Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (6 page)

Some of the most dramatic violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has happened at the tomb. In 1980, Palestinians murdered six Jewish yeshiva students and wounded twenty others as they returned from prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. In 1994, American-born Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers at the tomb, killing twenty-nine and wounding 125.

I went to Hebron, however, because of a different rivalry. One of the world’s oldest cities had the most interesting contest in the Palestinian election: A top Fatah official who had once been considered an heir apparent to Arafat was running against a popular Muslim preacher with Hamas.

They, too, happened to be brothers.

The Rajoub boys, Jibril and Nayef, came from a family of thirteen children. Both born in the 1950s, they grew up in Dura, on Hebron’s outskirts. In 2006, they symbolized Palestinian politics fifteen months after Arafat’s death. Although eleven parties were competing, the election for the 132-seat parliament and a new government had boiled down to a contest between two: Fatah and Hamas.

The Rajoubs represented the conundrum of choices.

Jibril Rajoub—Jibril is Arabic for Gabriel—is the older brother and a Palestinian legend. He is a bear of a man, now balding and paunchy, with a tough-guy swagger. His career has been checkered. In 1969, at age sixteen, he was caught throwing grenades at Israeli troops in the West Bank. He was imprisoned for seventeen years, until 1985. After the first intifada erupted, he was deported. He went to Tunisia and joined the Fatah inner circle around Arafat.

After the Oslo Accords, Rajoub returned with Arafat and was put in charge of West Bank security, a pseudo-defense minister’s job for a nonstate. The job included liaising with Israel—ironically, using the Hebrew he had picked up in an Israeli prison to deal with his former jailers—and the United States. A bit of a braggart, Rajoub made no secret of ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. During a 2001 trip to Washington, he boasted that the CIA always provided him with an armor-plated limousine during his visits.
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An autobiographical collection of his interviews includes a picture with former CIA Director George Tenet, with whom he worked closely during Tenet’s brief mission in Middle East diplomacy.

By Palestinian standards, the older Rajoub was a tough pragmatist willing to do Arafat’s dirty work. He reined in militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop attacks against Israelis during peace efforts. He also quashed dissent against Arafat. His Preventive Security Force made calls or visits to media outlets, nongovernmental organizations, and academics that became too critical of Arafat’s autocratic rule. More feared than popular, Rajoub was sometimes referred to as the king of the West Bank.

On Israel, however, Rajoub straddled the line. After the second uprising erupted in 2000, he supported the intifada against Israeli troops in the occupied territories, but he opposed attacks inside Israel.

“Suicide bombs and violence will not serve the Palestinian cause,” Rajoub told Voice of Palestine Radio after two Palestinians were killed while preparing a bomb near the site of the Maccabiah Games, Israel’s Olympics-like athletic competition, in 2001.

“Resistance against the occupation is one thing, and using pernicious means to kill people, just because they are people, is something else,” he added. “These should stop because it is not in our interests, it does not serve us.”
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On Islamic militancy, he took a tough line. He publicly blasted Islamic schools for teaching “dangerous things” about the faith. “No one,” he said in 2001, “has a right to dictate their crazy vision to our children.”
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In the 2006 election, Rajoub’s base of support was hard-core Fatah loyalists and the bloated Palestinian security services. The West Bank force had 5,000 personnel, but Palestinians told me that almost 60,000 were on the payroll—one of the ways Fatah maintained support. Rajoub’s well-financed campaign was partially footed, according to West Bank scuttlebutt, by ill-gotten profits off the Palestinian Authority’s import monopolies. His entourage tooled around in armored vans and European luxury cars. He used the conference center of Hebron’s best hotel to meet local leaders. A large staff of handlers arranged rallies, answered calls, and distributed glossy brochures. He even had a campaign song, with a refrain, “Jibril Rajoub is the lion of the south; he
is
the strong man.”

Rajoub ran on Fatah’s Future List. The split within Fatah had deepened in the run-up to the election. The young guard, who came from inside the territories, felt it should assume more power after Arafat’s death. When the old guard balked, the younger generation threatened to break away and run on its own. In a last-minute compromise, they agreed to field candidates from both factions, sometimes in the same districts. Each district had multiple seats; Hebron was the largest district, with nine seats up for grabs. Conceivably, candidates from both factions could win. It proved a fateful decision.

Fatah’s young guard was led by Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Fatah politician. Barghouti came from Ramallah. He had been student-body president at Birzeit University and later a leader in the first intifada. Israel deported him to Jordan in 1987; he was allowed to return after the Oslo Accords. In the 1996 election, he won a seat in the Palestinian legislature. Barghouti advocated peace with Israel, but after the Oslo process died and the second intifada erupted, he was again a major figure as a leader of the new Tanzim militia that emerged within Fatah.

Israel arrested Barghouti after it reoccupied the West Bank in 2002. He was charged with the murder of four Israelis and a Greek monk carried out by the Tanzim. It was largely guilt by leadership. He was sentenced to five life sentences. Nevertheless, in 2006 he was running, from prison, for reelection to the Palestinian legislature. As part of the compromise between the old and young guards, he headed Fatah’s list. He became Fatah’s election poster boy. Ramallah and other West Bank cities were festooned with billboards and placards of Barghouti in brown prison garb, smiling and waving his shackled hands above his head, as if in victory.

Fatah did not have much to offer besides Barghouti’s popular appeal. The whole campaign played out over the party’s failures.

During the final campaign week, the eleven parties held a debate at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace. Candidates from each party sat at a desk on stage for two hours of intense questioning by four independent moderators. Each answer was limited to two minutes. Throughout the evening, I kept thinking back to Arafat rambling on interminably and making impossible promises, his inner circle unwilling to rein him in, at Fatah’s 1981 anniversary event. In 2006, eleven parties had to present detailed political platforms in a program televised throughout the Arab world. Each party outlined an agenda centered on ending corruption, investigating government abuses, limiting leaders’ special powers, and strengthening an independent judiciary—all reforms playing off Arafat’s failures.

