ONE

THE PALESTINIANS

The Conundrum

We are not to expect to be transported from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON

The rise of political Islam is not a statement about its strength or ideology as much as it is about the failure of elites that are corrupt and dictatorial.

—IRAQ’S DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER BARHAM SALIH

On January 25, 2006, the Palestinians became the first Arabs to peacefully and democratically reject the status quo. They took their uprising to the ballot box. It started out as quite a party.

I woke up on Election Day to horn-tooting and deafening loudspeakers. Caravans of battered cars, pickup trucks and taxis were driving through the rocky hills of the West Bank, blaring party slogans, get-out-to-vote appeals, and even hip-hop campaign ditties for their candidates. Big party flags billowed from car rooftops, little banners on suction cups flapped from the back. One procession would fade into the distance, and another would soon roar noisily down the street.

Eleven parties were running. It was a raucous morning.

“I truly believe things will never be the same again,” Nader Said, a political sociologist and pollster at Birzeit University, told me almost giddily as he organized staff to run exit polls at voting sites. “These elections are a real threshold for the Palestinians. Even those who were hesitant or who refused to participate before are being brought into the game.”

The pollsters, however, seriously underestimated the scope of change in store—and the direction.

The Palestinian election was a dicey experiment for the Middle East. Over the previous century, big political change had more often been determined by bloody purges, coups d’état, revolutions or civil wars. Autocratic monarchies and one-party rule have long been the norm; real opposition is not tolerated. While most countries did conduct elections, most were a sham. Opening them up—fairly—to all who wanted to run was a rarity. The few earlier attempts had been manipulated, sabotaged, or aborted.

When fifty-four parties competed in Algeria to replace one-party rule in 1992, the military launched a coup on the eve of the final vote because it feared the projected winners. The election was abandoned. After a serious opposition party emerged in Jordan in 1989 and won a large chunk of parliamentary seats, the government redistricted to disperse its constituency for the next election. After Egypt’s president faced real opposition in a popular vote for the first time in 2005, his leading opponent was arrested.

The Palestinians also reflected the central conundrum of change in the Middle East—that perilous condition when both the status quo and the available alternatives are problematic, but delaying change could make the situation even worse. For just that reason, most key players—among Palestinians, Israel, the international community, and especially the United States—decided that long-delayed democratic elections should go forward. It was, however, the most thoroughly monitored election ever held in the Middle East.

The Palestinians are among the smaller Arab communities, but they are the savviest politically. They have the highest education rates in the Arab world. They have long interacted with worldly ideas and experienced diversity in the hub of the three great monotheistic religions. And in an ironic twist they have been exposed to Israel’s democracy.

About 2.4 million Palestinians live in the fertile West Bank, an area the size of Delaware positioned between Israel and Jordan. Another 1.4 million reside in the tiny but teeming Gaza Strip, which is less than 140 square miles, or twice the size of Washington, D.C., and is squished between Israel’s southern border and giant Egypt. More than half of the Palestinians, somewhere between four to six million, are scattered among twenty-two Arab nations and the six inhabited continents. Without a state for almost six decades, the Palestinian political experience has been unique among the Arabs.

Yet the Palestinians have defined the Arab agenda since 1948. And on election eve, politicians throughout the Middle East knew that the outcome would have disproportionate impact regionwide.

“We are the wound in the Arab world,” added Said, the pollster, as he toyed with the yellow and light green magic markers on his desk.

“And everyone watches what happens to us.”

The pattern of change globally—communism’s demise in Eastern Europe, the end of Latin America’s military dictatorships, and apartheid’s collapse in Africa—has a common denominator: Change begins with breaking the monopoly of an autocratic leader, party, government, or ideology. It can take decades. Once accomplished, it is still only the starting point.

In the Middle East, the Palestinians were the first to reach that stage—on their own steam.

I watched the election for a new government in Ramallah, the embryonic Palestinian capital and a bustling city of some 60,000 in the West Bank, or biblical Judea. It is the first city across the border from Israel, about ten miles slightly north of Jerusalem, in the middle niche of the peanut-shaped West Bank. Palestinians often say that the road to peace is not through Damascus or Baghdad but through Ramallah.

Ramallah is the most liberal and cosmopolitan Palestinian city. It launched its own international film festival in 2004. You can browse downtown at the Miami Beach Arcade, shop at Cowboy 2000 Jeans, and get coiffed at Just 4 U Hair, Face and Nails. Among the dining options are Mickey Mouse Subs, Angelo’s Pizzeria, the Titanic Coffee Shop, the Pollo-Loco Mexican restaurant, and a Chinese take-out. Its basketball teams—both men and women—have competed regionally; the poster shop downtown features a blowup of American basketball star Allen Iverson in the window. Ramallah is known for its poets and writers, artists and musicians. It is also home to the leading Palestinian university, Birzeit.

In Arabic, the city’s name—ram allah—means “God’s hill.” Allah is the Arabic word for God—not an Islamic God, but the same monotheistic God worshipped by Muslims, Christians, and Jews. In Ramallah’s case, the reference was originally Christian. The city was founded by tribes of Christian Arabs in the sixteenth century. To this day, about fifteen percent of all Palestinians worldwide are Christian.

Many families in Ramallah can trace their ancestors to the eight original Christian clans.¹ The mayor’s job in Ramallah is still reserved for a Christian.

“It’s not exactly a law. It’s a custom,” explained Janet Michael, Ramallah’s first female mayor and a Greek Orthodox who descends from a founding clan, when I dropped by her office in City Hall. Michael, a graying former school headmistress, had been selected by the city council two weeks earlier. She had even won the votes of the three city council members from an Islamist party, she told me, pointedly.

Ramallah was redefined after the birth of Israel in 1948, when refugees flooded into what was then Jordan and transformed the city’s quaint pastoral life. Its numbers more than doubled, even as many Christians fled to the United States and Europe. Squalid refugee camps grew up on its outskirts. Ramallah was quickly converted from a prosperous Christian town of some 6,000 into a burgeoning community of Muslims who had abandoned or lost almost everything.

The city was transformed again a generation later after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. Jewish settlements grew up quickly near Ramallah, sometimes built on confiscated Palestinian land with Palestinian labor. The city became economically dependent on Israel and paid Israeli taxes.

Yet Ramallah’s early identity has not disappeared. Many Christian customs have endured despite big demographic shifts. The Quaker Friends School, opened in 1869, is still the choice of elites, both Muslim and Christian; many prominent politicians and intellectuals are among its alums. The Sabbath is still observed on Sunday, not Friday, the Muslim Sabbath; church bells from several denominations echo through Ramallah’s hills. And on Election Day, exactly one month after Christmas, an artificial Christmas tree decorated with miniature gift boxes, gold bulbs, and a star of Bethlehem—named for a city that is less than fifteen miles down the road, as the crow flies—was still up in the lobby of the Best Eastern Hotel.

“We won’t take it down until the end of January. That’s the tradition,” the reception clerk told me.

Ramallah, originally an agricultural center, is still surrounded by gently tiered hills of olive groves, citrus orchards, and vineyards. “God’s hill” refers more to the area’s fertility and scenic beauty than its history.

For there is certainly nothing more sacred in Ramallah than politics.

The Palestinian campaign was quite intense, right down to a competitive new election chic. Parties distributed thousands of baseball caps, in party colors, inscribed with party slogans. Packs of campaign workers handing out party literature on downtown streets looked like rival teams who had showed up to play ball. Others produced pageant-like sashes and headbands with campaign logos. An Islamic party organized children wearing green sashes—printed with the Muslim creed, “There is no deity but God and Mohammed is his messenger”—and accompanied by drummers to parade through West Bank towns. Ramallah, a city of creamy stone buildings and dirty streets, was plastered with candidates’ faces on utility poles, shops, fences, billboards, traffic intersections, even monuments. The Third Way, a group of independents trying to carve out a new middle ground, rolled huge ads down the sides of buildings, top floor to bottom, and made downtown Manara Square look like a modest version of Times Square. And the array of posters, placards, and banners was constantly changing. Overnight, one long row of a candidate’s picture would be covered by another contestant’s face until, in the brief three-week campaign, posters were layers thick. It was as if political parties calculated that each poster might produce another vote, so whoever put up the most would triumph.

Or perhaps the Palestinians were making up for lost time.

Ramallah is also home to the Muqata, which means “something separated.” It is an imposing compound of white stone buildings that has the commanding presence of a fortress. Britain built the Muqata in 1920, during its mandate of Palestine, as a prison. After the British left in 1948, Jordan turned the Muqata into a military base. When Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, it was converted back again into a prison and a center for occupation troops.

In 1994, the Muqata became the West Bank headquarters for the first Palestinian government. It was Yasser Arafat’s domain.

For almost a half century, Palestinian politics was dominated by one man—and one party. In the mid-1950s, as a young engineer working in Kuwait, Arafat gave up a lucrative job and his beloved two-tone pink Thunderbird convertible to establish a new Palestinian political movement. Arafat’s creation was Fatah. It translates from Arabic as “victory” or “conquest,” but it is also the backward acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Falistiniya, or the Palestine Liberation Movement.² In a macabre twist, the acronym spelled forward is hataf, or “death.”

The first conflict among Fatah’s founding members—mostly engineers and teachers trained in Egypt, when Arafat was president of the Union of Palestine Students at Cairo University—was over leadership. They decided against a single leader, opting for collective power. A fifteen-member central committee was the ultimate authority and was supposed to vote on all major decisions.*

But Arafat—a surprisingly short man with a potbelly, a perpetual three-day stubble, bulbous lips, and a cunning charisma—quickly developed a chokehold over Fatah. It became his personal political tool.

