Opening the gates of hell:
The murder of Sheikh Yassin
 
Trevor Mostyn

This is a slightly expanded version of an article published in The Tablet on 27th March, 2004

ISRAEL'S ASSASSINATION IN GAZA of Hamas's spiritual leader, the quadriplegic and half-blind Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, is a dire omen, above all for Palestinian moderates. His killing will give Hamas immense popularity in Palestine.

Hamas means 'Zeal' in Arabic but is also an acronym for 'Islamic Resistance Movement'. The military wing of Hamas - known as the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades - began its suicide attacks against Israeli targets in 1994 and it has killed 400 Israelis since the second Palestinian Intifada began in September 2000, sparked off by Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to Jerusalem's holiest site, The Haram ash-Sharif or Temple Mount. During the same period Israel has killed 2,849 Palestinians, of whom over 300 were assassinations or 'targeted killings'.

When in 1988 the Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman, Yasser Arafat, recognised the state of Israel and declared that the PLO's charter was caduc ('lapsed' in French) the newly formed Hamas published its own covenant, restoring the PLO's revolutionary slogans, but in Islamic language. 'Armed struggle' became 'jihad'. Palestine as an 'Arab homeland' became a 'waqf' (Islamic trust). Significantly, Hamas quotes in its charter from the highly anti-Semitic and fraudulent book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some see the assassination of Yassin as the death-knell of an increasingly impotent PLO with Arafat isolated in his battered Ramallah headquarters amid accusations that his Paris-based wife Soha has squandered millions of dollars of public money. Israel's deputy defence minister Zeev Boim said that Yassin had been behind a terror network in Gaza and had been what he called "marked for death" in January after the worst bus bombing in Israel in three years.

Yassin was no Mandela, certainly no Gandhi but he promised Palestinians two things, redemption of their nation from Israeli occupation and, even more importantly, the salvation of their souls. Unlike Arafat, he was entirely free from corruption. His funeral saw 200,000 mourners turn out in Gaza's streets waving the green flags of Hamas and the black and gold flags of Islamic Jihad. It was the biggest demonstration since Arafat's triumphant return from his Tunis exile in 1994.

Israel's defence minister Shaul Mofaz, who had been pushing for Sharon's permission to assassinate Yassin, said that "his hands are soaked in the blood of Israeli children." Hamas's tactic of suicide bombing is certainly grotesque, but Yassin was also a moderating influence. Although he had for long preached the view that Palestine was the "property of Muslims until the day of judgement" and that no ruler had the right to surrender it, he was apparently willing to accept the two-state solution on an interim basis, leaving it to later generations to deal with any Palestinian 'right of return' to Israel itself (the 78% of pre-1948, "Mandate" Palestine). This sort of compromise was in character.

In his early days his quietism, the ideological challenge he posed to secular nationalism and his opposition to the PLO's armed struggle, had endeared him to the Israelis. Ironically, last year the Israelis assassinated his moderate deputy, Ismail Abu Shanab, who had suggested even more openly that Hamas might accept a two-state solution. Yassin, born in Majdal (now Ashkelon, an Israel seaside town near to the Gazan border) and forced to flee to Gaza in 1948, was crippled playing football on a Gazan beach. In 1964 he enrolled as a student at Cairo's Ain Shams University where he became a radical interpreter of the Qur'an under the auspices of the Ikhwan (Muslim 'Brethren'), the beating-heart of Islamic fundamentalism founded in Egypt in 1928.

Back in Gaza he founded al-Mujamma' al-Islami (The Islamic Community) which soon controlled almost all of Gaza's religious institutions. His goal was to combat secularism and to turn Palestine into a pure Islamic society. Seeking a foil against the PLO, then their deadly enemy, the Israelis granted Yassin's Mujamma' an official licence in 1979. Palestinians saw the movement as a clean, dynamic force for social change. An offshoot of the Ikhwan, Islamic Jihad embarked on armed Islamic struggle in Gaza in the 1980's. It was the largely peaceful first Intifada - characterised by children throwing stones at heavily armed Israeli soldiers - that led to the creation of Hamas in 1987 as a violent political movement which would rival the movement of Arafat, a man who had remained the very symbol of Palestine even to those who disliked him. As David Hirst notes in his Guardian obituary, Yassin offered Palestinians a special kind of struggle "that combined moral purity and social action with the promise of divine grace - not just redemption of the homeland, but salvation of the troubled soul as well."

