Benny Morris on Hamas
[Sara - in case you haven’t seen this - I should do something good
with my TNR sub! - Doug]
The New Republic - July 10, 2006
THE FUTURE OF HAMAS. Alms and Arms by Benny Morris
Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad By Matthew Levitt (Yale University Press, 324 pp., $26)
In a way, the world’s Islamist movements are frank and honest. They
wish, and they say that they wish, to install theocratic rule and
promote the dominance of Muslim religious mores, ridding their world
of any hint of that cluster of secular, democratic, and liberal
values that Western civilization has progressively adopted over the
past four or five centuries. No guile there.
But on another level, these movements, at least in their contemporary
Middle Eastern efflorescence, are characterized by a multi-layered
culture of deceit. I am not referring to the concrete operational
deceit of a suicide bomber pretending to be a backpacking tourist or
a devout Jew as he boards a train in Madrid or a bus in Jerusalem. I
have in mind a larger and more systematic deception. These movements
loudly trumpet the demand for the political “liberation” of Western-
occupied lands–Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. But in fact they
are united in wishing the extirpation of all Western influence
(”pollution,” in their jargon) from the sacred Islamic lands,
stretching from Pakistan to the Atlantic Ocean: all Western music and
cinema and books, all Western companies, all Westerners–in short,
all modernity and all liberalism, all of what the West stands for.
And it goes further than that. Here and there you will hear imams,
when preaching in Arabic, demanding the “return” of all former
Islamic territories–”Andalus” (Spain and Portugal), southern France,
the Balkans as far north as Hungary and Austria–for it is a basic
tenet of Islam that any land conquered for the faith remains
rightfully, in perpetuity, sacred Islamic land (Dar Al Islam). And
beyond this realm lies the rest of the world, the “Land of War” (Dar
Al Harb)–territory that is fair game for conquest and must yet be
conquered or converted to Islam. And this, ultimately, is what the
Islamists–who believe that theirs alone is the true path–want: the
whole world under the aegis of Allah. They see this world as in
perpetual conflict between the forces of light and darkness, and
believe that the forces of light will ultimately prevail. Osama bin
Laden occasionally says as much. But most Islamist preachers merely
hint at their apocalyptic agenda. First things first, they say.
For many or most Islamists, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are
merely Stage One. A “clash of civilizations” is precisely how they
perceive what is going on–and not merely in the “occupied” countries
or even in the immediate outer ring of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and
Morocco, but also in France’s suburbs and in Leeds and in Madrid, and
in Sarajevo, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, Nigeria,
Sudan. Ask the lawyer who recently shot five “secularist” judges in
Turkey; ask the assassin who a few years ago stabbed to death Theo
van Gogh, a documentary movie producer in Amsterdam; ask the rioters
in Nigeria who killed hundreds and burned down streets because of a
beauty pageant. But in public, in the West, when they speak to
journalists, the Islamists prefer to speak only of “Iraq,
Afghanistan, Palestine.”
In this thicket of deceit, Islamists present Muslims always as
victims, never as perpetrators. (When has there ever been a community
with such a litany of grievances?) And they have read the West well,
especially Western Europe, with its gnawing discontents, its guilty
conscience over a colonial past, its burgeoning Muslim populations,
its thirst for oil, its distaste for war, and, yes, its anti-
Semitism. The Islamists, perhaps accurately, see the West as weak–
and they exploit every fissure and crevice, every greed and appetite,
every self-flagellating impulse. And as they privately snicker in
their back rooms, they are busy taking the West for a ride: they
laugh as the West beats itself over every dead Iraqi (the vast
majority of the killings in Iraq are committed by Muslims against
fellow Muslims, not by Westerners), and over every impoverished
Afghan or Palestinian child (impoverished because their societies and
economies have failed to develop, largely for internal reasons,
beyond opium production and living on U.N. handouts), and over every
human rights abuse to which some Muslims are subject in Guantánamo
and Britain and the United States (when these pale in comparison with
those perpetrated in every hour of every day in Sudan, Egypt, Syria,
Yemen, Iran, and Saudi Arabia).
Matthew Levitt’s enlightening book focuses on one group of Islamists,
the Palestinian Hamas (which is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-
Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement), and on two aspects of the
mendacity that lies at its core: the uses that Hamas makes of its
dawa–propagation of the faith–activities, including its social
welfare programs (free kindergartens, food for the poor, free medical
services), as both a cover for and a means of furthering its
political and military designs, which are to install a theocratic
regime in all of Palestine and to destroy Israel; and its foreign
fund-raising activities, which are designed to deceive Westerners
into believing that they are furthering humanitarian aims while in
fact they are facilitating both the dawa and the terrorism.
