Arabs (91 page)

Nonviolence made the Intifada the most inclusive of Palestinian movements. Rather than privileging young men with military training, the demonstrations and civil disobedience of the Intifada mobilized the whole of the population of the Occupied Territories—men and women, young and old—in a common liberation struggle. The underground leaflets of Hamas and the UNC provided a wide range of resistance strategies—strikes, boycotts of Israeli products, home teaching to subvert school closures, garden plots to increase food self-reliance—that empowered Palestinians under occupation and instilled a deep sense of common purpose that kept the Intifada going in spite of heavy Israeli repression.

 

Tensions emerged between the secular United National Command and Hamas as the Intifada ran through the spring and into the summer of 1988. Both organizations claimed to represent the Palestinian resistance. In its leaflets, Hamas referred to itself as “your movement, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas,” and the UNC claimed leadership of the Palestinian masses, “this people that heeded the call of the PLO and of the United National Command of the Uprising.”
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The secular and Islamist rivals read each other’s leaflets and vied for control over popular actions in the streets. When Hamas called for a national strike in its leaflet of August 18—a prerogative the PLO claimed for itself in the Occupied Territories—the UNC issued its first direct criticism of the Islamist organization, claiming “every blow to the unity of ranks is tantamount to doing the enemy a significant service and harms the uprising.”

Such jostling for ascendancy masked the fundamental differences that divided Hamas from the PLO: whereas Hamas sought the destruction of the Jewish state, the PLO and the UNC wanted to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas viewed the whole of Palestine as inalienable Muslim land that needed to be liberated from non-Muslim rule through jihad. Its confrontation with Israel would be long-term, for its ultimate objective was the creation of an Islamic state in the whole of Palestine. The PLO, in comparison, had been moving toward a two-state solution since 1974. Yasser Arafat seized on the Intifada as a vehicle to achieve independent statehood for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem—even if this meant conferring recognition on Israel and conceding the 78 percent of Palestine lost in 1948 to the Jewish state. The positions of the two resistance movements could not be reconciled, and so the PLO proceeded down the path of the two-state solution without consideration for the views of the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Palestinian resistance and Israeli repression had placed the Intifada squarely on the front pages of the international press—and nowhere more so than in the Arab world. In June 1988, the Arab League convened an emergency summit in Algiers
to address the Intifada. The PLO took the opportunity to present a position paper that called for mutual recognition of the right of the Palestinians and the Israelis to live in peace and security. Hamas rejected the PLO’s position outright and reasserted its claim for Muslim rights to the whole of Palestine. Its leaders made their views known in Hamas’s leaflet of August 18, in which the Islamic Resistance insisted that “the Muslims have had a full—not partial—right to Palestine for generations, in the past, present and future.”

Undeterred by Islamist opposition, the PLO proceeded to use the Intifada to legitimize its call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In September 1988 the PLO announced plans to convene a meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile, to consolidate the gains of the Intifada and secure the Palestinian people’s “national rights of return, self-determination, and the establishment of an independent state on our national soil under the leadership of the PLO.”
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Again Hamas rejected and condemned the PLO position. Its leaflet of October 5 read, in part: “We are against conceding so much as an inch of our land which is steeped in the blood of the Companions of the Prophet and their followers.” Hamas insisted that “we shall continue the uprising on the road to the liberation of our whole land from the contamination of the Jews (with the help of God).” The lines of confrontation between the PLO and the Islamic Resistance could not have been clearer.

Arafat’s agenda for the meeting of the PNC, which had been set for November 1988, was nothing less than a Palestinian declaration of statehood in the Occupied Territories. For many in Gaza and the West Bank, worn down by eleven months of the Intifada and violent Israeli reprisals, statehood held the promise of independence and an end to the occupation, which seemed sufficient gains for their sacrifices, and they looked forward to the November meeting of the PNC with growing anticipation.

Though Sari Nusseibeh had some reservations about the PLO’s policies, he saw the impending declaration of independence as “an important milestone, and like everyone else, I looked forward to its unveiling.” Nusseibeh, who had received an advance copy of Arafat’s text, wanted the Palestinian declaration of independence to be a moment that people would remember, and he hoped to read the text to “tens of thousands of people” in the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque complex atop the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. “I wanted a people under occupation, the people of the intifada, to congregate at the center of our universe, and to celebrate our independence.”

It was not to be. On November 15, 1988, the day Arafat addressed the PNC, Israel imposed a draconian curfew over the territories and East Jerusalem, banning cars and civilians from the streets. Nusseibeh chose to disregard the curfew and made his way through the backstreets to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where a handful of political activists had gathered, milling about with religious clerics. “Together, we all walked into Al-Aqsa mosque. At the appointed hour, as the bells from the [church of the]
Holy Sepulchre swung, and calls wailed out from the minarets, we all solemnly read our declaration of independence.”
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The declaration, which Arafat read to the nineteenth session of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, represented a radical departure from past PLO policies. The declaration endorsed the UN partition plan of 1947 that provided for the creation of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine, and it approved UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, drafted after the 1967 and 1973 Wars, that established the principle of the return of occupied land for peace. The declaration committed the PLO to peaceful coexistence with Israel.

The PLO had come a very long way since its London diplomat Said Hammami’s first attempts to broach the two-state solution in 1974. No longer a guerrilla organization—Arafat now categorically renounced “all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism”—the PLO presented itself to the international community as the provisional government of a state in waiting.

