by Robin Wright
The Israeli offensive did not end until a cease-fire was declared in November. Little was gained by either side during the five-month confrontation. Shalit was still a hostage; Rajoub and the Hamas politicians were still in an Israeli prison.
Amid military hostilities with Israel and Palestinian political tensions, life in the territories deteriorated rapidly. A year after the election, roughly two thirds of the Palestinians lived below the poverty line—or on less than three dollars a day.33 A public-opinion survey found that three out of four Palestinians were disappointed with their government and the direction of their society. More than one half of the Palestinians polled blamed both Fatah and Hamas for failing to form a viable unity government—and for their economic plight.
In February 2007, Saudi Arabia intervened to end the year-long deadlock. Assembling leaders of the rival factions in Mecca, King Abdullah brokered a deal for a unity government and a cease-fire. Hamas retained the prime minister’s job, while a Fatah official became his deputy. Cabinet posts were divvied up: Hamas got nine ministries, Fatah six, left-wing parties four, and independents five. Abbas accepted the Mecca Accord for Fatah, Mashaal for Hamas.
Al Qaeda again railed at its fellow Islamists in Hamas. “The Hamas leadership has finally joined the surrender train of [former Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat for humiliation and capitulation…. Hamas went to a picnic with the U.S. Satan and his Saudi agent,” Zawahiri said in another statement from hiding.34
The uneasy calm didn’t last long, however. The fierce rivalry among militias soon flared anew. Tensions began to tear the two territories apart—from each other.
Although they are only thirty miles apart, the West Bank and Gaza had always been distinct places since they became the refuge for almost 500,000 fleeing Palestinians after Israel’s creation in 1948. The two territories were ruled by different countries: The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. Gaza was administered by Egypt.
Under Jordanian rule, the West Bank—a mix of cosmopolitan cities and rustic agricultural areas with both Christians and Muslims—evolved into a society where religion was largely in the private domain. The West Bank was the center of Palestinian intellectual life. West Bank Palestinians often went to university in Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. The middle class filled the ranks of Fatah and a slew of leftist factions under the Palestine Liberation Organization umbrella.
Under Egyptian rule, the Palestinians in the narrow Gaza Strip—which had one teeming city, three towns, and eight densely congested refugee camps—were initially influenced by Arab nationalism. But the poor in refugee camps had few cultural outlets beyond the mosque. The young who gravitated to universities in Egypt, including the leaders of Hamas, often came under the spell of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic charities often provided badly needed services, from dental care to food banks and summer camps.
Israel’s conquest of large chunks of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the 1967 war brought the two territories together. Even under common occupation, however, the West Bank and Gaza continued on their own ways culturally and economically. They had distinct education systems, legal systems, and local leadership in nongovernment groups.
The territories finally came under common Arab rule in the new Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Israel agreed to treat the two areas as a single unit and guarantee safe passage between them. A winding road—for Palestinian use only—connected the West Bank and Gaza for the first time. The tenuous link lasted for seven years, until Israel imposed travel bans after the second intifada began in 2000.
Yet after almost fifteen years together, the two territories still had disparate profiles: The West Bank was occupied by Israeli troops but it was economically viable. It had more resources; its economy was diverse. Less than six percent of its population lived in refugee camps. In contrast, Gaza was free of Israeli troops, which had been withdrawn in 2005, but was economically strapped. One third of Gazans were stuck in overcrowded refugee camps of cinder-block homes and rutted allies. With few resources, at least one half of Gaza’s labor force was out of work by 2007. Roughly eight out of ten Gazans relied on some form of United Nations food aid.
The new rupture began on June 9, 2007. Tensions building over the eighteen months since the election literally exploded. Weeks of escalating attacks between rival forces loyal to Fatah and Hamas turned into open street battles in Gaza. The narrow strip echoed with the staccato of gunfire, as smoke rose into the air from rocket and mortar attacks on government buildings. Bands of masked fighters roamed Gaza City, waged gun battles in the streets, and executed captives on the spot. Both Hamas and Fatah reportedly hurled opponents from high-rise buildings, with gunmen hunting down wounded rivals in hospital wards to finish them off.35 Hamas executed a Fatah commander and paraded his body through a refugee camp. Another Fatah official escaped by tying Hamas hostages to the front and roof of his pickup truck.
The Gaza showdown quickly began to look like civil war. “I think we are in Iraq, not Gaza,” a father of six told Reuters.36 “Snipers on rooftops killing people. Bodies mutilated and dumped in the streets in very humiliating ways. What else does civil war mean but this?”
The security forces loyal to President Abbas had far greater numbers but no strategy. Hamas forces had more arms and greater discipline. Hamas systematically seized Fatah’s outlying positions, then closed in on the four security headquarters in Gaza City. Hamas claimed its goal was only to end the factional fighting and restore order by bringing all armed factions under control of the unity government.
“What happened in Gaza was a necessary step. The people were suffering from chaos, and the lack of security drove the crisis toward explosion, so this treatment was needed,” Mashaal told a press conference in Damascus. But the timing may also have been linked to an American plan to train, arm, and upgrade Abbas’s personal Presidential Guards with over forty million dollars in aid. It was a little-disguised effort to give Abbas more muscle, which Hamas leaders suspected was designed to oust them from power. Their offensive was in part a preemptive strike.
