Asked if a final peace treaty between Israel and a Palestinian state would
not bind Hamas if it came to power later, Abu Marzook replied: “No. I don’t
think any kind of treaty can ‘stuck’ anybody in the future. Just read
history.”
Hamas Wouldn’t Honor a Treaty, Top Leader Says
Abu Marzook Says He's Open to a New Israel Relationship
In an exclusive interview, Abu Marzook discussed his own political future,
relations with Israel, the Hamas Charter and the impact of the Arab Spring
on his organization.
By Larry Cohler-Esses The Forward Published April 19, 2012, issue of April
27, 2012.
http://www.forward.com/articles/155054/hamas-wouldn-t-honor-a-treaty-top-leader-says/?p=all#ixzz1sYqY70Hr
Any agreement reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will be
subject to far-reaching changes if Hamas comes to power in a democratic
Palestinian state, a top Hamas leader told the Forward in an exclusive and
wide-ranging interview.
Mousa Abu Marzook, considered Hamas’s second-highest-ranking official, said
that his group would view an agreement between Israel and the P.A. — even
one ratified by a referendum of all Palestinians — as a hudna, or
cease-fire, rather than as a peace treaty. In power, he said, Hamas would
feel free to shift away from those provisions of the agreement that define
it as a peace treaty and move instead toward a relationship of armed truce.
“We will not recognize Israel as a state,” he said emphatically. “It will be
like the relationship between Lebanon and Israel or Syria and Israel.”
The exchange was but one part of an unprecedented five-and-a-half-hour
discussion conducted over two days between Abu Marzook and the Forward, the
first-ever in-depth exchange between a senior Hamas leader and a Jewish
publication.
Abu Marzook, deputy director of Hamas’s political bureau, for the most part
used the opportunity to expand on long-standing Hamas positions. Contrary to
some media reports, he indicated no new flexibility that would move Hamas
closer to accepting conditions laid down by the so-called Quartet of the
United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations for his
group’s participation in the now moribund Middle East peace process. Abu
Marzook did not, however, foreclose the possibility of a more accommodating
relationship with Israel in the future.
Quite apart from the content of Abu Marzook’s remarks, several veteran
observers of the hard-line Islamist group viewed the fact that the interview
took place as a larger signal of change now roiling the organization.
“I think the mere fact of his speaking to you, independent of what he said,
is almost more important than the specifics,” said Shlomi Eldar, who has
reported on Hamas from Gaza for Israel TV’s Channel 10 and other media
outlets since 1991. “Even granting such an interview is far away from what
he thought two or three years ago…. What [Abu Marzook] really wants is for
Jewish Americans to convince the Israelis that Hamas is not like an animal.”
Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist who has acted as a liaison between
Hamas and senior Israeli government officials, including in the process that
finally freed Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, termed the interview an
“historic landmark.”
“The amount of time he gave you is amazing,” Baskin said.
But David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, focused more on the actual content. “Unfortunately,” he said,
“it’s a validation of those who believe Hamas has a far way to go before it
becomes a legitimate Palestinian interlocutor.”
In a number of cases, Abu Marzook — who is one of three prime candidates in
upcoming internal elections for Hamas’s top leadership spot — offered words
that differ on a practical level with the organization’s actual stance or
behavior. The discrepancy could cut either way: In his call for a hudna with
Israel, Abu Marzook sounded almost beseechingly dovish, even though his
underlying conditions and details suggested a considerably more hard-line
stance. On the other hand, his defense of Hamas’s right to launch operations
targeting civilians compared with the absence of such attacks in recent
years within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.
Over the course of the two-day discussion, amid a lunch of salmon and Nile
River fish the first day and takeout pizza the second, Abu Marzook expounded
on a variety of topics, ranging from the Holocaust, American Jewish
solidarity with Israel, and the impact of the Arab Spring on his
organization, to anti-Semitic passages in the Hamas Charter.
But Abu Marzook appeared to speak most passionately when touting his
proposal for a hudna — an idea he first proposed in 1994.
“Let’s establish a relationship between the two states in the historic
Palestinian land as a hudna between both sides,” he said. “It’s better than
war and better than the continuous resistance against the occupation. And
better than Israel occupying the West Bank and Gaza, making all these
difficulties and problems on both sides.”
Pressed regarding concerns that Hamas’s goal during a hudna would remain the
destruction of Israel as a state, and that a truce would give Hamas time to
build up its arms toward that end, Abu Marzook said: “It’s very difficult to
say after 10 years what will be on both sides. Maybe my answer right now
[about recognizing Israel] is completely different to my answer after 10
years.”
