It wasn’t long after I began looking into this case that I realized that although the events took place in the United States, there is no way to separate this story and the characters that make it up from Palestine and from Islam. The people involved are devout Muslims and proud Palestinians, and the experience they had undergone was a direct result of that. I feel that we cannot fully appreciate the tragedy and injustice of this story without juxtaposing it with the profoundly kind and generous qualities of Islam.
My own impressions and prejudices regarding Islam were formed in large part by the fact that I was born and raised in Jerusalem, the holiest city to Muslims after Mecca and Medina and home of the “Distant Mosque,” or Masjid Alaqsa. I grew up in a sphere that was completely segregated and excluded all but Jews. The community in which I lived, a community of secular Israeli Jews, pretends to this day that Islam has no significance to this city, which we claim is “ours.” But still I could not help seeing that Jerusalem is a city steeped in Muslim traditions and has its own unique brand of Muslim culture. Granted, I had to cross to the “other” side, the Arab side of the city, to see this, because in West Jerusalem all signs of the city’s glorious Muslim past were erased.
Everything I saw in the “other” Jerusalem made it obvious to me that Islam inspires beauty, generosity of spirit, and devotion, disrupted only by the presence of Israeli soldiers and settlers who violently invaded the city. The most obvious example of beauty in Jerusalem is the golden dome that covers the holy sanctuary, the Haram Elsharif, which is the hallmark of the Old City of Jerusalem. Then there is the architecture, the ceramic tiles decorated with arabesque and Armenian designs and the shiny brass artifacts engraved with intricate Arabic calligraphy, all of which beautify the alleyways of the Old City of Jerusalem. The sound of the Athaan—the Muslim call to prayer one hears throughout the day in all Muslim cities—sounded and still sounds to me like a celestial chant. The sight of the Muslim prayer, be it a lone man standing at a construction site or countless Muslims kneeling in prayer on a Friday as they face Mecca, speaks to the devotion found in those who follow this faith. Add to that the tolerance, hospitality, and greetings of Asalaamu Aleikum—peace be with you—this is Islam as I saw it my entire life.
Whenever I am with Muslim friends, visiting a Muslim city or even visiting a mosque, I am reminded of these images. For me, Islam will always be associated with beauty, goodness, and charity. Sadly, the contempt and fear toward Islam, which are a major part of the Jewish-Israeli narrative, has seeped into America and become part of the accepted narrative in the United States as well. Living in the United States, I always felt deprived of the warmth that Islam and the Arab world offer. But when I began working on this book, I met Islam all over again, and in the most unlikely places.
It would be wrong not to delve a little into Islam here, even if it means straying for a moment from the story, so as to gain a broader view of Islam. Rachid Al-Ghannouchi, a Tunisian Islamic scholar and one of the founders of the An-Nahda (Renaissance) Party that played a big role in Tunisia’s post-2011 democratization, writes that Islam is “a faith that generates within the believer a passion for freedom.”31 He quotes the Algerian thinker Malik Bennabi, who wrote that
[T]he Islamic faith accomplishes two objectives. First it liberates man from servitude, and renders him un-enslaveable.
As I read this I cannot help but think of the five men about whom this story is written and the free spirit they display even as they face persecution and hardship. Bennabi continues,
And second it prohibits him from enslaving others. This is where the concept of jihad lies. Jihad is the constant endeavor to struggle against all forms of political or economic tyranny because life has no value in the shade of despotism.
For centuries Islam was portrayed in the West as deceptive, corrupt, savage, and violent, and at the same time exotic. That is the way in which the Western colonial powers portrayed the Arab and Muslim world. Today, suicide bombings, military regimes, and civil wars—or in other words, chaos—have become synonymous with the Arabs and Islam. And as is typical, things are presented in a flat, superficial manner and without context. Explaining but not excusing what he refers to as tawahush, or barbarism, Al-Ghannouchi writes,
Colonialism is also to blame for the present signs of tawahush in various parts of the Muslim world. The phenomenon of violence is a reaction to Westernization, the colonial process undertaken by the Western invaders to divide Muslims, nurture hostilities among them, and perpetuate their weakness and backwardness through the installation of puppet Western governments in territorial states they themselves created.
As an example, he cites the violence that had erupted in Algeria because of French support for the military junta that interrupted the democratic process and overthrew the democratically elected government. Then, as in other similar cases where Western intervention supported tyrants and military dictatorships favorable to Western palates, the regime installed a security apparatus that was licensed to torture and kill all those who opposed it. Algeria is just one example of this, but it represents Western intervention and oppression of Arabs and Muslims dating back to the end of World War I.
