Mashaal presses Arafat for 'calm' and 'wisdom'
Ouch. This must have been very painful for the embattled Arafat: to have Hamas's Damascus-based head Khaled Mashaal urging him to restore calm and act wisely.
Th AP's Muhammed Daraghmeh has a sort of catch-all piece out of Ramallah this evening listing all kinds of people and institutions--including the elected Palestinian legislature-- that are urging Arafat to accept Abu Alaa's resignation. And then halfway down, we have this:
- The Syria-based head of the Hamas militant movement, Khaled Mashaal, telephoned Arafat Wednesday to urge him to restore calm.
Mashaal, whose organization has a wide following in Gaza, called for "a wise leadership handling to get out of this turmoil and for resorting to dialogue'" to resolve Palestinian differences, said a Hamas statement.
Hamas has sat quietly for the past week while factions of Arafat's Fatah movement and his security forces sank deeper into violent rivalry.
As I noted in this article in the April-May Boston Review, Hamas is the best organized and one of the best-respected and most popular political organizations in the Gaza Strip.
Last year, when Abu Mazen was PM, he urged Arafat to bring Hamas into the government as a follow-on to its agreement to participate in the ceasefire against Israel. Arafat refused. I think most of all he just hates that the Hamas people don't kowtow to him as most of the people in his own entourage do. Plus, they are generally well-respected for not being corrupt, and raise trenchant criticisms of the corruption in his entourage. And compared with his lot--the wildly chaotic, many-faceted Fateh-- they are a model of solid, serious, effective internal organization. Even with many of their leaders wiped out by Israel's fiendish campaign of assassinations.
Well, here we are again: one year and many hundred Palestinian (and Israeli) casualties later.
I read the report about Mashaal's call to YA as signifying both (a) that he's making an overture that could well signal a willingness to open coalition talks, and (b) that he's doing so from a position of apparent political self-confidence and strength. There's something rather elder-statesman-ly, perhaps even fatherlike and/or patronizing, about what he is reported to have said to Arafat.
That's what must have hurt.
Oh, did I mention that Hamas is on the U.S. government's list of Terrorist Organizations?