Over the next five decades, Arafat did pretty much what he pleased—and, shrewdly, used the others as his advisers, emissaries, shields, and decoys for the party’s darker activities. Among them was cofounder Abu Iyad, the nom de guerre of the portly intelligence chief with bushy black eyebrows who created Black September, the notorious network that carried out the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and other dirty deeds. Arafat usually wanted to be one step removed from the airplane hijackings, bombings, and assassinations that killed hundreds of Israelis—and far more Palestinians in Israeli counterstrikes. He preferred to put himself above it all as the father of the Palestinian people, not the executioner of its youth or the master terrorist.

I encountered Arafat many times during the years I lived in Lebanon. I got an anecdotal glimpse of his hold over Fatah’s leadership during an anniversary rally on New Year’s Eve 1981. Fatah had no fireworks, but it had plenty of weapons. Arafat’s fighters fired round after noisy round of flares, tracers, automatic rifles, and even antiaircraft guns into Beirut’s night sky to celebrate. Most of Fatah’s central committee, including Abu Iyad, had gathered in an underground bunker behind the dais; it was one of many in a subterranean network under Beirut built by the PLO to hide its fighters and arsenal. I tagged along with one of Arafat’s advisers to get inside. The bunker was almost bourgeois—paneled walls, modern chrome furniture, shag carpeting. The thick stink of many cigarettes permeated the poorly ventilated room.

The centerpiece of the evening was Arafat’s long speech exhorting Palestinian fighters on to victory against Israel and promising refugees that they would soon go home. Alternately waving his fist and a rifle in the air, Arafat appealed,

Let all rifles gather. Let all wills unite. And let all our people in the good Holy Land come together, because victory is near…. This is the year of the victorious march in the direction of Palestine…. We have a rendezvous with our steadfast kinfolk. Our flag which will fly over the minarets, churches, plains, hills, and mountains of liberated Jerusalem. We can already smell the scent of the land.

As Arafat spoke, not one member of the central committee bothered to leave the bunker for the outdoor rally just a few steps away. They all stayed behind, smoking and talking among themselves.

The evening, like Palestinian politics, was a one-man show.

Over the years, in frustration and anger, rivals occasionally split off to form their own factions. Most of them were leftist. Fatah, ironically, had little ideology; it basically had a leader and a mission—to eliminate the state of Israel and expel all Jews who arrived after 1917. Arafat acquired weapons from the Soviet Union, China, and the eastern bloc, but the PLO was quite capitalist. It invested in Wall Street, through intermediaries, and ran a string of businesses, farms, and factories that produced furniture, clothing, toys, and kitchenware. Its conglomerate was often referred to as PLO, Inc.³ For all his claims of leading a simple life, Arafat wore a Rolex watch. His uniforms were custom-made Italian khakis. And his late-in-life wife and daughter led a luxurious life in Paris.

Arafat usually coerced or cajoled most of his rivals back together under the broader umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization. And he often took the toughest decisions to his inner circle as well as the Palestinian National Council, a parliament in exile. But it was usually to provide him cover to do what he wanted. Wily Arafat almost always prevailed.

Little changed after he returned from exile in 1994. From the Muqata, Arafat ran the new Palestinian Authority for the next decade as autocratically as he had the Palestine Liberation Organization. He also ensured that Fatah dominated all branches of government, the best private sector jobs, monopolies on lucrative imports, and the top security positions. Patronage was the lever of power. Laws passed by an elected legislature, including some impressive judicial and executive-branch reforms, sat on his desk ignored and unsigned for years.⁴ Critics were often picked up and released at his whim rather than the dictates of a court.

In 2004, a public opinion poll found that eighty-seven percent of Palestinians surveyed believed that Arafat’s government was corrupt and that its leaders were opportunists who became rich off their powers. Ninety-two percent wanted sweeping political reform of the Palestinian government.⁵

“Arafat became the curse of the Palestinian people. He was like a pharaoh,” Palestinian journalist Sufian Taha told me. “He had the blood of many Palestinians on his hands during the years he was in Jordan and Beirut. We also suffered when he came back.

“Arafat wanted people to be corrupt, because that was the way he could control them,” Taha said. “He could look them in the eye and know he could tell them what to do, because he knew what they were doing. He was like Don Corleone.”

Disdain was widespread. Reflected Said, the pollster, “For Fatah, power was like having an open credit card, and it was all free. They had a ‘shop ’til you drop’ attitude.”

In 2006, the Palestinian attorney general revealed that 700 million dollars in state funds had been squandered or stolen over the previous few years. Some of the money lost in fifty separate cases had been transferred to personal accounts locally and abroad. Twenty-five people had been arrested, but ten had fled overseas. The fraud included construction of fictitious factories and land deals that existed only on paper. The Palestinian Authority had received five billion dollars in foreign aid over the previous five years, but was still on the verge of bankruptcy.⁶

“I thought Arafat and his people would be accountable once they were face-to-face with the people, in a way they hadn’t been when in exile. But I was mistaken,” said Samir Abdullah, director of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, when we met at the Ramallah Coffee Shop, the hub of political gossip. Abdullah had been a delegate to peace negotiations in the 1990s and was an early deputy minister of economy. But he quit in disgust, he told me.

“Arafat was like any dictator who relied on the few around him. He wouldn’t listen. He never changed,” Abdullah said.

When he died in late 2004, Arafat was buried at the Muqata, in a space cleared in the parking lot next to his old headquarters. The grave was lined with soil imported from Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, the resplendent tiled shrine erected in the seventh century to mark the spot where Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed began his night journey into the heavens, mounted on a winged steed and in the company of the archangel Gabriel, to receive the word of God. I visited the grave site four months after Arafat’s death. I was among the press traveling to the Muqata with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for talks with Arafat’s successor, President Mahmoud Abbas. Rice’s motorcade deliberately whizzed past Arafat’s grave. I ambled back to take a look. Arafat’s familiar black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh headdress was at the top of the grave. Self-conscious about his bald pate, Arafat had always covered it; he refused to be seen in public or to allow pictures without his headdress or military cap.

On a drizzling February day, the grave site seemed a forlorn place. It was inside a simple glass enclosure; plans were in the works to build a larger shrine and mosque around the grave. Three of the men who had protected Arafat in life stood at attention guarding his tomb. But there were no visitors. Arafat had quickly passed into history.

Arafat’s death was one in a convergence of catalysts that has begun to spur change in the Middle East. It symbolized the gradual—and ongoing—passage of the old guard of leaders who emerged between the 1960s and the 1980s and then hung on to power for decades. That early generation of leaders may have started out with popular ideology or nationalist zeal, but they all ended up corrupt, ineffective, or autocratic—and often all three. Each miscalculated the costs to their societies of monopolizing power. They became the obstacles to progress.

Each also insured that the pace of change in the Middle East would be slower and its course more complex than anywhere elsewhere in the world.

 

After decades of autocratic rule, the search for alternatives can divide societies. Change unleashes not only new democrats. Transitions can produce the unexpected and even the extreme, and the process is complicated by conflict.

During the final week of the campaign, I called on Khalil Shikaki, who heads the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research. Born in 1953, Shikaki is a sturdily built man who dresses impeccably, usually in dark suits, fashionably classic ties, and wing-tip shoes. He wears large aviator glasses and has a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. His center, which is on the third floor of a small office building in Ramallah, was bustling with young researchers at computers, preparing for the election.

The vote, Shikaki told me, was the most important turning point since the Palestinian Authority was founded twelve years earlier.

“Politics here was dominated for so long by Arafat and Fatah. Palestinians for the first time have a lot of options,” he explained, in his husky American-accented voice, as we chatted in a sunlit office. “So this election will go a long way in defining our future.”

Shikaki has spent his professional life chronicling the evolution of Palestinian politics in international foreign-affairs journals and at prominent American and European think tanks. But his own family reflected the evolving diversity too. The son of refugees, Shikaki came from a family that had farmed citrus, apricots, cucumbers, and wheat for generations in the village of Zarnouga, near Rehovot, in what is now central Israel. His parents fled in 1948. He was one of eight children brought up in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Education was often the only way out of rampant poverty among refugees; both he and his older brother Fathi won scholarships outside Gaza.

The Shikaki brothers, close in age and appearance, then chose opposite paths.

Khalil Shikaki earned a doctorate in political science at Columbia University in New York. He returned in 1986 to teach at a West Bank university. He later founded the first fully independent political research center in the Arab world. He became an outspoken advocate of democracy for the Palestinians and of peace with Israel, frequently speaking to Jewish groups and working with Israeli colleagues.

His older brother Fathi Shikaki took a medical degree at Egypt’s Zagazig University, a campus with a restive Islamist movement. He returned to the Gaza Strip in 1981 to practice medicine. He soon cofounded Islamic Jihad, the Palestinians’ most militant movement, and became its first leader. The goal of secret underground cells under his command was to eliminate the “Zionist entity” and reestablish old Palestine in a state based on Islamic law.

Khalil Shikaki refuses to talk about his older brother, a relationship that has complicated his own life and sparked controversy despite their estrangement.⁷ He responded only generically to my question about the political range—and contradictions—within a single family.

“Education was important in giving Palestinians the ability to express their own opinions,” he told me. “It’s not an issue now for family members to have quite different views and tactics. You’ll find it in dozens of cases, even in this election.”

The evolution of new leadership usually unfolds in uneven stages. For the Palestinians, it has been a particularly circuitous path because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The goals and tactics of Palestinian politics have evolved through four stages since the so-called Nakba, the “disaster” or “cataclysm,” of 1948.

The early leaders who rejected a United Nations proposal to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states were the traditional powers, including feudal landowners, clan patriarchs, and community figures like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The exodus in 1948 of some 700,000 Palestinians—more than half of the population, according to United Nations and British figures—left the Palestinians largely rudderless and in disarray. For a generation, the Palestinian issue was managed by other Arabs. Egypt created the original Palestine Liberation Organization, which was only years later wrested away by Arafat’s Fatah to become the umbrella for many Palestinian factions.

The first power shift began in the mid-1960s, as traditional leaders lost ground to a modern and secular nationalist movement no longer based on class and clan. It took two forms. Exiles in the Diaspora were the most visible. Over the next two decades, the eight factions in the Palestine Liberation Organization mobilized fighters from refugee camps in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to wage war on Israel.

