Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad

Alms and Arms

In a way, the world's Islamist movements are frank and honest. They wish, and they say that they wish, to install theocratic rule and promote the dominance of Muslim religious mores, ridding their world of any hint of that cluster of secular, democratic, and liberal values that Western civilization has progressively adopted over the past four or five centuries. No guile there.

But on another level, these movements, at least in their contemporary Middle Eastern efflorescence, are characterized by a multi-layered culture of deceit. I am not referring to the concrete operational deceit of a suicide bomber pretending to be a backpacking tourist or a devout Jew as he boards a train in Madrid or a bus in Jerusalem. I have in mind a larger and more systematic deception. These movements loudly trumpet the demand for the political "liberation" of Western-occupied lands -- Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. But in fact they are united in wishing the extirpation of all Western influence ("pollution," in their jargon) from the sacred Islamic lands, stretching from Pakistan to the Atlantic Ocean: all Western music and cinema and books, all Western companies, all Westerners -- in short, all modernity and all liberalism, all of what the West stands for.

And it goes further than that. Here and there you will hear imams, when preaching in Arabic, demanding the "return" of all former Islamic territories -- "Andalus" (Spain and Portugal), southern France, the Balkans as far north as Hungary and Austria -- for it is a basic tenet of Islam that any land conquered for the faith remains rightfully, in perpetuity, sacred Islamic land (Dar Al Islam). And beyond this realm lies the rest of the world, the "Land of War" (Dar Al Harb) -- territory that is fair game for conquest and must yet be conquered or converted to Islam. And this, ultimately, is what the Islamists -- who believe that theirs alone is the true path -- want: the whole world under the aegis of Allah. They see this world as in perpetual conflict between the forces of light and darkness, and believe that the forces of light will ultimately prevail. Osama bin Laden occasionally says as much. But most Islamist preachers merely hint at their apocalyptic agenda. First things first, they say.

For many or most Islamists, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are merely Stage One. A "clash of civilizations" is precisely how they perceive what is going on -- and not merely in the "occupied" countries or even in the immediate outer ring of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Morocco, but also in France's suburbs and in Leeds and in Madrid, and in Sarajevo, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, Nigeria, Sudan. Ask the lawyer who recently shot five "secularist" judges in Turkey; ask the assassin who a few years ago stabbed to death Theo van Gogh, a documentary movie producer in Amsterdam; ask the rioters in Nigeria who killed hundreds and burned down streets because of a beauty pageant. But in public, in the West, when they speak to journalists, the Islamists prefer to speak only of "Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine."

In this thicket of deceit, Islamists present Muslims always as victims, never as perpetrators. (When has there ever been a community with such a litany of grievances?) And they have read the West well, especially Western Europe, with its gnawing discontents, its guilty conscience over a colonial past, its burgeoning Muslim populations, its thirst for oil, its distaste for war, and, yes, its anti-Semitism. The Islamists, perhaps accurately, see the West as weak -- and they exploit every fissure and crevice, every greed and appetite, every self-flagellating impulse. And as they privately snicker in their back rooms, they are busy taking the West for a ride: they laugh as the West beats itself over every dead Iraqi (the vast majority of the killings in Iraq are committed by Muslims against fellow Muslims, not by Westerners), and over every impoverished Afghan or Palestinian child (impoverished because their societies and economies have failed to develop, largely for internal reasons, beyond opium production and living on U.N. handouts), and over every human rights abuse to which some Muslims are subject in Guantánamo and Britain and the United States (when these pale in comparison with those perpetrated in every hour of every day in Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Saudi Arabia).

Matthew Levitt's enlightening book focuses on one group of Islamists, the Palestinian Hamas (which is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement), and on two aspects of the mendacity that lies at its core: the uses that Hamas makes of its dawa -- propagation of the faith -- activities, including its social welfare programs (free kindergartens, food for the poor, free medical services), as both a cover for and a means of furthering its political and military designs, which are to install a theocratic regime in all of Palestine and to destroy Israel; and its foreign fund-raising activities, which are designed to deceive Westerners into believing that they are furthering humanitarian aims while in fact they are facilitating both the dawa and the terrorism.

