection vote and the protest vote and, of course, the reform vote, and not necessarily all the ideological vote. Part of Hamas' victory was made by the Fatah".
In fact, it was a divided Opposition that gave Hamas such a sweeping victory. The divided Fatah and four other secular parties together won 55 per cent of the popular vote. According to pollsters, the most important issue before the voters was corruption and law and order.
However, it was the Israeli and the U.S. factor that contributed significantly to the Fatah's decline. The refusal of successive Israeli governments to implement the Oslo Accords and negotiate honestly with the P.A. impacted negatively on the latter's image. Hamas and other militant Palestinian organisations had rejected the Oslo Accords as a "betrayal" of Palestinian interests. Many in the Fatah also acknowledged that the Oslo Accords were fundamentally flawed.
The beginning of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) five years ago and the rise of Ariel Sharon in Israeli politics complicated the situation for the Fatah-led P.A. The terrorist strike in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, further loaded the dice against the Palestinians. George W. Bush accepted his "good friend Ariel Sharon's position on Palestinian terrorism". Arafat's political credibility was further undercut when Sharon demolished his office and residence in Ramallah. Arafat died, virtually a prisoner, confined to a room and a half in his bombed-out presidential palace. The international community stood aside and watched.
After the death of Arafat in Paris under mysterious circumstances, the decline of the Fatah accelerated under the leadership of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was one of the main negotiators involved in the Oslo talks. Many Palestinians on the street view Abbas as an apparatchik with close links with the West. Immediately after the Hamas victory, many Fatah activists held rallies calling for the resignation of Abbas as P.A. President.
As the Fatah's monopoly over Palestinian decision-making started eroding, Hamas started filling the gap. Along with other militant groups such as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and the Islamic Jihad, Hamas have been given credit by the public for expediting the withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza.
On the other hand, the construction of the separation wall in West Bank by the Israeli government, with the connivance of the Bush administration, did little to boost the Fatah's image among Palestinians. For instance, Qalqilya, a Palestinian city of more than 50,000, is today almost entirely surrounded by the wall. Before the construction of the wall started, the Fatah used to sweep the polls in Qalqilya. Today, it has become a Hamas bailiwick.
Hamas' victory is being justifiably interpreted as reflecting the determination of the Palestinian people to fight the Israeli occupation. Bush's open endorsement of Abbas' leadership did not help matters either. As the results showed, it only convinced many Palestinians to reject the Fatah.
The scale of the Hamas victory astounded not only pollsters but also the Israeli and United States security agencies. A "blame game" has already started within the Bush administration. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice professed shock at the outcome. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming. It says something about us not having a good enough pulse," she told mediapersons in Washington. The Bush administration had, in fact, rushed financial aid to the beleaguered Fatah-run P.A., weeks before the elections, in an effort to speed up development projects. But the help came too late and was too little to make any significant difference to the electoral outcome.
In the West Bank town of Hebron, an election banner shows an array of Hamas leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (front row, left) and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi (front row, right), who were assassinated by Israel.
Israel too tried to stymie Hamas' electoral prospects. Before the elections, Israeli troops had launched operations in the West Bank and arrested top Hamas politicians. Months before the elections, the Israeli authorities tried to incarcerate all the candidates who filed their nominations on behalf of Hamas. Many analysts and experts in the region and outside have gone to the extent of asserting that the victory of the Islamist party in an internationally monitored election is the most important development in West Asia since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Meanwhile, the victory has been characterised in some sections of the Arab media as a definitive departure from the Oslo peace process. According to many commentators, the victory of Hamas signals the rejection of the notion that only Palestinians have to prove that they are not "terrorists", while Israeli acts of terror such as targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders are rarely classified as "state-sponsored terrorism" by the international community.
At the same time, the victory of Hamas does not signal the rejection of the two-nation solution to the long-running problem. Recent polls have shown that the majority of Palestinians still support a two-state solution and are tired of the unending cycle of violence. Polls taken in the West Bank showed that 75 per cent of the population wanted Hamas to drop its call for the destruction of Israel.
Hamas, on its part, has observed a military truce with Israel for more than a year, despite grave provocations. Although the charter of Hamas states that the Israeli state is illegitimate, the organisation has in reality shown that it is quite flexible on the issue. The Hamas leadership has indicated that it is willing to extend the present truce with Israel provided the latter also does the same.
At the signing of the Oslo Accords in Washington in 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), a respected think tank, has reported that the Hamas leadership has indicated that there is no religious prohibition against negotiating with Israel and "that the provisions in its charter for the destruction of Israel are not indelible". Senior Hamas leaders have said after the victory that they want peace. At the same time they have made it clear that they will not be duped into negotiating endlessly with Israel. They have said that the "Irish model" appeals to them. The only condition they attach is that Israel recognise Hamas as a political party.
Hamas, while reiterating its commitment to "resistance" against Israel, has signalled that it will like to confine itself to the domestic agenda and let Mahmoud Abbas continue with the negotiations with the occupying power. It is also well-known that the Israeli state had informal contacts with Hamas in the 1980s. At that time the secular PLO was the main enemy of the Zionist state and some key Israeli politicians and officials were not averse to propping up Hamas as a counter-weight to it.
Israel has, however, ruled out negotiations with Hamas saying that it would refuse to engage in dialogue with any Palestinian government that includes "armed anti-Israeli groups". The Israeli government got its cue from Bush, who was quick to announce that his government would not deal with any group that advocated violence against Israel. After the election results came, Hamas leaders said that they would not disarm their cadre but would prefer that they integrate into the national Palestinian security forces. Interestingly, following Hamas' string of victories in municipal council elections held in 2005, the Israeli government had no option but to cooperate with Mayors owing allegiance to the Islamists on day-to-day issues such as the supply of water and electricity.
Israel and its closest ally Washington evidently want to use the Hamas victory as a pretext to continue with their unilateralist policies. Israeli politicians cutting across the political divide are using ominous jargon. A former Israeli Army Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon has said the victory of Hamas has brought Iran to Israel's doorsteps. Many Palestinians fear that Israel may try to dismantle the P.A. completely and create the environment for a bigger conflict.
posted by Alice at
Monday, February 20, 2006
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