A second leadership also quietly emerged inside the territories after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. It was tentative and fragmented. Its focus was local affairs. It deferred to the PLO to pressure Israel. But to fend for themselves, the internal Palestinians developed a vibrant array of institutions more diverse, independent, and active than in any other part of the Arab world.

“In order to work together against Israel, Palestinians had to overlook major differences among themselves,” Shikaki explained. “That created a de facto pluralism. It opened the door for a new civil society that emerged in context of the occupation—and having to respect each other’s role in fighting it.”

Among those who witnessed the shift between 1967 and the mid-1980s was Ghassan Khattib, a tall man with a neat black mustache and a modest deference. He was eleven when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I also visited him during the final campaign week.

“We had a different experience from other Arab countries. The occupation didn’t allow the emergence of an elite powerful enough to dominate the community or prevent elections among us or suppress whole strata of society, as happened elsewhere,” Khattib told me. “But because we didn’t have our own government, we built grassroots nongovernment organizations—charitable societies, trade unions, a women’s movement, youth and sports groups, professional organizations, a lawyers’ bar, a medical association.

“Almost all of them were structured on a democratic basis, with leadership that was elected, most of them annually,” he said. “The student-union elections at universities were very prominent. People all over the country would stay up all night to see the results of the student elections.”

I had occasionally covered those elections, which generated great interest in Israel and the wider Middle East too. They first revealed the takeover of Palestinian politics inside the territories by the nationalists. The student council votes then became the strongest indicator of political trends and effectively the only form of public-opinion polling.

Khattib was one of the early student leaders. He was elected to the Birzeit University council five times.

“So we’ve been living in a society with the beginnings of democratic ambitions for quite some time,” he told me, then added pointedly, “and this did not come from the PLO in Beirut.”

Khattib later held three cabinet posts in the Palestinian government. He was minister of planning, a pivotal post in a nascent state, when we spoke.

The second big power shift followed Israel’s 1982 lightning invasion of Lebanon. Israel routed the Palestinians in one week, then besieged west Beirut for three months, until Arafat was forced to pull out of Lebanon altogether. Only six months after his New Year’s Eve vow that 1982 would mark “the year of the victorious march” to Jerusalem, Arafat was instead dispatched even further away. I watched him sail off from Beirut’s port to distant Tunis in North Africa—not even on the same continent. Palestinian fighters were dispersed as far away as Yemen and Algeria.

It was the biggest defeat for the Palestinians since 1948. Almost three decades after Fatah’s creation and almost two decades after the PLO was founded, the exiled Palestinian leadership had achieved virtually nothing.

Hundreds of miles from the action, the defeated PLO soon lost its leverage—with Israel, the international community and, most of all, its own people.

“The defeat of the PLO created a vacuum,” Shikaki told me. “Leaders in the territories were quick to take charge, and from 1982 until 1988, the inside leadership became stronger than the leadership outside.”

In 1987, angry young Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for the first time took action against Israel into their own hands with a grassroots revolt. Tensions with Israel had been compounded by growing unemployment, soaring poverty, and high birth rates in small spaces. The situation was combustible. It took only the spark of a traffic accident in which an Israeli military truck crashed into a van, killing four Palestinians from a Gaza refugee camp, to set it off.⁸ Rioting erupted and quickly spread across Gaza and into the West Bank. Young Palestinians initially confronted Israeli troops with rocks, but later with Molotov cocktails and barricades of burning tires.

The uprising—popularly called the intifada, literally the “shaking off”—marked the rise of the Palestinian internal leadership. It altered the political dynamics too.

“The intifada,” Shikaki explained, “produced two phenomena. It introduced political Islam as a mobilizing force. It also produced a new young guard of nationalists who posed a challenge to the dominance of the PLO’s old guard in exile.”

The PLO in Tunis tried to claim credit for the intifada and manipulate its activities from afar. But the heart of the uprising was really run by local leaders. In the West Bank, Ramallah was the center for the intifada’s Unified Command, a new umbrella for young leftist, nationalist, and religious activists who banded together. Every week, its leadership passed out bulletins on Ramallah’s streets with schedules of protests or strikes. The intifada raged on year after year in sporadic angry bursts.

Overtaken and increasingly irrelevant, Arafat was forced to cede to the internal leaders—and, more importantly, their quite different agenda.

The PLO Covenant formulated in 1968 had pledged “armed struggle” until all of old Palestine was “liberated.” Articles Twenty and Twenty-one in the covenant ruled out Jewish rights to a country.

Jewish claims of historical or religious ties with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem.

But the Palestinians inside the territories had moved in a different direction. Thousands worked in Israel. Many spoke Hebrew. And significant numbers appeared willing, albeit begrudgingly, to accept Israel’s right to exist and a two-state solution in which Israel and a Palestinian state would coexist.

“The occupation was by Israel, a democratic country, not a dictatorship. Palestinians worked in Israel, watched Israeli television, read Israeli newspapers, and what they saw was that Israel had the kind of democracy that they wanted,” Shikaki explained to me.

“This was very different from the PLO elite, who lived in countries that were dictatorships—Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, or Syrian-controlled Lebanon—that weren’t tolerant. These were societies with guns that were used to enforce views.

“The outside leadership was made up of refugees whose solution was the return of all of Israel. The leadership inside had only one goal: to create a Palestinian state,” Shikaki said. “Every time the inside leadership gained prominence, the PLO had to moderate its positions.”

In 1988, to avoid becoming irrelevant as the intifada raged on, Arafat was forced to take the two steps he had long avoided—renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel’s right to exist. He had little choice. It was the only way to get back in the game. His concessions opened the way for the PLO to become a player in diplomatic efforts. In exchange, Arafat won diplomatic recognition of the PLO by the United States, the primary broker of peace.

The uprising did not wind down completely until peace talks began in Madrid in 1991 and led, on a circuitous and initially secret route, to talks in Oslo and the first phase of a peace agreement. The formal pact was signed in 1993 by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the south lawn of the White House. The Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority, a tiny new pre-state, with powers limited to policing and municipal services in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Shikaki brothers were among the new internal leaders.

Khalil Shikaki was part of back-channel contacts between Palestinians and Israelis in London in 1992. It was a parallel process to the secret negotiations in Oslo that produced the peace accords. He also conducted the first public-opinion poll to test whether Palestinians would embrace peace after more than four decades of war. The process took nine months. The idea of getting Palestinians to say what they really thought—which had never been done before, and was complicated by the Israeli occupation—proved far harder than anticipated.

“During the initial tests, four out of ten homes refused to talk to us. We had to take dozens of tests just to find out what was preventing people from allowing us into their homes,” Shikaki said. With little basic data to work from, field teams had to draw their own maps of some areas and figure out from scratch the local demographics to ensure a representative sampling. They eventually got rejections down to two percent.

“On the day that the Oslo agreement was signed on the White House lawn, we released our first survey. We asked whether people supported or opposed the plan,” he recalled.

“Two thirds supported it,” he said, cracking a small smile. Shikaki usually speaks with a professor’s serious precision. “It was very exciting.”

Over the same period, however, his older brother was committed to undermining peace. Often described as a charismatic man, Fathi Shikaki was twice jailed by the Israelis, for a year in 1983 and for three years beginning in 1986. In 1988, he was deported to Lebanon. By 1992, he was headquartered in Syria, and Iran had become Islamic Jihad’s main source of funds, arms, and training.

“We reject a negotiation process, because it legitimizes the occupation of our land and neglects the Palestinians who are without a country or identity,” Fathi Shikaki told an interviewer in 1992, the same year his brother was negotiating with Israelis. “I do not know how the Palestinian is described as a terrorist when he screams from his pain and suffering and is defending his land against Jewish Russian soldiers, who never—neither he nor his forefathers—set foot in any inch of Palestine.”⁹

Islam, he added, “is the ideology that must be adhered to in achieving liberation and independence as well as development and progress. This is what the PLO lacked from the very beginning.”

After the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed, the older Shikaki helped launch the National Alliance, a coalition of ten hard-line Palestinian groups that rejected the peace plan. It, too, was headquartered in Syria.

On October 26, 1995, Shikaki was in Malta, reportedly in transit between Libya and Syria. All Islamic Jihad activities are clandestine. All its members operate in covert cells. Shikaki’s movements were all secret. According to accounts from the time, Shikaki walked out of his hotel and was approached by two men on a motorcycle. One pulled out a gun with a silencer and shot Shikaki five times. The Maltese government described the assassination as a professional hit. The motorcycle was later found abandoned. It had false license plates. The gunmen were never identified or caught.

The assassination was widely attributed to, but never acknowledged by, Israeli intelligence. Fathi Shikaki’s funeral in Damascus was reportedly attended by some 40,000 people.

The third shift in power followed the breakdown of peace efforts in 2000.

The 1993 Oslo Accords called for a final peace agreement within five years. Its Declaration of Principles tackled the thorny issues of statehood and borders, Jerusalem, refugees, and Jewish settlements. But the Oslo goal proved elusive. And a last-ditch effort by the United States to negotiate in 2000 broke down when Arafat balked at terms offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

With the death of the Oslo process, tensions again reached breaking point. Another intifada erupted within weeks.¹⁰

The second uprising was far more sophisticated, down to the onions and perfume handed out by teenage girls as antidotes to Israeli tear gas. It was also deadlier.¹¹ Rock-throwing escalated into low-intensity warfare after two Israeli soldiers were captured and taken to Ramallah’s police station. A mob stormed the facility, beat the two Israelis to death, then mutilated their bodies. Israeli helicopter gunships retaliated by demolishing the police station. It was the first Israeli air strike on the Palestinian territories in thirty-three years, since the 1967 war.

