Arab News Blog

Hamas demolishes dozens of homes in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, saying they were built on government land.
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AP – Hamas police wielding clubs beat and pushed residents out of dozens of homes in the southern Gaza town of Rafah on Sunday before knocking the buildings down with bulldozers, residents said.
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UPDATE 1: Egyptian security vessel collides with Palestinian boat off southern Gaza at dawn, witness says.
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AFP – Israeli aircraft hit a disused airport in southern Gaza on Friday night, injuring 11 people, two of them seriously, Palestinian medical officials and witnesses said.

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AFP – Israeli warplanes bombed smuggling tunnels in southern Gaza overnight after a rocket was fired from the Hamas-run territory, but neither attack caused injuries, officials and medics said on Thursday.

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Scott Sanford of Jihadica has helpfully collected and summarized some of the early reactions from salafi extremists to last Friday’s confrontation between Hamas and the salafist Jund Ansar Allah group in southern Gaza.

By the application of vastly superior force, Hamas won that battle, though at some cost. The JAA’s leader and several of its fighters were killed and the movement has now, presumably been effectively suppressed.

One of the salafist strategists Sanford cites is Akram al-Hijazi, a Palestinian who yesterday launched this tirade against the Hamas leadership on Al-Fallujah Islamic Forums yesterday.

Three days ago, Hijazi posted this tirade against Hamas on the forum.

I haven’t had time to read these texts in detail. But Sanford tells us that Hijazi argues that the present Hamas leadership has abandoned the “true path” that was established by Hamas founder Skeikh Ahmed Yassin and the movement’s second leader in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi.

In this way, Hijazi is making a play for the sympathies of Hamas rank-and-filers who may be disgruntled with the diplomatic-political tack taken by the current leadership.

Of course, Yassin was the originator of the idea that it would be a good idea to have a “hudna” (truce) of some possibly lengthy period with Israel, during which the Palestinians could run their own government in the post-liberation territories of the West Bank (including E. Jerusalem) and Gaza. That is still the version of the “two-state solution” advocated by the Hamas leadership.

Yassin also cooperated with Israel in several ways during his life. Much more than Meshaal and the rest of the current leadership ever have! So the idea that salafists somehow represent the “true path” of Yassin does not have a lot of prima facie credibility…

However, the potential attractiveness of the salafists to Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere– who see themselves confined by Israel in the open-air prisons that are what Gaza and the West Bank have become, and who see their just claims for liberation, national independence, and the settlement of decades-old refugee claims all just endlessly denied, derided, and shunted aside as Israel’s colonization of the West Bank continues apace– cannot for a moment be denied.

Nehemiah Strasler had a good piece in Haaretz on this topic on Tuesday.

He wrote,

During the entire period of our rule in the territories, we have destroyed the existing leadership, which led to the rise of more extreme leaders. We destroyed the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat, who had agreed to a two-state solution and was capable of “delivering the goods.” And we brought about Hamas’ seizure of the Gaza Strip. Now we are cultivating the third stage: Al-Qaida.

That’s because on our side people don’t want to understand that when the oppression increases and there is nothing to lose, the adversary doesn’t surrender and grovel. Just the opposite. He becomes more radical. Hate wins out and the desire for revenge becomes the only hope. So when poverty in Gaza increases and unemployment is on the rise, Al-Qaida will take control. It will happen either in a coup or through elections, and we will long for that terrible Hamas.

—

By the way, just a small geographic note. I know there’s a Fallujah in Iraq, and there’s also a Fallujah in southern Palestine (maybe now in Israel?), which was one of the limits that the Egyptian army reached in 1948. Was one of them named after the other? Does anyone know?

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At noon prayers yesterday in a mosque in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah, a salafist (Islamist extremist) preacher called Abdul-Latif Musa made a fiery appearance surrounded by heavily armed guards– and the Hamas police in the city cracked down hard on this show of defiance.

A lengthy gun-battle ensued, in which, according to Ehab Al-Ghussain, the spokesman of the PA interior ministry in the Gaza Strip, Musa, nine of his supporters, six Palestinian police officers, and six civilians were killed.

Some other reports said two of the dead were young girls– also, that around 120 people were injured in these firefights. Another report said that among those killed in the fighting was Mohammed al-Shamali, the Hamas military chief for southern Gaza,

Musa was the head of a small faction, called Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the partisans of God), which was generally affiliated with Al-Qaeda and first surfaced in Gaza in mid-2008. JAA militants were reported as having acted for some months as a tough ‘morality police’ at various places in the Strip, threatening to close internet cafes and other public places and terrorizing Gazans sitting in mixed groups on the beach, etc.

