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John Wallach and Janet Wallach
As sixteen-year-old Walid sat with his family watching Tom and Jerry chase each other across the television screen, he could hear the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful for late afternoon prayers. The religious wail was drowning out the shrieks of the cat and the mouse. Walid was enjoying the cartoon, but, as one of the sbabab in Gaza, he knew he was supposed to report to the mosque. His home in Jabalya, the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, was under curfew; even the mosque was off limits. But Walid knew it was important to attend afternoon prayers; the mosque was the only place in the overcrowded camp, where 60,000 people lived in conditions of appalling stench and poverty that Israeli forces were forbidden to enter. It was, thus, a sanctuary for the shabab to plan their anti-Israeli activities.
Walid was a tenth-grade student at Khalid ibn al-Walid High School, a school named for a general in the Muslim army of Prophet Mohammed that had defeated two tribes of Jews in 628 A.D. His high school, like the rest of Gaza, had been kicked back and forth, like a soccer ball, between Israel and Egypt. The school's curriculum, established by the Egyptians during their rule of the Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967, included English, mathematics, chemistry and religion. There was, however, no course on Palestine or Palestinian politics. The Israelis had banned such. Since conquering Gaza in the Six-Day War, the Jewish state had tried to discourage a separate Palestinian identity. They had even encouraged the Muslim fundamentalists to build mosques, as a means of undermining the PLO. But none of that mattered now. On this warm, damp day in early December of 1987, Khalid ibn al-Walid School was closed, and Walid wanted to reach his friends at the mosque. Running down a narrow dirt path, Walid met up with several of his buddies; together they ran toward the mosque in whose enclosed yard they could hide in preparation for the approaching showdown.
The battle had started earlier that week, at about noon on Sunday, December 6, 1987, when Shlomo Sakal, an Israeli plastics salesman, had been stabbed to death on the main street of Gaza. Sakal had been removing merchandise from his van when he was murdered by a member of the Islamic Jihad, a shadowy group of militants who modeled their ideology on Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary Iran. Two days later, on Tuesday afternoon, December 8, an Israeli truck smashed into a car carrying Arab laborers home from their jobs in Israel to the Gaza Strip. Four of the Arab occupants were killed; others were badly injured. One of the injured was Walid's father, Mahmoud, a Bedouin who had worked for almost twenty years as a construction worker at a nearby Israeli settlement. Rumors swept Gaza that the “accident” was no accident, that it was a deliberate act of revenge by the family of the Israeli salesman who had been stabbed to death in the marketplace two days earlier. As the mourners returned from the funerals, they were joined by thousands of Jabalya camp residents. The large group of refugees hurled stones at the Israeli soldiers who stood inside their fortified outpost, protected by a barbed-wire fence. The soldiers fired shots into the air, but this did little to dampen the anger of the crowd. "The ground will be burned from underneath the feet of the infidels!" the protestors chanted. Others called out, “Jihad! Jihad!” By early the next day, ¡ December 9, a new, unidentified group had circulated a leaflet denouncing the killing of the four Palestinians and calling for a mass uprising. The Israelis, meanwhile, had decided they could not tolerate any more disturbances and ordered two armored personnel carriers (APCs), preceded by a jeep, to enter Jabalya to restore order.
Walid had reached the mosque by the time the group of fifty soldiers arrived. He picked up a rock and hurled it in the direction of one of the Israelis. Within seconds tear gas was fired into a window of the mosque, and the rhythmic chants of. “God is Great!” escalated to screams. Women, their heads covered and a few wearing veils, stood at their doors and began to wail hysterically. The sbabab fled to the roof of the mosque. There they pelted the Israelis, who had already been hit by Molotov cocktails. The Arab boys fired stones from their slingshots and threw jagged, broken bottles at them. A few Palestinians hurled themselves onto the APCs, forcing the drivers to swerve out of control, while others tried to grab the machine guns from their turrets. Walid ran from the roof out of the mosque to a friend's house. There he knew he could find a handkerchief that had been doused in perfume to get the irritating sensation of the tear gas out of his eyes. But the door was jammed.
