Free, Yassin stands to build Hamas’s credibility as a political force. Yasir Arafat already has been hurt by his inability to push forward the peace process, and his Palestinian Authority government is widely perceived as corrupt. ““He [Yassin] is going to unify Hamas,’’ proclaims Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. In the past two weeks, Arafat has been forced to honor his rival; he twice visited Yassin, and as a good-will gesture released another elderly Hamas activist from Palestinian-controlled prison.
No sooner was he out of jail than Yassin started playing politics. He offered Netanyahu a ceasefire in return for a total Israeli withdrawal from the territories and the release of all Palestinian prisoners–evidently without consulting Arafat. Israel won’t consider such a deal. But it played well in Gaza, where Netanyahu’s punitive border closings and repeated humbling of Arafat has made the Palestinian leader seem without leverage.
Just one month ago, Hamas was on the run after two suicide bombings killed 21 Israelis in Jerusalem. Under intense Israeli and U.S. pressure, Arafat’s Palestinian police rounded up hundreds of Hamas figures and shut down many of the orphanages, sports clubs and other welfare organizations loosely affiliated with Hamas–which Israel covertly supported in the 1980s as a counterweight to Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Last week Yassin was demanding that Arafat reverse the ““unjust’’ closing of Hamas institutions. He is also likely to insist that Arafat release some 350 Hamas activists held in Palestinian jails.
Some observers read moderation in Yassin’s initial comments. His ceasefire proposal seemed to acknowledge at least Israel’s pre-1967 borders. And he has checked extremism before. In July 1995 Yassin is said to have instructed Hamas leaders from his jail cell to suspend attacks until further notice. The undeclared ceasefire held until Netanyahu’s predecessor, Shimon Peres, approved the assassination of the movement’s top bomb builder, Yehya Ayyash, last year.
But the optimism was quickly dispelled when Yassin reaffirmed his fervent wish that the Jewish state be eliminated altogether. At Friday prayers, he promised to ““liberate our land and establish our Muslim Palestinian state.’’ ““What Yassin had been saying had elements of reasonableness that had been missing before,’’ says Netanyahu adviser David Bar-Illan. ““But then he fell back to the old slogans.''
So far, Hamas does not seriously threaten Arafat’s power base. Though Hamas officials claim a following of between 30 and 40 percent of Palestinians, recent polls have put the support at more like 10 to 15 percent. To try to shore up Arafat’s position, Netanyahu last week met with the Palestinian Authority leader for the first time in nine months and promised to release $50 million in long-withheld tax revenues.
But as the peace process languishes, Hamas gains–with help from some unlikely quarters. One recent poll by the Center for Palestinian Research Studies found that 36 percent of all Palestinians now support the recent rash of suicide bombings. And several known Hamas activists have beaten Arafat allies in recent trade-union elections. ““Corruption [in the Palestinian Authority] gave credibility to Hamas,’’ says Ismail Abu Shanab, a U.S.-educated civil engineer who was recently elected head of the 3,000-member engineering union in Gaza. So does growing support from Jordan’s King Hussein, who engineered the prisoner swap, flew the sheik home to Gaza and relayed a Hamas ceasefire offer directly to the Israelis without consulting Arafat. As a longtime opponent of the Oslo peace accords, Yassin stands to narrow the gap with Arafat if Netanyahu continues to resist Palestinian demands that he relinquish Israeli control over large stretches of the West Bank. And in that case, more and more young and embittered Palestinians will be inspired by the likes of Yehya Ayyash and the other so-called martyrs of Hamas.