The second intifada featured the bloodiest cycle of violence ever between Israelis and Palestinians. Suicide bombings soared against Israeli civilian targets, including hotels, discos, a bustling café, a pizzeria, a pub, a shopping mall, and several bus stations.¹² Israel struck back hard against both Palestinian street fighters and government sites. In 2002, Israeli troops reoccupied big chunks of the Palestinian territories and began construction of a controversial wall to cordon off the West Bank. Arafat came under siege in the Muqata.

The Palestinian Authority, unable to deliver either stability or basic governance, started to disintegrate. Its legislature had to meet by videoconference because Gazan lawmakers were unable to travel to headquarters in Ramallah. The United States orchestrated a new “road map” for peace, which stalled when Arafat did not end the violence against Israel. Temporary cease-fires were organized but frequently violated. Much of daily life came to a standstill. Unemployment, lawlessness, and despair became rampant.

Fatah also increasingly fragmented. Arafat, ailing and stubborn, refused to leave the Muqata for fear he would not be allowed back. Bitter and sometimes bloody power struggles erupted within Fatah. Its young guard—which included both moderates and militants, both rising politicians and armed thugs—increasingly went out on their own. Younger Fatah politicians like Marwan Barghouti, almost by default, took the political initiative away from Arafat and his cronies. And young thugs in the security forces effectively became militias that initiated their own attacks against Israel and ruled the Palestinian streets by intimidation, racketeering, and gangsterism.

As order broke down, Hamas increasingly filled the political space. During this third shift in power, the Islamic party moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Hamas differed significantly from Islamic Jihad, the first militant movement. Islamic Jihad had remained tiny, totally underground, engaged only in violence, with leaders either forced into exile or eliminated in Israel’s “targeted assassinations.” Hamas was not clandestine. It was also dual-purpose. Created in 1987 during the first intifada, its well-armed al Qassam Brigade became notorious for some of the most brazen suicide and rocket attacks against Israel.¹³ But Hamas also used the 1990s to establish a huge network of social services, schools, clinics, welfare organizations, and women’s groups—a parallel civil society. Up to ninety percent of its resources and staff were devoted to public-service enterprises.¹⁴ When the Palestinian Authority failed to deliver, Hamas institutions increasingly did.

“Hamas emerged as a credible political and security alternative to Fatah and a challenge to its long-standing dominance,” Shikaki explained.

“The shift did not mean a greater religiosity in society. Hamas responded to the perception of a heightened threat more than anyone else. Palestinians were subject to collective punishment, so there was a great deal of public anger. Suicide attacks became very popular. The Palestinian public wanted it in the same way Ariel Sharon’s brutality against the Palestinians was popular among Israelis.”

Support for Hamas more than doubled between the outbreak of the intifada in 2000 and 2004, Shikaki’s surveys found. Support for Fatah had meanwhile tumbled, with Arafat’s personal standing cut in half, from a high of sixty-five percent support in 1996, when he won the presidency in the first Palestinian election, to thirty-five percent in 2004.¹⁵

And then Arafat suddenly died, opening the way for long-deferred elections—and even more dramatic change.

 

Voters, when offered real choices for the first time, often go to the polls to get revenge for the past. Early victors are not always long-term winners. They are simply the ones not rejected.

The day before the election, I drove to Hebron. Twenty miles south of Jerusalem, it is now the West Bank’s largest city. While Ramallah is the most liberal town, dusty Hebron is the most conservative. It is rich with religious history, centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham is buried, along with Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, the patriarchs and matriarchs of Judaism. The tomb is a venerated place for Jewish pilgrimages; 500 Jewish settlers reestablished a presence in Hebron, under the protection of 2,000 Israeli troops, to be near it. But Muslims also revere Abraham. Religious tradition holds that he fathered the Arabs through his son Ismail and the Israelites through his son Isaac. He is mentioned more than two dozen times in the Koran. In Arabic, Hebron is called al-Khalil, short for Ibrahim al-Khalil al-Rahman, or “City of Abraham, the Friend of God.” Muslims also pray at the tomb.

Some of the most dramatic violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has happened at the tomb. In 1980, Palestinians murdered six Jewish yeshiva students and wounded twenty others as they returned from prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. In 1994, American-born Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers at the tomb, killing twenty-nine and wounding 125.

I went to Hebron, however, because of a different rivalry. One of the world’s oldest cities had the most interesting contest in the Palestinian election: A top Fatah official who had once been considered an heir apparent to Arafat was running against a popular Muslim preacher with Hamas.

They, too, happened to be brothers.

The Rajoub boys, Jibril and Nayef, came from a family of thirteen children. Both born in the 1950s, they grew up in Dura, on Hebron’s outskirts. In 2006, they symbolized Palestinian politics fifteen months after Arafat’s death. Although eleven parties were competing, the election for the 132-seat parliament and a new government had boiled down to a contest between two: Fatah and Hamas.

The Rajoubs represented the conundrum of choices.

Jibril Rajoub—Jibril is Arabic for Gabriel—is the older brother and a Palestinian legend. He is a bear of a man, now balding and paunchy, with a tough-guy swagger. His career has been checkered. In 1969, at age sixteen, he was caught throwing grenades at Israeli troops in the West Bank. He was imprisoned for seventeen years, until 1985. After the first intifada erupted, he was deported. He went to Tunisia and joined the Fatah inner circle around Arafat.

After the Oslo Accords, Rajoub returned with Arafat and was put in charge of West Bank security, a pseudo-defense minister’s job for a nonstate. The job included liaising with Israel—ironically, using the Hebrew he had picked up in an Israeli prison to deal with his former jailers—and the United States. A bit of a braggart, Rajoub made no secret of ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. During a 2001 trip to Washington, he boasted that the CIA always provided him with an armor-plated limousine during his visits.¹⁶ An autobiographical collection of his interviews includes a picture with former CIA Director George Tenet, with whom he worked closely during Tenet’s brief mission in Middle East diplomacy.

By Palestinian standards, the older Rajoub was a tough pragmatist willing to do Arafat’s dirty work. He reined in militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop attacks against Israelis during peace efforts. He also quashed dissent against Arafat. His Preventive Security Force made calls or visits to media outlets, nongovernmental organizations, and academics that became too critical of Arafat’s autocratic rule. More feared than popular, Rajoub was sometimes referred to as the king of the West Bank.

On Israel, however, Rajoub straddled the line. After the second uprising erupted in 2000, he supported the intifada against Israeli troops in the occupied territories, but he opposed attacks inside Israel.

“Suicide bombs and violence will not serve the Palestinian cause,” Rajoub told Voice of Palestine Radio after two Palestinians were killed while preparing a bomb near the site of the Maccabiah Games, Israel’s Olympics-like athletic competition, in 2001.

“Resistance against the occupation is one thing, and using pernicious means to kill people, just because they are people, is something else,” he added. “These should stop because it is not in our interests, it does not serve us.”¹⁷

On Islamic militancy, he took a tough line. He publicly blasted Islamic schools for teaching “dangerous things” about the faith. “No one,” he said in 2001, “has a right to dictate their crazy vision to our children.”¹⁸

In the 2006 election, Rajoub’s base of support was hard-core Fatah loyalists and the bloated Palestinian security services. The West Bank force had 5,000 personnel, but Palestinians told me that almost 60,000 were on the payroll—one of the ways Fatah maintained support. Rajoub’s well-financed campaign was partially footed, according to West Bank scuttlebutt, by ill-gotten profits off the Palestinian Authority’s import monopolies. His entourage tooled around in armored vans and European luxury cars. He used the conference center of Hebron’s best hotel to meet local leaders. A large staff of handlers arranged rallies, answered calls, and distributed glossy brochures. He even had a campaign song, with a refrain, “Jibril Rajoub is the lion of the south; he is the strong man.”

Rajoub ran on Fatah’s Future List. The split within Fatah had deepened in the run-up to the election. The young guard, who came from inside the territories, felt it should assume more power after Arafat’s death. When the old guard balked, the younger generation threatened to break away and run on its own. In a last-minute compromise, they agreed to field candidates from both factions, sometimes in the same districts. Each district had multiple seats; Hebron was the largest district, with nine seats up for grabs. Conceivably, candidates from both factions could win. It proved a fateful decision.

Fatah’s young guard was led by Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Fatah politician. Barghouti came from Ramallah. He had been student-body president at Birzeit University and later a leader in the first intifada. Israel deported him to Jordan in 1987; he was allowed to return after the Oslo Accords. In the 1996 election, he won a seat in the Palestinian legislature. Barghouti advocated peace with Israel, but after the Oslo process died and the second intifada erupted, he was again a major figure as a leader of the new Tanzim militia that emerged within Fatah.

Israel arrested Barghouti after it reoccupied the West Bank in 2002. He was charged with the murder of four Israelis and a Greek monk carried out by the Tanzim. It was largely guilt by leadership. He was sentenced to five life sentences. Nevertheless, in 2006 he was running, from prison, for reelection to the Palestinian legislature. As part of the compromise between the old and young guards, he headed Fatah’s list. He became Fatah’s election poster boy. Ramallah and other West Bank cities were festooned with billboards and placards of Barghouti in brown prison garb, smiling and waving his shackled hands above his head, as if in victory.

Fatah did not have much to offer besides Barghouti’s popular appeal. The whole campaign played out over the party’s failures.

During the final campaign week, the eleven parties held a debate at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace. Candidates from each party sat at a desk on stage for two hours of intense questioning by four independent moderators. Each answer was limited to two minutes. Throughout the evening, I kept thinking back to Arafat rambling on interminably and making impossible promises, his inner circle unwilling to rein him in, at Fatah’s 1981 anniversary event. In 2006, eleven parties had to present detailed political platforms in a program televised throughout the Arab world. Each party outlined an agenda centered on ending corruption, investigating government abuses, limiting leaders’ special powers, and strengthening an independent judiciary—all reforms playing off Arafat’s failures.

