Hamas will have to shed the "terrorist" image which suicide bombers have given it and negotiate with Israel if there is to be an agreed settlement, writes Michael Jansenin Jerusalem
The stunning victory of the Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, in Wednesday's Palestinian parliamentary election marked the end of 40 years of Fatah domination and was a historic turning point for the Palestinian people. This poll ended the autocratic rule of the ageing secular revolutionaries who, along with Yasser Arafat, founded Fatah, and brought to power Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is competing for power in Egypt with the secular National Democratic Party of President Hosni Mubarak.
The parliamentary election and the municipal polls which preceded it gave Hamas power on both the local and national levels. Hamas must now take over the Palestinian Authority and govern instead of criticising the Fatah-run authority from the sidelines, carrying out pin-prick attacks on Israeli targets and indulging in irresponsible flights of rhetoric.
The testing time for Hamas began last night as soon as the election commission read out the names of the candidates who won seats in the 132-member legislative council. How the movement handles itself in the next days, weeks, and months will decide its fate and will have a major impact, for good or ill, on the fate of the Palestinian people.
Hamas, which means "zeal" in Arabic, was founded as a Muslim resistance movement in December 1987 when the first Palestinian Intifada was launched.
Its spiritual mentor was Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a blind preacher who trained in Cairo, and most of its original members were Egyptian-educated professionals, mainly engineers, doctors and scientists who were associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Initially Israel tolerated and even encouraged Hamas as a counter- weight to Fatah, which had pan-Arab credentials as a national resistance movement and assumed control over Gaza and West Bank Intifada activists.
During the first few months of the Intifada, Hamas leaders were allowed to go free while Fatah militants were detained by Israel and Hamas leaflets and pronouncement were allowed to circulate. But Israel then cracked down on Hamas, which was particularly strong in Gaza, imprisoning leaders and recruits. At the end of 1992, after Yitzak Rabin became Israeli premier, scores of Hamas activists were rounded up by Israel and deported from the Palestinian territories into southern Lebanon, where most remained camped on a hillside for a year. During this period the exiled leadership became both cohesive and radicalised. Subsequently, the movement developed pragmatic and ideological factions as well as Gaza, West Bank and external leaderships, each with its own point of view.
The top man on the Hamas national list, Ismail Haniyeh from Gaza, is considered a pragmatist. Upon hearing the news of Hamas's victory, he adopted a soft line towards other elements and attempted to bring them into the government Hamas will form. Mahmud Zohar, ninth on the list and senior ideologue and hardliner, displayed a pragmatic bent when he said that Hamas would continue to abide by the truce it agreed with the Palestinian Authority if Israel reciprocates by refraining from killing Palestinian activists and staging raids into Palestinian cities and towns. But he also stuck to his ideological positions when he said that Hamas would not negotiate with Israel. "We have no peace process. We are not going to mislead our people by telling them that we are waiting for a peace process which does not exist." He also asserted: "We are going to change every aspect of the economy, industry, agriculture, social aid, health, administration and education." Therefore, he proposed a Hamas revolution.
The overall leader of Hamas is Khaled Mishaal, a hardliner who is based in Damascus, an outsider. He rejects negotiations with Israel and territorial and political compromise. But it is unlikely that the pragmatic faction, headed by Mr Haniyeh, will pay much attention to Mr Mishaal's rhetoric or accept his guidance.
On the Palestinian-Israeli plane, Hamas cannot afford to remain true to its original platform, which called for the creation of an Islamic state in all of geographic Palestine. It will have to shelve the armed struggle against Israel, as Fatah did in 1993 before it signed the Oslo accord, and extend some sort of recognition to the Jewish state within the 1967 borders. Hamas will have to shed the "terrorist" image which suicide bombers have given the movement and, eventually, negotiate with Israel if there is to be an agreed settlement between the two peoples.
Hamas will soon have to transform itself into a "partner" for peacemaking because with every passing day Israel adds new sections to its West Bank wall and constructs new settlements and new roads on West Bank land the Palestinians want for their state.
On the domestic plane, Hamas will also have the daunting task of providing services and security for the 3.5 million Palestinians living in the unruly Gaza Strip and four isolated enclaves in the West Bank. Over the past decade Hamas has constructed and run clinics and schools and provided welfare assistance in poor Palestinian communities. But now it will have to find the funding and expertise to run the ministries on which Palestinians depend for healthcare, education, water, electricity and employment. Hamas will find that there is a huge difference between running a charitable organisation and running a country, particularly a state-to-be under occupation.