’S
HAMAS STRATEGY
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Wall Street
Journal, January 7, 2009
Anyone who knows anything about the
Middle East
knows that Sunni and Shiite radicals don’t work together—er, except when they do. Proof that the conventional wisdom is badly wrong is on offer in
Gaza
, where the manifest destiny of the Islamic Republic of Iran is now unfolding.
Tehran
has been aiding Hamas for years with the aim of radicalizing politics across the entire Arab Middle East. Now
’s response to thousands of Hamas rocket provocations appears to be doing just that.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attends an anti-Israeli demonstration in
Tehran
, Dec. 12, 2008. A poster at rear shows the late spiritual leader and founder of the Hamas movement, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.
Born in the 1980s from the ruins of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s corrupt and decaying secular nationalism, Hamas is a grass-roots, Sunni Islamist movement that has made Shiite Iran a front-line player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Before Hamas, the mullahs had financed the Palestine Islamic Jihad, whose holy warriors became renowned suicide bombers. But Islamic Jihad has always been a fringe group within Palestinian society. As national elections revealed in 2006, Hamas is mainstream.
Although often little appreciated in the West, revolutionary
’s ecumenical quest has remained a constant in its approach to Sunni Muslims. The anti-Shiite rhetoric of many Sunni fundamentalist groups has rarely been reciprocated by
’s ruling elite. Since the death in 1989 of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the charismatic, quintessentially Shiite leader of the Islamic revolution,
’s ruling mullahs have tried assiduously to downplay the sectarian content in their militant message.
Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, has consistently married his virulent anti-American rhetoric (Khomeini’s “Great Satan” has become Khamenei’s “Satan Incarnate”) with a global appeal to faithful Muslims to join the battle against the
and its allies. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the most politically adept of the revolution’s founding clerics, loved to sponsor militant Sunni-Shiite gatherings when he was speaker of parliament and later as president (1989-1997). He and Mr. Khamenei, who have worked hand-in-hand on national-security issues and have unquestionably authorized every major terrorist operation since the death of Khomeini in 1989, have always been the ultimate pragmatists, even reaching out to Arab Sunni radicals with a strong anti-Shiite bent.
The most radical branch of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad Organization and its most famous member, Ayman al-Zawahiri, became favored Arab poster boys for the clerical regime in the 1980s and 1990s even though Islamic Jihad, like other extremist takfiri Sunni groups, damns Shiites with almost the same gusto as it damns Western infidels. The laissez-passers that Iran gave members of al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001 (see the 9/11 Commission Report), the training offered to al Qaeda in the 1990s by the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah (again, see the report), and the “detention” of senior members of al Qaeda fleeing Afghanistan after the American invasion are best seen against the backdrop of clerical Iran’s three-decade long outreach to radical Sunnis who loathe Americans more than they hate Shiites.
In 2003, launched two Arabic satellite TV channels both under the guidance of the former Revolutionary Guards commander Ali Larijani, a well-dressed, well-trimmed puritan with a Ph.D. in philosophy who crushed a brief period of intellectual openness in
’s media in the early 1990s. A favorite of Mr. Khamenei, Mr. Larijani pushed TV content extolling Hamas, anti-Israeli suicide bombers, anti-Semitism and an all-Muslim insurgency in
. Iran’s remarkably subdued rhetoric against Arabs who gave loud support to insurgents and holy warriors slaughtering Iraqi Shiites between 2004 and 2007 is inextricably tied to Tehran’s determination to keep Muslim eyes focused on the most important issue—the battle against America and Israel. ’s full-bore backing of Hezbollah in the July 2006 war with the Jewish State, a conflict that Tehran and its Syrian ally precipitated by their aggressive military support of Hezbollah, drew Sunni eyes further away from
’s internecine strife.
The 2006 war, which lasted 34 days and saw Hezbollah’s Iranian-trained forces embarrass the Israeli army, made Tehran’s favorite Arab son, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, one of the most admired men in the Sunni Arab world. This was a remarkable achievement given that Hezbollah had helped train some of the Iraqi Shiite militants who were wreaking a horrific vengeance against Baghdad’s Sunni Arabs in 2006—a bloodbath that was constantly on Arab satellite television.
Prominent Sunni rulers—Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah—have railed against a “Shiite arc” of power forming in the
Near East
, only to see few echoes develop outside of the region’s officially controlled media. Although the Sunni Arab rulers have sometimes shown considerable anxiety about the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon, Sunni fundamentalist organizations affiliated with
’s Muslim Brotherhood, the mother ship for Sunni Islamists, have been much more restrained in expressing their trepidation.
