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Journalism of Courage
Whenever Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was asked if he feared assassination at Israel’s hands — an often-posed query in his final months, as one lieutenant after the other was targeted for fiery death by Israeli helicopter gunships —the white-scarved cleric would fix his questioner with a piercing gaze while a half-smile played across his waxy features. ‘‘All my life,’’ he would declare in his high-pitched voice, ‘‘I have dreamed of martyrdom.’’
In killing of the spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, Israel may have granted him his greatest wish — and made him the ultimate symbol of the violently self-immolating ideology he propounded.
Even before the outbreak of the Palestinians’ 42-month-old Intifada, or uprising, Hamas was at the forefront of the campaign of suicide bombings that has haunted Israeli cities and towns.
With grim regularity, members of its military wing, the Izzedine al Qassem Brigades, murmured their final prayers, strapped on explosives belts and blew themselves up in the middle of crowded cafes and buses, leaving carnage in their wake.
The frail and ailing Yassin — he had used a wheelchair since a childhood accident left him almost completely paralysed — although himself the picture of physical powerlessness, probably did more than any other single figure to sear into the consciousness of these young Palestinians the notion that death deliberately sought in order to inflict a bloody blow upon a hated enemy was a glorious one. For Hamas and its followers, ‘‘martyrdom’’ was the constant watchword — shouted over and over again at mass rallies that flowed like unruly rivers through the streets of the Gaza Strip, ceaselessly invoked in the carefully scripted videotapes that assailants left behind, seamlessly incorporated into the rote lessons taught to Palestinian schoolchildren.
In many Gaza neighbourhoods, Hamas functioned almost as a quasi-government body, doling out payments to the destitute, running an elaborate network of clinics and schools, keeping public order in one of the most lawless corners of the Palestinian territories.
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Ariel Sharon defends
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• ‘‘The war between us and them is open’ • ‘‘Israel will pay the heaviest price yet’’ • ‘‘It opens the door to chaos’’ Story continues below this ad • ‘‘He was a leader of the Palestinian assassins and terrorists’’ |
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When the Sheikh came home to Gaza in 1994 — after a bungled assassination attempt against another Hamas leader in Jordan forced Israel to ransom him to free a pair of hapless Mossad operatives — many of those in the enormous crowds that turned out to greet him wept with joy. From the beginning, suicide ideology was part of the philosophical underpinnings of Hamas, which was born in the volatile milieu of Gaza’s refugee camps in late 1980s, in the early days of the Palestinians’ first Intifada. But the key element of that struggle against Israel was popular resistance — stone-throwing street protests that swept up everyone from children to elderly women. The current Intifada, which erupted in September 2000, much more quickly assumed the dimensions of full-on armed conflict between the two sides. While other, newer groups such as the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade struck out with roadside shootings and guerrilla-style attacks on Israeli troops, Hamas made suicide bombings its weapon of choice — and the other Palestinian militant groups, alarmed by the stature and popularity Hamas was afforded as a result, scrambled to follow suit, in what evolved into a grisly competition of sorts. Yassin always denied any personal involvement in the planning and execution of suicide attacks. But in mosque sermons and teachings, he repeatedly portrayed them as a divinely inspired means for the weak to strike at the powerful. He depicted such attacks not as a mere military strategy, but as a means of those who carried them ot to automatically achieve oneness with God — something Yassin imself professed to long for. ‘‘There is no greater glory,’’ Yassin said last year, delivering a eulogy to a Hamas field commander who was killed by Israeli helicopter-fired missiles, a strike much like the one that months later would kill him. — (Laura King, Los Angeles Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, reported from Alexandria, Virginia)