Hamas was created in 1987-1988 out of the Islamic Association, which was the Gazan front organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist political party set up by Sheikh Hassan Al Banna in Egypt in 1928. The party, which assassinated the Egyptian prime minister Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi in December 1948 (and through one of its offshoots also murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981) was suppressed by successive Egyptian governments between 1948 and 1967, but enjoyed a revival during the first years of the Israeli occupation of the territories. Its leader in the Palestinian territories was Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a charismatic and wily quadriplegic refugee from Majdal (today Ashkelon) in southern Israel.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Islamic Association took control of various Muslim Trust (or waqf) institutions, including Gaza's Islamic University and dozens of mosques, and set up a private welfare system that included kindergartens, schools, and medical clinics. Yassin nominally steered the association clear of politics, concentrating instead on his social and economic base -- though in the early 1980s the association clandestinely began acquiring arms. The incipient military organization was crushed by the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, and for a while the association reverted to do-gooding.

But with the outbreak of the first intifada in December 1987, Hamas emerged like a butterfly from the cocoon of the Muslim Brotherhood. Several clandestine armed squads recruited earlier by Salah Shehadeh served as the core of Hamas's military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (named after a Muslim preacher and terrorist leader in Haifa killed by the British in 1935). During the first intifada, Hamas led many of the street demonstrations, and also engaged in small terrorist operations. By the time of the second intifada in 2000, Hamas was larger and better organized, and it led the way in the intensified suicide-bombing campaigns against large Israeli civilian targets, such as buses and restaurants. Shehadeh and Yassin (and several of their successors) were killed by the IDF and Shin Bet in the course of the second intifada, but the movement's popularity and lethality grew apace, until it won a plurality in the Palestinian elections in January 2006.

Levitt has written a timely and useful book, but before dealing with its central points, it is worth recounting a story that illustrates the nature of the people who are the object of his study. In January 2004, the first woman Hamas suicide bomber, Rim Salih al-Rayashi, a mother of two, blew herself up at the Erez checkpoint at the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. Afterward, as is their wont, Hamas broadcast a video "living will" in which she appeared, appropriately accoutered with Kalashnikov, Koranic slogans, a map of Palestine, and green articles of clothing. On the tape she declares that since second grade she has aspired to become a suicide bomber: "I have always wished ... that my body would be shrapnel that tear the sons of Zion and to knock the door of heaven with the skulls of the sons of Zion.... I have always told myself: be filled with every possible grudge for the Jews, the enemies of your religion, and make your blood a road leading to paradise."

As it turned out, however, the whole moving speech was a fake. It was "scripted and choreographed," Levitt proposes, by Rayashi's handlers. Israeli investigators found no evidence of her early radicalization, and that she had been, in Levitt's phrase, "coerced into carrying out the attack as a gesture of repentance for committing adultery against her husband, a Hamas member." Hamas probably hoped that the video would be of use in recruiting and radicalizing children (or women), two of the movement's target groups. Waste not, want not.

Levitt lays out before his reader -- a bit repetitiously -- the mechanics of the dawa and the uses to which it is put. To begin with, Hamas uses its social programs to garner popular support in its march toward power. Most people will acknowledge this as inoffensive: why shouldn't philanthrophy earn political rewards? But Hamas does not confine its philanthrophy to politics. It puts its dawa personnel and facilities also to terrorist uses. Hospitals, mosques, and kindergartens are employed to hide weapons and bombs; cars and houses are used to ferry and hide fugitives; funds for terrorism are laundered and channeled through charities and social organizations. And the workers employed in these dawa organizations sometimes wear two hats, the clandestine one being that of terrorist recruiters and organizers.

In this sense, Levitt is right to speak of Hamas as a single seamless organization whose parts are inseparable. Hamas's leaders speak this way, too. Mahmoud Zahar, the new Hamas government's foreign minister, has declared that "Hamas responds to all questions related to the life of the citizens not only in case of confrontation but also in the political, economic, social, health, and internal relations fields. This movement has proved that it is one organic unit. Mistaken is the one who thinks that the military wing acts outside the framework of Hamas or behaves recklessly." Contrary to Hamas's sympathizers, who relentlessly press to distinguish between the good and the bad in the Palestinians' new representatives, this is absolutely correct. As David Aufhauser, former general counsel to the U.S. Treasury Department, put it, it is "sophistry" to suggest a distinction between Hamas's charitable branches and its terrorist and military ones.

