INTRANSIGENT AND NOW IN CHARGE
by David Pryce-Jones
Wall Street Journal
May 2, 2006

In less than 20 years, Hamas has arisen apparently out of nowhere to form the government in the Palestinian Authority. This is an astonishing success for a small group of largely anonymous fanatics. Like al Qaeda, the Taliban, Abu Musab Zarqawi's murder squad in Iraq, and Islamist groups in Egypt and Algeria, Hamas consists of men who will stop at nothing to impose what they consider to be true Muslim beliefs. This general politicizing of Islam is one of the most disturbing portents of our times.

When Hamas started, about 1987, Yasser Arafat spoke for the Palestinians through the Palestine Liberation Organization and its military wing, Fatah. In spite of their nationalist rhetoric, Arafat and the PLO undertook no state-building but instead appropriated for themselves the huge sums of money provided for the purpose by well-intentioned but gullible international donors. In contrast, Hamas has raised funds from political Islamists everywhere and distributed them with relative honesty to poor Palestinians. Arafat's corruption was the precondition of Hamas's popularity.

An organization with a violent, apocalyptic view leads the Palestinian Authority.

At the same time, Hamas has remade the nationalist cause in its own Islamist image. It rejects the two-state solution toward which the PLO and Israel were working in their tentative way, on the grounds that God decreed Palestine to be a Muslim trust in perpetuity. Israel therefore has to dissolve itself; otherwise it will be liquidated by force. Proving its resolution, Hamas has routinely ordered into action suicide bombers, and they have killed several hundred Israelis and injured thousands. Hamas presents them as "martyrs" for the faith and pays money to their families.

Persuaded by a combination of welfare and violence, Palestinians voted Hamas into power in January and are now at the mercy of its Islamist regime. The dispute with Israel is no longer about territory and boundaries; it is about the need for all good Muslims to wage jihad until one side is victorious and the other exists no more. Iran, its proxy Hezbollah and Saudi Arabia share this apocalyptic view or at least support it. In the circumstances, mistakes and misunderstandings may well trigger a regional war with unforeseeable consequences.

For "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad," Matthew Levitt has had access to reports from various official agencies in the U.S., Canada, Britain and, not least, Israel. By its nature, Hamas is a clandestine movement closed to outsiders. It is safe to say that Mr. Levitt offers the fullest picture that can be drawn from available sources. His tone is rigorously analytic and nondramatic. The plethora of Arab names, and the many almost indistinguishable front organizations and charities, real or bogus, are no doubt inevitable aspects of such a subject, but they are also quite a challenge to the reader.

Mr. Levitt emphasizes that Hamas is a unified movement with the single purpose of imposing its will. Within its ranks the only open question is whether the cause of Palestine will further politicize Islamism or whether more Islamism is the necessary prelude to Palestinian victory over Israel. Outsiders -- in particular well-intentioned but gullible donors -- like to draw distinctions between the civilian and military wings of Hamas, but it follows that such distinctions are meaningless: Hamas's charity to Palestinians and violence toward Israel are interlocked and mutually sustaining.

Hamas's many outreach programs show that it is an organization of skill and cunning, in no way to be underestimated. Mr. Levitt documents how it has sought and found supporters all over the world, primarily in Arab and Muslim governments. Saudi Arabia, he estimates, contributes between $70 million and $90 million annually, a sum that buys a lot of terror. Iran is probably matching it by now. What Mr. Levitt calls "economic jihad" is waged in mosques, meetings and conferences, milking funds from Muslims and especially do-gooding nongovernmental charities in the West. Time and again, Hamas operatives have practiced frauds and ruses -- including money-laundering -- that outwit slow or badly informed Western intelligence agencies.

In a chapter on Hamas's terrorism, Mr. Levitt examines how the movement's operatives knowingly radicalize young men (and a few young women) by desensitizing them to violence, portraying it to be an imperative of the faith. This process begins in primary schools and continues in youth movements and mosques and universities. Sacrificing the young in this ruthless way amounts to a death cult that is unbalancing the whole society and prejudicing its future.

What is to be done? Israel has no choice except to defend itself. Hamas might not attack the U.S. or Europe for fear of losing the money it extracts from them one way or another, but Mr. Levitt tends to think that one day Hamas will be unable to resist launching suicide bombers in the West. He recommends cutting the ground from under Hamas by providing Palestinians with humanitarian aid on a larger scale.

But this is really another counsel of despair. As needy as Palestinians certainly are, the Western aid that Mr. Levitt calls for would merely allow Hamas to claim that its extremism is rewarding. In sad fact, Palestinians voted in Hamas. Only when they realize that such a vote has its costs are things likely to get any better for them or everyone else.

Mr. Pryce-Jones's "Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews" will be published in the fall by Encounter Books.

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