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Women, Secret Hamas Strength, Win Votes at Polls and New Role    [

    What Hamas Really Wants
    By Ren Backmann
    Le Nouvel Observateur

    02 February 2006 Issue

    The victors are surprised by their own triumph.

    Will the Islamists who won 74 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council prove to be as pragmatic in Parliament as they have been in the municipalities they won last year? In doubt, the Israeli government has decided that there won't be any dialogue for now with the winners of the elections...

    "Elected officials must not profit from their position to benefit from privileges, but on the contrary, must provide an example." Frozen stiff in her shabby dark green coat that falls down over her mud-encrusted shoes, Samira Halaika, her head covered in an - also green - veil that allows only her austere face to be seen, recites, full of militant ardor, the argument of the party she will now represent in the Palestinian Legislative Council. This 41-year-old journalist, who has lived since her infancy in the village of Shuyukh, northeast of Hebron, is one of the five women elected from the Change and Reform Party, that is, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), to general surprise - including its own - the big winner of the January 25 Palestinian legislative elections.

    Fourteen months after Yasser Arafat's death, West Bank and Gaza voters have chosen, in conditions determined to be perfectly democratic by the 850 foreign observers, to put an end to the supremacy over Palestinian politics exercised for forty-one years by the Fatah Party. And to hand a victory to a movement that rejects the Oslo Accords, demands the destruction of Israel in its Charter, and the armed branch of which - the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades - is responsible for over forty suicide attacks that have killed close to 300 Israelis. A local earthquake, the shock of which not only affects the 3.6 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza and their Israeli neighbors, but covers the entire Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, where Islamist groups dream of gaining power and seek models of legitimacy.

    "We said to our Fatah brothers: we don't want to replace you, we want to work with you," says Samira Halaika, who admits to a primary preoccupation with the fate of the 9,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel. It's true that since last August, her husband Mohammad, also a journalist, and the eldest of her six children, Hannes, figure among those detainees. While the new Deputy tells the story of her childhood as the daughter of peasants, her studies in a Koranic school, then her diploma in Muslim Theology from the University of Hebron, a young bearded man puts a chubby baby down in front of her. The baby's forehead is circled by a band which reads "There is no God but God." "It's the son of my husband's other wife," Samira explains. "We get along very well with one another."

    For her, in this village where the green flags of Islam fly over all the houses, as for a number of the new Hamas Deputies who often come from the social aid organizations that have made the Islamist Party so popular, the political shock in which they are the actors doesn't seem surprising. As though it were only the logical consequence of the justice of their fight. Here, in the Hebron region, nine seats were up for election. Hamas took all of them. In Nablus, Hamas took 5 out of 6; in Jerusalem, 4 out of 6; in Ramallah, 4 out of 5; in Tulkarem, 2 out of 3; and in the Gaza Strip, 16 out of 24. With 74 Deputies out of 132 - versus 45 for Fatah - Hamas enjoys an absolute majority that sometimes seems as awkward for itself as it is worrying to Israel and its allies. "Winning elections, no, that's not our plan," Sami Abu Zohri, Hamas's spokesperson in Gaza explained to the Nouvel Observateur only two months ago. "What we want is a solid enough minority - around 30% - to have a say in the Legislative Council." "Around 30%," is also what one of the principal Hamas leaders in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, had announced to a Minister of the Palestinian Authority who visited him.

    So how was it that neither Palestinian pollsters nor Israel's civil and military intelligence services saw this green tidal wave coming that Palestinian Interior Minister Nasser Yussef feared five days before the election? "We underestimated the dynamism of Hamas's candidacy, which fed on others' mistakes and overturned everything - to the point that certain pockets of the Christian electorate in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Bethlehem have voted Islamist," explains one Ramallah political scientist. "Yet it was easy to see that the polls gave Hamas 20% favorable opinions in January 2005, 30% in June, 40% in December, and to foresee that the trend was not going to turn around since nothing in Palestinians' daily lives was improving." "If I were the head of Hamas, I'd send three thank you telegrams," says a smiling Menahem Klein, Political Science Professor, former advisor to Labor Foreign Affairs Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, and artisan of the Geneva Initiative. "The first to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority for having allowed division in the ranks of Fatah, the chaos in Gaza, and for having done so little to counter corruption. The second, even though he can't read it, to Sharon, who turned his back on negotiation, chose unilateralism, and built the wall. The third would go to the heads of the domestic secret service - Shin Beit - and of Military Intelligence for inventing the strategy of targeted assassinations of Hamas's leaders, which was supposed to disorganize the movement and which made it more popular than ever. I'd also thank them for not having foreseen Hamas's victory and leaving Israel's government in the dark."

