Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [245]
In its rivalry with the PLO, Hamas began to dictate the pace of events in the Intifada, by deliberately establishing its own cycle of demonstrations, shop closures and strikes like an alternative calendar to that of the secular nationalists. It issued a charter, which called the destruction of Israel a religious duty. The charter was an odd document, managing as it did to call the Jews Nazis while citing the forged ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ as proof of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination from the French Revolution onwards. Even the Rotary Club gets a discredit. To call the charter ahistorical would be to understate the ways in which it collapsed time into an eternal struggle between Muslims, Jews and ‘Crusaders’ from the West.40 Hamas’s public attitude towards terrorism was also changing, although its armed wing, and secret department for killing Arab collaborators, actually predated the founding of the political movement. In July 1988 it lauded a young Gazan who knifed two prison guards while visiting a jailed relative. The organisation had for several years had a small military wing of ‘holy fighters of Palestine’ who, it now transpired, were planning terrorist attacks on Israel.
That summer, the Israelis struck first at Islamic Jihad by getting the US to force king Hussein to eject the three Fatah chieftains who planned Islamic Jihad’s operations. All three were killed by a mystery Mossad car bomb shortly after reaching their sanctuary in Cyprus. Next, Israel detained hundreds of Hamas activists, confining them in Khediot detention camp, where they continued to direct operations by passing and receiving messages through kisses from their families. After initially sparing sheikh Yassin, the Israelis finally detained him too. Despite his disabilities, he and one of his younger sons seem to have been treated in a brutal manner unworthy of a quadriplegic, including being slapped in the face and bashed on the head with a metal tray. Repression only increased the domestic and international appeal of Hamas. Its candidates began to win elections on Palestinian professional bodies, while in 1990 Kuwait alone donated US$60 million to Hamas as opposed to US$27 million to the PLO. The PLO’s attempts to neutralise Hamas by co-opting it on to the umbrella Palestinian National Council, as it had done with the PFLP and the Communists, failed when Hamas demanded half the Council seats. The PLO’s acceptance of Israel and public renunciation of terrorism through the Oslo Accords deepened the rift between implacable Islamists and Arafat’s more diplomatically focused Fatah, however fake Arafat’s subscription to non-violence proved.
The human cost of the first Intifada was considerable. By the summer of 1990, over six hundred Palestinians had been killed by the IDF, including seventy-six children under fourteen, with a further twelve thousand people injured. Ten thousand Palestinians were held in detention camps and prisons, a shared experience that served to radicalise even further those affected. On the Israeli side, eighteen people had been killed, including ten civilians, with 3,391 injured, the majority of them soldiers.
During the 1990s Hamas increasingly made the running in terms of devastating terrorist attacks within Israel. In addition to money coming from both Saudi Arabia and Iran, Hamas built a vast charitable money-laundering operation that had important nodal points in the USA, where the Irish republican NORAID was said to have shown how easy it was to raise dollars for foreign terrorism