In his essay, Al-Ghannouchi also does not shy away from mentioning the elephant that sits in every room where the Arab and Muslim world is mentioned, and that is Palestine.
The violence perpetrated by the Palestinians in Palestine is part of a legitimate struggle for national liberation to reverse a colonial project.
He criticizes the West for supporting the “secular” Arab despots at the expense of the democratic process because the West cares little for the will of the people of the Arab and Muslim lands. “Islamists today are the victims,” he writes, repressed under the pretext of “saving democracy from themselves.” While the secular regimes get a pass for violating human rights, Islamists are condemned for the mere possibility that if elected, they might reverse the democratic process in the future.
Both Al-Ghannouchi and Tamimi have argued that contrary to the Western experience where secularism brought about scientific progress and democratic ideals, in the Arab and Muslim world it was the opposite. The Western colonizers who wanted to see radical secularization and a struggle against Islam and its heritage imposed secularism, or “pseudo-Secularism,” on the Muslim world and by doing so inhibited progress. Progress and Islam can reside in perfect harmony for as Al-Ghannouchi admits, “Islam places no restrictions on the mind, and the Quran clearly encourages believers to explore, think and search.”
Munir Shafiq, a Palestinian writer and scholar, has written that, “The model for a guided Islamic state cannot be described as a theocracy,” but rather a state whose frame of reference is religious.32 In the model Islamic state, he claims, the ruler is “freely elected by the community to whose scrutiny and reckoning he is subjected.” Shafiq also points to “a major difference between the Islamic model which offered scores of exemplary experiments over a 1,400-year period and the record of the church in the West.” The Islamic experience, Shafiq writes, “was reflected in a period of renaissance, justice, progress, equality and respect for freedom of expression,” whereas the experience in the West under the church included the Dark Ages and the Inquisition. This is one reason why in the West the view is that religion stands in the way of progress while in the Muslim world religion is not generally viewed as an obstacle to freedom and progress.
Jewish religion recognizes only three commandments for which one must choose death over disobedience: murder, conversion, and incest. In Israeli popular mythology, the famed Zionist hero Yosef Trumpeldor, who was killed in battle in northern Palestine, said as he took his last breath, “It is good to die for our country.” Christianity also has its share of martyrs, and in Islam, though life is considered sacred, life may be sacrificed in the pursuit of justice. And so, when speaking of suicide attacks, by using the term “suicide” one expresses an opinion on the issue. This is because in Islam there is a strict prohibition on suicide; missions where one chooses to kill him- or herself in order to kill the enemy are not considered suicide but martyrdom.
The spiritual leader of Hamas, the late Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, repeatedly said that “we do not fight the Jews because they are Jews,” rather the fight is against the Jewish State that occupies Palestinian land and forces Palestinians into exile and since 1948 has continued to arrest, kill, and injure Palestinians. In other words, the fight is against Israel—being the representative of Zionism—and not because of anti-Semitic tendencies. Others, like the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Khaled Mash’al, said this as well. The misgivings people have of Hamas’ view of Jews emanate from an early version of a document that most Hamas leaders today view as archaic and out of touch with Hamas policies and ideology—the Hamas Charter, which was revised in 2017. The charter is invoked each time critics of Hamas wish to portray the organization as anti-Semitic and extreme. The Charter, or Mithaq in Arabic, was published on August 18, 1988, and was, according to Azzam Tamimi, “an honest representation of the ideological and political position of Hamas at that moment in time.” According to Khaled Mash’al, in an interview with Azzam Tamimi in 2003, the Charter “should not be regarded as the fundamental ideological frame of reference from which the movement derives its positions.”
“However,” Tamimi admits, “the biggest problem arising from the charter lies in its treatment of the Jews.” Judaism is considered one of the faiths from which Islam emanated. And the fact is that Israel claims it is The Jewish State and that it represents Jews. It is also true that Jews from around the world support Israel financially and politically and the State of Israel is made up of Jews. There can be no denying that Jews came to Palestine, took the land, established a military force that was made of Jews, and used it to push Palestinians to leave or live under harsh oppressive conditions. While more and more Palestinians do distinguish between Zionist Jews and Jews who are not Zionist or even reject Israel completely, it is still very common to hear the word Yahud among Palestinians when talking about Israel. And while historically and religiously there have always been close relations between Jews and Muslims, the creation of the State of Israel over the ruins of Palestine strained that relationship severely.
