A Month by the Sea (12 page)

Eight bloody years later, on 24 May 2004 – not long after the assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi – a ‘Document on the Approach to the Anticipated Withdrawal from the Gaza Strip’ was considered by the Gazan Hamas leadership. It showed the influence of another paper, written in jail by Marwan Barghouti, leader of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, who had
suggested a role for Islamists in running the post-withdrawal Strip and who communicated regularly and amiably with his Hamas fellow-prisoners. The Hamas document’s authors were Dr
al-Zahar
and Ismail Haniyeh. Assuming the PA would not continue to side with the IDF after its withdrawal, it advocated a powersharing ‘joint legitimate leadership’, using all Gaza’s ‘nationalistic and Islamic factions’. Even were the PA to stick with Israel, making it impossible for the Hamas leadership to share power, this remarkable document recommended that in many areas Hamas members should

A lot of thought had gone into this document which was scarcely noticed by the outside world. It showed Hamas keen to move on from suicide bombing, with its misleading al-Qaeda resonances (Hamas and al-Qaeda had always been antipathetic). Now the leadership craved international recognition as a
legitimate
resistance movement and power-sharing on the post-withdrawal Strip would be a significant advance in that direction.

When Deeb announced that Dr al-Zahar would like to meet me I was slightly taken aback, remembering his justification for the Hamas ban on dancing – ‘A man holds a woman by the hand and dances with her in front of everyone. Does that serve the national interest? If so, why have the phenomena of corruption and prostitution become pervasive in recent years?’ And in an interview with Stephen Farrell in
The Times
(7 October 2005) he had ranted against gay marriage – ‘Are these the laws for which the Palestinian street is waiting? For us to give rights to
homo-sexuals
and lesbians, a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick?’ However, this would certainly be something to write home about, meeting the Hamas government’s first Foreign Minister and the only founder member of Hamas to have (so far) survived the assassin state. Thrice Israel has tried to eliminate him, on one occasion breaking his wife’s spine, leaving her invalided, on another killing two of his sons and a son-in-law while flattening his home (now rebuilt).

Hamas government departments don’t run fleets of limos nor can their officials afford family cars. Everyone uses
serveeces
– or, for special occasions like calling on Dr al-Zahar, ordinary private taxis. Deeb escorted me and was puzzled by my lack of journalistic equipment: no camera, no tape-recorder, not even a notebook and pencil. I explained that I don’t like interviewing people, I just like talking with them.

Perhaps the al-Zahars’ new home is well protected but it doesn’t seem so. From a rough laneway we turned into a wide
vine-draped
patio: there wasn’t even a low gate, never mind any of those hi-tech systems used by rich gated communities fearful of the mob. Instead, two young men ushered us in, so courteous and discreetly armed they seemed like butlers rather than security guards. Afterwards, when I commented on this, Deeb pointed out that a gated community’s defences are irrelevant if a drone is coming to get you.

Dr al-Zahar, wearing a white
galabiya
, sat in a corner at the far end of a long, sunny salon, the ceiling arched, the floor tiles blue and green, the décor white and gold, the furnishings austere. He didn’t rise to greet me but shook hands – a firm, warm handshake that made me feel not only welcome but relaxed. As he gestured me towards an easy chair close to his own one of the ‘butlers’ appeared – jinn-like, through an invisible door – providing water and fruit juice. My host asked, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and Deeb, sitting on a sofa across the room, thoughtfully explained that I don’t take sugar.

Above Dr al-Zahar’s chair hung A4-sized photographs of his murdered sons and son-in-law, simply framed, not given the usual ‘martyrs’ embellishments. As he didn’t mention them, or the attempted assassinations, neither did I.

I began by saying, ‘Politically I’m on your side but as a European woman Hamas is not where I belong.’

Dr al-Zahar nodded and chuckled and we never looked back. A handsome man in late middle age, he has the attractive demeanour of an elder statesman unaware of his own importance. He also has a humorous tilt to his mouth and kind eyes which contradict his reputation. For more than twenty years he has been vilified as a brutal, bigoted, irrational, anti-Semitic, homophobic psychopath. And yes, he had indeed backed the suicide bombing campaign, until it was unofficially abandoned before the withdrawal. Personally he had never ordered or organised an operation, but that was beside the point: he agreed with his paediatrician friend Dr al-Rantissi (Hamas’s second-in-command until his assassination), who often reminded critics, ‘We wouldn’t use suicide bombers if we had F-16s, then we could kill without being killed.’