Levitt is deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis in the Treasury Department and a former FBI analyst, and by dint of his official connections he has been able to make lavish use of American intelligence reports. (He also appears to have been given access to a great deal of Israeli intelligence material, including transcripts of interrogations of would-be suicide bombers, and to Palestinian Authority intelligence reports, the latter probably indirectly, via the American administration or Israel.) Levitt describes the nuts and bolts of the unitary character of Hamas, the inseparability of its social works from its terrorist violence. He shows that Hamas-run or Hamas-aligned teaching institutions, from kindergarten to university, all teach virulent hatred of Israel and the Jews (and the West). They also provide the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades with their manpower. In 2001, in a graduation ceremony for forty-one Gaza kindergartens, a five-year-old girl dipped her hand in red paint to mimic admiringly "the bloodied hands Palestinians proudly displayed after the lynching of two Israeli [reservists] in Ramallah." A poll in Gaza at the time found that 73 percent of children aged nine to sixteen hoped to become martyrs. The charitable "Al Aqsa Intifada Martyrs Summer Camp" hosted by Hamas in 2003 combined recreation with "radical indoctrination," which included small-arms training and pictures and biographies of suicide martyrs lavishly dispersed on wall surfaces. Nablus's Al Najah University has been described by Hamas itself as "a greenhouse for martyrs."

But the dawa's terrorism-related activities are not limited to indoctrination and propaganda, though these have been crucial in raising a generation of Palestinian suicide-murderers. In his interrogation by Israeli security men in summer 2002, Mustafa Amjad, a doctor at al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, confessed to helping terrorists enter Israel. He was recruited by Hamas and worked for a hospital affiliated with a Hamas charity. In a Hamas kindergarten in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, Palestinian security men found hidden thirty-two kilograms of explosives, according to Palestinian security chief Jibril Rajoub. Two members of a Jenin charity organization board, Jamal Abd al-Shamal Abu Hija and Ibrahim Hassan Ali Jaber, helped to plan terrorist attacks and to transport terrorists into Israel, according to Israeli authorities cited by Levitt. Another man, Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah, the director of food supplies for Gaza refugees with UNRWA, confessed to using U.N. vehicles to transport arms and terrorists. The Hamas-linked Charity and Contribution Committee of Ramallah-al-Bireh regularly provided funds for the families of suicide bombers, while Abd al-Khaliq al Natsheh, who headed the Hebron Islamic Charitable Society, was jailed for recruiting terrorists. The Hamas-affiliated Jihad Mosque in Hebron had a soccer team that carried out five terrorist operations in the first half of 2003, before the scorers (shooters?) were apprehended.

A similar duplicity informs much of Hamas's overseas fund-raising, which is ostensibly earmarked for good works among a needy population but is in fact also a channel for funding Izz al-Din al-Qassam operations. Terrorist attacks, as Levitt notes, are often expensive. An M-16 A2 assault rifle costs $6,642; bullets for an AK-47 cost $2.20 apiece; a stolen vehicle costs $656 to $1,550. Salah Shehadeh once estimated that operations cost $3,500 to $50,000 each. The bombing at the Hebrew University cafeteria in July 2002 was said by a Jordanian Islamist to have cost $50,000. So a parallel "economic jihad" was necessary to provide the funds. Levitt provides many details of the charitable organizations that raised the money, mainly in the West, and the mechanisms through which it was moved to the occupied territories. He also details the contributions of and from the various Arab states (mainly Iraq, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia).

A great deal of this charity-bound money reached Hamas fighters' families (those of Fatah seem to have done rather poorly), thus helping to motivate young Palestinians from poor families to carry out attacks. The Ramallah-al-Bireh branch of the Islah Charitable Society, a Hamas front, in November and December 2000 paid out $4,990 to martyrs' families, $16,257 to prisoners, and $17,275 to prisoners' families, according to documents captured by Israel and cited by Levitt. Follow-up monthly stipends for the families are also standard practice, apparently. And there are special one-time dispensations on holidays.