But asked if, offered guarantees for his physical security, he would be
prepared to go to Jerusalem to negotiate with Israel for exactly the kind of
hudna he seeks, Abu Marzook replied bluntly, “No.”
Hamas has rejected negotiating with Israel directly. Abu Marzook said that
under a previous understanding with Fatah, the faction controlling the P.A.
in the West Bank, Hamas allows the P.A. to negotiate with Israel, despite
its objections to the process. But Abu Marzook repeated his organization’s
demand that any result must be approved in a referendum that includes all
Palestinian refugees, not just those in the West Bank and Gaza. “All of the
Palestinians should vote about this,” he said.
He also made clear that such an agreement must include the unqualified right
of Palestinians to return to land in what is now Israel.
From there, it only got more complicated. Abu Marzook described an agreement
that would be treated almost as a “Rashomon”document — seen by the P.A. as a
peace treaty, but by Hamas as a mere truce agreement.
“When we reach the agreement, our point of view is, it’s a hudna,” Abu
Marzook emphasized.
This is not just a matter of semantics. Like the classic Akira Kurosawa
film, in which each party observes the same event but sees it in radically
different and ultimately irreconcilable ways, Fatah and Hamas envision
radically different relationships with Israel, based on the same document.
For Fatah, a peace treaty with Israel encompasses mutual recognition,
diplomatic exchange, trade, commerce, movement of peoples across borders and
regional cooperation. It also includes a non-militarized Palestinian state
and a limited Palestinian right of return.
And Hamas’s hudna vision?
“What’s the relationship between Israel and Syria and Lebanon right now?”
Abu Marzook asked.
That answer — closed borders, barbed wire, no trade, no commerce, no
diplomats, and arms build-ups on each side, to the best of each side’s
respective abilities, in preparation for a possible war — might not matter
much, so long as Fatah remained the party ruling a new Palestine state. But
both Fatah and Hamas agree that their new state will be a democracy. So the
question was unavoidable: What will become of any peace treaty Israel
negotiates with the P.A. under Fatah if and when Hamas comes to power?
“Rabin signed the Oslo Accords,” Abu Marzook recalled, referring to Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s solemn ceremony with Yasser Arafat, chairman
of the Palestine Liberation Organization, on the White House lawn in 1993.
“And when [Israeli opposition leader Benjamin] Netanyahu came [to power], he
disagreed about the Oslo agreement,” leading to numerous changes in the
accords.
Asked if a final peace treaty between Israel and a Palestinian state would
not bind Hamas if it came to power later, Abu Marzook replied: “No. I don’t
think any kind of treaty can ‘stuck’ anybody in the future. Just read
history.”
Abu Marzook offered his views at a moment of unprecedented and far-reaching
change in the Arab world, and within his own organization. The Arab Spring
is one year old, and Hamas, classified as a terrorist group by the U.S.
government, is today, numerous experts say, the latest stage on which the
Arab world’s revolutionary drama is playing out.
The tidal wave that pitched out dictators in Tunis and Cairo has pushed the
staunchly militant Palestinian group from its longtime home in Damascus,
where the Spring’s surge has run blood red.
Hamas leaders have disavowed the Syrian regime’s slaughter of its own
citizens and scattered across the region, some resettling in the Persian
Gulf, others in Jordan and some in Gaza, where democratically elected Hamas
officials rule a rump territory still under Israeli siege.
But Abu Marzook has come to Cairo — the Arab Spring’s still bubbling
crucible. He has settled into a large three-story mansion some 90 minutes
outside the city, in a newly developed, upper-class planned community known
as New Cairo. The neighborhood’s wide, still unpaved streets look almost
deserted but for construction crews, and are lined with numerous half-built
homes, their scaffoldings still mounted in place and mounds of rubble piled
in front of them. It’s quiet; a far cry from Cairo’s tumult. Security, a
major consideration for a man in Abu Marzook’s position, is no doubt an
easier proposition in this tranquil corner of a country still in
midrevolution.
Inside his sparsely furnished home, with its large, airy rooms and marble
floors, Abu Marzook works amid a retinue of bodyguards and aides. No women
are in sight. At the end of the second day of the interview, he cheerfully
offered his business card and invited follow-up questions via phone or
email. But first, he wrote a new phone number at the top of the card.