By now the Israelis, who had been using rubber bullets, switched to live ammunition? "You could see them kneeling and I taking aim," recalls Walid. "They were sitting on their haunches and they were shooting. They wanted to fire straight at us," he says. But instead, keeping to their military orders, the Israelis fired at the legs of those they thought were the ringleaders. “I didn't feel the first shot,” says Walid. “The soldiers were around the corner. I didn't see them. Then while I was running, I felt as though I had lost my right leg, as if it was paralyzed. I looked at it, and suddenly I saw blood coming down my knee.” He collapsed and was picked up by two of his friends, who carried him to the house of a camp doctor. A nurse administered first aid and telephoned for a Red Crescent ambulance. Walid had been shot in an artery, causing massive bleeding in his thigh. The bullet had entered the soft tissue of one leg and then gone into his other leg, where it had smashed the femur and shattered his kneecap.
On the same day that Walid had been wounded at Jabalya, hundreds of students had gathered in schoolyards at Rafah and other refugee camps, taunting the Israelis by cursing at them in Hebrew and tearing open their shirts, baring their chests, and challenging the Jewish army to shoot them. Later that evening, on December 9, 1987, a military spokesperson announced on Israeli Radio that three Arab youths had been killed and twenty wounded. In the painful chronicle of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the events of those four days in December marked the start of the popular uprising known as the intifada.
The Israelis should have expected trouble. Only a few weeks earlier, in November, support for the Islamic Jihad at al-Azhar, the Islamic University, had risen dramatically. Supporters of the militant underground movement had won three times the number of seats in the student council than in the elections a year earlier. A few days before the December incidents there had also been a huge demonstration in Gaza in support of the Islamic Jihad .When Israel subsequently arrested its leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Odeh, more than 2000 Palestinians had stormed the Israeli out post at Jabalya.
On the first day of the intifada, December 9, 1987, I was with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and five others and we decided to establish Hamas at that time,” boasts Abdul Aziz Rantisi. The forty five-year-old pediatrician says Hamas, the acronym for Harakat al Mukawwamah al Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement) was deliberately created to demonstrate that the Muslim Brotherhood was among the principle initiators of the uprising. “We changed the name from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas because not all the Muslim Brothers are sharing in Hamas. It’s one branch of the Brotherhood," he explains.
Rantisi claims that Hamas issued its first leaflet on December 9, the first day of the intifada. ”The decision was to start the intifada under Hamas' name. We were preparing for that for a long time," he adds. Although there is no firm evidence to support his contention-none of the first three leaflets were signed the Israelis have no doubt about the identity of Abdul Aziz Rantisi. They know he was one of the original founders of Hamas. In March 1988 he was convicted on charges of establishing the group and of having written its first leaflet. Abdul Aziiz Rantisi served two and a half years in Israeli prisons, including eight months at Ansar III, before being released on September 4.1990.
Two months later he was sentenced again to another year in prison.
As he sit in a office at the Islamic university in Gaza, the husky, bespectacled Palestinian look more businessman that theologian. He keeps a green Koran with gold arabesque lettering on his desk; but dressed in a conservative navy suit and boldly stripe tie, he hardly looks like a religious fanatic. At the university, he teaches courses in science, genetics, and parasitology. He admits that he did not expect to lead this kind of life. But for Abdul Aziz Rantisi, as for almost three-quarters of the 750,000 residents of Gaza, life did not give him a choice. Like the more than half a million other Palestinians in Gaza, he, too, is a refugee.
His own life parallels that of the 16-year-old high school student Walid. Born in October 1947 in Yibna, a small town between Ashkelon and Jaffa, Abdul Aziz was only six months old when the Rantisis fled to Gaza. Like all refugees after the 1948 war, his family believed they would return home shortly. But instead they joined the 200,000 other Arabs displaced when Israel was created and the 80,000 Arabs already living in the Strip. The Rantisis settled in Khan Yunis, the second-largest of eight U.N. administered camps in the Gaza Strip.
Less than seven miles wide in the south and narrowing to only four miles wide in the north and at its midsections, Gaza's steamy twenty-eight miles of sand could never contain the passions of its inhabitants. Gaza is bordered on one side by the sea, on the other side by a barbed wire fence with Israel. The strip has been compared to a long, narrow bottle. Its only opening is the congested Erez roadblock, where Israel monitors traffic in and out of the dusty, sun-drenched dirt roads of the main city. This narrow opening at its top is the only way out; it is blocked off at its southern end by the border with Egypt. So whenever Israeli security is threatened, Gaza is sealed shut, forcing the bottled-up mixture of hatred and poverty to transform into vapors of violence and death.