Hamas was created in 1987-1988 out of the Islamic Association, which
was the Gazan front organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, the
fundamentalist political party set up by Sheikh Hassan Al Banna in
Egypt in 1928. The party, which assassinated the Egyptian prime
minister Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi in December 1948 (and through one
of its offshoots also murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981) was suppressed by
successive Egyptian governments between 1948 and 1967, but enjoyed a
revival during the first years of the Israeli occupation of the
territories. Its leader in the Palestinian territories was Sheikh
Ahmad Yassin, a charismatic and wily quadriplegic refugee from Majdal
(today Ashkelon) in southern Israel.
During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Islamic Association took control
of various Muslim Trust (or waqf) institutions, including Gaza’s
Islamic University and dozens of mosques, and set up a private
welfare system that included kindergartens, schools, and medical
clinics. Yassin nominally steered the association clear of politics,
concentrating instead on his social and economic base–though in the
early 1980s the association clandestinely began acquiring arms. The
incipient military organization was crushed by the Shin Bet, Israel’s
internal security service, and for a while the association reverted
to do-gooding.
But with the outbreak of the first intifada in December 1987, Hamas
emerged like a butterfly from the cocoon of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Several clandestine armed squads recruited earlier by Salah Shehadeh
served as the core of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam
Brigades (named after a Muslim preacher and terrorist leader in Haifa
killed by the British in 1935). During the first intifada, Hamas led
many of the street demonstrations, and also engaged in small
terrorist operations. By the time of the second intifada in 2000,
Hamas was larger and better organized, and it led the way in the
intensified suicide-bombing campaigns against large Israeli civilian
targets, such as buses and restaurants. Shehadeh and Yassin (and
several of their successors) were killed by the IDF and Shin Bet in
the course of the second intifada, but the movement’s popularity and
lethality grew apace, until it won a plurality in the Palestinian
elections in January 2006.
Levitt has written a timely and useful book, but before dealing with
its central points, it is worth recounting a story that illustrates
the nature of the people who are the object of his study. In January
2004, the first woman Hamas suicide bomber, Rim Salih al-Rayashi, a
mother of two, blew herself up at the Erez checkpoint at the northern
edge of the Gaza Strip. Afterward, as is their wont, Hamas broadcast
a video “living will” in which she appeared, appropriately accoutered
with Kalashnikov, Koranic slogans, a map of Palestine, and green
articles of clothing. On the tape she declares that since second
grade she has aspired to become a suicide bomber: “I have always
wished … that my body would be shrapnel that tear the sons of Zion
and to knock the door of heaven with the skulls of the sons of
Zion…. I have always told myself: be filled with every possible
grudge for the Jews, the enemies of your religion, and make your
blood a road leading to paradise.”
As it turned out, however, the whole moving speech was a fake. It was
“scripted and choreographed,” Levitt proposes, by Rayashi’s handlers.
Israeli investigators found no evidence of her early radicalization,
and that she had been, in Levitt’s phrase, “coerced into carrying out
the attack as a gesture of repentance for committing adultery against
her husband, a Hamas member.” Hamas probably hoped that the video
would be of use in recruiting and radicalizing children (or women),
two of the movement’s target groups. Waste not, want not.
Levitt lays out before his reader–a bit repetitiously–the mechanics
of the dawa and the uses to which it is put. To begin with, Hamas
uses its social programs to garner popular support in its march
toward power. Most people will acknowledge this as inoffensive: why
shouldn’t philanthrophy earn political rewards? But Hamas does not
confine its philanthrophy to politics. It puts its dawa personnel and
facilities also to terrorist uses. Hospitals, mosques, and
kindergartens are employed to hide weapons and bombs; cars and houses
are used to ferry and hide fugitives; funds for terrorism are
laundered and channeled through charities and social organizations.
And the workers employed in these dawa organizations sometimes wear
two hats, the clandestine one being that of terrorist recruiters and
organizers.
In this sense, Levitt is right to speak of Hamas as a single seamless
organization whose parts are inseparable. Hamas’s leaders speak this
way, too. Mahmoud Zahar, the new Hamas government’s foreign minister,
has declared that “Hamas responds to all questions related to the
life of the citizens not only in case of confrontation but also in
the political, economic, social, health, and internal relations
fields. This movement has proved that it is one organic unit.
Mistaken is the one who thinks that the military wing acts outside
the framework of Hamas or behaves recklessly.” Contrary to Hamas’s
sympathizers, who relentlessly press to distinguish between the good
and the bad in the Palestinians’ new representatives, this is
absolutely correct. As David Aufhauser, former general counsel to the
U.S. Treasury Department, put it, it is “sophistry” to suggest a
distinction between Hamas’s charitable branches and its terrorist and
military ones.