The Arab experience saw Jews leave Arab countries in which they lived for centuries, sometimes millennia, and go to participate in the creation of Israel, which dispossessed Palestinians and committed acts of aggression against its Arab neighbors. And so one can hardly be surprised Palestinians refer to Israelis as “the Jews” as opposed to Israelis or Zionists. Still, Khaled Mash’al has said repeatedly that the liberation of Palestine does not mean killing Jews or driving Jews out, but rather regaining the rights of Palestinians, rights that Israel has been denying them since 1948.
The sweeping victory of Hamas in the 2006 elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip took Israel and the US government by surprise but did not come as a surprise to the movement’s leadership. Hamas was quite ready to take on the challenges of governing after more than a decade that the Palestinian Authority was controlled by the secular and by then extremely corrupt Fatah movement. The results of the 2006 elections demonstrated that the people who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip respected Hamas and saw it as representing their values and their worldview at least in part. Hamas, unlike Fatah, had not given up on achieving the liberation of the whole of Palestine from Israeli domination, a goal that may seem unrealistic to many but is still very much alive in the hearts of Palestinians everywhere. Hamas also gained the respect of Palestinians and others in the Arab and Muslim world because they view it as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, which for decades had provided social, medical, and educational services to millions of needy Palestinians free of charge.
Hamas leaders who were receiving millions of dollars from overseas donors had made sure that the money was directed to various charities and not to the pockets of those who held positions of power. As an example, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin lived in a very modest home in the refugee camp and until the day he was assassinated by Israel received just a small monthly allowance. Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, also lives in the refugee camp in Gaza in the home in which he was born and raised. And finally, Hamas kept the flame of hope of a free Palestine alive under severe conditions while Fatah, with its willingness to compromise and negotiate with Israel, failed to bring relief to even a single Palestinian.
But Israel and the United States were not willing to accept the will of the Palestinian people. Both maintained that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and consecutive US administrations refused to deal with Hamas unless the organization agreed to recognize Israel, renounce violence, and accept previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Azzam Tamimi claims that in reality the Hamas-led government could have survived without US financial support because the support from Arab and Muslim countries as well as from Russia would have sufficed. But Israel and the United States used all the means at their disposal to make sure that no funds reached the newly elected Palestinian government. Banks around the world were afraid of retaliatory policies from the United States and thus would not transfer money.
At the same time, in what amounted to a de facto coup d’état, the outgoing Palestinian legislature gave President Mahmoud Abbas sweeping authority, and he in turn stripped the new government of any real executive power. I recall sitting with Palestinians in Ramallah one day as this was taking place when one of them asked me why Israel was allowing an unprecedented free flow of weapons into the Gaza Strip. The answer to that question became clear in the months ahead as the outgoing Fatah-led government began using its own US-trained security forces to push Hamas out of power. Things came to a head in the end with battles between the two sides on the streets of Gaza. Hamas prevailed, forcing all Fatah forces and their supporters out of the Gaza Strip. This forced a permanent split between the legitimately elected Palestinian government, which was now in Gaza, and the forces of Fatah who refused to relinquish power. They remained in Ramallah and were supported by Israel and the United States.
Since then, Israel has imposed a permanent siege on the Gaza Strip and has mounted several massive attacks from the air, land, and sea upon its people in what amounted to massacres of unprecedented proportions, hoping to bring about the collapse of the Hamas government, but to no avail. Hamas not only prevails but also manages from time to time to launch successful military operations against Israeli forces around the Gaza Strip. As of October 2016, two million people live in the Gaza Strip, and they have proven to be more resilient than anyone could have foreseen. The predictions of UN development experts, as well as those of the numerous other aid agencies working in Palestine, describe the situation in the Gaza Strip as a humanitarian disaster. With water unfit for human consumption, no access to proper medical care or basic medicine, and growing malnutrition and trauma, Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe. Though the Palestinians in Gaza have never had so much as a tank at their disposal, let alone a real military force, the United States and Israel perpetuate the myth that the siege and Israel’s massacres in Gaza are legitimate self-defense.
Had it not been for the ethnic cleansing, brutal attacks, and the ongoing oppression of Palestinians by Israel, Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, would never have been created. It is hard to argue that a nation living under such severe conditions, imposed upon it by another nation, does not have the right to resist. As it stands, Hamas is part of the landscape of Palestine, and one may expect that it will continue to play a major role in Palestine.
31 Rachid Al-Ghannouchi, “Secularism in the Arab Maghreb,” in Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, ed. John Esposito and Azzam Tamimi (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 97–123.
32 Munir Shafiq, “Secularism and the Arab-Muslim Condition,” in Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, ed. John Esposito and Azzam Tamimi (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 139–150.