The political failure of the PLO and the origins of Hamas
Part 2
By Jean Shaoul
6 July 2002
This is Part 2 in a three part series. Part 1 was posted on July 5.
The Arabs’ second defeat at the hands of Israel in 1973 was accompanied by
an oil boycott of those nations supporting Israel and a quadrupling of oil
prices. This served to enrich the reactionary feudal regimes of the Arabian
Peninsula, which had their own disputes with Nasser’s Egypt, and to enhance
their influence. Militant Islamic groups benefited from the newfound wealth
of the oil-rich states both directly and indirectly. Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf States poured money into the Brotherhood and other similar groups to
counter and suppress the growth of any progressive political tendencies
within the working class that might threaten their position. The Egyptian
and Jordanian movements also benefited from the remittances of workers who
had gone to the Gulf in search of work.
Popular support for Islamic groups began to grow in Iran, Egypt, Syria,
Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Gaza, particularly among the most impoverished
layers and the rural poor. The success of religious opposition to the Shah’s
tyrannical regime in Iran and the 1979 revolution offered proof that an
Islamic state could be established. It inspired and promoted a network of
Shi’ite groups, including Amal and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi’ite opposition
elements to the Iraqi regime, and Shi’ite minorities in the Gulf states. The
success of the Iranian revolution also encouraged the growth of other
Islamic tendencies, including Sunni groups.
There was another important sponsor of militant Islamic groups. Washington
played a crucial role in promoting their growth to provide a counter to
Moscow’s influence in the Middle East and internationally, as a political
weapon against radical nationalists such as the Ba’ath Party in Syria, as
ballast for the reactionary monarchs of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and as an
explicitly anti-Communist force through which to divert the oppressed masses
with radical sounding rhetoric.
From 1980-89, the CIA provided the largest covert aid programme in US
history to Afghanistan in order to destabilise the Soviet Union. It financed
and armed the most extreme of the mujahidin groups, including Osama bin
Laden’s Al Qaeda network, fighting the Soviet backed Afghan regime in Kabul.
Such US sponsored groups have in turn been crucial in promoting the growth
of militarily trained Islamic forces in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria,
occupied Palestine, and elsewhere.
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The US attitude towards Islamic militancy began to change after the Iranian
revolution, which removed from power America’s main ally and the custodian
of its interests in the Gulf. From its inception, the revolution took on an
explicitly anti-American and anti-Zionist character.
Islamic militancy was beginning to harm the interests of the US and its
Middle East allies more broadly. In November 1979, a group of militant
Islamic opponents to the Saudi regime took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
The Saudis were only able put down the revolt at the cost of hundreds of
lives, with the help of Jordanian and French military advisors. Then in
1981, the very opposition forces that Egypt’s President Sadat had promoted
called for an armed uprising against him. Shortly afterwards, he was
assassinated by Islamic Jihad army officers opposed to his peace treaty with
Israel. In April 1983 in Lebanon, where US forces were openly involved in
supporting the Israeli-installed and Maronite backed President, Amin
Gemayel, Islamic Jihad destroyed the US embassy. In October, another suicide
mission destroyed the US Marine Corps barracks. Over the next few years,
several Shi’ite militias held US personnel and other Westerners as hostages,
while Hezbollah launched raids against Israeli troops in occupied south
Lebanon. By 1984, Reagan was forced to admit that the US position was
untenable and withdrew US forces from Lebanon.
The rise of political Islam in the Occupied Territories
With the PLO confined to Tunis after September 1982 and without support from
the Soviet bureaucracy and the Arab bourgeois states, Arafat played less and
less of a role in directing the ongoing struggle of the masses in the
Occupied Territories and came to be identified in the popular imagination
with passivity and corruption. He had all but renounced the armed struggle
in favour of diplomatic manoeuvring, under conditions where the Palestinians
had fallen off the Arab regimes’ radar screen. The Arab Summit Conference at
Amman in November 1987, called primarily to address the Iran-Iraq war, only
added the Palestinian issue to the agenda as an afterthought and issued no
major resolutions regarding Palestine. The PLO was increasingly riven with
murderous conflicts that took place openly on the streets of London and
Paris.
