Fundamentalists seize role in Palestinian uprising

Growing influence of extremist Islamic Resistance Movement worries both Israel and the PLO

By Glenn Frankel, The Washington Post, Bireh, West Bank

Fundamentalists seize role in Palestinian uprising — Anchorage Daily News, 25 September 1988 — Anchorage Daily News · Anchorage, Alaska · 25 September 1988

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“BIREH, West Bank — The quarter-mile-long stone wall outside the old Moravian Church leper colony has long been a favorite billboard for Palestinian sloganeers. But lately a new set of graffiti has appeared that, even by local standards, is harder-edged and more radical than most nationalist fare.

‘The end of Israel is a Koranic inevitability,’ reads one. ‘Yes to the revolution of the mosques… Let those calling for peace be silent… We will tell the sons of Zion that we will not forget Haifa and Jaffa. We are coming.’

Each slogan is signed by Hamas, which means ‘zeal’ and is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, the newest and most extremist of the underground Palestinian resistance groups to have emerged during the nine-month uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In recent years, the combination of fundamentalism and Palestinian nationalism has been a potent force in the poorer, more traditional Gaza Strip and was a major element in triggering the uprising last December.

But Hamas is still a fledgling, but its growing influence not only in Gaza but in the wealthier, better educated and more sophisticated West Bank is a phenomenon that both Israel and secular activists of the Palestine Liberation Organization are watching with concern… Hamas is also opposed to an international peace conference, one of the PLO’s major proposals, because it believes a conference would result in territorial compromise and PLO recognition of Israel.

Its hard-line stance is one of the factors limiting Arafat’s options. ‘The PLO first gained respect and support because it adopted the armed struggle,’ says Sheik Bassam Jarrar, one of the young imams of the West Bank who are considered spiritual leaders of Hamas.

‘But now that the PLO is giving up the armed struggle, its support is lessening.’… It has a vast, built-in communications network in the mosques that cover both Gaza and the West Bank. Within a week of the issuing of its covenant, the document was posted in mosques throughout the territories. Jarrar and other local imams preach to full houses each week.

In the covenant, Hamas rejects compromise with Israel because it claims all of Palestine is an Islamic trust that cannot be yielded. It condemns the international conference proposal as ‘arbitration by unbelievers over the land of the Moslems.’ The only solution, it claims, is ‘jihad’ — Islamic holy war.”

Context added by this archive

Nine months into the intifada, a Washington Post correspondent standing at a wall in Bireh reading the graffiti to find out who is writing it. The sheik is named and quoted on why the PLO is losing support, and the map beside the story is credited to the Christian Science Monitor.

Cite this clipping

"Fundamentalists seize role in Palestinian uprising," Anchorage Daily News, 25 September 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-040. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-040