Roland Rance looks at the growth of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement and argues that their recent victory reflects the failure of secular nationalist and socialist forces in the Arab world to provide an alternative leadership and direction to the Palestinian people.

On a visit to Beirut in 1982, I asked many of the Lebanese and Palestinian activists that I met about the effect of the 1979 Iranian revolution on their struggle. The response was invariably incomprehension: ‘Iran is a long way away’, ‘They are not Arabs’, ‘What’s it to do with us?’ A quarter of a century on, when militant Islam dominates politics from Morocco to the Philippines, such a response seems incomprehensible; but it is salutary to remind ourselves that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of Islamic politics, and that twenty years ago for most political activists the entire issue seemed irrelevant.

The growth of militant Islamic movements reflects a failure of the secular nationalist and socialist forces in the Arab world. They have also developed through a direct collaboration with external imperialist forces, which have short-sightedly viewed Islamic militants as reliable allies in resisting Arab struggles for political freedom and for social and economic justice. Some of these alliances are well-known. In Afghanistan, for example, the West supported the mujaheddin against Soviet domination. Osama bin-Laden was himself long regarded by the US as an ally. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, which has just won the elections to the Palestine Authority, provides another example of this process.

Palestinian Liberation Organisation

In Palestine during the 1970s, the Islamic forces were insignificant, and the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – although illegal – had total political hegemony. Indeed, it was the PLO’s political strength inside Palestine, rather than any alleged external military threat it posed, which had led to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Israel had attempted to stem the rise of Palestinian nationalism by backing traditional clan and family-based networks. These so–called Village Leagues proved an ineffective alternative to the PLO, which by the late 1970s had won control of many municipal authorities and student unions, and was beginning to attract widespread international support. Despite increasing repression, including assassination attempts on leading Palestinian activists by Israeli right-wing terrorists, the appeal of the PLO’s secular nationalism was growing stronger. Indeed, during the 1989 trial of Israeli activist Michel Warshawski, for, ‘providing services to a banned organisation’, an anonymous Israeli intelligence agent testified in court that, ‘there is not one institution in the occupied territories that is not affiliated to the PLO’.

At the same time, the expulsion of the PLO leadership from Lebanon to Tunisia weakened the control of Arafat over developments inside Palestine, and contributed to the growth of a local leadership, younger, more responsive to its own public, and more aware of the realities of Israeli as well as Palestinian society. This development culminated in the first Intifada of 1987-90, which was an authentic revolutionary struggle. Israel’s military adventure in Lebanon had not produced the desired results, and they desperately sought an alternative strategy.

Israel and the Muslim Brotherhood

They found this through promoting and developing members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-based, conservative Islamic group which had been operating within the Village Leagues in an attempt to block the advance of the PLO’s secular Arab nationalism, which they identified as their primary enemy. At first, the Islamists operated as a non-political, and explicitly non-military, welfare organisation, which received indirect political and financial support from Israel. In 1978, Israeli officials encouraged the Gaza leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ahmed Yassin, to register his social welfare organisation, Mujama’, as a charity.

Israel’s expectation was that the provision of relief would lower tension in the occupied territories; and that it was preferable that this should come via conservative clerics rather than the secular nationalists of the PLO. There is also evidence that Israel tacitly encouraged reactionary moves by the Muslim Brotherhood, such as the encouragement of so-called ‘honour killings’ to reinforce the traditional clan rivalries in the occupied territories and to strengthen the authority of the conservative clan elders over the younger radicals.

Hamas and the Intifada

All this changed, however, with the first Intifada. Yassin himself claimed that, in secret meetings with Israeli officials, he was urged to seize power in Gaza and crush the PLO. But by then the decision had already been taken to establish Hamas and to collaborate with the United National Leadership of the Intifada. Had Yassin and his allies not done so, they would have been outflanked by Islamic Jihad, which had some years earlier broken from them to establish a military organisation.