Disregard the four Damascus phone numbers still printed under his name, he
said.
It is almost certainly not the first time he has had to improvise business
cards. Abu Marzook’s has been a peripatetic life. A calm, soft-spoken man of
61, Abu Marzook struggles haltingly in rusty English — a language he once
spoke daily while pursuing a master’s degree in construction management at
Colorado State University; a doctorate in industrial engineering at
Louisiana Tech, in Ruston, La., and living several years in Falls Church,
Va., where his primary work through the early 1990s was raising millions of
dollars for Hamas.
“They called him ‘the genius,’” said the journalist Eldar, whose new book,
“Getting To Know Hamas,” is to be published in Israel in May. “In 1989 and
1992, he saved Hamas during periods of crisis. His fundraising built up
Hamas’s infrastructure in Gaza because he had the financial connections with
the Islamic funds around the world, especially in America and Europe.”
Indeed, during this earlier period, Abu Marzook was the top director of
Hamas’s political bureau, not its deputy director. Within the movement, he
was known as the favored protégé of Hamas’s revered founder, Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin. Born in Rafah, a southern Gaza city near the Egyptian border, to
parents who hailed from a village near Hebron in the West Bank, Abu Marzook
was picked by Yassin at an early age as a prize pupil meant for greater
things. With Yassin’s support, he attended college at Ain Shams University
in Cairo and went on to graduate school in the United States — in part, to
gain worldly knowledge of the West that would help a movement with few in
its ranks who had this background.
Ostensibly, Abu Marzook’s fundraising, based in the United States and run
from his home outside Washington, went to support Hamas’s huge network of
social services in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, in the West Bank. Israel
alleges (and he denies) that some of his fundraising went to support
terrorist actions, as well. Hamas’ sprawling enterprise of medical clinics,
orphanages, schools and social service agencies made up the overwhelming
bulk of the group’s work in the occupied territories, as it does today. At
the time, such fundraising was not explicitly illegal. The U.S. government
did not designate Hamas as a terrorist group until 1995.
The popular gratitude and deep social roots that Hamas and its precursor
group accrued through years of providing such service to Palestinians made
it a formidable force when it launched its first attacks against Israel,
during the first intifada, in 1988. Until then, Israel had quietly
encouraged the religious movement as a rival to Fatah and other militant PLO
groups, then seen as the Jewish state’s primary enemies.
Citing arguments that Islamic law prohibits ceding Muslim lands to
nonbelievers, Hamas resolutely opposes the Oslo Accords and the halting
efforts made by its bitter rival, the PLO, and by Israel toward a two-state
solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. From the start of the Oslo
process, the group backed up its opposition with terrorism, launching a
campaign of bombings and eventually suicide bomb attacks, targeting
civilians in cities across Israel. Since its inception, Hamas claims to have
killed 1,365 “Zionist soldiers”— a statistic likely to include combatants
and non-combatants, as the group has stated in the past that it views all
Israeli Jews as combatants.
In 1993, Abu Marzook left the United States for Jordan, where he joined
other leaders of Hamas’s “outside” wing to set up the group’s political
headquarters in Amman. Jordan’s ruler, King Hussein, had long cultivated
close, if careful, ties with Jordan’s affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood,
and Hamas, which was established as the Islamist movement’s Palestinian
branch, was offered offices in the Jordanian capital to set up its political
operation right next door to Israel.
But after Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, Israeli
officials pressed Hussein hard to expel the group. The United States also
pressured Jordan, and so, for that matter, did the PLO, which had come to
view Hamas as the biggest internal threat to its hold on power.
In response, Hussein, who preferred to keep potential enemies close, offered
a concession: He threw out Abu Marzook, who returned to the United States in
1995.
But on his arrival, Abu Marzook was instead detained when a terrorism watch
list at immigration turned up his name. A search of Abu Marzook’s carry-on
bags found what looked like evidence of substantial offshore and American
bank accounts. And a strip search of his wife yielded an address book with
hundreds of names, including several people whom American authorities
regarded as Middle East extremists. Soon after his detention, Israel asked
Washington to extradite Abu Marzook to stand trial in Israel on terrorism
charges.
Abu Marzook eventually spent a year-and-a-half in Manhattan’s Metropolitan
Correctional Center as his attorney, Stanley L. Cohen, fought a
no-holds-barred, high-profile battle against his extradition. In the end,
after initial decisions against him, it was Abu Marzook, weary of sitting in
jail, who instructed Cohen to desist in his appeals; he’d go to Jerusalem,
he decided, and face the Israelis in what promised to be a trial of the
century.