It was here, amidst the open sewers and constant buzzing of f1ies, near the huge mounds of garbage and cesspools that turn into squalid wintry rivers that Abdul Aziz grew up. He was one of eleven children, nine boys and two girls, a typical-size family in the refugee camp. By the time Abdul Aziz became an adult, the population of Gaza had more than doubled to almost 650,000 Palestinians, an average of 1800 people per square kilometer, making the Gaza Strip the most densely populated area on earth.
But despite the crowding and the cramped conditions, Abdul Aziz will tell you, his family always maintained its identity. In fact, for Abdul Aziz and other refugees, the term “camp” is a misnomer; it implies impermanence. However makeshift in appearance, the camps have proved durable. They are a constant reminder, a thorn on the conscience of the world, that between 4 million and 5 million Palestinian people remain homeless and stateless. In the camps, families expand inward, not outward: each generation builds literally on top of the previous one; the concrete additions rise upwards, not only because this is the Arab style but because they have nowhere else to go.
Ask teenagers in Khan Yunis or Jabalya or Rafah where they are from, and they will not give you their street address or postal box number. Nor will they tell you they are from Block 3 or Block C or even from the camp at Khan Yunis, Jabalya, or Rafah. They will tell you they are from Yibna or Kharatia or another town in Palestine, even though they have never seen it and there is no country called Palestine.
Abdul Aziz Rantisi's mother still lives in Khan Yunis-forty years after she fled Israel. For her and thousands of others, the camps have accomplished a purpose: maintaining the mental presence of the homeland. The families from a particular village or town still live together, and marriages are arranged between their sons and daughters. Even the old hierarchy is still in place: the elderly Arab who was the mukhtar, the traditional religious leader, of Yibna or Kharatia continues to be the mukhtar of Block C or Block 3. It is all intended, of course, to keep the memory alive.
Abdul Aziz Rantisi was raised in the camp. He played among its sandy alleys and exposed, shallow sewer channels, and received his health care from the medical facilities of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). His family lived in a tent. When he was four years old, he recalls, the winter was so harsh they had to move to an old school to escape the cold. UNRWA subsequently built mud houses for the refugees but the Rantisi’s mud house was nothing like the beautiful home his parents told him they had abandoned in Yibna. When he was six, he had to work during the summer, earning the equivalent of one cent a day, which he gave to his father to help buy food for the family. “I will never forget that I had no shoes. I had to go to school with bare feet and torn clothes. I never had enough to eat.” During the October 1956 Suez crisis, when Abdul Aziz was nine years old, the Israelis bombed Khan Yunis to deter the Palestinian guerrillas from using the refugee camp as a base of operations for commando raids into Israel. He remembers hiding in an underground shelter and being very scared. “When I got home, I heard my mother and father screaming. I was told that the Israelis attacked my uncle's house and had killed him.”
But the biggest crisis in Abdul Aziz's young life occurred in 1957, just after his tenth birthday. “I borrowed some money from my relatives and bought some goods to sell in Egypt,” he recalls. It is only a few miles from Khan Yunis to the Egyptian border, and it was easy in those days to cross and come back on the same day. Abdul Aziz never got to the border, however. “Some thieves stole my goods and ran away with them. I had to go home empty-handed. I was crying because I knew my parents were very poor and, of course, they did not have the money to pay my cousins back." Abdul Aziz attended an UNRWA secondary school at Khan Yunis, where he and his sisters wore the blue-and-white-striped uniform required by the international organization. In 1965 he graduated from high school. “I was from a very poor family and we had to struggle, but I was the top in my class,” he says proudly. Education, he explains, has always been the only way to escape. When he left Khan Yunis later that year to begin taking courses at the University of Alexandria in Egypt, he was preparing for a career in medicine; neither religion nor politics was on his mind, “I was concentrating on my medical studies,” he says.
Throughout his childhood, and even before Egypt took over the administration of the Gaza Strip in 1948, Cairo enjoyed a special relationship with Gaza. This was due in part to Egypt' physical proximity and to the ease with which one could travel back and forth across the border at Rafah. But there was more than human traffic; Egypt and Gaza also traded in goods and ideologies. Gazans became familiar with Egyptian television and books, Egyptian culture, dialect, and food. Although Egypt never annexed Gaza or gave its residents passports, the Egyptians greatly improved the educational system in Gaza, opening many new schools and requiring compulsory attendance for every child over the age of six. Egypt also opened its own universities to talented students like Abdul Aziz, offering college education to several thousand Palestinians a year, most of whom could not afford to pay tuition.
