Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (9 page)

“All these measures are to make the Hamas government fail,” Mashaal told me.

The Palestinian Authority suffered from a political vacuum and rumbling disorder. The most vocal supporters of Hamas were other extremists. The day before I saw Mashaal, al Jazeera had aired a new audiotape from Osama bin Laden. The al Qaeda chief raged at the West for cutting off aid to the Palestinians after Hamas’s victory.

“The European and American rejection of the current Palestinian government is a Zionist-Crusader war against Muslims,” bin Laden said.

To the outside world, al Qaeda and Hamas fell into the same camp of militant groups built around a zealous religious ideology that justified suicide bombers and called for societies built strictly around Islamic law. With the rise of political Islam, cells of al Qaeda affiliates or wannabes had also emerged in Gaza. The Swords of Islamic Righteousness was one of the shadowy new renegade groups that attacked music stores, recreational clubs, Internet cafés, and cultural centers. “Get back to Allah and away from all those dirty, corruption things, because you will never withstand the fire of hell and the torture at the end of your life,” the Swords warned after an Internet café attack.
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The new cells were widely linked to the mysterious deaths of three prostitutes.

Hamas and al Qaeda, however, were often also at odds. After the Hamas election, Ayman al Zawahiri, the second-in-command, issued a statement from hiding that scolded Hamas and appealed to the Palestinian movement not to work with the “secularist traitors” of Fatah.

Mashaal struggled to distance himself from al Qaeda. “Hamas has very different policies,” he told me. “Bin Laden thinks it’s wrong to participate in elections, while we participate. We also limit our struggle against the Israeli occupation to Palestine. We don’t take our attacks outside Israel. The world must make a clear distinction between us and al Qaeda.”

Before leaving, I asked Mashaal to look at the Middle East a decade down the road.

“There will be a general escalation in the region, because of the Israeli occupation, the war in Iraq, and the expected American war in Iran over its nuclear program,” he offered. “So the region in the coming years will have no real stability.

“But despite the difficulties in the coming years,” he said, “the Palestinians will get their own state.”

Over the next year, however, Palestinian politics instead drifted deeper into a dysfunctional political deadlock. Talks between Hamas and Fatah repeatedly collapsed; rival security forces and militias increasingly attacked each other. Deaths from factional violence mounted.

Tensions with Israel also escalated. On June 25, 2006, Hamas gunmen and militants from two other groups sneaked through a tunnel under Gaza and attacked an Israeli army post. Two Israelis were killed, three were injured. The gunmen seized nineteen-year-old Corp. Gilad Shalit, then fled back to Gaza. They then demanded freedom for 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the lone Israeli soldier.

Israel blamed Mashaal personally for the kidnapping. It also pledged not to succumb to extortion. Three days later, Israeli troops launched Operation Summer Rains, invading Gaza and launching raids across the West Bank to arrest Hamas members of parliament—thirty-eight in all, including the speaker of parliament and several cabinet ministers. Among them was Sheikh Nayef Rajoub.

The Israeli offensive did not end until a cease-fire was declared in November. Little was gained by either side during the five-month confrontation. Shalit was still a hostage; Rajoub and the Hamas politicians were still in an Israeli prison.

Amid military hostilities with Israel and Palestinian political tensions, life in the territories deteriorated rapidly. A year after the election, roughly two thirds of the Palestinians lived below the poverty line—or on less than three dollars a day.
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A public-opinion survey found that three out of four Palestinians were disappointed with their government and the direction of their society. More than one half of the Palestinians polled blamed both Fatah and Hamas for failing to form a viable unity government—and for their economic plight.

In February 2007, Saudi Arabia intervened to end the year-long deadlock. Assembling leaders of the rival factions in Mecca, King Abdullah brokered a deal for a unity government and a cease-fire. Hamas retained the prime minister’s job, while a Fatah official became his deputy. Cabinet posts were divvied up: Hamas got nine ministries, Fatah six, left-wing parties four, and independents five. Abbas accepted the Mecca Accord for Fatah, Mashaal for Hamas.

Al Qaeda again railed at its fellow Islamists in Hamas. “The Hamas leadership has finally joined the surrender train of [former Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat for humiliation and capitulation…. Hamas went to a picnic with the U.S. Satan and his Saudi agent,” Zawahiri said in another statement from hiding.
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The uneasy calm didn’t last long, however. The fierce rivalry among militias soon flared anew. Tensions began to tear the two territories apart—from each other.

Although they are only thirty miles apart, the West Bank and Gaza had always been distinct places since they became the refuge for almost 500,000 fleeing Palestinians after Israel’s creation in 1948. The two territories were ruled by different countries: The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. Gaza was administered by Egypt.

Under Jordanian rule, the West Bank—a mix of cosmopolitan cities and rustic agricultural areas with both Christians and Muslims—evolved into a society where religion was largely in the private domain. The West Bank was the center of Palestinian intellectual life. West Bank Palestinians often went to university in Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. The middle class filled the ranks of Fatah and a slew of leftist factions under the Palestine Liberation Organization umbrella.

Under Egyptian rule, the Palestinians in the narrow Gaza Strip—which had one teeming city, three towns, and eight densely congested refugee camps—were initially influenced by Arab nationalism. But the poor in refugee camps had few cultural outlets beyond the mosque. The young who gravitated to universities in Egypt, including the leaders of Hamas, often came under the spell of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic charities often provided badly needed services, from dental care to food banks and summer camps.

Israel’s conquest of large chunks of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the 1967 war brought the two territories together. Even under common occupation, however, the West Bank and Gaza continued on their own ways culturally and economically. They had distinct education systems, legal systems, and local leadership in nongovernment groups.

