[Mb-civic] Hamas Poised to Become Insiders - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Hamas Poised to Become Insiders
With Strong Showing Predicted in Palestinian Vote, Group to Face New 
Challenges

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 25, 2006; A14

GAZA CITY -- Mahmoud Zahar is a relatively well-off thyroid surgeon who 
wears his thinning gray hair in a comb-over that shakes loose when he is 
angry, which is often. On his forehead is the dime-size bruise of a 
devout Muslim, the result of many hours spent praying in the mosque 
across the dirt street from his house here.

He is also among the most obdurate leaders of the Islamic Resistance 
Movement, or Hamas, and will almost certainly be among those who emerge 
victorious as Palestinians vote Wednesday for parliament for the first 
time in a decade. Often described by those who know him as severe and 
short-tempered, Zahar is ebullient as the movement makes its first bid 
for power in the Palestinian Legislative Council.

"We are feeling victory," Zahar, 60, said during an interview earlier 
this week in the sunny courtyard of his home. "The people are going to 
vote for the project of the resistance. Israel should know that a new 
political and moral atmosphere is going to appear."

Hamas is projected to win roughly a third of the new parliament's 132 
seats and bring the Islamic movement inside the Palestinian government. 
Hamas, a party at war with Israel, refused to participate in earlier 
elections and rejected the 1993 Oslo peace accords that led to the 
creation of the Palestinian Authority. Now, Hamas may be taking new 
risks by joining a weak and nearly bankrupt Palestinian government it 
has scolded from the outside for years.

Already Hamas leaders are facing questions about how they will manage 
future peace negotiations with Israel, win the freedom of thousands of 
Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and ease the occupation in the 
West Bank given their vow not to recognize Israel or talk to its leaders.

At the same time, many Hamas followers who favored the group's past 
attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians over the Palestinian 
Authority's cooperation with Israel are wondering why the movement is 
going mainstream while the occupation endures in the West Bank.

Each week in the courtyard of the Red Cross here, a group of women 
gather to demand the release of the estimated 7,000 Palestinians in 
Israeli jails. Most of the women are poor, desperate residents of the 
Jabalya refugee camp. They are veiled, clutching framed photos of their 
sons. They are the natural constituency of Hamas. Yet none said they 
intend to support Hamas now. "If they wanted to help, they would be here 
protesting with us," said Ghaliah Barood, 70, who leads the weekly 
demonstration. "But you can see that none of them are."

Although Hamas officials vow not to meet with Israeli officials, Zahar 
said he favors mediation through Egypt, Jordan or the European Union to 
win the prisoners' release, perhaps the most emotional issue in 
Palestinian politics. Barood, whose son Ibrahim has been in an Israeli 
jail for two decades, said only kidnapping Israeli soldiers would win 
the prisoners' release. "We've never seen anyone pay attention to us, 
and now they only come for our vote," said Aziza Abu Dabah, 55, whose 
son has been in jail for 11 years.

Though designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Europe 
and Israel, Hamas has positioned itself among Palestinians as the clean 
counterweight to the corrupt, ineffective rule of Fatah, the movement 
that governs the Palestinian Authority. Hamas has a military wing that 
has carried out deadly attacks on Israelis, but its popularity stems 
largely from the grass-roots charity work and political organizing that 
is the hallmark of Islamic movements throughout the Arab world.

Here in the Gaza Strip banners festoon the streets bearing the "Change 
and Reform" label alongside a green crescent moon, the Hamas trademark. 
In some places, the signs bear the faces of Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel 
Aziz Rantisi, Hamas leaders in Gaza whom Israel assassinated in 2004.

In the final week of the campaign, Hamas has been broadcasting 
television ads featuring the party's top national candidate, Ismail 
Haniyeh, explaining why it is joining the government. Haniyeh, who 
favored participating in the first parliamentary elections a decade ago, 
says Hamas will be better able to confront corruption, free Palestinian 
prisoners and fight the Israeli occupation from inside the system.

Zahar, who lost a son in a 2003 Israeli airstrike that also broke his 
back and badly injured his wife, said Hamas will not abandon its goal of 
establishing a Palestinian state across a territory that includes what 
is now Israel. He argued that Hamas is not joining the existing 
Palestinian Authority so much as creating a new government through its 
presence.

"This is to assure people they have not shifted," said Nashat Aqtash, a 
professor of media studies at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank who 
is designing the Hamas advertising strategy, though he is not a party 
member. "They are moving in one direction -- fighting corruption and the 
occupation -- and that has not changed."

He added with a laugh, "I'm just afraid they'll win more than 50 percent 
of the vote, and then they'll be in real trouble."

Hamas showed well in a number of municipal races last year, especially 
in urban areas where its message of war with Israel and its charity 
networks have broad appeal in the refugee camps. But Hamas may find 
criticizing the Palestinian government far easier than governing an 
increasingly frustrated electorate. Leaders of Fatah, a secular 
movement, say a coalition government with Hamas will likely be 
impossible given their vastly different views on relations with Israel, 
the role of Islam in political life, and the future of party-affiliated 
militias now roaming the Palestinian territories.

"The issue is not who will win in the elections, but the power-sharing 
and political partnership that must follow," said Ziad Abu Amr, a 
longtime broker between the Palestinian factions, who is running as an 
independent candidate from the Gaza City district with the public 
support of Hamas.

Abu Amr said a "national accord" will have to be reached in parliament 
outlining a political consensus on the most pressing issues -- peace 
talks with Israel, continuation of the temporary cease-fire, disarmament 
of the militias, and reforms in a bureaucracy staffed almost entirely by 
Fatah members. He said Israel's elections in March and the aftermath 
will give the new Palestinian parliament time to focus first on internal 
matters.

"We'll have a breathing space of about six months, and we'll need that 
time to organize ourselves," he said. "The fact is there is no 
alternative to real partnership, and the two parties will be Fatah and 
Hamas."

Polls show that roughly 30 percent of the Palestinian electorate remains 
undecided, and in the final week, Fatah and Hamas leaders have been 
casting their rivals as the more dangerous option.

Abdullah Frangi, head of Fatah's campaign here, said of Hamas: "They are 
pragmatic and they say they will not try to destroy Israel. But it is 
not working. It would be very hard on the Palestinians if Hamas became 
the government, and this is the message we are telling people now."

Zahar, dressed in a khaki suit and stylish silk tie, is among the 
sternest personalities in a movement whose members celebrate the grim 
culture of suicide attacks and hope to establish Islamic law in the 
Palestinian territories.

Zahar said Hamas would not give up its military wing after joining the 
government, which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said 
would be required. Zahar also warned that the cease-fire with Israel 
that Abbas brokered with armed Palestinian factions last year was no 
longer operative, saying, "We are outside the calm, but it is in our hands."

"The Palestinian Authority has failed to achieve even the most basic 
demand: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital," Zahar said. 
"The people know it is time for the party with clean hands to take over."

But Hamas has already dealt with Israeli officials in its capacity 
running municipal councils. In the West Bank town of Qalqilyah, Hashem 
Masri, the Hamas mayor, acknowledged recently that he has sought 
permission from the Israeli military to build an industrial park he 
hopes will create hundreds of jobs. Whether that contact will continue 
at the national level is uncertain, but some former Israeli security 
officials see the elections as an opportunity.

"Israel must take a chance with Hamas inside the system," said Shalom 
Harari, a retired senior Israeli military intelligence officer now with 
the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya. 
"We're already faced with a failing peace process that had them on the 
outside. Israel has nothing to lose. They are already here. Let's try to 
tame them."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/24/AR2006012401486.html
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