On Religious Fundamentalism: Dance of Death (1)

Israel’s victory in the June War and its renewed occupation of the Gaza Strip lifted the nightmare of the Egyptian regime from the Muslim Brotherhood, following a confrontation triggered by the attempted assassination of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in Manshiyya, Alexandria, in 1954. At the time, the Egyptian authorities accused the “Brotherhood” of plotting the attack and launched a sweeping campaign of arrests targeting its leading figures, including Sayyid Qutb, the foremost theorist of political Islam’s approach to power.

A decade later, after Abdul Salam Arif became president of Iraq, his mediation secured Sayyid Qutb’s release. The episode did not, however, lead to reconciliation. Qutb was arrested again, accused of establishing a clandestine organization aimed at overthrowing the Egyptian regime by force, and sentenced to death. He refused to appeal for clemency in exchange for a commutation of his sentence and was hanged on August 29, 1966.

A few months later, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip for the second time.

The defeat of the Egyptian regime marked the beginning of a resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestinian cities, particularly in the newly occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There, the “Brotherhood” operated as a religious outreach movement seeking to reform the individual and society. It built a network of mosques, schools, and charitable associations, without offering the population any real political program beyond a call for reform and a return to religion according to its own understanding and interpretation.

At the same time, the Palestinian national movement embraced armed struggle as the path toward the liberation of Palestine, both from within the Palestinian territories and across the borders of the Arab confrontation states: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Although the Palestinian national movement, represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization, dominated the political landscape and enjoyed broad popular support throughout the Middle East, the Islamist movement patiently pursued its long-term work. It benefited from Israel’s policy of turning a blind eye to its activities, to the point that some of its institutions obtained permits from the occupation army to operate.

In its religious outreach activities, the “Brotherhood” gave priority to shaping the individual and society according to its particular conception of Islam. Its approach to dealing with the occupation army did not entail the kind of confrontation advocated by the secular, leftist, and nationalist forces of the Palestinian national movement. It thus created a social environment of its own, relatively isolated from the majority of Palestinian society, while also becoming a safe haven for those unwilling to bear the consequences of the armed and violent confrontation pursued by the factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Consequently, neither its public discourse nor the conduct of its leaders and members placed it in a position of confrontation with the occupation. In this manner, it accumulated influence slowly and gradually.

Twenty years passed during which the Brotherhood quietly and steadily developed its internal mechanisms. It accumulated considerable experience in sustained, organized work among its cadres, with significant support from the Muslim Brotherhood’s international networks.

It also allowed a degree of individual participation by members who wished to fight in the major battles waged by the Palestine Liberation Organization, but always through military structures with no organizational ties to the Brotherhood, such as the Palestine Liberation Army, the al-Assifa Forces, or under other names that did not make the Muslim Brotherhood directly responsible for the participation of individual members in any battle, large or small.

This situation continued until the outbreak of the “Stone Intifada” in 1987, when the Brotherhood began participating directly and openly in the uprising, while remaining outside the Unified National Leadership of the Intifada.

It was during this major event that the Muslim Brotherhood launched its new organization under the name “Islamic Resistance Movement,” or Hamas. It subsequently established its armed wing, known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

This marked the first transformation of a religious outreach and social movement into an independent political movement, charting a distinct path of its own, separate from the secular national movement. A new fundamental dilemma thus emerged for the Palestinians with the rise of a pole whose conception of the Palestinian national interest differed radically from the one that had prevailed until then and stood in complete opposition to the mainstream orientation embodied by the Palestine Liberation Organization over four decades.

The disagreements were not confined to a handful of specific issues. They extended to virtually every question, major and minor. A profound rupture thus began to emerge over the very definition of the policies meant to express the Palestinian national interest, deeper than any division the Palestinian national movement had previously experienced.

The division cut vertically through Palestinian society itself and rapidly spread to its trade unions, federations, and grassroots organizations wherever they operated. Even at universities, student organizations proved unable to devise a common framework for student union activity.

This was not due to an inherent inability to reach agreement, but rather to the absence of a political framework that would allow agreement even on a basic union program. Dozens of attempts at dialogue were undertaken in an effort to establish common ground, but their results quickly evaporated whenever the fundamental disagreement resurfaced: which authority was entitled to define the Palestinian national interest?

The Decisive Turning Point

During the years separating the establishment of Hamas from the announcement of the “Oslo Accord,” the new movement adopted slogans that, in some respects, echoed principles espoused by Fatah in its early days. Then came an event that struck the Palestinian political landscape like an unprecedented earthquake, reverberating among the public and the factions, as well as within the political and intellectual elites.

The official Palestinian leadership proved unable to provide a convincing political analysis explaining the reasons behind the conclusion of the agreement, either at the international or regional level. Nor did it succeed in explaining the role the “Oslo Accord” could play in addressing the Palestinians’ most pressing needs and priorities, both in the homeland and in the diaspora.