International recognition was quick to follow. Eighty-four countries extended full recognition to the new state of Palestine, including most Arab states, a number of European, African, and Asian countries, and such traditional supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement as China and the Soviet Union. Most West European states granted a diplomatic status to Palestine that fell short of full recognition, but the United States and Canada withheld recognition altogether. In mid-January 1989 the PLO scored another symbolic victory by gaining the right to address the UN Security Council on equal footing with member states.
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The PNC declaration did not meet with the Israeli government’s approval. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir responded in a written statement on November 15 to denounce the declaration as “a deceptive propaganda exercise, intended to create an impression of moderation and of achievements for those carrying out violent acts in the territories of Judea and Samaria,” and the Israeli cabinet dismissed it as “disinformation meant to mislead world public opinion.”
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Hamas too was unimpressed by the statement. The Islamic resistance issued a communiqué in which it stressed “the right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state on all the soil of Palestine,” not just in the Occupied Territories: “Do not heed the U.N. resolutions which try to accord the Zionist entity legitimacy over any part of the soil of Palestine . . . for it is the property of the Islamic nation and not of the U.N.”
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For all the excitement surrounding the PNC declaration of independence, the initiative brought no tangible benefits to the residents of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel showed no more willingness to relinquish the Occupied Territories after November 15, 1988, than it had before the PNC declaration. After a year of excitement and high expectations, nothing seemed to change. And yet the Palestinians had paid an
enormous price for such small results. By the first anniversary of the Intifada, in December 1988, an estimated 626 Palestinians had been killed, 37,000 Palestinians had been injured, and over 35,000 Palestinians had been arrested in the course of the year—many of them still behind bars at the start of the second year of the uprising.
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By 1989 the early idealism of the Intifada had given way to cynicism, and the unity of purpose to factionalism. Hamas supporters broke out in open fights with Fatah members. Vigilantes within Palestinian society began to intimidate, beat, and even murder fellow Palestinians suspected of collaboration with the Israeli authorities. And still the communiqués were issued, the demonstrations held, the rocks thrown, and the casualties mounted as the Intifada continued toward no discernable end, the latest phase of a decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict for which the international community seemed to have no solution.

O
ver the course of the 1980s, a number of Islamic movements launched armed struggles to overthrow secular rulers or to repel foreign invaders. The Islamists hoped to establish an Islamic state ruled in accordance with sharia law, which they firmly believed to be God’s law. They took their inspiration from the success of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Egypt a splinter movement managed to assassinate President Anwar Sadat. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood mounted a civil war against the Ba’thist government of Hafiz al-Asad. The Lebanese Shiite militant movement Hizbullah, heavily influenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran, viewed the United States and Israel as two sides of the same coin and sought to deal both a massive defeat in Lebanon. Jihad in Afghanistan was directed against both internal and external enemies, targeting the Soviet occupation forces and the Communist government in Afghanistan that was openly hostile to Islam. Islamists in Gaza and the West Bank called for a long-term jihad against the Jewish state to restore Palestine to the Islamic world under an Islamic government. The military successes enjoyed by Hizbullah in forcing a total U.S. withdrawal and an Israeli redeployment, and by the Afghan mujahidin by forcing the Soviets to evacuate their country in 1989, did not lead to the ideal Islamic states that their ideologues had hoped for. Both Lebanon and Afghanistan remained mired in civil wars long after their external enemies had been forced into retreat.

Islamists across the Arab world adopted a long-term approach to the ultimate goal of an Islamic state. The Egyptian Islamist Zaynab al-Ghazali spoke in terms of a thirteen-year cycle of preparation, to be repeated until a significant majority of the Egyptians supported an Islamic government. Hamas vowed to struggle for the liberation of all of Palestine “however long it takes.” The ultimate triumph of the Islamic state was a protracted project and required patience.

If the Islamists had lost some battles in the “struggle in the path of God,” they remained confident that they would ultimately prevail. In the meantime, Islamist groups chalked up a number of successes in reshaping Arab society. Islamist organizations emerged across the Arab world, attracting growing numbers of adherents in the 1980s and 1990s. Islamist values were spreading in Arab society, as more young men began to grow beards and women increasingly took to head scarves and modest body-covering fashions. Islamic publications dominated bookshops. Secular culture was driven into retreat before an Islamic resurgence that continues ever stronger down to the present day.

The Islamists took courage from major changes in world politics at the end of 1989. The certainties of the Cold War were crumbling as quickly as the Berlin Wall, which fell on November 9, marking the end of U.S.-Soviet rivalry and ushering in a new world order. Many Islamists interpreted the collapse of Soviet power as proof of the bankruptcy of atheist communism and a harbinger of a new Islamic age. Instead, they found themselves faced with a unipolar world dominated by the last surviving superpower, the United States of America.

CHAPTER 14

A
fter nearly a half-century of superpower rivalry, the Cold War came to an abrupt end in 1989. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of greater openness (glasnost) and internal reform (perestroika) wrought permanent change to the political culture of the Soviet Union during the mid-1980s. By the time the Berlin Wall was formally breached in November 1989, the Iron Curtain separating Eastern and Western Europe already lay in tatters. Starting with the defeat of the Communist Party in the Polish elections in June 1989, the governments of the Soviet bloc fell one by one: in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. The once all-powerful dictator of East Germany, Erich Honecker, tendered his resignation that autumn, and Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ruled Romania with an iron fist for over twenty-two years, was summarily executed by revolutionaries on Christmas Day 1989.