Hamas campaign throws politics into confusion

Second in a series of occasional articles on the Palestinians as they prepare for elections on Jan. 25.

NABLUS, West Bank -- The celebration at the Trade Union Theater looked more like local politics at its most mundane than a campaign kickoff for Hamas, the best-organized and perhaps most feared of the militant groups that have unleashed scores of suicide bombings against Israel.

Banners draped the walls calling for ''Change and Reform." Candidates pumped the hands of priests in cassocks and schoolteachers in gray tweed. A union leader stepped to the microphone to deliver an uplifting, if innocuous, message: ''We will all work together to serve the country!"

Party organizers handed out sweet squares of baklava to congratulate the Hamas-backed candidates who had just won 13 of 15 seats on the city council of Nablus, the West Bank's largest city, as a new slate of candidates launched a campaign for Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for Jan. 25.

For the first time, Hamas is plunging wholeheartedly into the electoral battleground, a decision that has thrown Palestinian and Israeli politics into confusion as both sides wonder whether joining an elected Palestinian government will moderate Hamas, or whether Hamas will radicalize the government.

No one is sure whether Hamas's political campaign is a Trojan horse to push Palestinian society closer to Islamic rule and return it to all-out war with Israel, or a sign that the increasingly influential group is becoming more pragmatic.

Hamas's inclusion in the election has drawn criticism from Israeli officials and threats from the United States and Europe to cut off aid to Palestinians. But its campaign has injected new energy into Palestinian politics, giving voters what they see as their first real alternative, if an imperfect one, to the Fatah party founded by Yasser Arafat.

To Israeli officials, even a significant Hamas minority in the Palestinian Legislative Council is a nightmare scenario. Hamas remains officially committed to armed struggle and the abolition of Israel. It rejects the 1993 Oslo Accords, under which Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization accepted the existence of Israel and agreed to pursue a Palestinian state only in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel has occupied since the 1967 war.

The US State Department lists Hamas as a terrorist organization. But Palestinian voters -- even some who do not share Hamas's vision of an Islamic state and an indefinite armed struggle -- increasingly view Hamas as the only viable alternative to Fatah and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, which they view as weak and corrupt.

''Hamas's victory is no surprise because of the corruption and security chaos that the Palestinian people have been suffering for the past 10 years," said Yasser Mansour, a candidate for the legislature from Nablus who is managing the campaign there, as he greeted visitors at the union hall .

Hamas draws strength from a network of mosques and social service organizations, as well as an estimated 5,000 active fighters. Its branches provide free medical care, schooling, and food to the needy, and tend to draw their support from independent businessmen rather than the government employees who support Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas aims to capitalize on disarray in Fatah, which is in the throes of a generational split so deep it initially fielded two competing slates for the national elections.

In the municipal elections on Dec. 15, slates of Hamas members and affiliated independents -- carefully chosen for the respect they enjoy in their communities -- won 73 percent of the vote in Nablus, 72 percent in El Bireh, and half the seats in Ramallah, despite the town's large Christian population. Polls suggested that in the national elections, Hamas is likely to receive 30 percent to 40 percent of the vote, compared with 45 percent to 50 percent for Fatah.

Hamas's popularity has grown steadily since 1993, when it commanded the support of 13 percent of Palestinians, according to Khalil Shikaki, a Columbia-educated political scientist who tracks Palestinian and Israeli public opinion. Now, 32 percent say they support Hamas.

Hamas has surged as religious Muslims increasingly defect from Fatah and even some secular Palestinians support Hamas's anti-corruption stance, Shikaki said.

Hamas was founded in 1984 as a militant outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to establish Islamic law in the neighboring country.

The name Hamas is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, and its members see no contradiction in running for office while continuing to fight Israel.

''There is a right to resistance, and our entry into the parliament will legitimize this right," Mansour said.

Palestinians are ambivalent about the use of violence, opposing further attacks on Israel but believing attacks are effective, according to Shikaki's work at the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

Sixty percent of Palestinians oppose continued attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip, and 80 percent favor continuing a truce with Israel that has brought 10 months of relative calm, he found.

Yet in the same survey, 86 percent also said armed struggle brought Palestinians their greatest recent gains in the conflict.

Hamas's political leaders are playing down their military wing in their appeal to a broader swath of society.

In the Nablus union hall, banners and buttons featured none of the snapshots of teenage suicide bombers who are lauded as martyrs on older Hamas posters plastered around town.

Instead, they showed a more subtle symbol, the Ottoman clock tower in Nablus' old city, which was besieged by Israelis in a 2002 military campaign against militant cells but also evokes pride in the city's lineage.

Mansour said the campaign would focus on internal Palestinian issues -- corruption, security, education, economic development, and health -- and stressed Hamas's reputation for providing charitable services.

And, like other Hamas leaders in recent months, he signaled that after taking a leading role in the bloody conflict that killed nearly 1,000 Israelis and more than 3,000 Palestinians between 2000 and early 2005, the group is at least for now shifting its tactics to take a more pragmatic approach.

Hamas, he said, still wants ''Palestine from the river to the sea" -- and believes in retaking the land from Jordan to the Mediterranean, including Israel. But on the way to that ''strategic goal," he said, the group might back negotiations with Israel ''under certain circumstances" and would support an ''interim solution."

Such language cracks open the door for Hamas to someday accept a state in the West Bank and Gaza only, although Mansour declined to say if he supported that.

Of all the Palestinian militant groups, Hamas has been the most disciplined in its adherence to the unilateral ceasefire the factions declared last February, which has brought 11 months of relative calm.

The six suicide bombings during that period have all been claimed by Islamic Jihad, a smaller group that rejects participation in the elections.

Israeli officials dismiss Hamas's campaign as a diversion from its real aim of continuing violent struggle.

''There's no serious evidence whatsoever that Hamas is actually moderating," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, noting that Hamas militants kidnapped and stabbed to death an Israeli candy factory owner in September without any public condemnation from Hamas leaders.

''If Hamas ever had a dominant position in the PA, that would be the end of the peace process, not because of anything Israel would do but because of who Hamas is," Regev said. ''From Israel's perspective, the Palestinian leadership is making a terrible mistake by letting Hamas run. They're undermining their own democracy because Hamas has not disarmed."

At the reception, women in headscarves bowed in prayer, men chatted on white folding chairs, and a small boy in a green Hamas baseball cap ran around the room wearing a Hamas streamer as a necktie.

In the swirl was Maawiyeh al-Masri, a Hamas-backed candidate for the legislature, who is an emblem of the protest vote that's going to Hamas from many longtime Fatah backers who never thought of themselves as Islamists.

''Their supporters are multiplying not because they support its ideology or strategy, but because they are looking for an alternative, a new way to fight corruption," he said.

Masri, a member of a wealthy Nablus family known for his charitable donations, decided Hamas was the best vehicle for his mainstream-sounding platform: ''Improving the conditions of the Palestinian people -- economic, security, and political. The rule of law. And an independent judiciary system."