Levitt is deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis in
the Treasury Department and a former FBI analyst, and by dint of his
official connections he has been able to make lavish use of American
intelligence reports. (He also appears to have been given access to a
great deal of Israeli intelligence material, including transcripts of
interrogations of would-be suicide bombers, and to Palestinian
Authority intelligence reports, the latter probably indirectly, via
the American administration or Israel.) Levitt describes the nuts and
bolts of the unitary character of Hamas, the inseparability of its
social works from its terrorist violence. He shows that Hamas-run or
Hamas-aligned teaching institutions, from kindergarten to university,
all teach virulent hatred of Israel and the Jews (and the West). They
also provide the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades with their manpower.
In 2001, in a graduation ceremony for forty-one Gaza kindergartens, a
five-year-old girl dipped her hand in red paint to mimic admiringly
“the bloodied hands Palestinians proudly displayed after the lynching
of two Israeli [reservists] in Ramallah.” A poll in Gaza at the time
found that 73 percent of children aged nine to sixteen hoped to
become martyrs. The charitable “Al Aqsa Intifada Martyrs Summer Camp”
hosted by Hamas in 2003 combined recreation with “radical
indoctrination,” which included small-arms training and pictures and
biographies of suicide martyrs lavishly dispersed on wall surfaces.
Nablus’s Al Najah University has been described by Hamas itself as “a
greenhouse for martyrs.”
But the dawa’s terrorism-related activities are not limited to
indoctrination and propaganda, though these have been crucial in
raising a generation of Palestinian suicide-murderers. In his
interrogation by Israeli security men in summer 2002, Mustafa Amjad,
a doctor at al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, confessed to helping
terrorists enter Israel. He was recruited by Hamas and worked for a
hospital affiliated with a Hamas charity. In a Hamas kindergarten in
the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, Palestinian security men found hidden
thirty-two kilograms of explosives, according to Palestinian security
chief Jibril Rajoub. Two members of a Jenin charity organization
board, Jamal Abd al-Shamal Abu Hija and Ibrahim Hassan Ali Jaber,
helped to plan terrorist attacks and to transport terrorists into
Israel, according to Israeli authorities cited by Levitt. Another
man, Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah, the director of food supplies for
Gaza refugees with UNRWA, confessed to using U.N. vehicles to
transport arms and terrorists. The Hamas-linked Charity and
Contribution Committee of Ramallah-al-Bireh regularly provided funds
for the families of suicide bombers, while Abd al-Khaliq al Natsheh,
who headed the Hebron Islamic Charitable Society, was jailed for
recruiting terrorists. The Hamas-affiliated Jihad Mosque in Hebron
had a soccer team that carried out five terrorist operations in the
first half of 2003, before the scorers (shooters?) were apprehended.
A similar duplicity informs much of Hamas’s overseas fund-raising,
which is ostensibly earmarked for good works among a needy population
but is in fact also a channel for funding Izz al-Din al-Qassam
operations. Terrorist attacks, as Levitt notes, are often expensive.
An M-16 A2 assault rifle costs $6,642; bullets for an AK-47 cost
$2.20 apiece; a stolen vehicle costs $656 to $1,550. Salah Shehadeh
once estimated that operations cost $3,500 to $50,000 each. The
bombing at the Hebrew University cafeteria in July 2002 was said by a
Jordanian Islamist to have cost $50,000. So a parallel “economic
jihad” was necessary to provide the funds. Levitt provides many
details of the charitable organizations that raised the money, mainly
in the West, and the mechanisms through which it was moved to the
occupied territories. He also details the contributions of and from
the various Arab states (mainly Iraq, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia).
A great deal of this charity-bound money reached Hamas fighters’
families (those of Fatah seem to have done rather poorly), thus
helping to motivate young Palestinians from poor families to carry
out attacks. The Ramallah-al-Bireh branch of the Islah Charitable
Society, a Hamas front, in November and December 2000 paid out $4,990
to martyrs’ families, $16,257 to prisoners, and $17,275 to prisoners’
families, according to documents captured by Israel and cited by
Levitt. Follow-up monthly stipends for the families are also standard
practice, apparently. And there are special one-time dispensations on
holidays.
Over the years hamas has abjured attacks on Western countries, saying
that it limits its activities to “Palestine.” It has not, in Levitt’s
phrase, “joined al-Qaeda’s global jihad.” Indeed, some of its leaders
mildly condemned the attacks of September 11. But expressions by
Hamas leaders of hatred of America and everything American are
legion, and Levitt plausibly questions “whether Hamas’s local focus
will continue.” When the space shuttle Columbia exploded in 2003, the
Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, briefly Yassin’s successor,
remarked that “it is reasonable to assume [it was] part of the divine
punishment of America … because of their massacres of Muslims, the
destruction of their lives, the humiliation of their honor, and their
desire to globalize corruption.” He later added: “We say to the
Muslim people of Iraq, we are with you in your struggle against
American terror and destruction, we are with you in your war in
defense of Islam…. Hamas stands by your side and blesses your Jihad.”
