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| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence, by Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela. Columbia University Press, 2000 and 2006. 237 pages. $24.50.
Glenn E. Robinson
Associate professor of defense analysis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California
In the midst of a cascade of sensationalist Chicken Little reportage in the aftermath of Hamas’s January 2006 parliamentary electoral victory, Columbia University Press re-issued Mishal and Sela’s thoughtful book on Hamas, which includes a new preface that updates the story through the elections. Mishal and Sela’s work is widely, and rightly, viewed as the best book in English on Hamas. While these two Israeli scholars do not ignore Hamas’s instrumental use of terror, neither are they blinded by it in their analysis of a complex and evolving social movement.
The key to Mishal and Sela’s argument is to see Hamas not as a fixed and unchanging group, but rather as a social movement that is both multifaceted and heavily influenced by the environment in which it operates. There is no one single Hamas, just there is no single Fatah. Mishal and Sela’s “more interpretive perception” of Hamas views it as a movement that is operating within an ever-changing historical context, aware of practical constraints, sensitive to its surroundings, attentive to circumstances, and subject to considerations of cost-effectiveness. Initially established by refugees as a social movement, Hamas prospers particularly among poor refugees and urban dwellers. In spite of its image as a primarily murderous organization, its main energies and activities have been focused on providing social and communal services through a well-administered web of institutions, from clinics, kindergartens, and schools to a blood bank and welfare services such as the distribution of food and other basic commodities (p. xxvii).
None of the substantive chapters has been updated for this edition. As they were widely reviewed when the book first appeared, I will only briefly summarize them here. Chapter 1 focuses on the founding of Hamas at the start of the first intifada, in December 1987. Mishal and Sela go beyond the simple political history of Hamas’s founding by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood caught between needing to respond to the emerging uprising and not wanting to put the Brotherhood’s prestige on the line in case the uprising faltered. The authors point to the earlier rise of a more technocratic middle-class leadership within the organization that pushed the Brotherhood into a more sophisticated and confrontational posture vis-à-vis Israel. I have referred to this same phenomenon as the rise of a “second stratum” within Hamas that tended to marginalize the upper- merchant- class conservative leadership of the Brotherhood. Mishal and Sela, however, pay special attention to these new leaders of Hamas in the Palestinian diaspora community, where they could more freely operate and develop.
The tension between Hamas’s maximalist dogma and its generally pragmatic politics is the subject of the second chapter. Hamas’s August 1988 Charter (mithaq) lays out a hardline position that thoroughly rejects Israel’s legitimacy and condemns any politician who makes peace with Israel as violating God’s endowment (waqf) of Palestine to Muslims until the end of time. Yet, at the same time, Hamas has consistently shown that it wants to be politically relevant and that it is primarily concerned with ensuring that its impoverished constituents within Palestine are adequately cared for. Hamas’s pragmatism is often at odds with its dogma; how far it can deviate from its ideological hard line without alienating its core supporters is a constant challenge.
The last four chapters are concerned with Hamas’s turn to violence (chapter 3), its complicated and evolving relationship with the PLO and Palestinian Authority (chapters 4 and 5), and its structural basis, including a mosque-centered complex of institutions called al-mujamma al-islami (covered especially in chapter 6). In each chapter, Mishal and Sela’s scholarship is judicious and their conclusions sound.
In addition to drawing attention to this earlier excellent work, the new edition is marked by a long new preface that focuses attention on the current challenges that confront Hamas now that it is in power.
As further evidence of its pragmatic streak, Hamas agreed to participate in the 2006 parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Authority (PA). Hamas had refused to participate in the 1996 legislative elections and even in the 2005 presidential elections because they were a byproduct of the hated Oslo accords. Hamas justified its participation in 2006 because the electoral law had been changed from a 100 percent district-based election to a split-district, proportional representation election. Hamas’s argument that this change fundamentally detached the legislative elections from the Oslo-created Palestinian Authority was never very persuasive. Rather, it reflected Hamas’s calculations that it might be able to win these elections, something it could not do in the earlier ones.
Like almost everyone else, Mishal and Sela overstate the extent of Hamas’s electoral victory. Hamas won an outright parliamentary majority due primarily to Fatah’s pathetic lack of party discipline during the campaign. While the national election was almost a dead heat (Hamas won by less than 3 percent of the popular vote), it was in the district elections that Hamas swamped Fatah. Hamas ran one candidate per open seat, and in each race it faced no less than six candidates from Fatah or independents allied with Fatah. In race after race, the sum of Fatah candidates garnered clear majorities, but the single Hamas candidate won the seat with a plurality of votes.
Still, Mishal and Sela are right to argue that Hamas’s victory was primarily a consequence of the “corruption, ineptitude, mismanagement and internal rivalries” found in Fatah and the PA that it controlled (p. xiv). Under Oslo, Fatah had translated its decades-old single-party domination of the Palestinian national movement into total control of the Palestinian Authority, its institutions and its resources. Lord Acton’s old insight into the corrupting nature of dominant power applied to Fatah as it has applied to so many one-party regimes throughout the world. Indeed, much of the violence in present day Palestine is not initiated by Hamas but by armed Fatah operatives unwilling to accept political pluralism in Palestine. Such Fatah thuggism not only informs political violence but is increasingly responsible for petty criminal activity as well.