    For Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, this victory effectively poses a host of questions without answers. First of all, because no one knows at present how Hamas will govern. Under the shelter of a technocrats' government to reassure the international community, as some of its leaders seem to desire? By improvising a "unity government" with representatives from the little parties and even the "dissidents" of Fatah? Or by controlling all the Ministries? Finally, because the Islamist party - which does not call for the creation of an Islamist State in its platform - presents ambiguities difficult to analyze and exploit. Resolved - according to their Charter - to destroy Israel, the Hamas candidates who last year took over most West Bank municipalities have often proved to be more pragmatic than their Fatah predecessors. That is the case, for example, of the new Mayor of Nablus, Adli Yaish, a Mercedes dealer who doesn't hide his connections with Israeli partners.

    As for Hamas's armed wing, it practices terrorism and fires homemade Qassam rockets on the vicinities neighboring Gaza, but is much more disciplined than the many armed groups that gravitate around Fatah, as it showed last year when it respected the truce concluded in Cairo with Mahmoud Abbas. "The week that preceded our disengagement from Gaza was - thanks to Hamas's orders - the calmest in years," President of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland recently confided to a visitor.

    But Hamas's ability to enforce its orders among its fighters interests the Israeli military more than their government, in the midst of an electoral pre-campaign and accused of culpable laxity by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who denounces the arrival in power of "Nazis" or "Taliban" on the other side of the Green Line. Even if certain experts recall rightly that the PLO was also a "terrorist organization" that called for the destruction of Israel in its Charter before being accepted as a partner in the Oslo negotiation, the political climate and Hamas's own nature do not incite Israeli officials to make too-risky bets on the future. That's why Ehud Olmert maintains a simple position: no dialogue with Hamas or a Palestinian Authority controlled by Hamas as long as the movement hasn't disarmed its military wing, renounced terrorism, recognized Israel, revoked its Charter, and endorsed all the agreements signed up to now by the Authority. A position officially maintained - sometimes with a few nuances - by most of Israel's and the Palestinian Authority's partners. It is specifically, since Monday, the position of the Quartet (United States, United Nations, European Union, and Russia) one of the members of which - Europe - is the principal source of financial aid for the Palestinians, to the tune of almost 350 million Euros a year.

    While the Authority's budget, on the verge of bankruptcy, could reach a record deficit of 900 million dollars, stopping international aid flows and Israel's freezing of tax and customs duties due to the Palestinian Authority risk definitively destabilizing a Mahmoud Abbas who is reeling under the shock of defeat. And that at a moment when the Fatah base is in the street, sometimes with weapons in hand, demanding the resignation of the party's principal leaders, held responsible for the electoral disaster. Also at a time when 50,000 police, a majority of them Fatah members, are wondering whether they must obey the new government or the President. "It is urgent that we convoke a General Conference of Fatah to design a new direction," asserts Mohamed Dahlan, the Gaza strongman reelected for Khan Younis, while Sa b Erekat, head of the Negotiations Department, handily reelected also in Jericho, calls for a "reconstruction of the party."

    For the moment, as long as Hamas has not officially taken power, the members of the Quartet don't intend to freeze their aid. Which should allow Palestinian and Israeli leaders to analyze the new balance of power. But time is running out. "We can no longer allow ourselves to wait twenty-five years," Tom Segev wrote in Monday's Haaretz, "for Hamas and Israel to rediscover this simple fact: this land must be divided between two nations and two countries. And that won't happen without negotiations ..."

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    Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.

 

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    Women, Secret Hamas Strength, Win Votes at Polls and New Role
    By Ian Fisher
    The New York Times

    Friday 03 February 2006

    Gaza - Hamas has been known and feared for its men, armed or strapped with suicide bombs. But in its parliamentary election triumph here last week, one secret weapon was its women.

    To a degree specialists said was new in the conservative Muslim society of the Gaza Strip, Hamas used its women to win, sending them door to door with voter lists and to polling places for last-minute campaigning.

    Now in surprise control of Palestinians politics, Hamas can boast that women hold 6 of the party's 74 seats in parliament - giving the women of the radical group, guided in all ways by their understanding of Islam, a new and unaccustomed public role.

    "We are going to lead factories, we are going to lead farmers," said Jamila al-Shanty, 48, a professor at the Islamic University here who won a seat in parliament. "We are going to spread out through society. We are going to show the people of the world that the practice of Islam in regards to women is not well known."

    If Ms. Shanty's prediction is true, the role of women will certainly not be along the secular Western lines followed largely, and with real strides for women, under decades of leadership by Yasir Arafat's now defeated Fatah faction. The model will be Islam: women in Hamas wear head scarves and follow strict rules for social segregation from men.

    And one of their role models - one of the few women in Hamas well known before the election - has a pedigree particularly troubling to many in Israel and the outside world.

    She is Mariam Farhat, the mother of three Hamas supporters killed by Israelis. She bade one son goodbye in a homemade videotape before he stormed an Israeli settlement, killing five people, then being shot dead. She said later, in a much-publicized quotation, that she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice that way. Known as the "mother of martyrs," she was seen in a campaign video toting a gun.