In June, they launched a fairly large-scale– but unsuccessful–attack against the Israeli crossing point at Nahal Oz. In it they used suicide bombers riding horses and trucks.

In today’s JAA action, Musa and his armed followers went into the mosque in Rafah and announced the establishment of an “Islamic emirate (princedom)” in Gaza, under his control.

This open challenge to the authority of the elected Hamas government in the Strip made a Hamas crackdown inevitable. In his announcement Ghussain said that Interior Ministry officials and local preachers and Ulamas had previously “tried to convince the militants to return to the straight way, and to lay down their arms but to no avail.”

Ghussain also said that Musa “had good relationship and coordination with the PA security forces in Ramallah city [and accused] those forces of attempting to destabilize peace and order in the besieged Strip after they failed to enter the tiny Strip.”

For their part, the newly elected Central Committee of Fateh blamed Hamas for having allowed all kinds of foreign fighters to enter into the Gaza Strip.

There has been no suggestion, however, that Musa himself is not Palestinian, and no evidence that any of his followers are (were) non-Palestinian, apart from one of his aides, known as Abu Abdullah al-Suri, said to be a Palestinian from Syria.

The tensions between on the one hand Hamas and on the other Al-Qaeda and its affiliates go back a long way. Al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman Zawahiri has frequently criticized Hamas for being far too moderate. For their part, Hamas’s leaders have always been at great pains to differentiate themselves from Al-Qaeda.

Indeed, the content of Hamas’s programs is very different from Qaeda’s. Hamas has numerous very experienced social-service arms that have provided much-needed services to Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere for many years now. It actively supports the inclusion of women in public life (and has four elected women MPs.) Oh yes, it also participates in elections at both the local and national levels, and has expressed a clear desire to be included in the US-led peace diplomacy in the region.

Also, Hamas has shown its ready and willing on numerous occasions to abide by a ceasefire with Israel, sometimes on a unilateral basis, sometimes on an indirectly negotiated reciprocal basis, and sometimes– as since last January– on the basis of an exchange of un-negotiated ceasefires with Israel.

The JAA’s demonstrated willingness to break that ceasefire and thus risk bringing the wrath of Israel’s military once again upon all of Gaza must have been a special concern for the Hamas leaders.

How should westerners think about an organization like Hamas that cracks down, with apparent success and at considerable cost to itself, on an armed salafist organization like the AAJ?

Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation observed today that, “Anywhere else but in the Israel-Palestine context Hamas would be the US ally getting training, equipment, and covert ops help, and Washington would mount a PR campaign to explain why Hamas is the moderate alternative fighting Al-Qaeda.”

He pointed, by way of example, to Sec. Clinton’s recent meeting in Nairobi with Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. The US military waged a tough war against the Islamic Courts Union, which Sheik Ahmed heads– until it became clear that the ICU was the only force in Somalia capable of standing up against the extreme-Islamist Al Shabaab movement.

But Palestine is different. There, the dictates of US politics have determined– until now– that the US government has to continue to quarantine, exclude, and actively oppose Hamas.

The JAA’s emergence in Gaza over recent months is not really a surprise. Hamas was indeed weakened to a noticeable extent by the assault Israel launched against it– and the whole of gaza– last winter. Israel inflicted some non-trivial damage on the police formations with which Hamas has tried to police its side of the border and of the ceasefire, though now, seven months later, they have had some time to rebuild.

Many westerners and Israelis have expressed the hope in the past that if only Hamas could be weakened, then the forces of the US-backed Fateh movement would get stronger. That has always been a dubious proposition. The well-informed International Crisis Group has warned for some time (e.g. in this March 2008 report) that if Hamas gets weakened in the Gaza Strip, then the forces that take up the slack are far more likely to be Islamist groups that are far more extreme than Hamas, rather than Fateh.

That report also noted that after Hamas’s expulsion of Fateh’s armed forces from the Strip the preceding June, Hamas was able to restore public security to those areas of the Strip that, while Fateh was there, were riddled with various forms of crime, inter-clan feuding, and other violence.

Over the past 4-5 years Hamas has made some significant moves towards a political/diplomatic stance of considerably more flexibility than hitherto. Including, it participated in– and succeeded in– the PA’s parliamentary elections of 2006.

But over that same period, Hamas’s most significant political base, in Gaza, has been subjected to repeated hardships, attacks, and gross indignities. So from the sociological/psychological viewpoint, too, it is not surprising that some Gazans are tempted to start criticizing the Hamas leaders from the extremist viewpoint.

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Hamas says that it has restored order in southern Gaza after a bloody crackdown on a radical Islamist group.
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