When he reflects on those early years, Abdul Aziz says he was strongly influenced, although he was unaware of it at the time, by a sheikh he had first met when he was ten years old and starting to go to the mosque in Khan Yunis. The sheikh's name was Mahmoud Eid. “I always felt that he was a very wise and smart man,” he recalls. When Abdul Aziz began college in Alexandria, he again ran into Eid, and the young man and the older sheikh started to attend prayers together. “Of course, Mahmoud was the sheikh of the mosque there,” recalls Abdul Aziz. It was Eid who taught him about the Muslim Brotherhood and who filled his impressionable mind with the “truth” about Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser and his pan-Arab philosophy. “I began to understand the failure of the system in the Arab world and why the Arabs had such bad leaders. At the same time, the Muslim Brothers were suggesting that Islam could solve all the problems in the Arab countries. It was because of Mahmoud Eid that I eventually became a faithful follower of the Brothers,” he says.
In fact, it was while he was studying in Alexandria, Abdul Aziz says, that he experienced a “psychic shock,” brought on by Israel's sudden and surprisingly swift victory over Arab forces in the 1967 war. He was twenty years old. He listened to the hourly reports of the fighting on a transistor radio and watched the more infrequent television news summaries. He could not believe what he heard and what he saw. In six days the Arabs had lost the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the entire West Bank of the Jordan River, and Jerusalem, the third-holiest city in all of Islam. The defeat had a profound impact on him. “I sat by myself for a long time. I did not talk to anybody for weeks. I just sat there all by myself. Then for six months I suffered from psychogenic dyspniea-sighing, a heavy sensation pressing on my chest. I was so irritable. I spent all the nights unable to sleep, and after that I became interested in religion,” he says.
Sheikh Mahmoud Eid suggested that Abdul Aziz read the works of two great Islamic scholars: Sheikh Hassan Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1929 and was its "Supreme Guide" until he was murdered twenty years later, and Sayyid Qutb, a theoretician and writer who was hanged in 1966 for allegedly plotting to assassinate Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser.
It was not unusual for university students like Abdul Aziz to turn to the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly after the crushing Egyptian defeat in the Six-Day War. By the mid-1960s the Muslim Brotherhood had been at the center of Egyptian politics for almost a generation; and in the period Abdul Aziz was in Alexandria dominated the headlines in the local papers.
Even though Nasser owed a big debt of gratitude to his fellow “Free Officers,” who had toppled King Farouk and installed him in power, he was less grateful to the Muslim Brotherhood, which had also helped overthrow the monarchy. Sixteen months after he took over, Nasser banned the Brotherhood following a power struggle with Mohammad Nagib, the Egyptian general who helped mastermind the 1952 coup and who had lobbied with Nasser for a more lenient approach to the Brotherhood. In October 1954 the Muslim Brotherhood was blamed for a plot on Nasser’s life, and nineteen of its leaders were charged with treason in a widely publicized “show trial.” Six of them were executed, and the Brotherhood was again forced to go underground.
By 1968, following the Egyptian defeat in the war against Israel, there was a new wave of student unrest through Egypt. Nasser, already on the defensive, again blamed the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdul Aziz, however, blamed Nasser: the Arabs had lost the war because they had not been good Muslims. “Surely, Islam is victorious not only because God stands side by with Muslims but for many other reasons,” he says. Nasser and his government were internally corrupt and too dependent on foreign social and political models, particularly Arab socialism. “Nothing can be called Arab socialism. It was Marxism with some cosmetic to create the impression that it belonged to us. In reality, it was a foreign seed implanted in the Islamic world. Nasser's government was not faithful even to the Egyptians,” he charges.
Only Islam, with its promise of fulfilling God's trust “in all the branches of our life, in the home, in the school, in medicine, in engineering, in how to deal with others,” can realize the potential of the Arab people. Islam “means science and development. It means all the best manners in your life and, above all, values,” he says, citing an excerpt from Sayyid Qutb's principal work, Ma'alimfi'il Tariq, “Signpost on the Road.” Humanity, wrote the martyred Muslim leader in 1964, “today stands on the brink of the abyss because of its bankruptcy in the domain of ‘values’ under which man could have lived and developed harmoniously.”