Once again the Brotherhood was able to fill the political vacuum left by the
crisis of secular nationalism. It was aided in this task by generous funding
from the Arab bourgeoisie, who viewed the Palestinian question as a
dangerous source of radical anti-imperialist sentiment and a threat to their
own privileges. They all sought to develop the Brotherhood as a
counterweight to the PLO and as a means of dividing the Palestinian working
class.
Fostered by Jordan, the Brothers in Gaza joined forces with the Brothers in
the West Bank and Jordan to become part of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.
The Brotherhood used the money that poured in from Saudi Arabia and the
Jordanian monarchy to build up its network of mosques, cultural
organisations and welfare services that were to provide a lifeline to the
impoverished Palestinians.
The leader of the Brothers in Gaza was Shaikh Ahmad Yasin, a teacher, who
was born in Mandate Palestine in 1936. He came from a prosperous middle
class landowning family that fled in 1948 and settled in a refugee camp in
Gaza. He set up the Islamic Congress in 1973 as a front for the Brotherhood
to control all its religious, educational and social activities.
The Brotherhood’s primary goal was the “founding of the Islamic Personality”
. Despite its call for the destruction of the state of Israel, when the time
was right, it abstained from all forms of anti-occupation activity. It gave
precedence instead to the cultural struggle against the PLO’s “atheist”
commitment to secular nationalism.
Shaikh Yasin never concealed his dislike of Yasser Arafat. “Pork eaters and
wine drinkers”, was his contemptuous denunciation of the secular PLO
leadership. He was even more hostile towards communism and left nationalist
factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).
For this reason, the Brothers received additional support from an unexpected
quarter: Israel. The Zionist state and its security forces actively
encouraged the Brotherhood as an alternative to the PLO. Its opposition to
terrorism and emphasis on charitable and educational activities made it
preferable to the PLO, despite its call for the destruction of Israel. The
Israeli occupation authorities viewed the Islamic groups as a useful tool
for fomenting dissension within the Palestinians. The former military
governor of Gaza, General Yitzhak Segev, explained how he had financed the
Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and Stalinists. According to
the journalist Graham Usher, he said, “The Israeli government gives me a
budget and we extend some financial aid to Islamic groups via Mosques and
religious schools, in order to help create a force that can stand up against
the leftist forces that support the PLO.”
David Shipler, a former correspondent of the New York Times, wrote: “In
1980, when Islamic militants set fire to the office of the Red Crescent
Society in Gaza, headed by Dr Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Communist and PLO
supporter, the Israeli army did nothing, intervening only when the mob
marched to his home and seemed to threaten him personally.”
As early as 1978, the commissioner of Muslim waqf, the religious trust,
warned Israel against registering and thus recognising the Islamic Congress
and allowing it to gain control of the waqf. The waqf was comprised of
lands, shops, businesses and agricultural land and constituted approximately
10 percent of the economy of Gaza Strip. Israel ignored his advice and gave
the Brotherhood’s front organisation a licence in 1979.
Within a decade, Yassin built the Islamic Congress into a powerful
religious, economic and social institution in the Gaza Strip. He developed a
welfare network around the mosques, many of which served also as community
centres. The number of mosques in the Gaza Strip tripled from 200 to 600
between 1967 and 1987, while the number of worshippers doubled. In the West
Bank, the number of mosques went from 400 to 750 in the same period. Women
were required to cover their heads and wear robes over their clothes, and
young men to grow beards. Sport was used to draw in the youth and bind them
to the Islamic League.
The Brotherhood targeted youth in the villages and refugee camps, school
students, teachers, civil servants, and particularly the poor. It shunned
workers and women in trade unions and professional organisations. While
eschewing violence against Israel “until the time was right”, its youth
trashed shops, cafes and businesses selling alcohol and threatened and
harassed the population to force them to return to supposedly traditional
Islamic ways and abstain from Western style music, past-times and habits.