Then, the government of Israel shifted. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin
Indyk cabled Washington that the recently elected Netanyahu government was
uncertain it wished to take on the case. A late-night meeting between
Washington’s envoy to Amman and King Hussein produced a way out: Hussein
agreed to take back Abu Marzook.
Abu Marzook returned to Jordan in 1997, expecting to be hailed as the hero
of Hamas who had faced down Israel and won. Khaled Meshal, a Hamas activist
with roots in Kuwait, was expected to quickly return the keys to Abu Marzook’s
office as chief of Hamas’s political bureau, which Meshal had managed on an
acting basis.
But then, in September 1997, Netanyahu singlehandedly, if unintentionally,
upended Abu Marzook’s triumph: He approved a Mossad hit on Meshal that went
terribly wrong when the Israeli hit team was captured while trying to
escape. To extricate the team, Netanyahu was forced to give up some 70
Palestinian detainees, including the most prized prisoner of all: Yassin. He
also had to save Meshal’s life with the antidote to the toxin the agents had
administered.
Abu Marzook’s star was not just eclipsed, it was sunk. “The day they tried
to kill [Meshal] was the day Meshal the leader was born,” the well-connected
Amman journalist Ranya Kadri told author Paul McGeough in his book, “Kill
Khalid,” a history of the botched hit. “The man who died that day was Abu
Marzook. Nobody wanted to talk to Abu Marzook after that — it was Meshal,
Meshal, Meshal.”
Since then, Abu Marzook, though still a top player in Hamas, has served as
deputy director to Meshal. The two are colleagues and rivals. On at least
three occasions, Abu Marzook has stood as a leadership candidate to retake
the top position in secret elections held by the Shura Council, Hamas’s
clandestine policymaking body. Meshal has emerged each time, victorious.
But in January, to widespread surprise, Meshal announced his resignation. No
one knows whether the Shura Council will accept the resignation when it
meets sometime soon, on a date that remains secret. There are now considered
to be three top candidates for the coveted post of political director:
Meshal, Abu Marzook and Ismail Haniyeh, who was elected prime minister of
the P.A. in 2006 and has been the effective chief of Gaza since then. The
contest comes amid signs of sharply increased tensions between Meshal, the
“outside” leader, and Haniyeh, now leading his own government in Gaza.
Asked if he is, indeed, a candidate, Abu Marzook explained that the process
in Hamas was not like a like a bid for the U.S. presidency, in which a
candidate throws his hat into the ring.
“Nobody announces himself as a candidate,” he said. “Someone else should
announce a person for a post.”
But asked if, like the Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman, he would
refuse to run if nominated and refuse to serve if elected, Abu Marzook
laughed heartily and said, “No, I’m not that man.”
For Israel’s current leaders, the question of who ends up running Hamas is
deemed moot. “None of this is relevant for Israel, because the government
says they don’t want to hear from Hamas,” Eldar said.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials routinely denounce efforts by the Fatah leaders
who control the P.A. to consummate a reconciliation agreement with Hamas,
arguing that as a terrorist organization it is an unsuitable partner. But
just as routinely, Israeli hard-liners dismiss negotiating with the P.A. at
all, since it controls only the West Bank while Hamas rules in Gaza, outside
its orbit.
A series of meetings between Fatah and Hamas leaders has ended in repeated
announcements of an imminent agreement to bring the two groups and their
rump governments back together. But the agreement has yet to be implemented,
and Abu Marzook indicated with a resigned air that this would not happen
very soon. “There’s some difficulties in the West Bank and some difficulties
in Gaza, and we are working together to solve these,” he said.
If Abu Marzook’s appeal for a hudna sounded more dovish than his plan’s
actual details, his rhetoric regarding Hamas attacks on Israel tacked in the
opposite direction: considerably more hawkish than the reality.
The last suicide bombing attributed to Hamas took place in August 2004,
almost eight years ago — an attack on two buses in Beersheba that killed 16
people. Since then, however, Israel claims to have thwarted terrorist
attacks sponsored by Hamas in Israel proper. The group has also continued to
launch attacks — some fatal — against Israeli Jewish settlers in the
occupied West Bank.
Since Israel’s 2008–2009 military offensive in Gaza, which it dubbed
Operation Cast Lead, Hamas has also ceased launching rockets from Gaza into
southern Israel.