It was also an opportunity for revenge. During the decade of Arafat’s rule, Fatah officials had often been ruthless with Hamas. Leaders and fighters had been jailed. Some were tortured; many had their beards, a sign of piety, forcibly shaved to humiliate them. As Hamas got its turn, Muslim clerics issued fatwas over the Hamas television and radio stations calling the battle “a war between Islam and the non-believers.”37
In a last-ditch effort to end the fighting, hundreds of men, women, and children marched down a main Gaza City street waving the Palestinian flag. One banner warned: “History will judge you. The street will not forgive you.”38 Fatah gunmen used the crowd as a shield to open fire at Hamas fighters. Hamas gunmen fired back. Two of the demonstrators were killed.
The finale to eighteen months of confrontation proved to be a rout, however. It was over in five days. Hamas won easily. Fatah’s fighters went to ground or simply fled, by land or sea, to Egypt. More than 140 Palestinians died in the process; three dozen were civilians, including women and children.
After it was over, Hamas fighters commandeered seafront villas owned by Fatah politicos, security officers, and moneymen. They ransacked the home of the Fatah security chief, ripping off crystal chandeliers, silk carpets, even a bathtub, the clay roof tiles, and the palm trees in a courtyard. Looters expressed astonishment at the opulence.39 At Gaza’s presidential compound, masked Hamas gunmen celebrated by pillaging the president’s Gaza office, with skirmishes breaking out among militants over who got the last television.40 The murals of both Arafat and Abbas were riddled with bullet holes. Outside, two bright green Hamas flags flew on the front gate.
Hamas declared June 14 the day of Gaza’s “second liberation.” The first had been from Israel in 2005, the second in 2007 from “the collaborators.”
From the West Bank, Abbas responded by declaring a state of emergency, dismantling the three-month-old unity government, and appointing a new prime
minister. Fatah gunmen also asserted their authority in the West Bank. They showed up at government offices and ordered elected Hamas mayors and city-council members to go home—and not return. They also attacked and set fire to Islamic schools and charities. Local imams also disappeared.41
The nascent Palestinian state had fractured into two pieces—with dueling governments. Fatah leaders ruled the West Bank. Hamas consolidated its control of Gaza.
In eighteen months, the two largest Palestinian parties had destroyed the euphoria of the Arabs’ most democratic election ever, anywhere.
“I do believe it is the end of Palestinian democracy,” Ayman Shaheen, a political scientist at Gaza’s al Azar University, told an American journalist.42
The Palestinian saga was far from over. The Palestinians’ sense of national identity is arguably stronger than any other Arab community outside of Egypt. Fatah and Hamas continued to share many goals, including the end of Israeli occupation, creation of a Palestinian state, and release of thousands of political prisoners. Even as the two halves split, the focus in the territories and the region was on how to get them back together. On their first day apart, the West Bank cleric at Ramallah’s main mosque called for reconciliation, while Hamas offered an amnesty to Fatah fighters in Gaza. In Damascus, Mashaal told a press conference that there would be “no two governments and no division of the homeland.” He also acknowledged Abbas’s leadership. “Abbas has legitimacy, there’s no one who would question or doubt that he is an elected president, and we will cooperate with him for the sake of national interest.”43
All was not forgiven by either side, for sure. But both felt a sense of loss.
In the end, Hamas understood that it had only achieved a military victory over Fatah. Neither party had achieved a political monopoly in either territory. Indeed, since the 2006 election, Fatah had gained politically in Gaza as life deteriorated under Hamas rule, while Hamas had made gains in the West Bank because Fatah still refused to clean up its act.44
The Palestinians have always been a harbinger of political trends in the Middle East. They showed that the Arabs did have a thirst for open political societies. And they proved that the Arabs were capable of holding robust and free multiparty elections.
But the first eighteen months of the Palestinian experiment with democracy also reflected the volatility of change and, after decades without freedom, the passions that can be unleashed in a free vote.
TWO
EGYPT
The Turning Points
We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.
—FRENCH PHILOSOPHER BLAISE PASCAL
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
—AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST MARGARET MEAD
However powerful the forces of history, the precise catalysts of change are often unpredictable. So, too, are its agents.
To understand how change is picking up momentum in the Middle East, I went to see Ghada Shahbender in Cairo. At age forty-two, Shahbender was a middle-aged soccer mom with four teenagers. She had never voted, never joined a party, never even signed up for one of Egypt’s little pink voting cards. She was, in that way, typically Egyptian. By law, everyone over the age of eighteen is required to vote. But, for decades, more than seventy percent of Egyptians did not bother to cast a ballot for anything.
“I didn’t believe in Egypt’s elections or referendums—or the whole political process,” Shahbender explained the first time we met in a middle-class neighborhood of Cairo in early 2006. “It was all fake.”
Yet, virtually overnight, Shahbender had become one of the new faces of change in Egypt, the most important country in the Arab world.