It carried out organised attacks on the PLO and its organisations, and
clashed with student supporters of the PLO and left groups in the
universities. After a series of particularly violent clashes between 1982
and 1986, it took over Al Azhar, the Islamic University in Gaza, where it
purged the school of PLO supporters in a mini-civil war against the PFLP and
its Stalinist supporters and turned the staff and students into a reserve of
700 “soldiers”. It was only when Fatah indicated that it would no longer
stand aside and let its supporters be ousted in this way, that Israel took
action to stop the fighting.
The Muslim Brothers and the Intifada
In December 1987, a spontaneous rebellion broke out amongst the Palestinian
youth and working class, catching the Brothers off guard. The Intifada was
the product of the harsh conditions of the Israeli occupation and the
deteriorating economic situation. In Gaza, conditions were dire. In 1986,
there were 634,000 Palestinians, concentrated in a narrow strip of sandy
soil 28 miles long and 3.5 to 8 miles wide. The population was increasing at
the rate off 4.3 percent a year. In 1988, 59 percent of the population was
under 19 years of age, and 76.9 percent were under 29. Today the population
will have grown by 50 percent, to about one million.
Yet, the Gaza Strip lacked the basic infrastructure to cope with its
existing population. There was an inadequate supply of clean drinking water.
Sanitation did not exist and there was little land, whether for housing,
agriculture, schools or hospitals. To cap it all, Israel was holding “state
lands” in reserve for the few Jewish settlers in the area: some 2,500
people. While the settlers comprised a mere 0.4 percent of the population,
they had already been awarded 28 percent of the state lands and were
demanding more.
The Palestinian economy was entirely subordinated to Israel’s determination
to protect its own industries and ensure a market free from competition in
the Occupied Territories. As Palestinian farmers were squeezed out of the
market, their credit was cut, their yield per acre shrank and the acreage
under cultivation followed suit. Such industry as existed could find no
outlet in either Israel or Jordan following Jordan’s embargo on the import
of manufactured goods from occupied Palestine.
The Palestinians therefore became almost totally dependent upon finding work
in Israel. But even in this, they were hindered by the Civil Administration,
from whom they had to seek documentation to travel and work. As Israeli
defence correspondents, Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, acknowledged in their
book, The Intifada, “The result was that in more ways than one, painful as
it is to admit, a ‘slave market’ of sorts came into being in the
territories.”
When the Intifada erupted in December 1987, the main source of resistance to
Zionist domination became the Palestinian workers and youth, not the PLO
guerrillas. The Brotherhood was confronted with a dilemma: maintain its
accommodation with Israel and thus its protection, or lose control of the
Palestinians to the Unified National Leadership Union (UNLU), which the PLO
had set up to co-ordinate and control the uprising.
The Brothers took the decision to establish the Islamic Resistance Movement,
known by its acronym Hamas, as an Islamic political party dedicated to
national liberation in order to divert the energies of the Palestinian
working class and channel it along religious lines.
Its Covenant, published in August 1988, essentially it’s founding charter,
blended nationalism with religion and naked anti-Semitism. It called for an
exclusively Islamic Palestinian state, repudiating the PLO’s formulation of
a democratic secular state as anti-Islamic, and made territorial
nationalism, previously a form of idolatry, into a religious mission or
jihad. It called for the destruction of the state of Israel and falsely
equated political Zionism with the Jewish people, both within Israel and
beyond. The Jews were denounced as the secret architects of both the French
Revolution and the Communist revolution, of two World Wars, of creating the
League of Nations and the United Nations as secret organs of world
domination and, above all, of being the destroyers of the Islamic Caliphate.
The charter explicitly rejected direct confrontation with the PLO,
positioning itself instead as an alternative leadership of the Palestinian
people. To this end, Hamas organised independently of the UNLO, issued its
own leaflets, and called separate strikes, often on holy days. It
intimidated, set fire to and sabotaged shops and businesses that did not
respond to its strikes. It refused to acknowledge the “sole representative
status” of the PLO.
Hamas led little action against the Israeli occupation authorities, with the
result that Israel did not interfere with Hamas-organised strikes. Indeed,
Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin even had talks with leading Islamists
in the summer of 1988.
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