Last update - 00:00 02/04/2004
Balance of pain
A 2002 interview with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin made it clear that he considered the intifada a major achievement - it imposed, he said, a `deterrent balance' between Israel and the Palestinians.
By Amira Hass
Sometimes Sheikh Ahmed Yassin would answer with a question. He smiled politely when told that to answer a question with another question was considered a Jewish trait. A Hamas activist who engaged Yassin in many hours of conversation says this was his style - not only with an Israeli interviewer: "He was a cautious person and that is how he spoke, always. That is also why he spoke slowly, to ensure that thought preceded speech."
After Yassin's release from prison in 1997, it wasn't difficult to arrange an interview with him - not even for Israeli journalists who came to the Gaza Strip. Yassin, like most of the other senior figures in Hamas and the grassroots activists, did not boycott the Israeli media, neither before the start of the second intifada nor during its course. Others, among them Abu Ali Mustafa, the secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (who was killed by an Israeli missile in August 2001), refused to give interviews to Israeli reporters. The same policy is followed by some senior officials in the Palestinian Authority, including Fatah members, and by students from Bir Zeit University and some academics, all of whom adamantly refuse to speak to Israeli journalists.
The Hamas policy is a typical example of the organization's pragmatism and practicality, and reflects its self-confidence as well. They feel no need to fall back on symbolic, demonstrative utterances, their opposition to the occupation or their rejection of the "Zionist entity." They don't feel that they need external proof of their patriotism or their militancy. Nor are they afraid to be accused of seeking "normalization" with Israel if they tell an Israeli media representative directly what is in any case broadcast on all television stations. Yassin was one of those who were instrumental in shaping this policy, but at the same time, he reflected his movement's frame of mind.
There wasn't much new in Yassin's answers-as-questions. The interview in June 2002 was conducted as part of an attempt to shed light on the positions of Hamas in particular, and on those of Palestinian society more generally, concerning the suicide attacks (or "acts of self-martyrdom," as they are known in Arabic). Frequently the line between slogans and the positions expressed by Yassin was very thin, sometimes too thin to be of use in an article. On the other hand, after Yassin's assassination by Israel last month, the slogans turned out to reflect the socialization process of Hamas activists, as well as conceptual and emotional processes thanks to which Hamas has become a strong movement within the Palestinian public.
In large measure, many of the statements made by a member of Izzadin al-Kassam, Hamas' military wing, who agreed at the time to meet with Haaretz (on condition that his name not be used), were far more contemplative and nuanced than anything his leader had to say. Now his name can be made public: Rami Saad, a young activist and a top student in computer studies at university, whom Hamas had earmarked for a political role, not a military one. He decided to join the armed group, he said, after so many Palestinians around him had been killed - ordinary citizens, and afterward his armed friends in Hamas, too. "Today I am better than them," he said when asked why he had decided to take the risk and join the armed operations against military forces and settlers.
In May 2003, Saad was killed in a hopeless battle when an Israeli tank force besieged a house in Gaza's Sajaiya neighborhood, and he and his comrades met them with rifles. His name became known in Israel after his death because his widow is the young and uncompromising caricaturist Omayya Joha (www.omayya.com).
At the time, the country was in an uproar over the remarks of the mother of a Hamas militant who was killed in an attack on a settlement in the Gaza Strip. She said she was happy for her son. Saad, for example, said he didn't believe that there was any mother, however proud she was of her son "who is fighting against the occupation," who would not weep in private for her dead child. He also told of his family's efforts to dissuade him from taking up arms, about the family's constant concern and about the relief they felt when he decided to adopt a lower profile.
Yassin, in his replies, did not give expression to grief, but to an approach that was certain of the importance of the fighter's personal sacrifice in the battle against the occupation. Saad also said that he supported a binational state (in which, he believed, the pain of the refugee situation and of the 1948 Nakba - the Palestinian calamity - would be dulled). In contrast to Yassin, Saad did not speak of an Islamic state. His conception was of a form of rule that would be decided by a political majority, rather than an ethnic or religious one; for example, a coalition of Fatah-Labor or, he suggested with a wink, Rakah (the Israeli Communist Party) and the Palestinian People's Party, or perhaps a Hamas-Shas coalition.
Rami Saad was no less religious than his leader, but he felt no obligation to declare allegiance to the political vision of an Islamic regime. And, in another example of pragmatism, there was far less uniformity of thought than might be expected from a religious-political movement like Hamas.
Saving the PLO
Still, the pragmatism implied in the answer to the first question came as a surprise. "What political activity is Hamas planning for the next two years?" Following a brief silence, Yassin chose to speak of "strengthening the PLO," meaning, effectively, joining the organization headed by Yasser Arafat. "In the years ahead we will strengthen national unity and act to conduct elections to the Palestinian National Council inside and outside [in the territories and the diaspora] in order to rebuild the PLO. In addition, we will continue the resistance until Israel recognizes our nation's right to freedom and independence on the soil of its homeland, and also to the return to this homeland of the expelled Palestinian people."
There was something manipulative about this reply - wasted manipulation if it is not published in a Palestinian newspaper. Yassin was presenting Hamas as the savior of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was also amusing himself in connection with Arafat's well known aversion to an election process.
"Such elections require agreement and coordination among all the other Palestinian factions," he replied positively to a question. If so, he was asked, will there also be coordination in the resistance to the Israeli occupation?
Yassin: "The situation in which our people is living obliges secrecy; secrecy is an important element in resistance."
