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The Palm Beach Post · 18 September 1988

CP-1988-039

Islamic zealots threaten PLO’s ‘unified leadership’

New York Times News Service, Jerusalem

Islamic zealots threaten PLO’s ‘unified leadership’ — The Palm Beach Post, 18 September 1988
The Palm Beach Post · 18 September 1988

Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM — In the first serious split of the 9-month-old Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories, an emerging Islamic fundamentalist organization is challenging the protest’s clandestine ‘unified leadership.’ The Islamic fundamentalists, who promote an uncompromising war with Israel and are critical of the Palestine Liberation Organization, have held three days of general strikes in the past month independent of those called by the underground leadership’s leaflets, and there have been several street fights between supporters of the two groups over whether merchants should open or close. The emergence of the new organization, known as Hamas (or Zeal), an acronym for the Movement of the Islamic Resistance, not only poses a threat to the secular, PLO-oriented leadership of the uprising but has also complicated the efforts of several West Bank leaders to press Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership abroad to capitalize on their political gains by offering to come to terms with Israel… The underground leadership attacked the fundamentalist group by name for the first time in leaflet No. 25, now circulating on the streets. Hamas has become a major force in the Gaza Strip. Only a little over two years ago, rivalries in the Gaza Strip were so great that Islamic fundamentalists severely beat several members of leftist PLO groups with iron pipes and set fire to an office of the Palestinian Red Crescent. Its influence is still spotty in the West Bank, where many of the organizers are loyal to the PLO. But Palestinians said that its protest calls were likely to be heeded in traditionalist Moslem areas such as Hebron.”

Photograph caption

The pull-quote set into the page reads: “The solution to the Palestinian problem will only take place by holy war. The initiatives and international conferences only waste time.” — Movement of Islamic Resistance.

Context added by this archive

Nine months into the uprising, Hamas is reported as a threat to the people leading it. The underground leadership attacks it by name for the first time in leaflet number twenty-five.

Cite this item

"Islamic zealots threaten PLO’s ‘unified leadership’," The Palm Beach Post, 18 September 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-039. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-039

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-1988-039.

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