Conflict Blotter

I spent the last two days running around doing interviews in the West Bank, in Ramallah, Hebron and Nablus. Hamas has definitely gone to ground and seems to be on the run, more so in the north than in the south. In the village of Shiyoukh, south of Hebron, the Hamas dominated town council is nowhere to be found. Only the mayor is in his office. He ran as a Hamas candidate last year boasting of his ties to the organization. When we talked to him on Wednesday he seemed never to have heard of Hamas. All he knew, he told us, was what he read in the newspapers.

The anti-Hamas violence in the southern West Bank has been far less than in the north, even though Hebron is Hamas’ biggest stronghold in the territory. I was repeatedly told that the south has remained calm while Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, etc have burned, becaus Hebron’s family/clan system is much stronger than the north’s, and is thus able to maintain order far more effectively.

Nablus deputy mayor and Hamas leader Khalood al Masry in the charred remains of the women’s center she founded. Photo by Debbie Hill.

In Nablus the only Hamas leader that was willing to speak was Khalood al Masry, the city’s dynamic 38 year old deputy mayor. She is in hiding, sleeping each night in a different safe house after gunman showed up to City Hall on Wednesday and warned her that if she came to work again she wouldn’t leave in one peice.

The Nablus city council has 13 Hamas members and 2 Fatah members. Hamas won an estimated 75 percent of the vote, but the Hamas-controlled council has been effectively disbanded by Fatah militia decree. The same thing has happened in other cities in the northern West Bank.

An Islamic women’s center in Nablus that Al Masry founded in 1997 was also torched last week as was her private business. She showed us around the ashen remains of the women’s center, called Markaz al Jathoor, or the Roots Center. It taught women practical job skills, computers, and traditional Palestinian crafts such as embroidery among others. It provided English lessons, karate classes for youngsters, and leadership classes for young women.

Like much of political Islam, this center had two distinct and seemingly incompatible faces peering up through the ashes. On the sooty floor there was a Monty Python Flying Circus video tape and a partially melted RCA vinyl record. The album was “Love Me Warm and Tender” by Paul Anka, not exactly an Islamist anthem.

In the library there was The Dictionary of Marxist Thought. There was also, however, Sayid Qutb’s multi-volume classic work of radical Koranic exegesis Fi Zilal Al Koran, or In the Shades of the Koran. Qutb, of course, was the Egyptian radical whose writings in the 1950s and 1960s fueled a generation of violent Islamic jihadists across the Muslim world.

Al Masry is a very likable and sympathetic figure. She came from a secular family and her mother preached against the veil and the rising Islamic tide, but Khalood still turned to Islam at the age of 14 and never looked back. Somewhat untraditionally, she wears blue jeans under her navy abaya, skips down steps two at a time, and karate kicked open the charred door leading into the smoldering women’s center she founded.

We talked about the theory that Daniel Levy floated on his blog last week, and which Steve Erlanger wrote about today in the NY Times, namely that Hamas will not sit on the sidelines, isolated, boycott, under Fatah siege in the West Bank, languishing in Israeli prisons and confined to internal administrative affairs in Gaza while Mr Abbas calls for new elections and presses ahead on peace negotiations with Israel. Backed into a corner Hamas will bare its teeth and fight. Said Khalood al Masry:

It is extremely dangerous to corner Hamas like this… The Israel occupation is pressing Hamas from one side and Fatah is pressuring it from the other. The point is coming when Hamas will say enough.

Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander in Nablus Faiz al Tirawi. Photo by Debbie Hill.

So far Fatah has given no signs that is going to lighten up on Hamas anytime soon. We spoke with Faiz al Tirawi, an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader in Nablus, and the cousin of Palestinian intel chief Tawfiq al Tirawi. He said:

We are working to eradicate Hamas from the West bank. We must totally wipe out these Hamas militants in the West Bank.

Tirawi took Abbas’ strident speech on Wednesday as a call to arms against Hamas. He all but admitted that his henchmen burnt down Khalood al Masry’s Islamic women’s center. This is what he had to say:

The Jathoor Center exists to deliver a poisonous message. It is another center that markets Hamas’ lies.

Finally, Tirawi said that the once divided Al Aqsa factions in the West Bank had been jolted out of their petty internal squabbles by the debacle in Gaza and for the first time in years were operating against Hamas as a cohesive unit. No idea how true that is, but someting worth keeping an eye on.