Freshly Elected Hamas Comes Out From the Shadows

Outlook Shaped by Years in Exile, Prison

By Scott Wilson

GAZA CITY — Ahmed Bahar arrived here in his mother’s womb, the beginning of a journey that has taken him from the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip into exile, prison and, soon, a seat in parliament.

Along his sandy street flutter the triumphant green banners of Hamas, the radical Islamic movement he has helped foster since before its official founding nearly two decades ago. A professor of Arabic, Bahar is the earnest face of an insurgent leadership that has been targeted by Israel and its secular Palestinian rivals over the years and is now set to assume a large share of political power.

"We were expecting that the future would be Islam," said Bahar, 57, who won a seat in the Gaza district. "We knew that Muslims would eventually be our judge."

The men who lead Hamas are doctors and professors, high school teachers and administrators who have patiently built an organization classified as a terrorist enterprise in Israel and the West. Their political outlook has been shaped by exile and prison, refugee camps, the threat of assassination and a strict reading of Islam that is at the heart of both their populist social program and their enduring war with Israel.

Now these men are emerging from lives little known beyond their tattered neighborhoods to chart the future of Palestinian politics after winning a large parliamentary majority last month. They have the right to form the next cabinet under the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, though it remains to be seen whether they will run ministries themselves or exercise influence less obtrusively.

On Saturday, Abbas met with Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahar, two top Hamas national candidates, for the first time since the election to begin discussing the next cabinet. After the meeting, the Hamas leaders told reporters that the group did not intend to recognize Israel, as Western governments have demanded, before entering parliament later this month.

Hamas, formally called the Islamic Resistance Movement, has evolved over decades from a pair of charitable foundations that ran kindergartens, health clinics, orphanages and sports clubs into an armed political movement that raises an estimated $150 million a year, mostly in donations channeled through Muslim foundations throughout the Arab world.

The party and its network of institutions — it controls the largest university here — have served as an alternative government in Gaza and in parts of the West Bank, supplanting the largely ineffective Palestinian Authority run by Abbas’s secular Fatah movement. In its organization and emphasis on political consensus, Hamas is also an example of the broader Islamic movement now challenging the Bush administration’s ambition to spread democracy in the Middle East.

Western governments are warning that the Palestinian Authority will lose a large measure of international funding unless Hamas softens its uncompromising message of war with Israel. The movement promotes the creation of a Palestinian state on land that now includes Israel, and it has embraced suicide bombings to achieve its goal. But Hamas leaders say Islamic organizations that share their party’s charitable goals and anti-Israel beliefs are pledging support should the Western aid disappear.

"Hamas is not alone," Haniyeh, who topped Hamas’s national candidate list, told reporters recently at his home in a refugee camp along a strip of polluted shoreline. "Many sides have offered to cooperate to make our project succeed."

Education in Mosques

In 1948, Bahar’s family, cow in tow, fled the fighting that consolidated the fledgling state of Israel amid Palestinian and Arab army attacks. They had lived in the village of al-Joura, near what is now the Israeli city of Ashkelon, and many al-Joura refugees gathered in the same camps. Among his neighbors was Ahmed Yassin, who later founded the two charities that became Hamas.

Like many Hamas leaders, Bahar was educated in Gaza’s U.N. schools. But his political education came from the mosques, and like the rest of Hamas’s founding leaders, he subscribed to the politically charged Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood that stressed liberation, social equality and a virulent anti-Semitism.

After earning a university degree in Saudi Arabia and a doctorate in Sudan, Bahar ran the Islamic Institution, which funded youth sports clubs, sponsored collective weddings for the poor and operated 35 kindergartens across the Gaza Strip. Along with Yassin’s other large charity, the al-Salah Foundation, the Islamic Institution was licensed by the Israeli military administration in the territories. At the time, Israeli officials were fostering the Islamic movement as an alternative to the secular and then-outlawed Palestine Liberation Organization, which was dominated by Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement.

Bahar is now a professor in the Islamic University, a tidy, teal-trimmed enclave whose enrollment has grown from 8,000 to 23,000 over the past decade. The school’s elected dean of students and the head of its teachers union are Hamas members.

"We pray with these people, we socialize with them," said Zahar, 60, another member of Hamas’s founding generation who won a seat in parliament. "We are not invaders. Islam is the culture, the history."