Rajoub also had little to run on, except his past power. He was often on the defensive and quite elusive to journalists. I set up several appointments to see him. But his assistant, a harried young woman named Rima, called back frequently to change the day or time—until it was finally election eve. When I got to Hebron, she told me that Jibril had had to leave town on short notice and would be unavailable. He may have gotten tired of talking about the competition. On the few occasions when the press did corner him, the subject inevitably turned to Hamas.

“We have nothing to learn from Hamas,” Rajoub told The New York Times. “Hamas believes armed struggle is the only way to confront Israel. I hope they will adopt a pragmatic, realistic platform. But they should learn from us. We have led the revolution. We have led the Palestinian people for forty-one years.”¹⁹

Rajoub, like most of the political analysts and pollsters, thought he was a shoo-in. The only question was which brother would come in first.

It was much easier to see Sheikh Nayef, as his younger brother is known in deference to his role as a mosque preacher in the Dura suburb of Hebron. Every time I called a telephone number I had been given, he answered. He was always amenable to shifting the time to accommodate the needs of his brother and rival. He invited me to meet him at his home.

Sheikh Nayef is a towering man with a full beard accented by gray wisps under the lip. He has strikingly large hands and long eyelashes. He was born five years after his older brother and has a fraternal twin named Yasser. We sat on worn velvet couches in a receiving room in front of the house. The sheikh was dressed informally in a V-neck sweater and a tan jacket with a zipper. He was as low-key as his brother was intense.

Sheikh Nayef was running on Hamas’s Change and Reform ticket. It was a low-budget campaign. He had to borrow his twin brother’s dented, secondhand car to drive around Hebron.

“Jibril is part of the Palestinian Authority, so he has tremendous assets available to him,” the sheikh told me, as the youngest of his eight children waddled into the room and over to her father. The two-year-old was wearing a green Hamas baseball cap and green Hamas sash over a pink sweater. “Our campaign is so modest that I had to borrow one thousand dollars to register as a candidate. I have yet to pay it off.” To supplement his income, the neighborhood sheikh was also a beekeeper. He was well known around Hebron for his honey.

Hamas underplayed its assets, however, and its strategy. Before the election, the party signed an election code of conduct not to exploit places of worship to win votes. But the younger Rajoub had an edge simply by preaching at the mosque every Friday. His campaign was also staffed by the faithful, including several women in conservative Muslim dress. And Hamas’s technologically hip campaign did not shy away from invoking higher powers.

“Vote for the green crescent of Hamas. Forward this message and you will be blessed by God,” was one of several text messages sent to cell phones throughout the territories, including my rental.

Like his brother, Sheikh Nayef had a checkered past. He had been arrested four times by Israel—and once by his brother.

Educated in Jordan, he joined Hamas when it emerged in 1987 out of the first intifada. Detained four times by Israel, he and his twin had been part of a mass expulsion in 1992 after the deaths of six Israeli soldiers, including one who was kidnapped and later found bound and stabbed. More than 400 Islamists, mainly from Hamas, were rounded up, blindfolded and handcuffed, and driven to the Lebanese border. When Lebanon refused to allow them to cross, the deportees ended up living in tents for a year in a no-man’s land between the two countries. Jibril Rajoub had visited his younger brothers; Sheikh Nayef had a picture in his receiving room of the three of them standing along the border. The deportees were eventually allowed to return as a by-product of the Oslo Accords. Seven of the nine Hamas candidates in Hebron had been among those deportees.

The sheikh and his twin were arrested by their big brother during Arafat’s 1996 crackdown on Hamas.

“It was nothing personal,” the sheikh said, smiling. Neither was held very long.

Ironically, Hamas and Fatah have the same roots. Both emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt. Arafat had been a member of the Brotherhood as a student in Cairo in the 1950s. Hamas had been created by the crippled but charismatic Muslim preacher Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who headed the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood in Gaza.

Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Arab organizations often look for double entendre in their titles. Hamas means “zeal.”

The Hamas charter lauds the PLO, since it “contains the father and the brother, the next of kin and the friend” who share a common enemy and a common fate. But it scolds the PLO for its secular platform. “Whoever takes his religion lightly,” the charter declares, “is a loser.” The Koran is the movement’s constitution. Its goal is to see “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”

The Hamas charter is venomous about Israel, which it charges is trying to consume territory from the Nile to the Euphrates. It echoes the Palestine Liberation Organization’s original covenant in its pledge to obliterate the Jewish state.

The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day…. It, or any part of it, should not be given up…. There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…. These conferences are only ways of setting infidels in the land of Muslims as arbiters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?…All [are] a waste of time and vain endeavors.

Since it rejected the peace process, Hamas boycotted the Palestinian Authority that the Oslo Accords had produced. The movement did not run in either the 1996 election or the 2005 presidential election to replace Arafat. Participating in national politics would have compromised its mission and goals. Arafat had never been keen to include Hamas anyway. His strategy was a mix of squeezing, confronting, and clamping down on potential rivals, especially the Islamists.

But the post-Arafat era changed the dynamics—and the strategy of both Fatah and Hamas.

After he was elected to replace Arafat, President Mahmoud Abbas opted to try to integrate Hamas into the political process.²⁰ He had few choices. The white-haired Fatah cofounder, who had just turned seventy, did not have the political leverage to contain Hamas, even though Israel had eliminated its founder, Sheikh Yassin, his successor, the chief bomb-maker, and other top leaders in a string of “targeted assassinations.” Hamas simply had too much local legitimacy. Its autonomous armed wing was too much of a threat both to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. And its institutions were on the verge of creating a parallel state.

Abbas could no longer establish order in the territories or negotiate with Israel without an arrangement with Hamas.

The turning point was local elections. Hamas, a grassroots movement, had long pressed for a vote in towns and cities; local councils had nothing to do with the Oslo Accords. Arafat had stalled, even after he agreed to hold them, aware that Hamas might gain further legitimacy.

After Arafat’s death, Abbas reversed course in an attempt to co-opt Hamas.

Five months after Arafat’s death and two months after Abbas took office, Egypt negotiated an agreement between the new Palestinian leadership and thirteen political groups. The Cairo Declaration in March 2005 called for all sides to honor a tahdiya, or period of calm, and to hold local and legislative elections without delay.²¹

In staggered votes over the next nine months, Hamas surprised even Hamas. By the final vote in December 2005, the Islamist party had won full or partial control of councils in most major towns, including historically Christian Bethlehem and other former Fatah strongholds. The one exception was Ramallah. In contrast, Fatah proved strong mainly in the politically marginal rural areas.²²

A month later, Hamas was running for the first time in national elections.

In both votes, Hamas ran on a twenty-point platform of everyday issues—more health care, better education, improved infrastructure—though not piety. Like many of the Middle East’s rising Islamist movements, Hamas was moving deliberately, but practically.

“We need to change many things, but step by step,” Sheikh Nayef told me.

“We have two big priorities,” he explained. “The first is corruption. Betraying the people’s trust is one of the main reasons for people’s disenchantment with Fatah and why they are turning to Hamas.

“The second is dealing with the chaos and lawlessness in the territories,” he continued, in Arabic, relying on a reporter from aljazeera.net who said he had studied at the University of Oklahoma and Southern Illinois University. “Those responsible for this insecurity are the Palestinian security agencies. We have to reconstruct them. They are entirely bloated and yet they have utterly failed to end the chaos. Over half of the 58,000 on the payroll draw a salary but never leave their homes. It is nepotism and graft and cronyism.”

I pointed out that his brother had controlled the West Bank security force.

“I am aware,” he said, with a bemused grin.

To a lot of ears, the security-force issue was doublespeak for peace with Israel. Whoever controlled Palestinian security determined whether the Palestinian forces were used for peace or to pressure Israel.

On election eve, the big debate among both Palestinians and Israelis was over whether a democratically elected Hamas would moderate its position—specifically by implicitly honoring the principles and agreements made by the PLO even if it did not formally sign on. In other words, would Hamas be willing to repeat what Fatah did in 1988 in formally renouncing terrorism and accepting Israel’s right to exist? Hamas had launched its first suicide bomb in 1993. Since the second intifada began in 2000, the militant movement was linked to more than 400 terrorist attacks—including over fifty suicide bombs—in which hundreds of Israelis had died and more than 2,000 had been injured.²³

Some Hamas leaders hinted at the possibility of an indefinite hudna, or ceasefire, if Israel returned all territory occupied in the 1967 war. But none of them suggested that Hamas would accept a permanent peace.

I asked the sheikh—who had been released just four months earlier after eight months in Israeli detention—how far apart he was from his older brother on peace with Israel. “We agree when diagnosing political problems, but we differ on how to treat them,” he replied, as his fingers flicked through a large set of worry beads. “Jibril’s approach is based on negotiating with Israel. The Islamic movement’s experience in negotiating has been dismal and disastrous. The Palestinian Authority was eventually reduced to a vanquished supplicant begging Israel for everything. This giant fiasco will not be repeated by us.”

I noted that he had not totally rejected negotiations with Israel. For decades, Arafat had deftly skirted the same issue. Time and again, he came close in deliberately suggestive but ambiguous language, only to back off again when asked to clarify. Only when Arafat began to lose his political grip did he formally cave.

“What you said is true,” Sheikh Nayef replied. “If negotiations have the potential to serve the interests of the Palestinian people or improve the lot of average Palestinians, yes, there is room for that. But it should not be conducted under conditions reflecting Israeli insolence and arrogance of power and blackmail and so on.”

“Look,” he said, “I am a moderate. There is a Koranic verse that says ‘Allah has made you a moderate nation, so that you may be witness upon mankind and so that the prophet will be a witness unto you.’ And I believe this.”

I asked the sheikh if he would allow his own eight children to become suicide bombers. Hebron had gained fame as the hometown of several suicide bombers. Eight members of a local soccer team, including a coach, had all become suicide bombers.