Egypt’s extraordinary history, its regional might, and its sheer bulk—one out of every four Arabs today is an Egyptian—make it the leading trendsetter among the twenty-two Arab countries. It is the heart and intellectual center of the Arab world, reflected in one of my favorite sayings about the region: “Books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon, and read in Iraq.”
Egypt has the clout to bestow legitimacy on any idea—and to change the direction of the region. In shaping the Middle East over the past century, Egypt rallied other Arabs to make war on Israel, but could then defy Arab sentiment to make peace with its Jewish neighbor. In shaping politics inside Arab countries for the next century, what happens among Egyptians will again have the greatest influence in defining the path and pace of change.
I called on Shahbender at an unmarked ground-floor apartment that had been converted into a makeshift office and equipped—down to the glasses—by donations from friends. She is a slim woman with an easy demeanor. Her tawny brown hair has the casually smart cut of privilege, and she was wearing a thin beige turtleneck to ward off the winter chill. We sat around an old table in the dining nook of the apartment that served as a conference area. Cradling one of the donated glasses, which was filled with a milky coffee, Shahbender told me her story as if she did not quite believe what was happening to her life.
“I graduated from university, got married, had my first child, then twins, then a fourth child, all in six years,” she explained. “I was convinced that the best thing I could do was to give these kids a good education, support my husband in his career, work hard at whatever job—I worked different jobs due to the kids—and I’d be fulfilling my parental, civic, social, and national duties.”
The turning point for her was May 25, 2005, a day that symbolized Egypt at a crossroads. Under pressure both at home and from abroad, Egypt began to dabble in the subject of political change in 2005. To start off a big election year, President Hosni Mubarak offered to let Egyptians vote on who would elect their leader—a rubber-stamp parliament, as it had been done for a half century, or the people. If the referendum passed in May, Egyptians would go to the polls in September to choose for the first time among multiple presidential candidates, and then return to the polls to elect a new parliament, in three stages based on geographic location, in November and December.
The referendum was supposed to signal Mubarak’s willingness to open up politically after twenty-four years of unchallenged rule. But the offer was not all it seemed: To nominate a presidential candidate, a party would have to already hold five percent of the seats in both houses of the People’s Assembly and to have been legal—or licensed by Mubarak’s government—for at least five years. Independent candidates would need endorsements from at least 230 elected officials. And specific quotas of support would be required from the national legislature as well as local city councils.
Most parties, including the largest opposition movement, could not meet those conditions.
So the fledgling new Egyptian dissident movement Kefaya, which means “Enough,” organized a demonstration to coincide with the May 25 referendum. Its protest in downtown Cairo was to demand more meaningful democratic reforms.
Shahbender was not interested in either the election or the protest. “I thought, ‘Really, what difference would either of these events make?’” she told me, with a shrug. “What difference could I make?” So on referendum day, she instead went to hand in her final term paper.
With her marriage failing, Shahbender had gone back to school to qualify to teach English as a foreign language. She was submitting the paper when her cell phone rang.
“It was a friend, a journalist, and she was so upset I could barely understand her,” Shahbender recalled. “She was at the Kefaya rally, and there was a lot of noise.”
The protest, her friend reported, had disintegrated into a melee. A large group of thugs had descended on the crowd, as police stood watching, and begun to beat protesters.
In Egypt, “thugs” is the widely accepted euphemism for the well-muscled young men, usually dressed in dark but informal clothing, who turn up conveniently at protests or polling stations to contain the opposition, always wi
thout leaving visible government connections. I saw them show up twice in one week at two small rallies where protesters were already grossly outnumbered by police. Some of them had short but thick truncheons in their hands. Without saying a word, the police stepped aside to let the thugs into the cordon and then watched, either ordered or mesmerized into inaction, as the thugs raised their arms and began beating people.
But the attack on May 25 was different. The thugs had gone after only the women, Shahbender’s friend told her. Females old and young had been groped, beaten, mauled, and then had their clothes ripped off. Her friend, a journalist who was covering the event, was also man-handled and hurt. Police failed to intervene even after women were dragged down the street partially unclothed.
Shahbender could only listen. “I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I had to go to a farewell lunch for the wife of the Libyan envoy to the Arab League. Many Egyptian women, educated women, working women, and ambassadors’ wives were sitting around discussing the referendum on the presidency, and they were making jokes about it.
“Then I thought of my friend at the demonstration,” Shahbender recalled, “and I left the lunch and walked through the park. It’s one of the most Egyptian parts of Cairo. You look out and see the Citadel and the City of the Dead.”
The medieval Citadel was built by Saladin, a hero for many Arabs even though he was actually a Kurd, not an Arab, born in what is today Iraq. Saladin ruled and revitalized Egypt and then forced European Crusaders to retreat from Jerusalem in the twelfth century, ending almost ninety years of Christian control of the Holy Land. For the next eight centuries, the massive walled fortress he built in Cairo continued to be the center of Egypt’s government; it remains the capital’s most prominent landmark today. In the twenty-first century, Egyptians and other Arabs also still talk about how much they need another Saladin to lead the Arab world.