Rajoub also had little to run on, except his past power. He was often on the defensive and quite elusive to journalists. I set up several appointments to see him. But his assistant, a harried young woman named Rima, called back frequently to change the day or time—until it was finally election eve. When I got to Hebron, she told me that Jibril had had to leave town on short notice and would be unavailable. He may have gotten tired of talking about the competition. On the few occasions when the press did corner him, the subject inevitably turned to Hamas.

“We have nothing to learn from Hamas,” Rajoub told
The New York Times.
“Hamas believes armed struggle is the only way to confront Israel. I hope they will adopt a pragmatic, realistic platform. But they should learn from us. We have led the revolution. We have led the Palestinian people for forty-one years.”
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Rajoub, like most of the political analysts and pollsters, thought he was a shoo-in. The only question was which brother would come in first.

It was much easier to see Sheikh Nayef, as his younger brother is known in deference to his role as a mosque preacher in the Dura suburb of Hebron. Every time I called a telephone number I had been given, he answered. He was always amenable to shifting the time to accommodate the needs of his brother and rival. He invited me to meet him at his home.

Sheikh Nayef is a towering man with a full beard accented by gray wisps under the lip. He has strikingly large hands and long eyelashes. He was born five years after his older brother and has a fraternal twin named Yasser. We sat on worn velvet couches in a receiving room in front of the house. The sheikh was dressed informally in a V-neck sweater and a tan jacket with a zipper. He was as low-key as his brother was intense.

Sheikh Nayef was running on Hamas’s Change and Reform ticket. It was a low-budget campaign. He had to borrow his twin brother’s dented, secondhand car to drive around Hebron.

“Jibril is part of the Palestinian Authority, so he has tremendous assets available to him,” the sheikh told me, as the youngest of his eight children waddled into the room and over to her father. The two-year-old was wearing a green Hamas baseball cap and green Hamas sash over a pink sweater. “Our campaign is so modest that I had to borrow one thousand dollars to register as a candidate. I have yet to pay it off.” To supplement his income, the neighborhood sheikh was also a beekeeper. He was well known around Hebron for his honey.

Hamas underplayed its assets, however, and its strategy. Before the election, the party signed an election code of conduct not to exploit places of worship to win votes. But the younger Rajoub had an edge simply by preaching at the mosque every Friday. His campaign was also staffed by the faithful, including several women in conservative Muslim dress. And Hamas’s technologically hip campaign did not shy away from invoking higher powers.

“Vote for the green crescent of Hamas. Forward this message and you will be blessed by God,” was one of several text messages sent to cell phones throughout the territories, including my rental.

Like his brother, Sheikh Nayef had a checkered past. He had been arrested four times by Israel—and once by his brother.

Educated in Jordan, he joined Hamas when it emerged in 1987 out of the first intifada. Detained four times by Israel, he and his twin had been part of a mass expulsion in 1992 after the deaths of six Israeli soldiers, including one who was kidnapped and later found bound and stabbed. More than 400 Islamists, mainly from Hamas, were rounded up, blindfolded and handcuffed, and driven to the Lebanese border. When Lebanon refused to allow them to cross, the deportees ended up living in tents for a year in a no-man’s land between the two countries. Jibril Rajoub had visited his younger brothers; Sheikh Nayef had a picture in his receiving room of the three of them standing along the border. The deportees were eventually allowed to return as a by-product of the Oslo Accords. Seven of the nine Hamas candidates in Hebron had been among those deportees.

The sheikh and his twin were arrested by their big brother during Arafat’s 1996 crackdown on Hamas.

“It was nothing personal,” the sheikh said, smiling. Neither was held very long.

Ironically, Hamas and Fatah have the same roots. Both emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt. Arafat had been a member of the Brotherhood as a student in Cairo in the 1950s. Hamas had been created by the crippled but charismatic Muslim preacher Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who headed the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood in Gaza.

Hamas is an acronym for
Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya,
or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Arab organizations often look for double entendre in their titles. Hamas means “zeal.”

The Hamas charter lauds the PLO, since it “contains the father and the brother, the next of kin and the friend” who share a common enemy and a common fate. But it scolds the PLO for its secular platform. “Whoever takes his religion lightly,” the charter declares, “is a loser.” The Koran is the movement’s constitution. Its goal is to see “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”

The Hamas charter is venomous about Israel, which it charges is trying to consume territory from the Nile to the Euphrates. It echoes the Palestine Liberation Organization’s original covenant in its pledge to obliterate the Jewish state.

Since it rejected the peace process, Hamas boycotted the Palestinian Authority that the Oslo Accords had produced. The movement did not run in either the 1996 election or the 2005 presidential election to replace Arafat. Participating in national politics would have compromised its mission and goals. Arafat had never been keen to include Hamas anyway. His strategy was a mix of squeezing, confronting, and clamping down on potential rivals, especially the Islamists.

But the post-Arafat era changed the dynamics—and the strategy of both Fatah and Hamas.

After he was elected to replace Arafat, President Mahmoud Abbas opted to try to integrate Hamas into the political process.
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He had few choices. The white-haired Fatah cofounder, who had just turned seventy, did not have the political leverage to contain Hamas, even though Israel had eliminated its founder, Sheikh Yassin, his successor, the chief bomb-maker, and other top leaders in a string of “targeted assassinations.” Hamas simply had too much local legitimacy. Its autonomous armed wing was too much of a threat both to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. And its institutions were on the verge of creating a parallel state.