With strong ties to its fundamentalist brethren along the Nile, Hamas has given
(really for the first time, and so far at little cost) an important ally within the fundamentalist circles of the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the Islamic revolution’s great disappointments was that it failed to produce more allies within the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots.
The revolution certainly inspired many within the movement in and in
. But
’s ties to the ruling Syrian Allawite elite—a heretical Shiite sect that Sunni fundamentalists detest—complicated its outreach to Sunni militants. When ’s dictator Hafez Assad slaughtered thousands of Sunni fundamentalists in the town of Hama in 1982, and revolutionary remained largely silent,
Tehran
’s standing within the Muslim Brotherhood collapsed.
With
Hamas,
has the opportunity to make amends. The mullahs have a chance of supplanting
, the font of the most vicious anti-Shiite Sunni creed, as the most reliable backer of Palestinian fundamentalists. Even more than the Lebanese Hezbollah, which remains tied to and constrained by the complex matrix of Lebanese politics, Hamas seems willing to absorb enormous losses to continue its jihad against
. Where has been uneasy about the internecine strife among Palestinians—it has bankrolled both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas—
has put its money on the former.
Although Fatah, the ruling party within the Palestinian Authority, may get a second wind thanks to the excesses of Hamas and the Israelis’ killing much of Hamas’s brain power and muscle, it is difficult to envision Fatah reviving itself into an appealing political alternative for faithful Palestinians. Fatah is hopelessly corrupt, often brutal, and without an inspiring raison d’ętre: a Palestine of the West Bank and
Gaza
is, as Hamas correctly points out, boring, historically unappealing, and a noncontiguous geographic mess. Fatah only sounds impassioned when it gives vent to its anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, profoundly Muslim roots. It’s no accident that the religious allusions and suicide bombers of Fatah and Hamas after 2000 were hard to tell apart. If Hamas can withstand the current Israeli attack on its leadership and infrastructure, then the movement’s aura will likely be impossible to match.
’s influence among religious Palestinians could skyrocket.
Through Hamas,
Tehran
can possibly reach the ultimate prize, the Egyptian faithful. For reasons both ancient and modern,
has perhaps the most Shiite-sympathetic religious identity in the Sunni Arab world. As long as Hamas remains the center of the Palestinian imagination—and unless Hamas loses its military grip on Gaza, it will continue to command the attention of both the Arab and Western media—
’s politics remain fluid and potentially volatile. Tehran is certainly under no illusions about the strength of ’s military dictatorship, but the uncertainties in
are greater now than they have been since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.
President Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, is old and in questionable health. His jet-setting son or a general may succeed him. Neither choice will resuscitate the regime’s legitimacy, which has plummeted even among the highly Westernized elite. The popularity and mosque-power of the Muslim Brotherhood, which would likely win a free election, continues to rise. A turbulent
Gaza
where devout Muslims are in a protracted, televised fight with the cursed Jews could add sufficient heat to make Egyptian politics really interesting. The odds of
cracking could be very small—the police powers of the Egyptian state are, when provoked, ferocious—but they are now certainly enough to keep the Iranians playing.
Where once Ayatollah Khomeini believed in the revolutionary potential of soft power (
’s example was supposed to topple the pro-American autocrats throughout the Middle East), Khomeini’s children are firm believers in hard power, covert action, duplicity and persistence. With Gaza and conceivably within Tehran’s grasp, the clerical regime will be patient and try to keep
Gaza
boiling.
It is entirely possible that
Tehran
could overplay its hand among the Palestinians as it overplayed its hand among Iraqi Shiites, turning sympathetic Muslims into deeply suspicious, nationalistic patriots. The Israeli army could deconstruct Hamas’s leadership sufficiently that
Gaza
will remain a fundamentalist mess that inspires more pity than the white-hot heat that comes when jihadists beat infidels in battle. But with a nuclear-armed
just around the corner, the mullahs will do their best to inspire.
Ultimately, it’s doubtful that
Tehran
will find President-elect Barack Obama’s offer of more diplomacy, or the threat of more European sanctions, to be compelling. The price of oil may be low, but the mullahs have seen worse economic times. In 30 years, they have not seen a better constellation of forces. And as the Shiite prayer goes, perhaps this time round the Sunnis, too, inshallah (God willing), will see the light.
(Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer,
is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)