A compelling institutional explanation for Hamas’s recent surge in support is also offered by the authors. Hamas’s “winning card” has always been its ability to provide a wide array of social services to poor Palestinians. Because its institutional infrastructure is largely based in the most densely crowded urban areas, often refugee camps, Hamas’s ability to provide social services was not significantly reduced during the al-Aqsa intifada. Israeli forces tended to avoid placing ground troops in these areas for a host of reasons, demonstrated clearly in Israel’s counterproductive and bloody taking of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. Nor did the IDF generally bomb these densely populated areas from the air. Thus, Hamas’s service infrastructure came through the uprising relatively unscathed, even while its military wing gained new support for its ability to kill numerous Israelis via suicide attacks.
The same cannot be said for the PA’s institutional infrastructure. PA institutions were the primary focus of attack by Israel during the uprising, especially during the re-occupation of West Bank urban areas in March and April 2002. Hardly a single PA police station, jail or security facility remained standing, and most governmental ministries and related buildings were attacked as well. During its assault on PA institutions, the IDF routinely confiscated computer hard drives and paper files, rendering PA administrative capacity virtually useless. Thus, while Israel’s counterinsurgency strategy largely spared Hamas’s service capacity, it gutted the PA’s. For many Palestinians, the PA simply ceased to exist as a tangible reality, but Hamas carried on as before (and even thrived).
As a result, when Palestinians went to the polls in 2006 and asked the perennial question, “what have you done for me lately?” Hamas could legitimately come out on top. But neither should anyone have been surprised. Hamas’s electoral gains in a series of earlier local elections gave fair warning that Hamas was a credible force in Palestinian elections.
In addition to its own internal shortcomings, Fatah had shown little ability to move Palestinian rights forward in recent years, either through insurrection or negotiations: unemployment hovers around one-third of the labor force; nearly half of all Palestinians live under the poverty line of $2 per person per day; and nearly two-thirds of Gazans now live under the poverty line. GDP per capita has dropped to one-third the level it had been in 2000. In short, Fatah had led Palestinians into a catastrophic uprising; Israel’s policies of collective punishment meant all Palestinians suffered as a result; and Hamas emerged the victor. In the process, Fatah has so fragmented that it barely exists as a coherent organization anymore.
Mishal and Sela suggest that Fatah may not be alone in terms of organizational disintegration. Hamas as well is plagued by internal contradictions that cannot easily be overcome. Hamas’s hardline dogma does not mix well with its pragmatic everyday politics. As a result, it comes up with “composite” or “hybrid” strategies that seek to have it both ways: appeal simultaneously to the ideological true believers and to those Palestinians simply seeking a better life and cleaner government. If Hamas moves too much to accommodate its hardliners, it will turn off its large base of soft or derivative supporters. Alternatively, if Hamas becomes too accommodating — especially with regard to the “peace process” — it will alienate its core constituents. Recognizing Israel, for example, as a means to acquire political concessions would likely split Hamas in two. This is why such a step is unlikely. Hamas is not a hostage to its ideology, but neither will it discard key ideological positions without significant concessions in return, also something unlikely to occur in the near term. In short, Hamas is best served organizationally by continuing to push composite strategies that satisfy no one. If it is ever compelled to truly choose between its two constituencies, it would likely fragment, as Fatah did before it.
These are dark days for Palestinian politics. Its once-dominant party has fragmented into at least three groupings, none of which can control the others. PA President Abbas sits atop perhaps the weakest of these groupings, yet is unwisely viewed by some in the West as the great White Hope of Palestinian politics. Putting all one’s policy eggs into Abbas’s basket could prove disastrous. Marwan Barghouti remains the most influential leader in Fatah and may be able to restore a rough unity, but he remains (for the time being) in an Israeli prison.
Hamas has arisen in this vacuum, in part due to its vast network of social services provided to desperate Palestinians, and in part due to the implosion of Palestine’s ruling party. But Hamas has no silver bullet in its arsenal with which to deliver Palestinian rights. As Mishal and Sela show, Hamas is very much the political animal that Fatah is and holds within itself fault lines that risk rupture if Hamas veers much off the course it has already set.
It seems unlikely that this internal stalemate will be broken any time soon, and it does not appear that Hamas will be the vehicle for dramatic political change. Hamas will need to be in the mix — it is far too important to be marginalized. The real question seems to be whether the stalemate will be broken through internal violence — some sort of civil war — or whether effective political change can come peacefully from within Palestinian civil or political society. It does seem clear that the continued strangulation of Palestinian society will not likely yield peaceful, positive change. It will instead continue to play to Hamas’s strengths.
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