Palestinian public opinion consequently split between supporters and opponents of the agreement. It can be argued that a significant part of the support it enjoyed within Fatah rested more on the considerable trust placed in President Yasser Arafat than on any clear explanation of the nature and significance of this turning point, or of the role it was supposed to play in correcting the course of the national struggle.

As presented by the Palestinian leadership, the essence of this turning point was a return to the geography of the homeland and the establishment of an internationally recognized Palestinian entity as a step toward independence. This was supposed to entail the national movement’s transition from the stage of an armed liberation movement to that of a movement struggling for independence, relying primarily on political and peaceful struggle and abandoning armed violence as a means of national action. This was what President Arafat declared and formally committed himself to in the documents associated with the agreement.

It was therefore hardly surprising that the nationalist and leftist opposition forces within the Palestine Liberation Organization regarded the Oslo Accord as a departure from the principles of the revolution and a retreat from its objectives. In this climate, Hamas found the political opening it had been seeking. It went even further in its characterization of the agreement, describing it as both a national and religious betrayal, based on the Muslim Brotherhood’s conception of Palestine as an Islamic waqf, no part of which anyone had the right to relinquish.

Overturning the Oslo Accord thus became a central pillar of Hamas’s political program, with everything else seemingly relegated to secondary importance. Yet from an early stage, the movement’s political practice revealed two parallel tracks.

The first consisted of making the fullest possible use of the realities created on the ground by the agreement. Foremost among these were the return of thousands of Palestinians to the homeland, the emergence of a relatively broad sphere of political freedom and open political activity, and the possibility of building party and organizational institutions beyond the direct authority of the occupation. This was in addition to benefiting from the services provided by the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in healthcare, education, and through its various public institutions and bodies.

The movement treated these gains as acquired Palestinian rights rather than as direct outcomes of the Oslo Accord.

In the same context, Hamas gradually shifted from a religious position that prohibited participation in municipal, legislative, and presidential elections to one that permitted such participation once its political and organizational outcomes began to serve the movement’s interests and provide it with a broader institutional and popular presence.

The second track consisted of continuing to accuse the political leadership that had brought about the Oslo Accord of betrayal, while keeping channels of dialogue with it open whenever necessary in order to secure further political and organizational gains. In doing so, Hamas benefited from the policy pursued by the late President Yasser Arafat, which sought to contain the movement by integrating it into the political process and kept the doors of the Palestinian Authority open to Hamas participation without imposing particularly stringent political conditions.

At various stages, the Palestinian Authority refrained from categorically requiring an end to violence, even though the commitment to renounce violence was one of the fundamental commitments undertaken by the Palestinian side on which the process of international recognition of the Palestinian National Authority rested.

Meanwhile, armed operations continued, particularly suicide bombings, at moments of acute political sensitivity. At times, they occurred on the eve of Israeli elections or coincided with visits by international envoys, making them a factor capable of influencing Israeli politics and contributing to the rise of its more hard-line forces.

It was in this context that an idea began to emerge in Israeli political and media discourse: that operations carried out by Hamas offered hard-line Israeli leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu new political opportunities and helped reorder Israeli society’s priorities around security and violence rather than a political settlement.

Palestinian religious radicalism thus began, indirectly, to fuel Israeli radicalism, and vice versa. Through Hamas, religious fundamentalism ceased to be merely a religious outreach and ideological discourse and became embodied in a political and military organization capable of directly influencing the course of the conflict and pushing the Palestinian situation back into the cycle of armed violence.

The effects of this development were not confined to the Islamist movement. The climate of escalating violence also helped revive armed tendencies among some nationalist and leftist currents. Its influence extended to certain Fatah leadership cadres as well as broad segments of the movement’s supporters and organizations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The political and social environment that preceded the Second Intifada thus gradually took shape. The uprising quickly abandoned the model of the First Intifada, which had been based on popular disobedience and civil resistance, and shifted toward an open armed confrontation involving multiple Palestinian forces.

The Second Intifada was therefore no mere continuation of the first. It gradually evolved into a different model, both in its methods and its consequences. Palestinian armed violence became intertwined with Israeli military and settler violence, drawing both sides into a cycle of mutual escalation in which the Palestinian people were the greatest losers.

The Palestinians paid an enormous price in lives and property. At the same time, prospects for a political settlement receded, while forces on the Israeli side that regarded military power and settlement expansion as alternatives to a negotiated settlement grew stronger.

Herein lies the great paradox: the Oslo period began as an attempt to move from the logic of revolution to the logic of statehood. Yet within only a few years, it resulted in the reproduction of the logic of armed conflict, albeit in new forms and with new instruments.

The way was thus opened to an even harsher phase in Israeli-Palestinian history.