The territories finally came under common Arab rule in the new Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Israel agreed to treat the two areas as a single unit and guarantee safe passage between them. A winding road—for Palestinian use only—connected the West Bank and Gaza for the first time. The tenuous link lasted for seven years, until Israel imposed travel bans after the second intifada began in 2000.

Yet after almost fifteen years together, the two territories still had disparate profiles: The West Bank was occupied by Israeli troops but it was economically viable. It had more resources; its economy was diverse. Less than six percent of its population lived in refugee camps. In contrast, Gaza was free of Israeli troops, which had been withdrawn in 2005, but was economically strapped. One third of Gazans were stuck in overcrowded refugee camps of cinder-block homes and rutted allies. With few resources, at least one half of Gaza’s labor force was out of work by 2007. Roughly eight out of ten Gazans relied on some form of United Nations food aid.

The new rupture began on June 9, 2007. Tensions building over the eighteen months since the election literally exploded. Weeks of escalating attacks between rival forces loyal to Fatah and Hamas turned into open street battles in Gaza. The narrow strip echoed with the staccato of gunfire, as smoke rose into the air from rocket and mortar attacks on government buildings. Bands of masked fighters roamed Gaza City, waged gun battles in the streets, and executed captives on the spot. Both Hamas and Fatah reportedly hurled opponents from high-rise buildings, with gunmen hunting down wounded rivals in hospital wards to finish them off.
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Hamas executed a Fatah commander and paraded his body through a refugee camp. Another Fatah official escaped by tying Hamas hostages to the front and roof of his pickup truck.

The Gaza showdown quickly began to look like civil war. “I think we are in Iraq, not Gaza,” a father of six told Reuters.
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“Snipers on rooftops killing people. Bodies mutilated and dumped in the streets in very humiliating ways. What else does civil war mean but this?”

The security forces loyal to President Abbas had far greater numbers but no strategy. Hamas forces had more arms and greater discipline. Hamas systematically seized Fatah’s outlying positions, then closed in on the four security headquarters in Gaza City. Hamas claimed its goal was only to end the factional fighting and restore order by bringing all armed factions under control of the unity government.

“What happened in Gaza was a necessary step. The people were suffering from chaos, and the lack of security drove the crisis toward explosion, so this treatment was needed,” Mashaal told a press conference in Damascus. But the timing may also have been linked to an American plan to train, arm, and upgrade Abbas’s personal Presidential Guards with over forty million dollars in aid. It was a little-disguised effort to give Abbas more muscle, which Hamas leaders suspected was designed to oust them from power. Their offensive was in part a preemptive strike.

It was also an opportunity for revenge. During the decade of Arafat’s rule, Fatah officials had often been ruthless with Hamas. Leaders and fighters had been jailed. Some were tortured; many had their beards, a sign of piety, forcibly shaved to humiliate them. As Hamas got its turn, Muslim clerics issued fatwas over the Hamas television and radio stations calling the battle “a war between Islam and the non-believers.”
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In a last-ditch effort to end the fighting, hundreds of men, women, and children marched down a main Gaza City street waving the Palestinian flag. One banner warned: “History will judge you. The street will not forgive you.”
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Fatah gunmen used the crowd as a shield to open fire at Hamas fighters. Hamas gunmen fired back. Two of the demonstrators were killed.

The finale to eighteen months of confrontation proved to be a rout, however. It was over in five days. Hamas won easily. Fatah’s fighters went to ground or simply fled, by land or sea, to Egypt. More than 140 Palestinians died in the process; three dozen were civilians, including women and children.

After it was over, Hamas fighters commandeered seafront villas owned by Fatah politicos, security officers, and moneymen. They ransacked the home of the Fatah security chief, ripping off crystal chandeliers, silk carpets, even a bathtub, the clay roof tiles, and the palm trees in a courtyard. Looters expressed astonishment at the opulence.
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At Gaza’s presidential compound, masked Hamas gunmen celebrated by pillaging the president’s Gaza office, with skirmishes breaking out among militants over who got the last television.
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The murals of both Arafat and Abbas were riddled with bullet holes. Outside, two bright green Hamas flags flew on the front gate.

Hamas declared June 14 the day of Gaza’s “second liberation.” The first had been from Israel in 2005, the second in 2007 from “the collaborators.”

From the West Bank, Abbas responded by declaring a state of emergency, dismantling the three-month-old unity government, and appointing a new prime minister. Fatah gunmen also asserted their authority in the West Bank. They showed up at government offices and ordered elected Hamas mayors and city-council members to go home—and not return. They also attacked and set fire to Islamic schools and charities. Local imams also disappeared.
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The nascent Palestinian state had fractured into two pieces—with dueling governments. Fatah leaders ruled the West Bank. Hamas consolidated its control of Gaza.

In eighteen months, the two largest Palestinian parties had destroyed the euphoria of the Arabs’ most democratic election ever, anywhere.

“I do believe it is the end of Palestinian democracy,” Ayman Shaheen, a political scientist at Gaza’s al Azar University, told an American journalist.
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The Palestinian saga was far from over. The Palestinians’ sense of national identity is arguably stronger than any other Arab community outside of Egypt. Fatah and Hamas continued to share many goals, including the end of Israeli occupation, creation of a Palestinian state, and release of thousands of political prisoners. Even as the two halves split, the focus in the territories and the region was on how to get them back together. On their first day apart, the West Bank cleric at Ramallah’s main mosque called for reconciliation, while Hamas offered an amnesty to Fatah fighters in Gaza. In Damascus, Mashaal told a press conference that there would be “no two governments and no division of the homeland.” He also acknowledged Abbas’s leadership. “Abbas has legitimacy, there’s no one who would question or doubt that he is an elected president, and we will cooperate with him for the sake of national interest.”
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