Until March, the Hamas government in Gaza had for the most part sought to
stop other groups from firing such missiles, as well. Then, on March 9,
Israel launched a targeted killing in Gaza of a militant from another group
whom Israel charged was planning a terrorist attack against it. That
provoked a fusillade of some 200 rockets fired into Israel by others, which
Hamas officials did nothing to stop. This, in turn, brought on escalating
Israeli retaliations, until Egypt brokered a cease-fire agreement.
The exchange resulted in the deaths of 25 Palestinians, most of them
militants but several civilians; no Israelis died.
Abu Marzook was at pains to knock down suggestions in numerous media outlets
that Hamas is preparing to abandon armed resistance against Israel in favor
of mass popular resistance against Israeli rule.
A February 6 article by Time magazine correspondent Karl Vick about the
“mainstreaming” of Hamas was one object of his disdain. In it, Vick played
up comments by Meshal, who, at a November reconciliation meeting with Fatah
leaders, praised the popular protests of the Arab Spring last year in Egypt
and Tunisia as packing “the power of a tsunami.”
“The new government emerging in Cairo may be dominated by Islamists,” Vick
wrote hopefully, “but it has pushed both sides to make up and adopt the
nonviolent strategy against Israel, complete with negotiations.”
For Abu Marzook, the November meeting in Cairo meant something “completely
different.” At the meeting, he said, the groups involved asked, “What kind
of [activities] between us we can share together?” And mass civil
resistance, it was decided, was one in which all could participate.
“We accept that,” he said. “[It] can now make reconciliation easier.” But
giving up both the right and the opportunity to conduct military operations?
“It doesn’t mean that,” Abu Marzook stated flatly.
Indeed, a careful look at the original Agence France Presse report from
which Vick drew Meshal’s comments reveals some important remarks the Time
correspondent left out. “Now we have a common ground that we can work on,”
Meshal said then. But he added, “As long as there is an occupation on our
land, we have the right to defend our land by all means, including military
resistance.”
“Hamas is not going to voluntarily surrender what they see as a strategic
and tactical option,” Baskin, the Israeli peace activist, said. “That would
be in their eyes like surrender. So they say the option remains on the
table. But what they tell people in the West who are engaging them is,
‘Watch what we do, not what we say.’”
Speaking in a different context, about the effects of the Arab Spring, Abu
Marzook himself offered an additional consideration.
“Hamas before the [2006] election is not the same as after they are
elected,” he said, “because as an opposition party, you can say anything,
but no one expects you to do anything. But after election, you have to
implement on the ground. And there are many, many difficulties when you
implement anything on the ground.”
Still, in a long exchange about terrorism, the Hamas leader resolutely
defended his organization’s past acts of violence targeting civilians. He
asserted that Israel, under the rubric of collateral damage, had killed
thousands more Palestinian civilians than vice versa. He dismissed the
notion that it made some moral difference that Israel generally issues
statements of public regret for the deaths of civilians it hits in pursuing
what it characterized as military targets, while Hamas leaders often
publicly celebrated the group’s successful actions targeting civilians.
“You cannot compare between the civilians killed by Israel and the civilians
killed by the resistance,” Abu Marzook said. The Israeli numbers, he
stressed, “were huge, really huge…. The action’s the action. You killed 17
children here. And there are 16 civilians killed in Israel. If you evaluate
what the Israelis said or what the resistance said — okay, you can compare
between just the talk. But in reality, the Israelis killed more than 1,000,
and they said, ‘We are sorry.’… The killing is killing.”
At some points, Abu Marzook seemed to claim that the Hamas leaders who
publicly celebrated such killings — who have included Meshal himself — were
not speaking for the organization, or that Hamas had not itself directed and
planned the actions or, at least, had not planned them as civilian hits.
“There’s no one speaker [within] the resistance,” he said. “Everybody talks
about their actions, and you can make what you want of those speakers. They
make it as [if this is] the policy of the resistance. And this is not right.
Our policy is… against targeting any civilian.”
On those occasions when civilians die in such actions, “there is no
planning” for this, he claimed, “because it’s very difficult to make
something like this to be perfect…. When you killed his brother or his
[fellow Palestinian] civilians, he wants to retaliate. It’s very difficult
to say anything bad to him.”
Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based Middle East contributing editor to Middle East
Report who follows Hamas closely, expressed surprise at such distancing
remarks.
“I’m surprised he didn’t repeat their traditional justifications,” he said.