“You have a totally gruesome picture of us that is inaccurate,” he replied, his fingers flicking faster through the worry beads. “Martyrdom operations are not a fixed feature of the Islamic movement. They are not a pillar of our policy. They should be viewed instead as a reaction to Israeli oppression. We earnestly appeal to the Israelis to refrain from murdering Palestinian civilians so that we can put an end to martyrdom operations once and for all. We can not get rid of the effect unless we get rid of the cause.”

I repeated my question about his children.

“Yes, I would allow them to carry out martyrdom operations, but I would much rather focus on ruling out the causes of what has made this inevitable,” he said. “Martyrdom operations are the result of Jewish Nazism. The Israelis have presented us with two choices—either we die submissively like meek sheep or we die in suicide bombings in the streets of Tel Aviv or Netanya.”

For the first time, the sheikh’s voice rose. “We might forgive the Israelis for murdering our innocent civilians,” he said, “but we will never forgive them for forcing us to kill their civilians.”

Before I left, I pressed Sheikh Nayef for his election predictions. All public-opinion polls indicated Fatah was in the lead, but Hamas was pulling closer—anywhere from two to ten percentage points behind Fatah. The day before, both parties had held large rallies in Hebron. Some 4,000 had turned out for Jibril Rajoub and Fatah, but 35,000 had turned out for Sheikh Nayef and the Hamas candidates.

I asked how the sheikh thought his own siblings were likely to vote.

He chuckled. “I honestly don’t know,” he told me. “Some will probably vote for Jibril, and some will probably vote for me.”

Even during their campaigns against each other, the two men had kept in touch.

“We see each other every two or three days, and we talk by telephone every day. We’re very close,” the sheikh said. “There’s an Arab proverb—‘A difference in opinion does not corrupt friendly relations.’

“This political diversity is a sign of the sophistication and maturity that members of one family can espouse different ideologies and political views,” he continued. “Our parents’ home was the epitome of Palestinian political plurality. We’re proud of it.

“But,” he added, “I think both of us will win.”

On election night, the results were announced at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace. They trickled in district by district amid great anticipation since, for the first time in an Arab election, no one knew the outcome in advance.

In the end, Hamas swept liberal Ramallah, except for the one seat reserved for a Christian. The Islamic party won all the seats in Jerusalem, except for two reserved for Christians. It took all but one seat allocated to Nablus. Even in historically Christian Bethlehem, Hamas won all but the two seats reserved for Christians.

The outcome stunned Palestinians—including the Rajoub brothers—as well as the outside world. Mused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Certainly I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming, and I hope that we will take a hard look, because it does say something about perhaps not having had a good enough pulse on the Palestinian population.”²⁴

In Hebron, Sheikh Nayef received more votes than any candidate in the entire West Bank. His older brother Jibril did not even make a decent showing. He lost. Hamas won all nine seats in Hebron.

Defying every exit poll, Hamas won an outright majority. It did not mop up, however. It won fifty-six percent of the seats in the legislature—and the right to form a government—but only forty-four percent of the vote. Fatah’s fatal mistake was running too many candidates, dividing its own vote. Pollsters later said Fatah could have won—with the same vote—by fielding fewer candidates.

Nevertheless, Palestinian voters had sent a decisive message. “This was the only way to stop Fatah,” said Samir Abdullah, director of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, a delegate to peace negotiations in the 1990s, and an early deputy minister of economy. “Fatah leaders showed no willingness to change.”

Added Nader Said, “If it had rained, Fatah would have lost out even more. You have to be motivated to vote.”

After a half century of dominating Palestinian politics, Fatah’s monopoly had ended. It was the first time an Arab electorate ousted autocratic leadership in free and fair elections—a message that resonated throughout the region.

Jibril Rajoub, jobless, decided to go back to school.

Sheikh Nayef became minister of religious affairs in the new government.

 

The coming conundrum in the Middle East is that free and fair elections may not initially produce a respectable democracy. After decades of autocratic rule, the political spectrum has become so skewed that the choices, and winners, may not all be peace-loving or tolerant moderates. The transition to stable democracy worldwide—in Russia, South Africa, and Venezuela, to name but a few still struggling in disparate ways—is a rocky process that requires time. But in the Middle East, transitions may be the messiest.

The Palestinians were the test case.

After winning several city-council elections in 2005, Hamas politicians sent mixed signals about their intentions. They often streamlined budgets, eliminated waste, and went after pervasive corruption. They also allied with Christian politicians in Ramallah and Bethlehem and did not try to change the tradition of councils appointing Christian mayors ruling over Muslim majorities. And they did not propose adopting Islamic law—yet.

“The implementation of Sharia is not a priority at this juncture,” Sheikh Nayef Rajoub told al Jazeera. “This doesn’t mean, however, that we will not seek to amend some of the existing laws to make them more even-handed.”²⁵

But the atmospherics clearly changed. Islam may not have become the law, but its rules were increasingly becoming the practice. In the West Bank town of Qalqilya, the city council cancelled a popular music festival because the music was too Westernized. The local sheikh said the festival violated Sharia. “There are times when the municipality acts as a brake on the Palestinian Authority decisions that are against Islam,” the mayor explained.²⁶ In Gaza, a clampdown by Islamist vigilantes targeted shops selling liquor and pharmacies carrying birth-control pills. Traditionally more religious than the West Bank, more men in Gaza also grew beards, and more women wore head scarves, some even donning face veils, a practice virtually unknown a generation earlier.

So Hamas’s decision to run for national office in 2006 deepened the debate about whether Islamists would honor democratic principles once elected. Views differed sharply.

“I have not seen any group as willing to be co-opted and integrated into a system that is not of their own making,” reflected Nader Said, the U.S.-educated pollster in Ramallah. “The Palestinian Authority is still the umbrella of power, the Americans are still the interlocutors, and Israel is still the neighbor. So whatever they say, Hamas has to give up a great deal to participate.

“Things will never be the same for Hamas. And they have willingly accepted this change. Hamas decided that participation is part of the Muslim Brotherhood tradition. And this is the best time to integrate and compromise. They are not god-given angels anymore. They are running to fix things, not just to serve God. Their rhetoric has changed 180 degrees.”

The region’s rulers firmly believed otherwise. They have long argued that their control is the main safeguard against an Islamist political wave and potential theocratic rule.

“We should follow a style of reform that will not undermine stability and encourage the forces of radicalism and fundamentalism to direct the course of reform toward their objectives,” opined Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. “What would happen if extremists won a majority in Arab parliaments?”²⁷

After the election, I went to see the Hamas leadership outside the Palestinian territories—the men who had not participated in the historic vote—to get a sense of their vision of the future. The Palestinians faced two immediate challenges: First, developing their nascent democracy amid one of the fiercest political rivalries in the Arab world. And second, achieving statehood after many false starts. The way ahead was not clear because Hamas, like the Palestine Liberation Organization during its years in exile, has both inside and outside branches. Unlike the PLO, Hamas has a binding ideology. Yet views still differ within the movement.

My ultimate goal was to see Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas. Getting access to him in Syria was hard enough. But security around Mashaal had also been tightened after an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997, which followed a series of suicide bombs in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister at the time, called Mashaal the “preeminent figure responsible for the murder of innocent Israeli civilians.” Israel came close to getting its revenge when two Israeli agents disguised as Canadian tourists tracked down Mashaal in Jordan and injected poison into his ear. The operatives were captured, and an enraged King Hussein demanded the antidote from Israel to save Mashaal’s life. As part of the deal, Jordan freed the two Israelis in a prisoner exchange that included Israel’s release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founding father of Hamas who had been imprisoned for eight years. Jordan later expelled Mashaal. He ended up in Syria.

Seven years later, Mashaal became head of Hamas by a process, literally, of elimination. In 2004, Israeli helicopter gunships swooped down over Gaza and fired a missile as Sheikh Yassin, who was partially paralyzed in a childhood sports accident, was being wheeled out of morning prayer services. Yassin, his bodyguards, and nine bystanders were killed. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a cofounder of Hamas, succeeded Yassin. Less than a month later, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a car carrying Rantisi, his bodyguards, and his son. It was incinerated. Mashaal then assumed leadership of Hamas.

To get to Mashaal, I went first to Beirut in search of Osama Hamdan, whom I had met in the mid-1990s when he headed the Hamas office in Tehran. As a primary supplier of aid and arms to Hamas, Tehran was an important posting. Nevertheless, Hamdan once grumbled about how hard he had to lobby the Iranian government. “It’s not as easy a job as you might think,” he once told me. As a Sunni Arab, he also felt somewhat out of place among the Shiite Persians. He spoke Arabic and English, but he needed an interpreter to speak to the Iranians.

From Tehran, Hamdan moved to head the Beirut office in 1998. He also became a member of the Hamas politburo. In 2003, he was one of six senior Hamas leaders named by President Bush as a “specially designated global terrorist,” which automatically froze personal assets in the United States and prohibited business transactions with Americans. I found his office in Beirut’s poor southern suburbs, which is also the stronghold of Hezbollah, another Iranian ally.

Born in 1965, Hamdan still had youthful eyes, even as he had grown from the leanness of youth in 1994 to the heft of middle age in 2006. His brown beard and hair had not changed; they were both cropped short and neat.

We had a long conversation about the election and the future. I asked him if Hamas might modify its position on Israel, perhaps under an arrangement where President Abbas continued peace efforts as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO was the signatory to earlier agreements committing the Palestinians to peace in exchange for their own state. The compromise widely proffered after the election envisioned Hamas running day-to-day government, while Abbas brokered a solution for a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel.

“No,” Hamdan replied, shaking his head with certainty.

“The Jews have the right to return to the places they came from, or they can live in the region as citizens, with their rights as Jews and as humans—but not in a state on our occupied land. Why did the French resist the German occupation during World War II? Why didn’t the Afghans let the Russians occupy their country? The Israelis know they are occupying our homeland.

“So they will have their choice: They can accept that they are Jewish Palestinians, or they can go back to their homelands. It’s their choice. No one will be forced to take one decision or the other.”

