Here is my translation of the interview that Hayat’s Ghassan Charbel recently conducted with Hamas secretary-general Khaled Mashaal. (And here is the link to the Arabic original.)
Mashaal’s word is the definitive word at this point, regarding the movement’s political position.
What he says here accords closely with the reported Hamas position paper that I wrote about (and linked to) here, on January 19.
Inb particular, in the interview Mashaal talks about the importance of “realizing true [Palestinian] sovereignty over the areas from which the [Israeli] occupation withdraws” — without spelling out whether or not he means the occupation of 1967.
On the crucial issue of a truce, he is reported as saying:
- There is talk about a calming, but about a conditional calming until the time that the occupation becomes committed to defined terms, the most important of which are the ending of all forms of aggression and attack and assassinations and killing, and the release of all the Palestinian prisoners. And in the event that the enemy should comply with these terms we in Hamas and also the other forces of the resistance, in general terms, we would be ready to deal positively with the issue of calming or a provisional truce.
I find another aspect of what he says also extremely interesting. This is the way he talks about Hamas’s political relations with the PLO.
People who don’t know much about Palestinian history probably need to understand that there’s a huge depth of animosity between Hamas and the PLO that goes back a long way, and was certainly exacerbated greatly by many actions that Yasser Arafat took.
So long as Arafat was alive, he didn’t want Hamas included anywhere at all in Palestinian decisionmaking structures– and they hated and distrusted him him greatly, in return. Back in 2003, Abu Mazen did try to bring them into an expanded leadership structure during his short-lived term as PM, and won their preliminary agreement to the move. But Arafat nixed it totally, which was a good part of the reason that Abu Mazen resigned. (Read some reflections on what happened then in this piece I published in BR last spring.)
But then, Arafat died….
Now, Abu Mazen has a much better shot than he did 18 months ago at bringing Hamas into the leadership. I believe they trust him much more than they ever did Arafat.
Two aspects of what Mashaal says in this regard are particularly interesting:
- Firstly, he says that Hamas (along with the other ‘factions of the resistance’– i.e., the non-PLO factions) is now prepared to enter the PLO itself, albeit a PLO “restructured” along the lines he advocates.
Secondly, he says that what is really needed is a “Higher Source of Authority” (marji’iyeh ulia)for the Palestinian people– but that a restructured PLO could play that role.
What is particularly significant about those utterances? Well, regarding being prepared to come in under the PLO umbrella for the first time, this looks like a very pragmatic move. The PLO as such enjoys wide legitimacy and acceptability from regimes in the Arab and Islamic worlds and elsewhere. Many of those regimes have been very constrained by strong US pressure from having any open dealings with Hamas– which the US has designated as a “foreign terrorist organization”.
Of course, the US pressures did not stop the Egyptians from inviting Mashaal to Cairo on at least one earlier occasion when they wanted his help in putting in place a ceasefire in Gaza. (As referred to in the latest interview.) But in general, it’s been hard for Hamas to operate securely and efficiently just about everywhere, under its own name. Mashaal himself was the target of an Israeli CW attack in Jordan a few years back; and last fall a Hamas second-ranker was assassinated by a car-bomb in Syria.
Coming in under the PLO umbrella would, I think, give Hamas a new range of places where they could operate, without having to go through the whole humiliating and time-consuming process of trying to do something open about rolling back the US government’s worldwide ban.
And then, the question of the “Higher Source of Authority”. Well, it does have a very Shi-ite ring to it, as a term, doesn’t it? I think that’s interesting.
For many, many years the PLO’s main claim (contested by Hamas) was that it was the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people. Now, Hamas proposes giving the PLO a different–and notably more religious-sounding– kind of self-definition.
All these are issues of internal Palestinian politics that will be fascinating to watch over the weeks and months ahead.
But the first order of business is the truce. Will the Israelis join (and therefore consolidate) it, or not?
I have this sneaky suspicion that, having been able to run rings around Yasser Arafat since 1993– mainly, by playing the old man’s seemingly boundless personal vanity– the Israelis have finally come up against some Palestinian leaders who are astute, self-disciplined, well organized, and have a seemingly impressive command of the world of politics.
The months ahead should be very interesting ones. Even, perhaps, a period in which we could some real progress in– or at least, a consrtuctive reframing of– the peace negotiations.