Zahar, the son of a mechanical engineer from the Gaza village of Zeitun, trained as a thyroid surgeon in Egypt and was elected chairman of the Gaza medical association in 1980. Under Zahar, the group association staged protests against Israeli health-care policy, insurance payments and salaries. Other professional associations took on a similar insurgent cast, Zahar said, as the men who would later found Hamas began winning places on their boards.

"These are people like us: professors, engineers, doctors and teachers," said Ziad Abu Amr, who also won an independent seat with Hamas’s support. "They are shaped most of all by religion, but in my mind they are not fundamentalists."

In December 1987, as the first Palestinian uprising began in the streets of Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, Yassin founded Hamas. The charities grew an armed wing, the Izzadeen al-Qassam Brigades, which Israeli officials say could number as many as 5,000 gunmen.

In December 1992, Israel rounded up about 400 Hamas members, including Zahar and Bahar, and bused them to southern Lebanon, where they were deposited on a roadside. They lived in forced exile in Lebanon until 1996, when they returned to Gaza under the Palestinian Authority, the provisional government created under the 1993 Oslo accords, which Hamas opposed.

The authority was dominated by Fatah, and many Hamas members were jailed. Bahar and Zahar each did four separate stints in Palestinian prisons. Moussa Arafat, then the head of military intelligence, ordered soldiers to shave the men’s beards, a sign of their piety, and torture them.

Last year, Moussa Arafat was dragged from his home here and killed in the street by an armed group filled with former Hamas gunmen. But Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian Authority’s head of preventive security at the time, won a parliamentary seat from the Gaza district of Khan Younis.

"We forgive," Bahar said. "Those who were unjust to us, we will not be unjust to them."

Charities Separated

Hamas is governed by a shura council — 60 people representing the party in Gaza and the West Bank, in exile and in Israeli prisons, which hold an estimated 2,500 Hamas members. The council includes women, though Hamas officials declined to say how many.

Among the most popular council members is Khaled Meshal, head of the political wing in exile. Meshal, 50, fled his West Bank village north of Ramallah during the 1967 Middle East War. His family arrived in Kuwait, where he eventually studied physics.

In 1997, two Israeli agents posing as Canadian tourists tried to poison Meshal while he was living in Amman, Jordan. In what proved to be a major embarrassment for Israel’s government, Jordan demanded that Israel provide an antidote to the poison and release Yassin from prison. A few years later, though, Meshal was expelled from Jordan. He now lives in Damascus, where he is taking part in talks over the formation of the next Palestinian cabinet.

The exiled leaders are often strident, in contrast with Gazans such as Haniyeh, who emerged from the Islamic University student movement and favored having Hamas candidates run in the Palestinian Authority’s 1996 legislative elections but was overruled. Haniyeh became the gentle face of the party during last month’s campaign, even though his nephew was killed in an Israel airstrike last year.

"We are calling on all of you to push this country forward," Haniyeh, standing before a Hamas banner stitched ostentatiously to the Palestinian national flag, said in front of a bank of cameras at the news conference.

Over the years, Hamas leaders have kept a legal separation between the party and its charities. The Hamas name does not appear on any of the foundations’ buildings, but its members occupy the senior positions and control the boards. The same goes for Islamic University.

"The people in the street know it’s us," said Sami Abu Zohri, who managed the Hamas district campaign from an office in an abandoned building here.

To some extent, the separation has sheltered the organizations from terrorist financing laws that Hamas officials say have complicated the party’s fundraising.

Zahar said most of Hamas’s money comes from Islamic foundations, supplied by a personal tithing that he says Muslims are supposed to donate to charity equal to 2.5 percent of their annual income. Party officials say the network extends to 80 countries, including the United States.

Shalom Harari, a retired Israeli senior military intelligence officer, said Hamas receives an estimated $70 million annually from the outside during lulls in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He said the amount triples during uprisings and estimated that Hamas’s average annual income is $150 million.

Harari said that, unlike the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, Hamas does not need money from Iran and receives very little. Money from foundations in Saudi Arabia have provided far more, he said, but those funds have diminished amid a Saudi government effort to end financing to radical groups.

"But it’s important to keep in mind that $100 million to Hamas is like $250 million to the Palestinian Authority," Harari said. "They simply know how to use their money more efficiently."

Researcher Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.

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