Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (20 page)

and related British policies, including the Wailing Wall Disturbances in 1929, a general strike in 1936, and a large revolt in 1937.36

The Irgun consisted of a group of Zionists who advocated a policy of violent action against Palestinians and British personnel who worked in Israel/Palestine and executed a series of violent acts against those groups, such as the destruction of a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, for the purpose of establishing a Jewish state.37 While Haganah perpetrated its own acts of violence against groups that it considered to be enemies of a future Jewish state, Haganah also engaged in numerous acts of sabotage. Following a similar strategy, the Stern Group assassinated Walter Edward Guinness, first Baron Moyne, who, among many other positions, held that of Britain’s Minister Resident in the Middle East when he was killed in 1947.38 These and a number of other factors, which were contributing to disorder in Israel/Palestine, led Britain’s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to refer the entire matter of Israel/Palestine’s status to the United Nations in February 1947.39 Through a vote of the General Assembly that took place on November 29, 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of Israel/Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states and accorded international status to Jerusalem.40 In stark opposition to the recommendations of the United States’ Defense and State Departments, whose officials wanted to maintain strong relationships with the emerging Arab states, the American President Harry S. Truman lobbied very hard in favor of the passage of this resolution which eventually led to the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. As Charles D. Smith has written, “Whatever the nature of the Zionist accomplishment in Palestine, the victory at the United Nations was essentially won in the United States.”41

The United States’ policy toward the Jewish settlers and the establishment of the state of Israel would come to have a largely negative impact on the United States’ relationship with many other Middle Eastern countries and majority-Muslim countries outside of the Middle East during the years ahead. In the wake of this resolution’s passage, fierce battles raged between Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine. On May 14, 1948, General Alan Cunningham, the last British High Commissioner in Israel/Palestine, departed from there and a few hours after his departure, David Ben Gurion, who was to become the Jewish state of Israel’s first Prime Minister and Defense Minister, declared Israel’s independence.42 One day later, on May 15, 1948, units from the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan (later to be called Jordan), and Iraq invaded Israel, beginning a regional war which, among other things, resulted in the defeat of those Arab forces as well as the enlargement of Israeli territory.43 During this period, more than 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.44

Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization

While a number of Palestinian groups have arisen during the period since Israel’s independence in 1948, the most important in the history of Palestinian resistance are Fatah (which was founded in the late 1950s and early 1960s), the Palestine Liberation Organization (which was founded in 1964), and Hamas (which was founded in 1987).45 While Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are primarily secular, Hamas is exclusively Islamist in its orientation.46

Fatah, which is the palindromic acronym for “Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya” (the Palestinian Liberation Movement), was established in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through the integration of various Palestinian nationalist organizations already active in refugee camps in the Middle East (where many Palestinians had been forced to go after having fled or been expelled from Israel after its founding) and in diaspora groupings of Palestinian students in different parts of the region.47 One of the organizers involved in the creation of Fatah was Yasir Arafat, who was to become the leader of Fatah until 2004, the Chairman of the PLO (a position he would hold from 1969 until 2004), and the President of the Palestinian National Authority (an office he would occupy from 1996 until 2004).48

Arafat was born Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini in December 1929.49 While Arafat claims Jerusalem as his spiritual home (because Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem who provided much of the leadership for the Palestinian nationalist movement from early in the twentieth century until 1948, was a relative of Arafat’s on Arafat’s mother’s side), it is not known with certainty whether Arafat was born there or in Gaza or Cairo, Egypt.50 During Arafat’s childhood, he saw Israel/Palestine convulsed by the revolts which had been engendered by the immigration of Jewish settlers into the country, and the resistance of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs against those settlers.51 Arafat played an active role in the struggle against the Zionists.52 After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, he left Palestine to study at the University of Cairo, where some of the core members of the organization which was to become Fatah were members of the Palestinian Students’ Union in Cairo. These men were to form the main leadership of Fatah at the time of the movement’s foundation in the late 1950s and early 1960s.53

Al-Fatah appointed a special committee in 1958 to draft its guiding principles. The summary of the draft is as follows:

This statement played a significant role in guiding Fatah, and subsequently the PLO, for much of the lives of these organizations and continues to do so in some measure today. Also, the secular notions of “revolutionary struggle” and “state control” are quite evident in this Fatah declaration. Unlike declarations that would be issued by Hamas during that organization’s founding in the late 1980s and for the rest of its history, there are no references to Islamic principles in this early Fatah statement.55 Although, after the writing of this document, some members of Fatah dispersed to various countries and regions in the Middle East, the group’s basic ideology and Fatah’s members’ commitment to resisting Israel and creating a Palestinian state remained durable. The members of Fatah established a Central Committee, which was to be the locus of the group’s day-to-day power.56 The members of the Central Committee stated that there should be regular meetings of a Fatah General Conference, which would represent the group’s leadership and rank-and-file membership. However, by early 1983 only four conferences had been held, with a gap of nine years between the third conference in 1971 and the fourth one in May 1980.57

