'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Who is Khaled Meshaal?

With all the current commotion about ex-president and Nobel Peace Laureate Jimmy Carter's plans to visit Hamas head Khaled Meshaal in Damascus,  most of the attention has been focused on Carter and his motivations for undertaking the meeting.  Little has been paid to Meshaal's motives for hosting it. Indeed, most of the western media shows little interest in the question of who Meshaal is, and what Hamas stands for, beyond simply parroting the fact that Hamas is a "terrorist organization" that has refused to meet Israel and the US's demands that it recognize Israel and foreswear violence before anyone should even start to talk to it.

That sounds, of course, extremely similar to the view expressed for many years by the Pretoria government (and Maggie Thatcher) about South Africa's ANC which, like most other national liberations movements over the years-- and Hamas today-- maintained parallel networks for military and for civilian, mass-organizing activities.  In Pretoria's case, it wasn't till Prime Minister P.W. Botha and then his successor Frederik De Klerk finally figured that it was a non-starter to demand complete the ANC's complete physical and ideological disarmament before talks were even started, that the historic negotiations with the ANC got off the ground...

Anyway, as steadfast JWN readers are aware, back in January I conducted a lengthy interview with Meshaal in Damascus.  Based on that interview and other research I've done on Hamas in recent years, I have an analytical article about Hamas that will be in the upcoming edition of Boston Review. But as finally edited, that piece ends up saying little about Meshaal.  So I thought I would take some out-takes from that article, add a little more material of my own, and write something here more specifically about him and his role in the movement...

Khaled Meshaal has been the head of Hamas's political bureau since 1995. He was born in 1956 in the village of Silwad, near Ramallah. When I interviewed him I found him thoughtful and articulate, but also defensive and generally inflexible.  The views he articulated were very different from what Israel and the United Stated government want him to say, though he did express an interest in concluding a speedy tahdi'eh (ceasefire) with Israel.  He also said he and Hamas could still consider the idea of negotiating a deeper hudna (armistice) with Israel-- a proposal that, just possibly, could be expanded to mesh with the "two-state" model for peacemaking currently being negotiated (without much success) between Israel and the Palestinian leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas.

In a short, informal discussion after the main interview, I raised the issue of the casualties that Hamas's campaign of rocketing southern Israel from Gaza has inflicted among Israel's civilian population. Meshaal denied that Hamas's own rocketeers target civilian communities.  (At a panel discussion held on Capitol Hill in February, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy gave some intriguing corroboration on this point, citing the judgment of senior Israeli security officials that Hamas generally tries to target its rockets onto military facilities inside Israel-- though it does not do nearly enough to stop its smaller allies in Gaza from targeting Israeli civilian communities.) 

For what it's worth, I reiterated to him a message that I am sure many human rights organizations have conveyed to him before, namely that like any state or non-state organization that undertakes armed operations for political reasons, Hamas is obliged under international law to exert strenuous efforts to avoid civilian casualties. He listened thoughtfully, talked about the many civilian casualties inflicted by Israel's operations, and expressed the hope that a reciprocal ceasefire could soon be concluded.

Meshaal  has generally been best known in the west for an incident that occurred in 1997 when Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu sent a two-man Mossad squad to Amman, Jordan, to kill him.  The agents used a slow-acting lethal chemical, believed to be Fentanyl, which they injected into his left ear in a public street.  But they were clumsy and were arrested shortly after delivering the injection.  Over the hours that followed, Meshaal’s blood-oxygen level plummeted, while King Hussein rushed to negotiate a deal whereby Netanyahu sent over the antidote to the chemical.  The antidote worked.  Then, to win his agents’ release from Jordanian prisons, Netanyahu had to release from Israeli prisons more than 40 Palestinian prisoners including Hamas’s historic founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who had served nine years of a 15-year term.  (In 2004 the IDF killed the paraplegic Yassin in Gaza with a Hellfire missile.)

But who is Khaled Meshaal?  After Israel invaded the West Bank in 1967, he left his home village with other family members, joining the stream of West Bankers who crossed rickety bridges into Jordan, fearful of the brutality that they expected from their new Israeli occupiers.  His father, like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, was already working in Kuwait and after some time in Jordan the teenage Khaled joined him there.  He attended Kuwait’s prestigious Abdullah al-Salim Secondary School, where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  Later, he studied physics at Kuwait University, then worked as a teacher in Kuwait—as many of Fateh’s founding members had done in earlier decades.

Inside Palestine, Yassin and other long-time MB members spent the first 20 years of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, focusing their energies on building networks of Islamist religious, social, and educational institutions in the two Israeli-occupied territories.  It was only after the first intifada erupted in 1987 that the MB founded an overtly political organization, the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), usually known  as 'Hamas', which also means 'Zeal'.  Since the early 1980s the Palestinian MB's parent body, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, had kept a commitment to work only nonviolently within Egypt's political system.  But Hamas rapidly developed its own armed wing, and from 1987 worked through parallel militia-based and nonviolent, community-based structures in the occupied territories.

The Israelis hit back hard, launching successive broad waves of arrests against Hamas's operatives in the occupied territories.  In 1989 the movement decided that, given the extreme vulnerability of its networks inside Palestine, it should move its overall headquarters operation elsewhere.  For a number of years its leadership structure was fairly widely distributed as it searched for a stable base for operations, preferably close to the occupied territories.  In 1990,when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, most of Kuwait’s large Palestinian community, including Meshaal, fled to Jordan.  He took over Hamas’s Jordan bureau.  In 1993, Hamas finally reached a formal agreement with Jordan to host its leadership operation there.  At that point, Meshaal was the deputy to political bureau head Musa Abu Marzuq.  Two years later, Abu Marzuq was arrested in New York after making the error of judging he could safely relocate to the United States. Meshaal took over as head of the political bureau at that point.

Relations with Jordan continued to be stormy.  Finally, at the end of 1999, Meshaal and the rest of the Hamas leadership were all kicked out of the country. After a short sojourn as "guests" of the Emir of Qatar, they concluded a new headquarters agreement with Syria.  Meshaal has lived there ever since, though he has traveled to numerous countries in and far beyond the Arab world on official business...

(One excellent source on Meshaal and the broader history of Hamas that I have drawn on here is Azzam Tamimi's recent book: Hamas: A History from Within. Hamas's own English-language website is here. You can access some of my earlier writings on Hamas through this portal.)