Over the years hamas has abjured attacks on Western countries, saying that it limits its activities to "Palestine." It has not, in Levitt's phrase, "joined al-Qaeda's global jihad." Indeed, some of its leaders mildly condemned the attacks of September 11. But expressions by Hamas leaders of hatred of America and everything American are legion, and Levitt plausibly questions "whether Hamas's local focus will continue." When the space shuttle Columbia exploded in 2003, the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, briefly Yassin's successor, remarked that "it is reasonable to assume [it was] part of the divine punishment of America ... because of their massacres of Muslims, the destruction of their lives, the humiliation of their honor, and their desire to globalize corruption." He later added: "We say to the Muslim people of Iraq, we are with you in your struggle against American terror and destruction, we are with you in your war in defense of Islam.... Hamas stands by your side and blesses your Jihad."

Rantisi was later killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, but his sentiments are common among the Palestinian people's new leadership. If Hamas ever achieves its political goals, or perhaps even before then, its cadres may be expected to roam the earth and kill in the name of global jihad. Hamas's founding charter defines in Article Five the movement's "dimensions of time and space," its sphere of interest and operations, in this way: "Its ultimate goal is Islam.... Its specialdimension extends wherever on earth there are Muslims.... Thus it penetrates to the deepest reaches of the land and to the highest spheres of Heavens." Article Seven declares that "the Movement is ... universal."

So will Hamas change? Some in Israel and many in the West are hopeful, even optimistic, that it will. Power, they say, will breed responsibility, and pragmatism, and moderation; international pressure will bend Hamas. And Hamas leaders have been obliging, at least tactically: they speak occasionally of an extended truce, if Israel withdraws completely from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, releases all Palestinian prisoners, and recognizes and accepts Palestinian rights, including the "right of return." They sometimes say that they are willing to talk with Israelis, if it will help to solve specific Palestinian problems.

But on the big things, the strategic things, the ideological things, they have so far been unwilling to budge, and the movement's history gives no reason to believe that they will, at least if their leaders' statements are anything to go by. Mahmoud Zahar recently said that the movement will never change "a single word" of its guiding principles or its founding charter. In this regard, the Hamas leaders have been supremely honest and forthright. And so the charter, or Covenant of Hamas, the movement's constitution and platform, finalized in August 1988, is worth quoting, and remembering. Here are some excerpts:

In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate ... the People of the Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] ... most of them are evil-doers. ... Israel will ... remain ... until Islam eliminates it. ... [Hamas] strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.... [Salvation] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! ... [Hamas] believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf [sacred trust] throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it ... as long as Heaven and earth last. ... Hamas regards Nationalism (Wataniyya) as part and parcel of the religious faith. Nothing is loftier ... than waging Jihad against the enemy. ... [Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of [Hamas]. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion. ... There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. ... When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, Jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims. ... I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill. ...

In Article 17, under "The Role of Muslim Women," the charter states:

The enemies have understood that role [and] therefore they realize that if they can guide and educate [the Muslim women] in a way that would distance them from Islam, they would have won that war. Therefore, you can see them making consistent efforts [in that direction] by way of publicity and movies, curricula of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like.... These Zionist organizations control vast material resources.... Islam ... will wipe out those organizations which are the enemy of humanity and Islam.

Rotarians and Masons had better watch out.

Hamas's view of the Jews is clearly stated in Article 22:

The enemies have been scheming for a long time. ... They took advantage of key-elements in unfolding events, and accumulated a huge and influential material wealth which they put to the service of implementing their dream. This wealth [permitted them to] take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [They also used this] wealth to stir revolutions. ... They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. ... They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world. ... They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials. ... They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations. ... There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.

Article 28 relates more directly to Zionism: "Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions, and other spying associations ... act for the interests of Zionism and under its directions, strive to demolish societies, to destroy values, to wreck answerableness, to totter virtues and to wipe out Islam. It stands behind the diffusion of drugs and toxics of all kinds in order to facilitate its control and expansion." Article 32 states that "they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates ... Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there." As to Palestine, Article 34 instructs that "the greedy have coveted [it] more than once. ... Multitudes of Crusades descended upon it ... waving their Cross. ... [Then it was liberated] by Jihad under ... Saladin. ... This is the only way. ... Only iron can blunt iron, only the true faith of Islam can vanquish their false and falsified faith."

And yet, at the same time, the movement that champions the views just cited can proclaim, in Article 31, that "Hamas is a humane movement, which cares for human rights and is committed to the tolerance inherent in Islam. ... Under the shadow of Islam it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security." If this is not deceit, I don't know what is.

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