Several factors favoured the growth of Hamas. Through their welfare work over many years, they had established both a network of contacts and supporters, and a reputation for effective and non-corrupt organisation. Their control of the mosques was particularly important, since Israel was reluctant to be seen directly targeting religious buildings, and they were able to transform them into centres of resistance. Crucially, when other communications were impeded, the minarets could be used to broadcast the communiqués of the United National Leadership of the Intifada and other rallying calls. In addition, a very large proportion of the known leaders of the secular parties were killed or arrested in the early stages of the Intifada, while Hamas leaders were ignored, even tolerated. Surprisingly, Hamas remained a legal organisation until December 1989, two years into the Intifada.

In the subsequent period Hamas grew as a result of its own militancy and the perceived failings of the secular nationalists, at a time of deepening Israeli repression of the Palestinians in the 1967-occupied territories. This militancy received both political and armed expression.

Oslo Accords

The 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO, which paved the way for the return of parts of the exiled Palestinian leadership, represented, as we noted at the time, ‘a significant defeat for the Palestinian masses . . . it replaces direct with indirect Israeli rule and co-opts the PLO, which has effectively agreed to police the occupation on Israel’s behalf’. [1] Hamas opposed this sell-out, and still refuses to endorse it, although their participation in the latest elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council represents an acceptance of some, at least of the consequences. So, at a time when the PLO was paying the political price for this historical error, Hamas constituted a focus of militant opposition, attracting secular and even socialist activists as well as Islamists.

Arafat’s regime in the Palestine Authority was marked by corruption and political repression. Many Palestinians who had welcomed the Oslo agreement as a partial victory, or were at least prepared to give Arafat the benefit of the doubt, became alienated from him and his movement. And Hamas had access to large amounts of funding, from many Arab and Islamic sources, used to alleviate the appalling conditions in the occupied territories. The distribution of this aid was widely recognised as less corrupt than that offered by the PA, and it was not restricted to religious, or even Muslim, recipients. So Hamas developed a reputation for honest and efficient administration in the areas which it controlled.

At the same time, Hamas was carrying out numerous armed attacks against Israel. At first, they focussed on military targets and armed settlers, but – particularly following the 1994 murder by an American Jewish settler of twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in Hebron’s main mosque – they turned to the tactic of suicide bombings against civilian targets. These bombings attract wide, but by no means universal, support among Palestinians. A series of opinion polls by the respected Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre (JMCC) showed a massive jump in support – from 24 to 76 percent – at the start of the current Intifada; since then, support has shrunk to around 56 percent, while opposition has steadily grown, to around 40 percent. Hamas clearly recognises the waning appeal of such attacks, and has in effect kept to an undeclared truth for the past year.

Hamas victory

It is clear that the main reason for the dramatic victory of Hamas in the election was opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s corruption. In a poll carried out by the JMCC after the election, 43 percent of Hamas voters said they had voted for the party to end corruption. And there is very little support for the establishment of an Islamic state. In its last poll on the issue, in December 2005, the JMCC found that less than 3 percent of the population supported such a state.

Although Hamas recognises these factors, and is unlikely to attempt to impose sharia law, its actual record in government is not good. Indeed, the only area in which it was defeated by Fatah in the elections was the West Bank town of Qalqilya, where Hamas won control of the municipality last May. Since then, they have banned a planned international folk festival which would have featured mixed dancing, while failing to improve material conditions or administration within the town.

In the absence of a clear strategy for mass mobilisation against Israeli occupation and the dispossession of the Palestinian people, Hamas will be forced to rely on religious rhetoric and a slightly cleaner pair of hands running affairs. This alone will be insufficient to liberate the Palestinian people, and to create the conditions for coexistence in Palestine and the Middle East.

All of this, of course, reflects a situation in which the bourgeois nationalists have demonstrated the utter failure of their strategy, while the Palestinian left, as frequently noted in Socialist Outlook and Socialist Resistance, has virtually abdicated the responsibility to provide an alternative leadership and direction, preferring to tail-end first the PLO leadership, and more recently Hamas. The victory of Hamas, and its likely failure, once again shows the desperate need for the rebuilding of the Palestinian left and the mobilisation of Palestinian workers and peasants in a mass struggle for liberation.

Roland Rance has been a socialist activist in Israeli, Palestinian and British politics for many years.