    Now she is one of the six women who are Hamas legislators, elected on the party list. The election rules had quotas for women for all parties. She was swamped this week at a Hamas victory rally at the women's campus at the Islamic University by young, outspoken, educated women who see no contradiction between religious militancy and modernity.

    "She is a mother to every house, every person," said one of the students, Reem el-Nabris, 20, who kissed and hugged Ms. Farhat.

    Ms. Farhat, 56, who had not been active in politics, said she hoped she deserved their praise as a role model. But she said her role should not be the only one for Hamas's women.

    "It is not only sacrificing sons," she said after the rally. "There are different kinds of sacrifice, by money, by education. Everybody, according to their ability, should sacrifice."

    The Islamic University, an oasis of order in the grit and chaos of Gaza, shows as well as any place the conflicting images of Hamas in relation to the women who strongly support it. A stronghold for Hamas, though not exclusively for its supporters, the university is split in two by sex, and it can be jarring to cross the corridor from crowds without a woman's face to another of only women, all with their heads covered, some wearing the full veil, the nikab. And on the day of the rally, some also plopped a green Hamas baseball cap on top.

    Yet Hamas encourages, and in some cases pays for, the education of these women. Sabrin al-Barawi, 21, a chemistry student, said she had grown up with Hamas programs for women: social groups, leadership courses, Koran classes.

    "It's not only religious," said Ahlan Shameli, 21, who is studying computers. "It's the Internet, computers."

    "Before Hamas, women were not aware of the political situation," she said. "But Hamas showed and clarified what was going on. Women have become much more aware."

    In nearly two decades, the top tier of Hamas's leadership has seemed very much reserved for men. But supporters of Hamas, as well as those of Fatah and other specialists, agreed with Ms. Shameli that Hamas had earned strong support among women. In fact, studies and results from municipal elections show women support the group in higher numbers than men.

    If the men's most visible role has been fighting Israel, Hamas's social programs have attracted the loyalty of women. Hamas offers assistance programs for widows of suicide bombers and for poor people, health clinics, day care, kindergartens and preschools, in addition to beauty parlors and women-only gyms.

    Women "are the ones who take kids to clinics," said Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at al Azhar University here. "They are the ones who take children to schools."

    And during the elections, he said, Hamas mobilized these same women as if it had been "building up for this occasion for 30 years," using them as grass-roots campaign workers.

    "It's something noticeable in the Gaza Strip," he said. "In Palestinian society, our values do not accept women to go out and campaign in the street. It's really a new phenomenon, especially for Hamas."

    Reem Abu Athra, who directs women's affairs in the Fatah youth wing, said that her party did not seem to understand how mobilized Hamas's women were generally - and that it did not match the grass-roots work by Hamas women during the elections. She said that Fatah seemed to think it would naturally win the women's vote, as the more secular party that has been in some ways a leader in the Arab world in rights for women.

    "Fatah took women for granted, and this is one reason it lost," she said.

    The questions now seem to be what role Hamas's women will play, and exactly how that will be expressed in the rules of Islam.

    Naima Sheikh Ali, a Fatah legislator who runs a group for women here, said that Hamas's strict interpretation of Islam would remain a bar to true participation by women. They cannot, for instance, be judges under Islam, she said, and will generally remain segregated and pushed to the side.

    "Yes, they respect women, but as they conceive that respect," she said. "It is from a religiously fundamental view. For the women's movement, this will set us back several steps."

    Ms. Shanty, one of the new Hamas legislators, begged to differ. She said that women, and especially the wives of top Hamas leaders, had long played a central role in Hamas's leadership, though she said that had not been publicized to protect them.

    "Every decision that is taken by Hamas is passed to us, not after the decision is made but before," she said.

    One measure of participation by women may be the extent that they take part in addressing the main problems facing Palestinians, not only on social issues that affect women, families or children.

    In an interview before she won a legislative seat, Mouna Mansour, 44, a physics teacher and widow of Jamal Mansour, an assassinated Hamas leader, seemed very much engaged in the central issues. The peace process with Israel, she said, was dead. There should be a Palestinian state, but not at the cost of Jerusalem or the claims of Palestinian refugees, who under previous negotiations would not be permitted to move into what is today Israel.

    Hamas, she said, needs to rebuild the economy, get rid of poverty and unemployment and, for now, to continue the cease-fire with Israel.

    But she also defended the decision of a young Nablus man to become a suicide bomber. "Why not ask the question from another angle?" she said. "Why would he blow himself up if he was not subject to such great pressures? What leads you to do such a bitter thing? People do this from anger and injustice, to bring back life to their own people by sacrificing their lives."

    But there is also unease over what Hamas might mean for women. At least one Islamic University student said Hamas represented an unknown for women like her. The student, Rula Zaanin, 19, said that Hamas had, at least, earned her trust.

    "A lot of Palestinians love Hamas and wanted them," she said. "But we don't know what will happen."