Rantisi was later killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, but his
sentiments are common among the Palestinian people’s new leadership.
If Hamas ever achieves its political goals, or perhaps even before
then, its cadres may be expected to roam the earth and kill in the
name of global jihad. Hamas’s founding charter defines in Article
Five the movement’s “dimensions of time and space,” its sphere of
interest and operations, in this way: “Its ultimate goal is Islam….
Its specialdimension extends wherever on earth there are Muslims….
Thus it penetrates to the deepest reaches of the land and to the
highest spheres of Heavens.” Article Seven declares that “the
Movement is … universal.”
So will Hamas change? Some in Israel and many in the West are
hopeful, even optimistic, that it will. Power, they say, will breed
responsibility, and pragmatism, and moderation; international
pressure will bend Hamas. And Hamas leaders have been obliging, at
least tactically: they speak occasionally of an extended truce, if
Israel withdraws completely from the West Bank and East Jerusalem,
releases all Palestinian prisoners, and recognizes and accepts
Palestinian rights, including the “right of return.” They sometimes
say that they are willing to talk with Israelis, if it will help to
solve specific Palestinian problems.
But on the big things, the strategic things, the ideological things,
they have so far been unwilling to budge, and the movement’s history
gives no reason to believe that they will, at least if their leaders’
statements are anything to go by. Mahmoud Zahar recently said that
the movement will never change “a single word” of its guiding
principles or its founding charter. In this regard, the Hamas leaders
have been supremely honest and forthright. And so the charter, or
Covenant of Hamas, the movement’s constitution and platform,
finalized in August 1988, is worth quoting, and remembering. Here are
some excerpts:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate … the People
of the Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] … most of them are
evil-doers. … Israel will … remain … until Islam eliminates
it. … [Hamas] strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch
of Palestine…. [Salvation] will not come until Muslims will fight
the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees,
which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on
and kill him! … [Hamas] believes that the land of Palestine has
been an Islamic Waqf [sacred trust] throughout the generations and
until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of
it … as long as Heaven and earth last. … Hamas regards
Nationalism (Wataniyya) as part and parcel of the religious faith.
Nothing is loftier … than waging Jihad against the enemy. …
[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the
international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all
contrary to the beliefs of [Hamas]. For renouncing any part of
Palestine means renouncing part of the religion. … There is no
solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. … When our
enemies usurp some Islamic lands, Jihad becomes a duty binding on all
Muslims. … I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will
assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill. …
In Article 17, under “The Role of Muslim Women,” the charter states:
The enemies have understood that role [and] therefore they realize
that if they can guide and educate [the Muslim women] in a way that
would distance them from Islam, they would have won that war.
Therefore, you can see them making consistent efforts [in that
direction] by way of publicity and movies, curricula of education and
culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part
of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names
and shapes such as: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and
the like…. These Zionist organizations control vast material
resources…. Islam … will wipe out those organizations which are
the enemy of humanity and Islam.
Rotarians and Masons had better watch out.
Hamas’s view of the Jews is clearly stated in Article 22:
The enemies have been scheming for a long time. … They took
advantage of key-elements in unfolding events, and accumulated a huge
and influential material wealth which they put to the service of
implementing their dream. This wealth [permitted them to] take over
control of the world media such as news agencies, the press,
publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [They also used this]
wealth to stir revolutions. … They stood behind the French and the
Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear
about here and there. … They obtained the Balfour Declaration and
established the League of Nations in order to rule the world. …
They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense
benefits from trading with war materials. … They inspired the
establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to
replace the League of Nations. … There was no war that broke out
anywhere without their fingerprints on it.
Article 28 relates more directly to Zionism: “Freemasons, Rotary
Clubs, Lions, and other spying associations … act for the interests
of Zionism and under its directions, strive to demolish societies, to
destroy values, to wreck answerableness, to totter virtues and to
wipe out Islam. It stands behind the diffusion of drugs and toxics of
all kinds in order to facilitate its control and expansion.” Article
32 states that “they will covet expansion from the Nile to the
Euphrates … Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what
is said there.” As to Palestine, Article 34 instructs that “the
greedy have coveted [it] more than once. … Multitudes of Crusades
descended upon it … waving their Cross. … [Then it was liberated]
by Jihad under … Saladin. … This is the only way. … Only iron
can blunt iron, only the true faith of Islam can vanquish their false
and falsified faith.”
And yet, at the same time, the movement that champions the views just
cited can proclaim, in Article 31, that “Hamas is a humane movement,
which cares for human rights and is committed to the tolerance
inherent in Islam. … Under the shadow of Islam it is possible for
the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism
to coexist in safety and security.” If this is not deceit, I don’t
know what is.
Benny Morris, a professor Middle East history at Ben-Gurion
University, is the author, most recently, of The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press).