After Fatah’s founding in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the next major event that had an eventual impact on Fatah’s history, structure, and direction was the establishment of the PLO in 1964. The PLO was established by the member nations of the Arab League as a hoped-for umbrella organization for Palestinian resistance movements; one could argue that the fact that several Arab states were involved in establishing it meant that they were attempting to use the PLO as one way to exert their own influence on the Palestinians and on Israel in the midst of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict.58 The first leader of the PLO was Lebanese-born Ahmad Shuqayri, who was born in 1908 and returned to his family’s home in Acre, Palestine (now Akko, Israel) when he was 8 years old. After graduating from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and the Jerusalem Law School, he practiced law for several years and became involved in the Palestinian nationalist movement. He departed from Israel/Palestine following the unsuccessful Palestinian Revolts between 1936 and 1939. He returned in the late 1940s during which time he held several positions in the Palestinian civil administration. Shuqayri fled the fighting of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and later worked for the Arab League.59

The Fatah leaders more or less ignored the establishment of the PLO. They were concentrating instead on continuing their armed struggle against Israel. However, the June War in 1967 (which is also called the Six-Day War and took place between Israel on one side and forces from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, on the other) played a pivotal role in Middle East politics as a whole and in Fatah’s relationship with the PLO. During that war, Israel conquered East Jerusalem (whose population was predominantly Palestinian because the Jews had fled or been expelled from there in 1947), the West Bank of the Jordan River (which had been annexed by Jordan in 1950), the Sinai Desert and Sinai Peninsula (which had been under Egyptian control beginning in 1949), and the Golan Heights (which had been part of Syria), among other areas.60 By 1968, in the aftermath of the Arab states’ defeat in the June War, Fatah and a coalition of other Palestinian groups which had emulated it in the guerrilla field were strong enough to take control of the PLO’s apparatus. Yasir Arafat, whose leadership had been crucial to Fatah, was elected Chairman of the PLO’s Executive Committee, and it was during that period that Shuqayri was forced to leave the leadership of the PLO.61

In the years after 1968, Fatah strengthened its hold on all parts of the PLO apparatus. The merger of Fatah and the PLO was one of the most significant events in the PLO’s history in that it helped give the organization increased energy, cohesion, and direction.62 As formulated in May 1964, the Palestinian National Charter vested supreme power for determining PLO policy in the Palestinian National Council (PNC), which has acted during various times in Palestinian history as a Palestinian Parliament-in-Exile.63 The Constitution had stated that PNC members should be elected by the Palestinian people. However, in practice that was impossible, largely because of the oppressed condition in which the Palestinians found themselves (under Jordan and Egypt during periods before 1967 and under Israel after 1967), the fact that the leadership of the Palestinians was often in exile, and communication between various Palestinian leaders as well as the rank-and- file was often difficult.64 The precepts governing the Constitution of the PLO are fully secular in nature insofar as Palestinians, regardless of their religious preference, may vote in or be elected to the Palestinian National Assembly.65

The Palestinian National Charter is one of the most important documents of the PLO. It contains the organization’s most significant principles, its cen- tral arguments, its goals, and a description of its strategy to achieve these goals. The ideas that the Charter describes are frequently echoed in Palestinian publications, debates, and other forms of Palestinian discourse. Thus, the Palestinian Charter serves as an excellent introduction to PLO thinking.66

Historically, the Charter preceded the establishment of the PLO. In some respects, the Charter helped catalyze the Palestine Liberation Organization,

since it functioned as the template according to which the PLO was formed.67 About three months before the organization was created in mid-1964, Ahmad Shuqayri formulated and published a draft of the Palestinian National Charter as a way of introducing the organization that he planned to create, to explain its nature to the Palestinians, and to obtain the consent of the Arab states to its establishment.68 Because the governments of the Arab countries of the Middle East wanted to maintain a level of control over the Palestinian resistance movement, partly so that the movement would not cause political disruptions in their own countries, the leaders of those governments attempted to maintain a close watch over the PLO and other resistance movements that had emerged among the Palestinians. In any case, the Palestinian National Charter was more than a mere platform or a summation of political views. It held, in the eyes of many Palestinians and their supporters, the relatively high status that is usually attributed to constitutions of nation-states with respect to its authority and the high bar that had to be overcome in order to amend it.69

The Palestinian National Charter is a product of the secular thinking which predominated in the time surrounding its creation. That is, virtually every Arab state that was in existence at the time, except for Saudi Arabia, possessed laws and constitutions which were largely secular in nature. The Palestinian National Charter was influenced by and manifested those aspects of its political environment. For example, except for Article 15 which states that the liberation of Palestine will safeguard the Holy Places for the free worship of all people, there is very little mention of religion in the entire document. Each of the six declarations in the Introduction begins with the phrase, “We, the Palestinian Arab people,” which sets the tone for the secular nature of the document. Instead of basing its authority on the Quran, as the Hamas Charter, which would be written well over 20 years later, does, the Palestinian National Charter finds authority for its position in secular notions of human rights, such as those recognized by interna- tional covenants and common practices including the charter of the United Nations.70 The introduction and the body of the Charter also frequently assert the secular notion of Arabism, an idea which is not found in the Hamas Charter.

Article 1 of the Palestinian National Charter is representative of the predominance of secular concepts in that document. Article 1 is one of the most important articles of the Charter and, in some respects, expresses some of the essential principles underlying Palestinian nationalism while also expressing the Palestinians’ integral connections with non-Palestinian Arabs.71 This article states,“Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the greater Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”72 This article presents three secular connections or links: (1) a connection between a