But won't joining the PLO oblige you to take action according to one plan?
"Each faction in the PLO has its own military wing. We are not a state, which is committed to the existence of one national army. We are now at the stage of national liberation, which obliges each faction to operate according to its ability."
Does joining the PLO imply acceptance of the two-state solution?
"It is not necessary for everyone who enters the National Council to adopt the agreements that have been signed [between the Palestinian Authority and Israel]. In Israel, for example, the Sharon government does not agree to what was signed in the agreements. Not everything that was agreed obliges everyone; what must oblige us is the right thing."
And if a new government is formed in Israel, one that supports the agreements, will you then accept them?
"Assumptions are not useful here. Can one assume that Israel has disappeared, doesn't exist? Or that the Palestinians have disappeared out of existence? Those are wrong assumptions. The reality now is one of an expelled and dispersed Palestinian people which is demanding its rights. Is the Israeli people ready to grant the Palestinian people its rights? Not in words or in the media, but in reality, on the ground."
In other words, it's important for you to persuade the Israeli people of the rights accruing to the Palestinian people?
"The rights of the Palestinian people are self-evident and require no persuasion. It is all known: where the Israeli people was before 1948, and where the Palestinian people was. It is always the case that those who plunder something from others do not consider it a crime. They are convinced that it is their right. Every occupation regime in the past thought it had the right to expand, to usurp the resources of another people and to establish military bases on its soil. It is not important that the criminal acknowledge his crime; what is important is that the holder of the right remain fixed in his resolve to restore his rights. In other words, in 1948 I lived in Ashkelon. Will I, who hold the right [to live in Ashkelon] go to make the case that it is mine? That is known."
If so, is the purpose of the present intifada "to liberate all the lands that were occupied in 1948"?
"The primary purpose of the intifada today is to expel the occupation from the 1967 borders. The future will decide the fate of what remains of the soil of Palestine."
And what has the intifada accomplished so far?
"A great deal. First of all, it emphasized that the Palestinian people was not defeated in the face of the tank and the plane, and that, just as the Palestinian people is paying the price of its resistance, the Israeli occupier is also paying the price of his occupation. The Palestinian people does not enjoy stability, and it is the same with the Israeli enemy: instability and insecurity. The Palestinian people is suffering economically and socially, and so is the other side. The intifada has achieved a deterrent balance between the occupier and the occupied people. That deterrence lies in the very fact that just as we are suffering, so are they."
But the terrorist attacks inside Israel are strengthening the view of Israelis that you want to "throw them into the sea."
"No Palestinian says that we want to throw the Jews into the sea. The Palestinians always say that they want to live on the lands of our forebears and that all of us - Muslims, Jews and Christians - will live together in the spirit of democracy. But the problem is that the Jews don't want to give the others their rights. They want to establish a racist regime."
In other words, you foresee a state in which Jews will live under Muslim rule?
"It is said that whoever commands the majority will govern. I say, for example, that the Jews in Andalusia lived at a very high level."
I know Palestinians who are afraid to live in a state under the Islamic leadership of Hamas.
"We have never imposed our principles, nor do we want to dictate them with force. There is no dictate. To each his own religion in a state that will respect all the human rights."
Yet the Islamic governments in Iran and Saudi Arabia do not respect human rights, do they?
"I am putting forward the correct Islamic picture, and the implementation by others is of no interest to me."
There is a debate today in Palestinian society about the consequences of the suicide bombings.
"Every action has negative and positive sides, and when the scale tips toward the positive, one may continue to act. The operations [the suicide bombings] have negative consequences, such as the harm to civilians, the pressure that is being brought to bear on the PA and on the Palestinian people. But there are positive consequences, because [they are] also deterring the other side, which kills and murders. Therefore we see them more as a means of deterrence than as a means of revenge. Our basic principles prevent us from harming civilians, but if the enemy harms our civilians we are entitled to do likewise. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. We have the right to punish in the same form. It is my right to deter him."
Aren't you concerned about the negative impact that the suicide bombings are having on Palestinian society, that young Palestinians are choosing death and sanctifying it?
"When a Palestinian chooses a martyr's death as a means of defending his land, that does not constitute a danger. The danger is that he will use this means against his own people. Why does a Palestinian choose a death of sacrifice? Because he doesn't have a helicopter, and all he can do is sacrifice himself. If you have a pistol, you don't use a stone."
From the outside, the attacks inside Israel and against civilians, it does ) look like an act of weakness. "I am weak because I don't have advanced weapons like my enemy. But this weak weapon inflicts losses on the enemy. Is this weakness or the height of human ability?"
Don't you think that a struggle along the lines of the one conducted by Gandhi in India would bring you more achievements?
"Are those with the weapons, who occupy my land, the ones who will order me to abandon my weapon and decide for me what means I am obliged and entitled to adopt in order to struggle? The Palestinian people has reached this situation because of its suffering, because all the doors of the future have been closed to them. If I plant flowers, I am barred from exporting them. If I want to import cheap cement, the Israelis don't allow it. We must look for the cause in order to deal with the problem."
But it's also necessary to examine the means of struggle, isn't it?
"That is also a question for the Israelis, for whom everything is permitted. Tanks, planes, all the military and economic means. Did they use humane means but were stopped by someone? Is the occupation humane or aggressive?"
How do you see the future of the Palestinian children, those who are now 8 years old?
"Our people is suffering from Israeli aggression and force. The Israelis are using the height of the strength they possess. But I emphasize that the future, in the long term, will be on the side of the Palestinian people."