-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,188137,00.html
}}}>Begin
Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2001
Hamas Explained
TIME.com's guide to the radical Palestinian movement threatening to eclipse Yasser
Arafat
BY TONY KARON
What is Hamas, and how does it operate?
Hamas is the religious-political-military organization at the center of the current
showdown between Israel and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA). Defined as
a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and the European Union because of its
suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, it has nonetheless emerged as a potent and
popular challenger to Arafat's own authority.
Hamas opposed the Oslo peace process from the outset because it involved
recognizing Israel's existence, and set about trying sabotaging that process by
sending waves of suicide bombers into Israeli cities in the mid-1990s. The
organization's ultimate goal is to create an Islamic state in all of pre-1948
Palestine,
which includes all of Israel. But its short-term objective is to drive the Israelis
out of
all territories they conquered in June 1967 — the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem, and Gaza.
The organization is best known for the exploits of its military wing, the Izzedine Al
Qassam brigades. These operate entirely on a clandestine basis, and are currently
believed to include up to 500 young volunteers for suicide missions. They are
organized into small, discreet cells with multiple leadership structures that can
quickly replace leaders eliminated by the Israelis or arrested by the PA.
But one of the keys to Hamas's popularity is its large-scale welfare arm. Hamas
provides educational, medical and other desperately needed welfare services in
impoverished West Bank and Gaza towns and refugee camps, creating a marked
contrast with the image of corruption and cronyism most Palestinians have of
Arafat's administration. The welfare arm also cares for the families of suicide
bombers and others who have died fighting the Israelis, making suicide bombing a
macabre form of life insurance in impoverished Palestinian communities. The social
services performed by Hamas also create a pretext for the massive funding the
organization receives from Muslim charities throughout the Persian Gulf and beyond.
In contrast to the large political and welfare arms of Hamas, its smaller rival Islamic
Jihad consists entirely of clandestine cells. The organization shares Hamas's
opposition to the peace process and its preference for suicide bombings as a tactic,
but its entirely underground operation leaves it shaded by the larger Hamas.
How is Hamas different from Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO)?
The PLO is an umbrella organization that has been overwhelmingly secular since its
inception. Today it remains dominated by the secular nationalists of Yasser Arafat's
Fatah organization. Before Oslo, the PLO's affiliate organizations, which included
smaller leftist groups such as the PFLP and DFLP, operated from exile in the Arab
world. The PLO's various factions maintained small guerrilla wings that periodically
carried out terror attacks against Israeli targets, and also operated illegal
underground structures in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hamas emerged as a direct rival to the secular in PLO in the West Bank and Gaza in
1987. Whereas the Israeli military authorities had banned PLO organizations from
operating openly there, it consciously allowed Hamas — whose activities did not at
that time include armed actions — to flourish as an alternative to Arafat, who
remained Israel's primary enemy at the time. But Hamas's active role in the first
intifada led to Israel banning the organization in 1989 and imprisoning its founder,
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
The Oslo Accord switched things around. Arafat became Israel's partner in peace
and the Fatah leadership was brought home to run the Palestinian Authority; Hamas
found itself alongside Islamic Jihad and Arafat's erstwhile leftist allies in
rejecting the
agreement. But by now Hamas was a large, well- established section of Palestinian
political society, which Arafat could not simply wish away.
Its opposition to Oslo kept Hamas from challenging Arafat in the 1994 elections for
the PA. It did, however, challenge and resoundingly defeat Fatah in many student
council elections in the West Bank and Gaza. Still, there was always dialogue
between the PA and Hamas, and periodic uneasy, silent agreements between them.
In 1996, Hamas unleashed a wave of deadly bombings that killed 60 Israelis in eight
days, prompting Arafat to clamp down heavily — some 1,000 Palestinians were
arrested and the PA even ousted Hamas from some of its mosques. Later, the
organizations appear to have negotiated a modus vivendi. While Hamas won't
abandon terrorist actions against Israel, it has periodically agreed, for example, to
refrain from sending suicide bombers into Israel for defined periods. While it refuses
to accept the PA as an authority, it does accept Arafat's right to represent the
Palestinian people internationally. And it shares his concern to avoid a Palestinian
civil war, in which both sides argue Israel would be the real winner.
While the intifada has made Hamas a de facto ally of Fatah and the PA in the day-to-
day battles against the Israelis, the Islamist group remains resolutely opposed to any
attempt to restore the crippled peace process. Their latest wave of suicide bombings
are designed in part to sabotage U.S. efforts to broker a cease-fire, and the resulting
international pressure on Arafat has set him on a collision course with Hamas.
Why has Arafat not simply eliminated Hamas as demanded by Israel, the U.S. and
the European Union?
The complex multilayered leadership structures of Hamas's military arm make it
difficult for either the Israelis or Arafat to destroy the organization by eliminating
its
leadership. But the source of Arafat's difficulty is political — Hamas is now believed
to directly represent the political views of one in three Palestinians, and its actions
carry the support of an overwhelming majority. Opinion polls find upward of 70
percent of Palestinians currently favor suicide bombings and oppose a cease-fire.
Compounding Arafat's crisis is the fact that most of the rank-and-file of his own
Fatah and security services regard Hamas as comrades-in-arms against the Israelis.
Fatah has publicly challenged Arafat's calls for arrests of Hamas leaders, and his
security forces plainly have little enthusiasm for the task — particularly when they're
being confronted by thousands of angry demonstrators. Hamas has been the primary
beneficiary of the alienation of many Palestinians from the corruption of the PA, the
failure of the peace process and of Arafat's declining political authority over the 14
months of the second intifada.
End<{{{
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