Hamdan’s answer was like going back thirty years in time, to the aggressive rhetoric from the days Yasser Arafat waged his campaign against Israel from the same southern suburbs of Beirut. Ironically, Hamdan invoked Arafat as justification for his view.

“In 1988, Arafat believed that recognizing Israel would win back part of our rights—and that he could get a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders. We met him several times after 1988, and he really believed that,” Hamdan said. “But what happened? The Oslo agreement in 1993 called for a Palestinian state by 1998. It didn’t happen. Since then, big chunks of West Bank lands have been taken by the Israelis. And the numbers of settlers tripled.

“It was all a grave mistake,” he said, shaking his head. “No one will think to do that again.”

On every issue, Hamdan represented the toughest positions within Hamas. His ideal state was a caliphate, ruled by a caliph, God’s representative on earth, which would incorporate several Muslim countries as well as modern Israel. I asked him if he really thought a caliphate was viable in the twenty-first century.

“It’s the right of people to dream that this may happen one day,” he replied. “If someone had talked in the fifteenth century about France existing without a kingdom, no one would have believed it. If I had said eighty years ago that there will be a European Union, no one would have believed it. If someone had talked about unifying Germany twenty years ago, no one would believe it. But they all happened.

“Understand, I’m not talking about going back to living in old times. It doesn’t mean riding camels or living in tents. It’s only the principles we want to revive.”

He was also dismissive of the American commitment to democracy for the Palestinians, even as he claimed Hamas was willing to talk to Washington’s envoys.

“The United States is like the prince in search of Cinderella,” he told me. “The Americans have the shoe, and they want to find the kind of people who fit the shoe. If the people who are elected don’t fit into the American shoe, then the Americans will reject them for democracy.”

Before leaving, I asked Hamdan if he would give me a contact to see Mashaal in Syria. Hamdan knew I disagreed with him, quite profoundly. I once told him that my father had been an officer in the U.S. Third Army unit that seized Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp to be liberated by American troops. Ohrdruf was part of the Buchenwald network of camps. I had grown up on my father’s stories about what the Nazis had done to Europe’s Jews. Hamdan always argued with me that the Palestinians should not have to pay the price for Germany’s atrocities. Neither of us ever got anywhere with the other on the subject of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Hamdan pulled out his cell phone and called Damascus.

A week later, I was in a large room filled with green overstuffed chairs at Hamas headquarters in Syria. On one wall was a large poster of Sheikh Yassin surrounded with smaller pictures of fourteen other Hamas officials who had died in Israeli “targeted assassinations.” A television tuned to al Jazeera was in one corner; a large model of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock was in another.

Khalid Mashaal is a beefy man with silvering hair and penetrating dark eyes; his short beard is still black except for two silver streaks under the two sides of his mouth. He was wearing a light blue shirt, open-necked, and a navy suit. He greeted me when he strode into the room, but before we began talking he paused to intone, “In the name of God the compassionate and merciful.”

Born in 1956 outside Ramallah, Mashaal had a reputation as a brainy kid from a conservative religious family. The family fled when Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967. The bitterness lingers.

“I’m from Ramallah,” he said when I told him that I been at the Palestinian election. “I can’t go there. But you, an American, just came from there.”

Mashaal had spent half his life, almost a quarter century, in Kuwait. At Kuwait University, he studied physics and founded an Islamic student movement called the List of the Islamic Right to counter Arafat’s Fatah. In the late 1980s, he was one of the original members of Hamas. He led the branch in Kuwait. Mashaal taught school until the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, after which he fled again, this time to Jordan. In 1996, he became political director of Hamas.

Mashaal, a serious man not prone to smiling, was almost gleeful about the election results. “I was confident of winning, but not by this much,” he told me. “Our people in the West Bank and Gaza said a week before the election that they thought we would do well. But it was much more than I expected.”

What Hamas had not counted on was forming a government alone. The widespread assumption among many Palestinians, whatever the election outcome, was that Fatah and Hamas would end up in a coalition government. After Hamas’s decisive win, however, Fatah opted to become the formal opposition. The result was a political mish-mash: Fatah still controlled the presidency, while Hamas won the right to pick the prime minister, form a cabinet, and run the day-to-day government.

The rivalry between the two parties only deepened. Both sides violated the spirit of democracy.

Fatah refused to heed the message of its electoral defeat. In a preemptive move during the old legislature’s final session, Fatah transferred many of the prime minister’s powers to the president’s office—effectively from Hamas to Fatah. Fatah ministers also filled vacancies and promoted followers in the civil service so it would be top-heavy with Fatah loyalists. President Abbas assumed control of lucrative border crossings from the interior ministry, and transferred authority over the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and the Palestinian News Agency from the information ministry to the president’s office.²⁸ He also failed to clean up rampant corruption. After promising to rebuild the party from the ground up, Abbas instead allowed the old-boys’ network to largely remain in place. Adding to the political tensions, Fatah’s militias roamed the streets as if they still owned them.

At a rally in Damascus shortly before my visit, Mashaal condemned Fatah as “traitorous” for “robbing us of our powers as well as our people’s rights.”

Hamas, in turn, used the network of mosques to lambaste Fatah. The Islamic party, which already had the largest Palestinian militia, the al Qassam Brigade, mobilized a new government security force loyal only to its officials. It used tunnels, some almost 100 feet deep, dug by profiteering Gaza clans under the eight-mile border with Egypt, to bring in arms.²⁹ It also refused to recognize Israel, renounce violence, and accept either past peace deals or future negotiations—even though every public-opinion poll before and after the election showed the majority of Palestinians favored peace with Israel and a two-state solution.

Mashaal tried to straddle the divergent views within Hamas about how to achieve a Palestinian state. In an op-ed piece in Britain’s Guardian newspaper a week after the vote, Mashaal invoked the old rhetoric opposing a Jewish state while at the same time proposing a long-term truce with Israel.

Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us—our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.

We shall never recognize the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognize the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins or solve somebody else’s problem. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice.³⁰

I asked Mashaal what “peace based on justice” really meant: Was Hamas willing to explore an arrangement that would effectively allow a permanent peace, or was it just positioning itself until demographics, regional support, and the military balance were more in its favor to claim all of old Palestine?

“Wars and struggles have favored Israel. These are historical facts,” he replied. “The issue is complicated, so that’s why we in Hamas have announced that we’re ready to establish a Palestinian country on the borders of 1967, with the right of Palestinian refugees to come back to the cities they came from, then there can be an agreement for a truce. After that, the coming generations will decide the future.”

His terms—the 1967 border and return of Palestinian refugees—were unacceptable to Israel. And, like Arafat at his slipperiest, Mashaal dodged the question—for ninety minutes—of recognizing the Jewish state.

“Israel does not recognize my rights. Who needs to be recognized—me the victim, or the killer and occupier?” he said.

Hamas’s immediate crisis, however, was governing the little Palestinian Authority. Unwilling to deal with a violent extremist movement, the outside world suspended foreign aid needed to develop the nascent state, from building schools and paving roads to fostering civil society. Israel also withheld some fifty-five million dollars a month in Palestinian tax revenues that it collected—and that paid one-half of the Palestinian government’s payroll, from teachers and police to medical staff and utility workers. Mashaal had been scrambling to raise tens of millions of dollars from a limited number of Muslim countries willing to help pay the Palestinian government’s bills.

As revenues and aid dried up, Fatah loyalists agitated unpaid government workers to organize sit-ins and protests, deepening tensions. Within months, Fatah politicians urged Abbas to call early elections, ostensibly to end the political deadlock but also because they were unwilling to wait until 2010 to have a shot at ruling again.

“All these measures are to make the Hamas government fail,” Mashaal told me.

The Palestinian Authority suffered from a political vacuum and rumbling disorder. The most vocal supporters of Hamas were other extremists. The day before I saw Mashaal, al Jazeera had aired a new audiotape from Osama bin Laden. The al Qaeda chief raged at the West for cutting off aid to the Palestinians after Hamas’s victory.

“The European and American rejection of the current Palestinian government is a Zionist-Crusader war against Muslims,” bin Laden said.

To the outside world, al Qaeda and Hamas fell into the same camp of militant groups built around a zealous religious ideology that justified suicide bombers and called for societies built strictly around Islamic law. With the rise of political Islam, cells of al Qaeda affiliates or wannabes had also emerged in Gaza. The Swords of Islamic Righteousness was one of the shadowy new renegade groups that attacked music stores, recreational clubs, Internet cafés, and cultural centers. “Get back to Allah and away from all those dirty, corruption things, because you will never withstand the fire of hell and the torture at the end of your life,” the Swords warned after an Internet café attack.³¹ The new cells were widely linked to the mysterious deaths of three prostitutes.

Hamas and al Qaeda, however, were often also at odds. After the Hamas election, Ayman al Zawahiri, the second-in-command, issued a statement from hiding that scolded Hamas and appealed to the Palestinian movement not to work with the “secularist traitors” of Fatah.

How come they did not demand an Islamic constitution for Palestine before entering any elections? Are they not an Islamic movement?…Accepting the legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas…is an abyss that will ultimately lead to eliminating the jihad and recognizing Israel.³²

Mashaal struggled to distance himself from al Qaeda. “Hamas has very different policies,” he told me. “Bin Laden thinks it’s wrong to participate in elections, while we participate. We also limit our struggle against the Israeli occupation to Palestine. We don’t take our attacks outside Israel. The world must make a clear distinction between us and al Qaeda.”

Before leaving, I asked Mashaal to look at the Middle East a decade down the road.

“There will be a general escalation in the region, because of the Israeli occupation, the war in Iraq, and the expected American war in Iran over its nuclear program,” he offered. “So the region in the coming years will have no real stability.

“But despite the difficulties in the coming years,” he said, “the Palestinians will get their own state.”

Over the next year, however, Palestinian politics instead drifted deeper into a dysfunctional political deadlock. Talks between Hamas and Fatah repeatedly collapsed; rival security forces and militias increasingly attacked each other. Deaths from factional violence mounted.