However you juggle them, two wrongs don’t make a right. But you can better understand one wrong (suicide bombers occasionally indiscriminately murdering Israeli civilians) if you never lose sight of the other (Israelis daily terrorising and often murdering Palestinian civilians all over the OPT).

On some issues my host and I were in perfect harmony. I could detect no taint of anti-Semitism in him and our levels of loathing for political Zionism were about equal. Dr al-Zahar enjoys history and we spent an hour or so mulling over happier times – when, for instance, Muslims and Jews flourished together on the Iberian peninsula before Christians intervened. And likewise in Baghdad, for millennia, until political Zionism’s poisonous fumes came wafting across the desert from Palestine. Dr al-Zahar could remember the exact dates when Jews were expelled from various
countries or subjected to major pogroms. ‘It’s natural,’ he said, ‘they’ve been twisted by those experiences, going so far back before the Holocaust, making them always fearful and suspicious.’ He wondered why Christians seemed unable to forgive the alleged deicide until Pope John Paul XXII made friendly noises. As a frivolous aside he added that if the Jews – like the Muslims – had accepted Jesus as a prophet there would have been no Zionists, political or otherwise. And then he remarked on a very sad fact: in Palestine anti-Semitism was virtually unknown before Zionism’s advent. ‘We’re all sons of Shem,’ he said, meaning Arabs and Semitic Jews. Sardonically he referred to the thousands of gentile Russians whose ‘right to return’ went almost unchallenged – and to the hitherto unheard of tribes recently arrived from Andean valleys and Burmese borderlands, ‘Jews’ desperately recruited for deployment on the demographic battlefield.

Dr al-Zahar obviously wanted me to believe that Hamas had driven the Israelis out of Gaza in 2005. Since 1992 he had been advocating violence because ‘it is justified when all else fails and Israel will never voluntarily leave our territories’. I didn’t doubt his estimate of Israel’s mindset but there were, I ventured to suggest, complicated demographic considerations behind the unilateral pull-out which involved no talks or deals with President Abbas. Ariel Sharon would have been happy to see Gaza and its 1.5 million Palestinians being absorbed into Mubarak’s Egypt. From a Zionist perspective, the Strip’s land value is more than cancelled out by its dense and fast-growing ‘enemy’ population. Also, Sharon wanted more shekels to expand West Bank settlements and protecting 8,000 settlers on the Strip was judged not cost-effective.

‘Yes!’ said Dr al-Zahar. ‘And why not cost-effective? Because of our resistance! That made Israeli voters restive about the
disproportionate
money spent on so few settlers – so politicians decided to “redeploy” which is the word they like!’

When Sheikh Yassin established Mujamma in 1973 its main
district leaders were Mahmoud al-Zahar, Ibrahim al-Yazuri and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi. They and the other founder members were all of refugee stock but had qualified abroad as doctors, dentists, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, geologists, surveyors. At first Mujamma concentrated on providing healthcare, welfare assistance, sports clubs and an Islamic education to Gaza’s poorest communities. The Islamic Revival was not yet of primary importance. Then, as the ’70s ended, Dr al-Zahar observed Gaza’s youth becoming more mosque-centred, possibly in reaction to the IDF’s increasing obtrusiveness.

Extreme Islamists often speak of being at war, meaning the cosmic war between good and evil. In 2003 a book by one of Osama bin Laden’s advisers came out, presenting all human history as ‘a perpetual war between believers and unbelievers’. It sold well on the Strip. However, during the 1990s, when Osama bin Laden tried to recruit Palestinians, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad repeatedly rebuffed him, being convinced that any tinge of Wahhabism would fatally pollute their ideology. A half-dozen Hamas militants spent time in Sudan’s training camps while bin Laden was based in that country (
c
.1991–95) but they never met him.

By March 2006, when Hamas named its first cabinet, assassins had eliminated most of the Mujamma/Hamas founders. Therefore Ismail Haniyeh was chosen as Prime Minister, Dr Mahmoud
al-Zahar
as Foreign Minister, Said Siam as Interior Minister and Dr Omar Abdel-Razeq, a high-powered, US-educated economist, as Finance Minister. The last-named, having closely considered the PA’s account books, calculated that Fatah’s spectacular corruption had bred a $1.2 billion debt – money owed to banks and suppliers. He also foretold that the collective punishment of Gaza would exacerbate Israel’s security problem by immensely strengthening Qassam.

