The murder of Ahmad Yassin: why it matters (3 April 2004)

Published in Palestine News (Spring 2004)

Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, killed when three Israeli missiles struck his limp, wheelchair-bound body on 22 March, had spent the six and a half years since his release from an Israeli cell consciously and successfully turning himself into a symbol of Palestine. An equation was made by many Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, including those who did not consider themselves Hamas activists, between Yassin's body and the Palestinian nation: paralysed, bereft of all the qualities with which we associate well-being, intensely vulnerable - but still, despite all this, resisting. His status as a role model, of how to maintain one's integrity despite all the degradations of one's physical circumstances, was compelling for many.

In reality, the gulf between Yassin's career and the image that was created of it was stark, and demonstrates much about the nature of the occupation. The anomalies in Yassin's status as the leader of the "Islamic Resistance Movement" were clear. Here was some claiming to be a "spiritual leader", but who had no formal training in Islamic law. Yassin had spent most of his political life leading the struggle not against the occupation but instead, like dozens of other clerics around the Muslim world, for the Islamization of society. His primary enemy had been secularization, fighting against self-proclaimed progressives who championed female emancipation, social liberalization and purportedly non-Islamic values. His Islamic Society, which he had established in 1973 and was the forerunner of Hamas, was known for its use of violence. But this was violence directed not against Israeli soldiers, but instead against Palestinian cinemas, outlets selling alcohol, and on occasion the Palestinian Red Crescent Society of Haidar Abdel Shafi, on whose house the activists of the Society attempted to march in 1980.

This was then music to the ears of Israeli administrators, who saw a force in the making who could challenge the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) for political preeminence within Palestinian society. Israel granted the Society charitable status in 1978. Brigadier-General Yitzhak Sager, the former Israeli military governor for Gaza, later acknowledged that the Israeli government indirectly funded it as part of their divide-and-rule strategy. There were frequent meetings between those who went on to become leaders of Hamas, including reputedly Yassin himself, and Israeli officials, most famously involving the then-defence minister, Yitzhak Rabin. The Israeli authorities delivered the control of the Islamic University of Gaza - the largest higher educational establishment in the Occupied Territories, and now Hamas' bastion - to Yassin's allies in 1981 by expelling secular intellectuals from its governing committee. Even after the distrust set in, with Yassin imprisoned briefly in the mid-1980s and the establishment of Hamas in 1987-88, Israel still saw Yassin primarily as a lever to use against the PLO. Yassin himself claimed that, during the first intifada (1987-1993), Israeli officials approached him and asked if he would be willing to head an "autonomous" administration that would take control of the Gaza Strip.

When I arrived at Yassin's home in the late 1990s to interview him, it was still unclear to me how - with that background - he could have risen to the status that he had done in Palestinian society. The pictures on Yassin's wall, repeatedly interlocking the gun and the Qur'an, in a glorification of violence that even the radical factions of the PLO had never embraced, only served to heighten my suspicions. Nevertheless, during the course of our conversation, it quickly became clear that there was a single claim upon which Yassin has built his enduring support from large numbers of Palestinians; and that was his claim to integrity. And in the Occupied Territories during the dying days of the Oslo era, with persecution from the Israelis working alongside the repression of the Palestinian Authority's forces, an assertion of integrity was tantamount to a display of heroism.

Everyone, aside from a few Israeli and American politicians, recognises that Palestinians have suffered intensely and unjustly for over 50 years due to the vicissitudes of international politics. But the international response to injustice has been to leave it intact. The Oslo process had attempted to sell to Palestinians the view that all they could aspire to was historical amnesia, indirectness in Israeli oppression, and acquiescence in their subjugation.

Yassin's response was not inflexibility; after all, he had been proposing an extended truce with Israel from his letters from prison since 1994, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Instead, it was an assertion of the belief that the Palestinian could live without denying his or her own self-worth or becoming absorbed with personal self-advancement. The brutality of the occupation, particularly from the first intifada onwards, had ensured that those claims to self-belief could only be exercised through resistance to the occupation. Yassin's key legacy for Palestinians may not be so much in the violent form of that resistance that he preached but rather in so reconnecting Palestinians' sense of their own integrity with the legitimacy of their cause. His death serves only to underline that legitimacy.

Author: Glen Rangwala

Back to the Index of Writings
To contact, email from here