In 1989 Israel imprisoned Yassin on charges of incitement to kidnap and of killing Israeli soldiers. However, Hamas's political wing also runs an efficient welfare system in Gaza. It is involved in building schools and hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza and in helping the community in social and religious ways. The Oslo accords gave Palestinians the hope that they were about to enjoy a genuinely independent state. What provoked the first Hamas suicide bombings was the massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in February 1994 by the Israeli settler doctor, Baruch Goldstein. They were further provoked by the gradual Palestinian realisation that Israel was not honouring the accords. In place of an independent Palestinian state, huge Jewish settlements connected by settler-only roads were turning the West Bank into a series of Bantustans divided by humiliating and dangerous checkpoints.

The suicide bombings escalated after the Israelis killed Hamas's main bomb-maker, known as the Muhandis (the engineer), in 1996. However, in 1997 the Israeli prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, released Yassin in exchange for two Mossad agents who had tried to poison Hamas's hardline political leader Khaled Mishaal in Jordan. Jordan had made peace with Israel and King Hussein was furious over the attempted killing. In hindsight, to many it seems strange to have released a man proclaimed as Israel's most deadly foe. Why did Sharon order the killing of Yassin this week when he could have killed him so easily at any time with Israel's deadly helicopter laser targeting ? "When they want me", said Yassin, "they will find me in my wheel chair. I do not hide."

Sharon claims that it was in retaliation for the killing of 10 Israelis at the important port of Ashdod the previous week. However, two more likely motives are to assuage Israeli public opinion and to prevent Hamas controlling Gaza before Israel pulls Israeli settlements out of Gaza as Sharon plans to do. Israel never wanted Gaza with its 1.3 million desperate Palestinians. Israeli strategy has always focused on the West Bank - biblical Judaea and Samaria - and Palestinians fear that Sharon's strategy is just that, to transfer Jewish settlers from Gaza to the West Bank. When the Israelis, mauled by the fierce and tenacious Hizbullah, pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, the Shi'a militant group crowed victory and became lionised throughout the Arab world and beyond. Sharon argued that if Israel could 'snap off the serpent's head', as he described Yassin, before leaving Gaza Hamas would be unable to emulate Hizbullah's sense of victory.

Initially the Hamas leadership will go to Dr Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, a hardliner and close ally of Hamas's hardline Damascus-based political leader Khaled Mishaal. However, some suspect a sinister Israeli strategy to get rid of Palestine's professional leadership and bait a new, fiercer generation of young Hamas militants into much greater violence, both inside Palestine and worldwide; to encourage them to fulfil their threat of 'opening the gates of hell' so that the Palestinian cause will lose the international sympathy it has won of late and become clearly associated in people's minds with international terrorism, in particular with Al- Qaida. Sharon wants the world to associate its war on terror with his own.

With the Palestinians thus denigrated, Sharon can fulfil his dream of transferring the West Bank Palestinians to the east of the West Bank (or even into Jordan itself) and making life unbearable for those who remain, hemmed in by a wall that will absorb 40% of the West Bank including its aquifer. Sharon is aware of a demographic time bomb; in five years' time Israelis and Palestinians will be equally balanced throughout the region of Mandate Palestine.

Most countries - with the characteristic exception of a US entering the election race - have condemned the killing of Yassin. The Arab world was outraged and next week's Arab summit in Tunis will no longer be talking peace. Britain was behind recent peace initiatives based on the Quartet's 'Road Map' for peace. The British foreign secretary Jack Straw was clearly furious, saying that the killing was "unacceptable, it is unjustified and it is very unlikely to achieve its objectives. This kind of so-called targeted killing or assassination is well outside international law."

The world community must now wait to see what the gates of hell are like. It must ask itself whether so soon after the Madrid massacre it should not be putting much greater pressure on Israel, a nuclear state whose actions as an occupying power are creating intense anger among Muslims throughout the world and are increasing the likelihood of a global war of terror. 
© Trevor Mostyn 2007 - www.trevormostyn.com