Meanwhile the Foreign Minister, having equally closely
considered
the PA’s morale, foresaw a split; it seemed likely the
US-sponsored 
Dahlan faction would oppose cooperation between Palestinians. He was also infuriated by US/Israel manoeuvrings to give the PA’s President Abbas more significance than the
Hamas-controlled
legislature. ‘This should not have surprised me,’ said Dr al-Zahar. ‘Democracy doesn’t work even in democracies. Leaders go to war against voters’ wishes.’ The Palestinians’ free and fair election was contemptuously dismissed by a UN-led ‘international community’. (‘Another humiliation,’ noted Dr al-Zahar.) At once, all funding was cut off from a government that would have used it comparatively honestly. US legislation already in place ensured that very severe sanctions would be applied to any person or institution caught dealing with ‘terrorists’. Before long Omar Suleiman, then director of Egypt’s anti-Palestinian intelligence services, was warning the West: ‘If you go on isolating Hamas, Iran will give them millions.’ He was right. In the autumn of 2006 ministers of Gaza’s new Hamas administration returned home via Rafah carrying large suitcases packed with dollar notes. These, they informed EUBAM, had been fetched from friends to pay public servants unpaid since Hamas’ election victory led to the withholding of Western funds. Dr al-Zahar also denounced the PA’s previous agreements with Israel, especially the 1994 Paris Economic Agreement (on trade and taxation) which had
undermined
what little there was of a Palestinian industrial sector by tightly tying it to Israel’s – so tightly that Palestinians can deal only with Israeli suppliers. And Israelis can punish Palestinians by (illegally) withholding taxes collected on their behalf – as was done, for example, after the PA’s ill-judged bid for statehood at the UN in September 2011.

Because of his attitudes on such matters, Dr al-Zahar’s ministerial career was brief. On 8 February 2007 in Mecca, Saudi Arabia encouraged the establishment of a Palestinian government of national unity. A month or so later, al-Qaeda’s voice was heard again from outside, accusing the Hamas leadership of ‘surrendering
most of Palestine to the Jews’. Some within Hamas smelled a plot to gain a Gazan toehold by making more trouble between Hamas’ Salafi-tinted ‘sons of Qassam’ and the unity-supporting political leadership. The latter found this hypothetical threat (which never came to anything) quite useful in negotiations with Fatah cabinet colleagues.

Meanwhile the Foreign Minister had learned of the Bush administration’s resolve to wreck the power-sharing government by donating $64 million (for starters) and many guns to the PA security forces. Without delay, Hamas significantly increased its import of weapons from ‘friendly sources’ (left anonymous by Dr al-Zahar) and set about training its armed wings ‘to professional standards’.

The new cabinet allowed Fatah six seats to Hamas’ nine and it soon became clear that none of the funding desperately needed for non-military purposes would be resumed until Dr al-Zahar and Said Siam, seen as the most inflexible hardliners, were replaced. This seems not to have embittered my host. He was indeed too inflexible to compromise his principles yet he recognised that the Unity Government’s survival would alleviate the extreme hardships inflicted on all Gazans by Israel’s closures. Despite his personal history, I found him remarkably free of bitterness on every level and sensed unusual reserves of calmness and strength – all derived from his faith in Allah, he himself would certainly say. We irreligious humanists have to acknowledge that religion, if it works for people, can work very well.

Dr al-Zahar spoke then of his ideal Palestinian state in which rulers would remember that Allah created everything to benefit all human beings of both sexes equally. People could choose for themselves whether or not to live by the Koran. There would be no discrimination against any faith – or lack of faith. With difficulty I resisted the temptation to ask why, if Hamas opposed discrimination, I could not buy a drink anywhere on the Strip –
not even in the UN Beach Club, for UN employees only, which was fire-bombed in 2005 to remind its owners that the sale or consumption of alcohol is a sin. I didn’t doubt my host’s sincerity when he spoke of his ‘ideal state’ but I did wonder who – if anyone – now has Gaza’s diverse groups of fanatics under control.