For Abdul Aziz, as for Qutb before him, neither the East nor the West has the answers. In the period from 1948 to 1967, he says, the pan-Arab nationalists failed to make any tangible gains. In the next two decades, secular, militant nationalist groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and pro-communist factions, failed in the struggle to regain Palestine. In the 1990s the demise of Marxism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe discredited the leftist ideologies.
Abdul Aziz, the devout believer in Islam, is not surprised. “What did you expect when the region did not have a single Islamic leader?” he asks rhetorically. “The communists failed. The nationalist leaders failed. The secularists totally failed. Now the field is empty of all ideologies-except Islam.” Again, the physician cites his mentor, Sayyid Qutb, who wrote in the mid-1960s that “both individualist and collectivist ideologies have failed. Now at this most critical time when turmoil and confusion reign, it is the turn of Islam, of the umma [“community of believers”] to play its role. Islam's time has come.”
The real credit for the religious rebirth belongs to Hassan Banna, says Abdul Aziz. “He was the ‘renewer.’ Before Hassan Banna you would not see a single religious person in the street or the mosque. You would only see old men. You would never see a young man in the mosque. But after Hassan Banna it was different. He put Islam in all the branches of our life.”
The twin defeats of the 1967 war and Black September had also bolstered the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Palestinians in Gaza. But, ironically, it also had appeal to the Israelis, who were faced with the difficult task of having to govern the lawless territory and who regarded the religious fundamentalists as a useful counterweight to the PLO.
In 1974 Abdul Aziz returned to the University of Alexandria to complete his master's degree in pediatrics, which he was awarded two years later. He returned to Gaza in 1976 and began an internship at Nasser Hospital, the main medical facility in Khan Yunis, the camp where he had grown up.
The frustration of the Palestinians in Gaza did not peak until 1978, when Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords, pledging to end their state of war and to negotiate a formal peace treaty. Left in the lurch were the million and a half Palestinians in the territories, who were offered what they believed was only a humiliating form of autonomy that would indefinitely perpetuate Israeli occupation. The real losers, however, were the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Anwar Sadat, who had succeeded Nasser in 1970, did not want to face the same kind of trouble his predecessor had experienced from the fundamentalists. The Muslim Brotherhood had condemned his willingness to make peace with Israel, calling it a gross capitulation to the Zionist entity. So Sadat reacted decisively. He sealed the border with the Gaza Strip, putting the Palestinians there entirely at the mercy of the Israelis. No longer would Palestinian students be able to pursue higher education at Egyptian universities. Sadat also expelled the members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were known troublemakers. He sent them to Gaza. How ironic that only three years later Sadat himself would be murdered by an Islamic zealot.
"Now, in 1978 those activists who were thrown out of Egypt and others carne to the civil administration and asked to register a jama'ah, a nonviolent association,” recalls an Israeli official who served in Gaza. “They told us they wanted to make a mahw l'ummyya, [fight against illiteracy] and wanted to build kindergartens for their children, to open a new set of stores for their people, and encourage social activity among the older generation. They started to flourish,” the official says. “They built one mosque, then a second and a third mosque. We tried to find out where the money was coming from. It was coming from Saudi Arabia and from Jordan and from a lot of internal taxation and zakat [charitable contributions].”
The chief architect of the Islamic revival movement was Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin, a thin man with a round face who was almost totally paralyzed as the result of a childhood illness. Yassin, a scholar on Muslim law, did not disguise his belief that Israel was an illegitimate state, but he urged his followers not to rush into ajihad before they knew they could win. Instead, he urged them to pursue tarbiyeh [education] and da'wah [preaching].
The popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood, explains Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari in Intifada: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Uprising, was partly a backlash against the materialism and permissiveness that had spread to Gaza from Israel and partly a result of the need for communion to share one's suffering. Yassin was like a father to his flock, they note. “When all doors are sealed, Allah opens a gate,” the cleric said. But the fundamentalist groups also “offered a special kind of activism that combined patriotism with moral purity and social action with the promise of divine grace,” explained the two Israeli authors. “Sheikh Yassin offered the young Palestinian something far beyond Arafat's ken; not just the redemption of the homeland but the salvation of his own troubled soul.” ………………………………………..
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