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Los Angeles Times · 5 September 1988

CP-1988-037

Palestine: Islamic Issue

Continued from Page 1

Palestine: Islamic Issue — Los Angeles Times, 5 September 1988
Los Angeles Times · 5 September 1988

Transcribed from the clipping

“The covenant, dated Aug. 18 and issued under the name of the Islamic Resistance Movement/Palestine, appears at a time of growing tensions between the predominantly secular PLO nationalists and Palestinian religious fundamentalists. The fundamentalists are strongest here in overcrowded Gaza, where the uprising began and where it has been particularly violent. But in recent weeks they have also appeared to be gaining support on the West Bank of the Jordan River, long considered a secular stronghold. Late last month, the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym as HAMAS, enforced a full commercial strike in major West Bank towns against the wishes of the secular intifada leadership… Palestinian sources say that Israeli officials have encouraged such divisions as a means of weakening the Palestinian cause. The government has allowed some fundamentalists to operate semi-openly here in Gaza, for example, while cracking down on militant PLO factions. ‘I have my suspicions that over the last 10 years the Israelis tried to encourage fundamentalism as a power to curb nationalism,’ said Rashad Shawa, a former Gaza mayor and head of a prominent local clan. ‘But to their disappointment, [the various groups] joined hands against the Israeli occupation.’… ‘For me, a secular state is out of the question,’ said Sheik Akhmad Yassin, a prominent Islamic leader here. In an interview at his home in a particularly squalid Gaza neighborhood, Yassin, who is paralyzed from the neck down, said that creation of neighboring Israeli and Palestinian states ‘is not a satisfactory solution… The solution we are looking for is a unified Palestine.’… The new HAMAS covenant defines all of historic Palestine—including Israel and the occupied territories—as ‘an Islamic trust for all the generations of Muslims until the resurrection.’… The document describes HAMAS as ‘a humanitarian movement that protects human rights and is committed to Islamic tolerance toward other religions.’ It is not hostile, it adds, ‘to anyone who does not stand in its way. In Islam, followers of Christianity and Judaism can live in safety and security.’ However, the covenant cites well-known anti-Semitic tracts in condemning the Jewish national movement.”

Context added by this archive

September 1988. The intifada is nine months old and led by the secular PLO, and Hamas is still being introduced to American readers, by its acronym, as a new development. A former mayor of Gaza says Israel spent ten years encouraging the movement in order to curb nationalism. The covenant is quoted on tolerance and then on antisemitic tracts, in consecutive sentences, and the paper names them as antisemitic.

Cite this item

"Palestine: Islamic Issue," Los Angeles Times, 5 September 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-037. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-037

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1988-037.

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