ABSTRACT
On February 8, 2007, following two days of negotiations, the conflicting Palestinian parties Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in the Saudi city of Makkah. Both factions agreed to cease the violent clashes against one another and form a unity government. The Saudi government played an important role in the run-up to the agreement. Unlike Egypt, Qatar, and Syria, whose previous attempts had failed, Saudi Arabia succeeded in bringing the two warring Palestinian factions to the negotiating table. For a brief moment, there was hope that with Saudi help the escalating intra-Palestinian conflict could be resolved. However, in the weeks and months following the signing of the Makkah Agreement it became clear that the accord was only a temporary dawn of hope in the bitter dispute between the two Palestinian factions. For many years, Fatah was by far the most influential Palestinian political party. Much of this had to do with the personal charisma and popularity of its long-time leader, Yassir Arafat. In 1967, Fatah had joined the PLO and only one year later became the most powerful faction within the organization. In 1969, Yassir Arafat was elected Fatah’s chairman, a position he held for 35 years. For a long time, Arafat was seen by many, both Palestinians and others, as the symbolic figure of the Palestinian liberation movement. Fatah’s rapid rise within the PLO was closely connected to the Battle of Karameh in March 1968, which turned out to be an important propaganda victory for Arafat’s party. Unlike other PLO factions which had previously fled, Fatah stayed back and fought to defend a PLO camp in the Jordanian village of Karameh against an Israeli raid. Although the camp was eventually destroyed and Arafat fled during the fight, Fatah’s steadfastness against the Israeli forces served its reputation among Palestinians and other Arabs well. During the 1974 Arab League Summit, the member states unanimously adopted a resolution that granted the PLO the status as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” For the time being, the leftist, secular, nationalist PLO, and with it Fatah, were virtually uncontested in Palestinian domestic politics. This slowly began to change after the PLO’s forced exile from Beirut in 1982. Following their exodus from Lebanon, the organization was seriously limited in its political and strategic options and stumbled into a growing ideological and structural crisis. The PLO had failed to free Palestine from Israeli occupation, had to relocate to far away
Tunis, and began to deteriorate from within. During this time, Islamic groups such as the charity organization Al-Mujamma Al-Islami (“The Islamic Center”) in Gaza gradually developed into a political opposition, addressing popular needs through a different strategy and based on a different, namely religious ideology.1 The First Palestinian Intifada against the Israeli occupation served as a catalyst to this development. Within days of the outbreak of the Intifada, Sheikh Ahmad Ismail Hassan Yassin and six associates founded Hamas (acronym for Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, “Islamic Resistance Movement”; the Arabic word hamas also means “fervor”) as a subsidiary of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. The establishment of Hamas was the result of a decade-long development that began with the foundation of a first Muslim Brotherhood branch in Jerusalem in October 1945. By 1947, the organization had opened numerous additional branches all over Palestine, inter alia in Haifa, Jaffa, Hebron, and Gaza. By that time, the number of members had reportedly already reached as many as 20,000.2 Early on, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood was heavily politicized; charitable work and the propagation of the organization’s religious teachings took a backseat. In their Palestinian nationalist fight against Jewish immigration, the Zionist ideology, and eventually the newly founded State of Israel, the Palestinian Brotherhood cooperated with unlikely allies, communists and Christians alike. From 1947 onwards, the Palestinian Brotherhood began its calls for jihad against both the British and the Zionists. Members of the Palestinian Brotherhood eventually participated in the First Arab-Israeli War: they organized arms and financial support and some of them joined Muslim Brothers from other Arab states in the active fight against Israel. Following the 1948 War, the Palestinian Brotherhood was split into two branches. The Brotherhood in the Jordaniancontrolled West Bank merged with its Jordanian sister organization. The Gazan Brotherhood, on the other hand, remained an independent organization, however, in close contact with the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo. In the following years, the two branches underwent a significantly different development. The Jordanian Brotherhood had a generally good although not conflict-free relationship with the Jordanian monarchy. King Hussein had granted the Brotherhood the status as the only legal political party and saw the organization as an important counterweight against Nasser’s pan-Arabist political ideology. After the above-mentioned phase of high politicization in the years leading to what Palestinians and Arabs at large call An-Nakba (“The catastrophe,” i.e the Palestinian exodus following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948), the Brotherhood in the West Bank focused in its work on education, particularly religious education, the respect of Muslim societal values, and the recruitment of new members. The Jordanian Brotherhood completely refrained from any military activities or militant resistance. While reliable membership figures are not available, it is obvious that, in the first two decades following An Nakba, the Muslim Brotherhood represented a relatively small political force in the West Bank.3 In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza took a very different development path. Until the mid-1950s, the Brotherhood was the largest and most
influential political force in Gaza. Unlike in the West Bank where members represented a cross-section of the society and included many house-owners and merchants, the Gazan Brotherhood attracted many students. Due to the very different economic situation and living conditions in Gaza, with many refugees and a widespread lack of nourishment, the Brotherhood was focused more on the preparation of armed conflict with Israel. Unlike the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gazans witnessed several months of Israeli military occupation following the 1956 Suez War, further nursing the desire to fight against Israel. Following the ban of the Muslim Brotherhood by Egyptian President Nasser both in Egypt and in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, the Gazan Brotherhood suffered a significant decline in membership. Despite the ban, the decimated Brotherhood joined other political organizations in demonstrations against suggestions to settle the Gazan refugees in Sinai or to internationalize the Gaza Strip. However, the Brotherhood gradually reduced its political activity and increasingly focused on education. Reportedly, shortly after the end of the Israeli occupation of Gaza in 1957, the Gazan Brotherhood rejected the proposal by one of its young members to establish a new organization, seemingly unconnected with the Brotherhood, to prepare the armed liberation of Palestine. The majority of the Gazan Brotherhood believed that prior to the establishment of a liberation movement stood the education of a new generation of Muslims in the Palestinian territories. The disappointed young member, Khalil Al-Wazir, then left the Brotherhood and shortly after became a cofounder of Fatah. The Gazan Brotherhood clearly dissociated itself from Fatah’s armed struggle and henceforth focused on matters of Islamic education. Having to compete with Arab nationalist and Palestinian nationalist organizations such as the Arab Nationalist Movement and Baath on the one hand and Fatah on the other, the Brotherhood lost much of its appeal among young Gazans in the 1960s and 1970s.4 In the course of the 1967 Six Day War, Israel occupied East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. In consequence, as transit between the previously cordoned off West Bank and Gaza was possible again, members of the two Palestinian Brotherhood branches could meet for the first time in nearly 20 years. Soon after, the two branches formed the Muslim Brotherhood Society in Jordan and Palestine. In continuity with their previous activities, the new organization primarily focused on education and the spread of Islam. One of the Brotherhood’s initiatives was the building of mosques in the Palestinian territories. Indeed, between the Six Day War and the outbreak of the First Intifada 20 years later, the Brotherhood almost doubled the number of mosques in the West Bank (from 400 to 750) and tripled it in Gaza (from 200 to 600). As a Hamas leader later stated, the underlying objective of this activity was to mobilize, unify, reorient, and consolidate the faith of a new generation of Palestinians in preparation for the confrontation with Zionism. Paradoxically, the Israeli occupation regime not only tolerated but also supported financially the work of the Muslim Brotherhood as it considered it to be a counterweight to the secular-nationalist terrorist groups such as Arafat’s Fatah.5