In the past, Rabbani said, Hamas had expressed interest in reaching an
understanding with Israel whereby each side would undertake to avoid hitting
civilians or civilian infrastructure targets. “In the past, among other
arguments, they’ve justified their actions by claiming every Israeli is a
soldier. It’s very uncommon for them to basically disavow these actions.”
‘Why am I here?”
This was not an existential plea to the cosmos. It was, rather, the first
question I put to Abu Marzook at the start of the interview: Why had he
agreed to a request by a Jewish news organization to talk with him in-depth
in a lengthy and probing exchange?
“We don’t have originally something against the Jew as a religion or against
the Jew as a human being,” he said. “The problem is that the Israelis kicked
out my family. They have occupied my land and injured thousands of
Palestinians…. I have to differentiate between the Jew who did this problem
to my people and [American] Jews like you, who never did anything bad to my
people.”
Abu Marzook waved away the contention that, in fact, most American Jews
strongly support Israel as a Jewish state — in many cases, quite actively —
and sympathize with their fellow Jews there. Speaking of Americans in
general, he said, “Those people who have sympathy for the Jews [in Israel],
it’s because of their history with the Jews. If you look carefully at what
happened to the Jews in Moscow or Madrid, in Spain or in Germany or Poland,
that’s very bad…. Anyone who historically his father or grandfather did
something like that [to the Jews], he should be ashamed.”
This made Abu Marzook’s comments the next day in defense of the Hamas
Charter all the more surprising. The charter, a lengthy, multi-part founding
document composed in 1988, contains several sections that have been widely
condemned as anti-Semitic.
The first such section cites a hadith, or saying of the Prophet Muhammad:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews
(killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The
stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me,
come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one
of the trees of the Jews.”
The second section cites passages from “The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion,” an early 20th-century forgery now widely attributed to the czar of
Russia’s secret police, that depict world Jewry as a nefarious international
force through Western history. The passages cited hold “world Zionism” as
responsible for, among other things, the French and communist revolutions,
the control of media and finance worldwide, and the machinations of “secret
societies,” including the “Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions in different
parts of the world” that have been formed “for the purpose of sabotaging
societies and achieving Zionist interests.”
Abu Marzook said that the charter does not govern his organization.
“We have many, many policies that are not going with the charter,” he said.
“But when you talk about ‘change the charter,’ there are many Hamas people
talking about changing the charter. That’s a debate inside Hamas, because
there are many, many policies against what’s written in the charter.”
Asked specifically about changing the passages on Jews, Abu Marzook
acknowledged no such amendments existed. But he defended the hadith as being
taken out of context. The passage, he said, did not apply to all Jews — just
those in Palestine.
As for the Protocols, “The Zionists wrote it, and they said, ‘No, we didn’t.‘
[It’s] linked to Zionists,” he said.
Informed that the document was, in fact, a forgery, Abu Marzook appeared
nonplussed. “Really? This is the first time I know [about this],” he said.
For a Hamas leader who had lived and studied in the West to respond in such
a manner seemed a stunning reflection of a movement that remains deeply
insular and parochial, even as it now seeks wider legitimacy.
Abu Marzook spoke hopefully of the influence of the Arab Spring as a boon to
his movement. The rise of fellow Islamist groups in Egypt and elsewhere
could help bring the issue of the Palestinians to the fore, he said, even
if, in the short term, Muslim Brotherhood groups, now responsible for
governing, emphasized domestic concerns.
He alluded to the debate that the Arab Spring has sparked within Hamas
itself, including discussion of converting the group fully into a political
party that eschewed its own separate militia or guerilla arm, as has
occurred with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. “There are some people in
Hamas thinking [that] way,” he said. “But personally, I’m against any kind
of political party, because Hamas is a political party and a resistance. You
can’t divide this.”
But asked how the Arab Spring’s themes of civil resistance and demands for
openness, transparency and democracy might influence Hamas, Abu Marzook
looked puzzled. His group operates in areas, such as the occupied West Bank,
in which it remains an illegal organization, he noted. And its status in
several Arab countries also makes open operations impractical. He declined
even to offer a dollar figure for its operating budget.
Might Hamas, for example, consider opening a window on debate within the
secretive Shura Council, a body that will soon select a new leader even
though no one, including its purported constituents, knows who its members
are and how they will vote?
“This is not the interest of people in any way,” Abu Marzook replied.
Contact Larry Cohler-Esses at cohleresses@forward.com
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