READING: Milton-Edwards & Farrell. Hamas.

Beverley Milton-Edwards & Stephen Farrell
Hamas
2010

AS an RAF Spitfire screamed overhead at the annual air-show in my ancestral home of Sunderland last weekend, my mother remarked how frightening it must have been for my Nana growing up in this heavily-bombed shipbuilding town in World War II to hear that foreboding sound in the knowledge that death could shortly follow in its wake.

But as the Spitfire receded over the horizon it was followed by an even more bloodcurdling noise. Children covered their ears and adults looked to the skies as a Dutch F16 launched into a barrel-roll, the buzz of its engines growing to a deafening roar as it blasted the seafront with its fearsome afterburner. This sound must be a thousand times more frightening to the embattled people of Gaza, regularly bombed by Israeli F16s, largely, in latter years, as a result of their political support for Hamas.

"Hamas stunned the world when it won one of the only free elections in the Arab world,” writes James Hider, author of The Spiders of Allah and Middle East Bureau Chief of The Times, in his endorsement of Beverley Milton-Edwards’ and James Farrell’s eponymous study of the radical Islamist resistance group that has ruled Gaza with an iron-fist since its election in 2006. The stellar-list of endorsements that accompany this book is reason enough to make it compelling reading, from Hider, to former BBC Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin, to Guardian Middle East correspondent Rory McCarthy, plus a host of respected authors and academics, but the fact that Belfast Queen’s University politics professor Dr Milton-Edwards was able to recruit Farrell, the twice kidnapped former Times and now New York Times correspondent, as co-writer lifts it from what could have been a weighty and worthy academic tome to an indispensible and often gripping account of Hamas’s inception and rise to power.

Hamas’s origins can roughly be summarised as inspired by the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, infused with the spirit of 1930s anti-colonial fighter Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, stirred up by the foundation of Israel in 1948 and the six-day war of 1967, propelled by the foundation of Sheik Ahmed Yassin’s Mujamma following the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and finally ignited by the first intifada in 1987. The authors chronicle how Hamas’s brand of deadly resistance to Israel came into its own during the second intifada:

“The first intifada was the stone throwing intifada. Now who believes in stones.” (Hamas MP Jamila al-Shanti)

Hamas rise to power was essentially a reaction to years of ineffectual resistance to Israeli expansionism and oppression of the Palestinians, who watched as the secular politics of Nasser and Fatah failed to contain Israel within its 1948 borders and proved ineffectual in making their anti-Zionist protests heard.

“We tried the fiasco of liberalism in 1948 and we lost half of Palestine. We tried socialist communism in 1967 and we lost the rest of Palestine. We need to be more doctrinaire if Israel is to be overthrown. We need an Islamic state founded on the principles of the Koran.” (Unnamed Islamist student activist)

The authors piece together Hamas’s complex web of supporters and financiers. Following its election in 2006 the movement benefitted greatly from the resources it inherited (or commandeered) from its Western-approved predecessors Fatah and, after international sanctions and the Israeli blockade cut off Gaza’s lifeline, it took a leaf from Hezbolla’s book and looked East for its support, overcoming its sectarian opposition to Iran’s Shi’a theocracy to rely on its support and drawing further assistance from the Arab states.

The authors go to great lengths to distance Hamas from the mindless terrorists that many western leaders often portray them to be. Hamas’s founding fathers are here revealed to be articulate and often reasonable in their justification for their attacks on what they regard as invaders. Even the abhorrent act of suicide bombing, painstakingly deconstructed in this book by psychologists, politicians and families of “martyrs” interviewed by the authors, contains a touch of reason when deployed against an enemy that is vastly superior in weaponry, finance and international political backing:

“Believe me if we had F16s we would never use suicide attacks.” (Senior Hamas leader Dr Abdel Aziz Rantissi)

However, the inherent brutality of the movement frequently seeps through and can be seen writ-large in the days after it took control of Gaza and began to remodel it as an austere Islamic entity in the mould of Iran and, at times, approaching the brutality of the Afghan Taliban. Women were relegated to the status of incubators for future resistance fighters and forced to cover up under threat of an acid wash (in a region where short-skirts were not an uncommon sight during the swinging 60s). Men were encouraged to grow their beards and forced to subscribe to the Hamas doctrine wholesale or risk being shot. And yet the Palestinian people continue to support them because they appear to be the only effective resistance to the Israelis who have had them under the cosh for over 60 years, and certainly the only force that has been able to inflict any serious damage.

Parallels are occasionally drawn with the French resistance during WWII or the Provisional IRA, particularly in Hamas’s recent embrace of the ballot box, but these parallels quickly break down on closer analysis. Unlike Sinn Fein, the authors observe, Hamas went into politics to keep their arms not lay them down and its leaders admit that its policy is to continue to terrorise Israel, whose existence it steadfastly refuses to recognise. Hamas is also standing up to an enemy far more deadly and vindictive than the British. As one Irish observer in Palestine noted in the aftermath of the one tonne bomb that killed Salah Shehadeh, founder of Hamas’s military wing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in 2002, wiping out 145 civilians in the process:

“If the British wanted to wipe out Gerry Adams would they use a bomb that size in a residential area?”

Ultimately, it is horrors such as this, and the countless other examples listed in this book’s 300 odd pages, that makes it hard to entirely condemn Hamas as nihilistic thugs. Gaza freely chose an Islamic resistance group with a history of violence in one of the fairest and most transparent elections in the region, so it is tempting to say that Gaza deserves everything that it has suffered in their hands. But the lesson of this book is that the people of Gaza felt they had no alternative. The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority failed to halt Israeli settlements, failed to create a Palestinian state, failed to stop the indiscriminate killing of innocent Palestinians and, by all accounts, lined their own pockets at the people’s expense. It failed to prove that secularism was the way to battle an aggressive theocracy so the only alternative was Hamas.

And the final lesson of this book is that, for the foreseeable future at least, Hamas is in Palestine to stay.