My review essay on Paul McGeough’s book “Kill Khalid” and the history of Hamas appears this weekend in the Review section of The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
“When Israel occupied Jerusalem, I was 14,” Sheikh Jamil Hamami once told me. Hamami grew up in East Jerusalem. That week in June 1967, he had heard the promises on the radio that the Arab states would defeat Israel “in a few days, a few hours”. Instead came the Israeli advance. Hamami described the day that the Old City fell in a series of staccato images: “The black picture in my mind is seeing an Israeli soldier enter Al Aqsa… Near the Wailing Wall, I saw a soldier step on the Quran… A soldier told us it was forbidden to pray in Al Aqsa.”
Hamami later became one of the first leaders of Hamas in the West Bank, though he left the movement in 1995, believing that the time for “military action” had ended with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. His jagged memories of June 1967 allude to two of the reasons for the Islamic revival in the occupied territories – and for the birth of Hamas, for that organisation’s ascendance as a rival to the secular nationalist PLO and for its position today as one of the two power centres of riven Palestinian politics.
In Hamami’s emblematic account, Israel’s military victory in 1967 was an affront to Islam, represented most vividly by Israel’s control of the Al Aqsa mosque. But it also revealed the bankruptcy of the Arab states – chief among them Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Secular Arab nationalism had brought the Palestinians a second disaster. Islam was both a part of an identity under perceived threat and a potential replacement for discredited ideologies.
Indeed, Islamic activists gave an explanation halfway between sociology and theology for the outcome of the war, as the Palestinian political scientist Ziad Abu-Amr observed in his sympathetic study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Islamic Fundamentalism in Gaza and the West Bank: Israel’s victory, Islamic groups claimed, “was the result of the adherence of the Jews to their religion, and… the Arabs’ defeat was caused by their failure to adhere to Islam”. (The explanation, ironically, ignored the intensely secular character of Israeli society in 1967.)
The return to faith that followed was incremental, seen more easily by those not in its midst. In 1999, I met in Nablus with a group of activists from left-wing Palestinian organisations. One woman had been deported from the West Bank by Israel in the early 1970s and had recently returned during the Oslo thaw. She wore slacks and a short-sleeve blouse; her hair was uncovered. That had been the style in Nablus when she was exiled, she said. Now, she continued, she was a stranger in the city of her birth, where the hijab and long, modest garments were de rigueur. …
Read the rest here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.