Tensions with Israel also escalated. On June 25, 2006, Hamas gunmen and militants from two other groups sneaked through a tunnel under Gaza and attacked an Israeli army post. Two Israelis were killed, three were injured. The gunmen seized nineteen-year-old Corp. Gilad Shalit, then fled back to Gaza. They then demanded freedom for 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the lone Israeli soldier.

Israel blamed Mashaal personally for the kidnapping. It also pledged not to succumb to extortion. Three days later, Israeli troops launched Operation Summer Rains, invading Gaza and launching raids across the West Bank to arrest Hamas members of parliament—thirty-eight in all, including the speaker of parliament and several cabinet ministers. Among them was Sheikh Nayef Rajoub.

The Israeli offensive did not end until a cease-fire was declared in November. Little was gained by either side during the five-month confrontation. Shalit was still a hostage; Rajoub and the Hamas politicians were still in an Israeli prison.

Amid military hostilities with Israel and Palestinian political tensions, life in the territories deteriorated rapidly. A year after the election, roughly two thirds of the Palestinians lived below the poverty line—or on less than three dollars a day.³³ A public-opinion survey found that three out of four Palestinians were disappointed with their government and the direction of their society. More than one half of the Palestinians polled blamed both Fatah and Hamas for failing to form a viable unity government—and for their economic plight.

In February 2007, Saudi Arabia intervened to end the year-long deadlock. Assembling leaders of the rival factions in Mecca, King Abdullah brokered a deal for a unity government and a cease-fire. Hamas retained the prime minister’s job, while a Fatah official became his deputy. Cabinet posts were divvied up: Hamas got nine ministries, Fatah six, left-wing parties four, and independents five. Abbas accepted the Mecca Accord for Fatah, Mashaal for Hamas.

Al Qaeda again railed at its fellow Islamists in Hamas. “The Hamas leadership has finally joined the surrender train of [former Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat for humiliation and capitulation…. Hamas went to a picnic with the U.S. Satan and his Saudi agent,” Zawahiri said in another statement from hiding.³⁴

The uneasy calm didn’t last long, however. The fierce rivalry among militias soon flared anew. Tensions began to tear the two territories apart—from each other.

Although they are only thirty miles apart, the West Bank and Gaza had always been distinct places since they became the refuge for almost 500,000 fleeing Palestinians after Israel’s creation in 1948. The two territories were ruled by different countries: The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. Gaza was administered by Egypt.

Under Jordanian rule, the West Bank—a mix of cosmopolitan cities and rustic agricultural areas with both Christians and Muslims—evolved into a society where religion was largely in the private domain. The West Bank was the center of Palestinian intellectual life. West Bank Palestinians often went to university in Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. The middle class filled the ranks of Fatah and a slew of leftist factions under the Palestine Liberation Organization umbrella.

Under Egyptian rule, the Palestinians in the narrow Gaza Strip—which had one teeming city, three towns, and eight densely congested refugee camps—were initially influenced by Arab nationalism. But the poor in refugee camps had few cultural outlets beyond the mosque. The young who gravitated to universities in Egypt, including the leaders of Hamas, often came under the spell of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic charities often provided badly needed services, from dental care to food banks and summer camps.

Israel’s conquest of large chunks of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the 1967 war brought the two territories together. Even under common occupation, however, the West Bank and Gaza continued on their own ways culturally and economically. They had distinct education systems, legal systems, and local leadership in nongovernment groups.

The territories finally came under common Arab rule in the new Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Israel agreed to treat the two areas as a single unit and guarantee safe passage between them. A winding road—for Palestinian use only—connected the West Bank and Gaza for the first time. The tenuous link lasted for seven years, until Israel imposed travel bans after the second intifada began in 2000.

Yet after almost fifteen years together, the two territories still had disparate profiles: The West Bank was occupied by Israeli troops but it was economically viable. It had more resources; its economy was diverse. Less than six percent of its population lived in refugee camps. In contrast, Gaza was free of Israeli troops, which had been withdrawn in 2005, but was economically strapped. One third of Gazans were stuck in overcrowded refugee camps of cinder-block homes and rutted allies. With few resources, at least one half of Gaza’s labor force was out of work by 2007. Roughly eight out of ten Gazans relied on some form of United Nations food aid.

The new rupture began on June 9, 2007. Tensions building over the eighteen months since the election literally exploded. Weeks of escalating attacks between rival forces loyal to Fatah and Hamas turned into open street battles in Gaza. The narrow strip echoed with the staccato of gunfire, as smoke rose into the air from rocket and mortar attacks on government buildings. Bands of masked fighters roamed Gaza City, waged gun battles in the streets, and executed captives on the spot. Both Hamas and Fatah reportedly hurled opponents from high-rise buildings, with gunmen hunting down wounded rivals in hospital wards to finish them off.³⁵ Hamas executed a Fatah commander and paraded his body through a refugee camp. Another Fatah official escaped by tying Hamas hostages to the front and roof of his pickup truck.

The Gaza showdown quickly began to look like civil war. “I think we are in Iraq, not Gaza,” a father of six told Reuters.³⁶ “Snipers on rooftops killing people. Bodies mutilated and dumped in the streets in very humiliating ways. What else does civil war mean but this?”

The security forces loyal to President Abbas had far greater numbers but no strategy. Hamas forces had more arms and greater discipline. Hamas systematically seized Fatah’s outlying positions, then closed in on the four security headquarters in Gaza City. Hamas claimed its goal was only to end the factional fighting and restore order by bringing all armed factions under control of the unity government.

“What happened in Gaza was a necessary step. The people were suffering from chaos, and the lack of security drove the crisis toward explosion, so this treatment was needed,” Mashaal told a press conference in Damascus. But the timing may also have been linked to an American plan to train, arm, and upgrade Abbas’s personal Presidential Guards with over forty million dollars in aid. It was a little-disguised effort to give Abbas more muscle, which Hamas leaders suspected was designed to oust them from power. Their offensive was in part a preemptive strike.

It was also an opportunity for revenge. During the decade of Arafat’s rule, Fatah officials had often been ruthless with Hamas. Leaders and fighters had been jailed. Some were tortured; many had their beards, a sign of piety, forcibly shaved to humiliate them. As Hamas got its turn, Muslim clerics issued fatwas over the Hamas television and radio stations calling the battle “a war between Islam and the non-believers.”³⁷

In a last-ditch effort to end the fighting, hundreds of men, women, and children marched down a main Gaza City street waving the Palestinian flag. One banner warned: “History will judge you. The street will not forgive you.”³⁸ Fatah gunmen used the crowd as a shield to open fire at Hamas fighters. Hamas gunmen fired back. Two of the demonstrators were killed.

The finale to eighteen months of confrontation proved to be a rout, however. It was over in five days. Hamas won easily. Fatah’s fighters went to ground or simply fled, by land or sea, to Egypt. More than 140 Palestinians died in the process; three dozen were civilians, including women and children.

After it was over, Hamas fighters commandeered seafront villas owned by Fatah politicos, security officers, and moneymen. They ransacked the home of the Fatah security chief, ripping off crystal chandeliers, silk carpets, even a bathtub, the clay roof tiles, and the palm trees in a courtyard. Looters expressed astonishment at the opulence.³⁹ At Gaza’s presidential compound, masked Hamas gunmen celebrated by pillaging the president’s Gaza office, with skirmishes breaking out among militants over who got the last television.⁴⁰ The murals of both Arafat and Abbas were riddled with bullet holes. Outside, two bright green Hamas flags flew on the front gate.

Hamas declared June 14 the day of Gaza’s “second liberation.” The first had been from Israel in 2005, the second in 2007 from “the collaborators.”

From the West Bank, Abbas responded by declaring a state of emergency, dismantling the three-month-old unity government, and appointing a new prime minister. Fatah gunmen also asserted their authority in the West Bank. They showed up at government offices and ordered elected Hamas mayors and city-council members to go home—and not return. They also attacked and set fire to Islamic schools and charities. Local imams also disappeared.⁴¹

The nascent Palestinian state had fractured into two pieces—with dueling governments. Fatah leaders ruled the West Bank. Hamas consolidated its control of Gaza.

In eighteen months, the two largest Palestinian parties had destroyed the euphoria of the Arabs’ most democratic election ever, anywhere.

“I do believe it is the end of Palestinian democracy,” Ayman Shaheen, a political scientist at Gaza’s al Azar University, told an American journalist.⁴²

The Palestinian saga was far from over. The Palestinians’ sense of national identity is arguably stronger than any other Arab community outside of Egypt. Fatah and Hamas continued to share many goals, including the end of Israeli occupation, creation of a Palestinian state, and release of thousands of political prisoners. Even as the two halves split, the focus in the territories and the region was on how to get them back together. On their first day apart, the West Bank cleric at Ramallah’s main mosque called for reconciliation, while Hamas offered an amnesty to Fatah fighters in Gaza. In Damascus, Mashaal told a press conference that there would be “no two governments and no division of the homeland.” He also acknowledged Abbas’s leadership. “Abbas has legitimacy, there’s no one who would question or doubt that he is an elected president, and we will cooperate with him for the sake of national interest.”⁴³

All was not forgiven by either side, for sure. But both felt a sense of loss.

In the end, Hamas understood that it had only achieved a military victory over Fatah. Neither party had achieved a political monopoly in either territory. Indeed, since the 2006 election, Fatah had gained politically in Gaza as life deteriorated under Hamas rule, while Hamas had made gains in the West Bank because Fatah still refused to clean up its act.⁴⁴

The Palestinians have always been a harbinger of political trends in the Middle East. They showed that the Arabs did have a thirst for open political societies. And they proved that the Arabs were capable of holding robust and free multiparty elections.

But the first eighteen months of the Palestinian experiment with democracy also reflected the volatility of change and, after decades without freedom, the passions that can be unleashed in a free vote.