'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

The Hamas perspective

Hamas Chief Whip Mahmoud Ramahi said yesterday that the party would be prepared to have the Palestinians' 'foreign affairs' conducted by the (Fateh-dominated) PLO, rather than insisting that it be the responsibility of the new Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

That was the main highlight of an interview I conducted in Ramullah yesterday with Dr. Ramahi, an Italian-trained anesthesiologist who is the "party whip" for Hamas's new 74-person bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Today, I see that the WaPo's is carrying the transcript of a phone interview that Lally Weymouth conducted with Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh. She doesn't say which day she conducted it.

Just about everything that Haniyeh said to Weymouth tracks exactly with what Ramahi said to me. (We had asked some of the same questions, some different. My interview was, I think, broader.) But these guys certainly know how to stay on message!

Anyway, I thought I'd write a post here that summarizes what Ramahi said to me and gives some additional atmospherics about the situation in and around the PLC's building in Ramallah.

I hadn't previously been to this building of the PLC, which is on a nice ridge-top site close to the bustling heart of Ramullah. Security going in was ways, ways laxer than I'd expected. Actually, I'd have to say just about non-existent: there was only one bored-looking guy sitting at a desk on the far side of the foyer who looked a bit surprised when I walked in and, instead of heading straight to the stairs or elevator, headed over to him to ask where the Hamas bloc had its offices. "Third floor," he said laconically and went back to picking his finger-nails.

Okay.

I took the stairs. The second floor landing had a huge photo of Yasser Arafat. I guess that's where the Fateh bloc has its offices?

On the third floor landing, there were no visible decorations. I walked along to a secretary's office and asked first of all for the new PLC speaker, Aziz Dweik. There were three female administrative people there. Two wore hijab scarves that completely covered their hair, the third wore no scarf. I sat and waited. (A good journalistic skill, wherever you are.) Fateh bloc head Azzam Ahmed popped his head in at one point and was hustled in to a meeting with Dweik. That seemed to keep Dweik busy, so after a bunch of time one of the male assistants who came in and out said I could talk to Ramahi instead. Fine by me.

Dr. Ramahi was polite and welcoming. I was kind of ready-- after many long experiences in Lebanon, Iran, etc-- not to shake his hand but to do the old hand-over-the-heart thing. But he walked out from behind his desk with his hand extended for a handshake. (And for what it's worth, he has no beard.) We started a conversation, which was almost immediately interrupted... So we made an appointment to meet later on in the afternoon.

When we finally did sit down together, we spoke for about half an hour. He answered all my questions in nearly impeccable English.

My first question-- also, I see, Lally Weymouth's!-- was whether Hamas had been surprised by the extent of its victory in the January 25 election.

He said,

We certainly expected to beat Fateh, and some internal polls showed us that we'd get 50% of the seats. Getting 60% was a surprise!

(Qais Abdel-Karim (Abu Leila), who is one of the two MPs from the leftist "Badil" bloc, told me that what he and others from the small blocs saw was that in the last couple of days of the campaign, Fateh tried to mount a big mobilization amongst its base along the theme of "not losing power" to Hamas. "But for a lot of unaffiliated or loosely affiliated voters, when they saw that mobilization, they stampeded the other way-- towards Hamas," he said. "All the smaller 'third party' lists lost around 50% of our expected voters in those last two days-- and most of them went to Hamas. Hamas jumped from 30% to 44%. People did that because they wanted a definitive change.")

Back to Ramahi.

He told me that Hamas had started a dialogue with all other parliamentary factions with a view to establishing a government of national unity.

Islamic Jihad refused to join this government-- but they said they wouldn't be an obstacle to our forming it. All the others are still in dialogue with us.

Our view is that if we want a government of national unity, it should be based on a common program. So we've started our discussions on the basis of the content of that program-- not on 'who gets which ministry'.

It's going positively. We're hopeful that reaching a compromise is possible.

I asked whether information I'd heard that Hamas might be prepared to let President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) handle foreign affairs was correct.

He replied,

When the Oslo Accords were concluded, they originally agreed that the Palestinian Authority would not handle foreign affairs. Remember that the Oslo Accords were concluded between Israel and the PLO. So the arrangement at that point was that the PLO would continue to handle negotiation affairs and the PA would handle only domestic affairs. But then Fateh reversed that.

We're suggesting a return to the original idea. And that fits in with an initiative from [the PLO's foreign-affairs chief] Farouq Qaddoumi.

Currently, there is a difference inside the PLO on this point. But we believe there is agreement on this proposal between Qaddoumi, Abu Mazen, Azzam Ahmed, and Abbas Zaki-- all of whom want Fateh to participate in our national unity government, whereas Mohamed Dahlan, Saeb Erakat, and Jibril Rajoub want to stay out of the government.

I asked him about the very important portfolio of security affairs. How would these be handled under the new government?

The Palestinian law says there are two parts of our security apparatus. Some bodies report to the president, like the intelligence agency and the Presidential Security. Others like the police and the Preventive Security (amn wiqa'i) should be under the Ministry of the Interior.

For our internal security problems, we certainly need to reach a strong agreement. Right now there are so many separate little bodies, some of which I'm sorry to say seem to act more like mafias.

