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.)