How about the proposal to fold Hamas's own militia/resistance forces, the Izzeddine Qassam Brigades, into the government's securituy forces?

No. The Qassam Brigades should not be part of the authority's police forces, because the Qassam Brigades need to continue fighting the occupation.

The demand to dismantle the Qassam Brigades is not acceptable. International law gives us the right to fight occupation.

I asked about the tahdi'eh (truce) with Israel that Hamas has stuck to-- on an unreciprocated basis, and with one exception-- since March of last year.

Until now, we have respected the tahdi'eh. Abu Mazen has asked for internal dialogue on continuing it. So we expect there would be a joint decision on this after we have formed the government.

As we spoke-- it was Saturday afternoon-- the Palestinian areas were coming to the end of a five-day period in which the Israeli forces had killed some eight to ten Palestinians, some armed, some not armed. Ramahi warned, "If the Israelis continue their present aggressions we'll find it hard to restrain some of our youngsters. We are certainly worried that the Israelis might launch a further escalation as their election campaign progresses."

I asked how he would characterize Hamas's vision of the longterm relationship between Israel and Palestine. He replied,

We have said clearly that Israel is a state that exists and is recognized by many countries in the world. But the side that needs recognition is Palestine! And the Israelis should recognize our right to have our state in all the land occupied in 1967. After that it should be easy to reach agreement.

They ask us to recognize Israel without telling us what borders they're talking about! First, let us discuss borders, and then we will discuss recognition.

What did Hamas plan to do about its naming on the terrorism lists maintained by thre US and the EU?

He almost shrugged.

The US and EU need to resolve their own problem there. It's not our problem.

We have said we're against terrorism.

The Israeis didn't accept to stop killing civilians. For one year we haven't done any suicide bombings-- but the Israelis have continued to kill our civilians.

You rememeber when they assassinated Saleh Shehadeh? They said afterwards that they had known there were 40 civilians in that house-- but they went ahead with dropping that big bomb, anyway.

... Yes, we'd like to have a reciprocal agreement to save the lives of all civilians.

You know that of the 3,500 Palestinians killed in the last intifada, more than 2,000 were civilians? Yet the Israelis lost only 1,000 people in all-- between soldiers and civilians.

Right now, regarding our relations with the US and Europe, Hamas and the other Islamic groups here say they are ready to sit down with them to agree on the future. But they refuse to sit with with us.

But they should know: if they make us fail, they won't find anyone else at all to talk with. We are the moderates in the Islamic movement. We condemned the Qaeda actions in the US and London and Madrid. We could have acted outside the area of Palestine, but we never did. We're the only group here that never did kidnappings or other undisciplined attacks like that.

Finally, I asked about Hamas's social agenda. (Ramullah is a historically Christian city and has numerous restaurants and stores that sell alcoholic beverages. There-- and also, in its Muslim 'parent-city', al-Bireh-- around half of the women seen in public don't wear head-coverings. Some of my friends there had made rueful jokes about the imminent arrival of new Islamic norms. But Ramahi tried to dispel any fears of that happening... )

He said,

We aren't planning to make an Islamic state. We aren't planning to impose anything like that on our people. We'll make our state first, and then see what people want. We want to convince people of the Islamic way, not impose it.

Some people had expressed particular concern about what Hamas might do with the education system that the PA has set up, quite successfully, over the past decade. Did Hamas have any particular plans for that?

We don't want to change it, basically, but we do need to have more in it about Palestinian history. Under the Oslo Accords, they cut that part of the education system rather short. We need to have a full history that also includes the history of the Palestinians inside Israel.

Well, there was a lot crammed in there, I thought.

Regarding the proposal to have foreign affairs handled "by the PLO" I obviously want to find out a lot more about that. Basically, Fateh under Arafat took control of foreign affairs away from the PLO because the PLO's pan-Palestinian Executive Committee was far more dubious of the value of the Oslo Accords than Arafat, Abu Mazen, and Co. ever were. Indeed, the PLO's longtime (almost forever!) "foreign minister", Farouq Qaddoumi, has always been a staunch opponent of Oslo. So I'm not sure whether and how the proposal that Ramahi spoke of might fly. I was intrigued to hear him say that within Fateh, Qaddoumi and Abu Mazen now appear to be on the same side of an issue, against Rajoub, Erakat, and Dahlan. Abu Mazen has apparently traveled outside the country today. Who knows whether he might be canvassing this proposal with PLO people on the "outside".

Anyway, Ramahi, like all the dozen or so Hamas people whom I've interviewed in the past, seemed like a very serious, sober, and determined individual. I noted that he used the terms "Israel" and "suicide bombings" quite openly and easily. (As opposed to, for example, "Zionist entity" and "martyrdom operations", respectively.) And he left open the distinct possibility that once Israel has withdrawn to the pre-1967 borders Hamas might consider the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be finished. (He notably did not refer to the post-withdrawal phase as being one of prolonged hudna, ceasefire, as many other Hamas leaders do.)

I have a bunch more material about Hamas-- from many different perspectives-- that I've been gathering and shall put together into blog posts and other pieces in the days ahead. But I don't have time to do that right now. I'm off to have dinner here in Jerusalem with an old Israeli leftist called Moshe Ma'oz, who's also an expert on Syria.