Ismail Haniyeh was a ‘moderate’? Then so was Adolf Eichmann
The media doesn't give you the whole picture sometimes
Was the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh a “moderate”, as much of the media has apparently derived such pleasure in suggesting? The notion will seem absurd to anybody who knows anything about the region. But setting aside the desire of western journalists to paint Israel as the brutaliser, as well as the naïve both-sideism that is incapable of calling a terrorist a terrorist, the subject may reward serious consideration.
Narrow the lens to Hamas and it’s something of a relative matter. Haniyeh was famously caught on camera receiving the news of the October 7 attacks with smug satisfaction in his luxury bolt-hole in Qatar, leading his cronies in prayer. In April, when his three sons were killed in Gaza, he received the news with equilibrium, praising Allah and carrying on with his day. By western standards, this was hardly the behaviour of a reasonable man.
It should be unnecessary to point out the obvious, but we must also consider his many blood-curdling and fanatical sermons. In an address to a conference in Qatar in January, for instance, he said that donations to Gaza were not humanitarian aid but “financial jihad”. He added: “The time has come for the jihad of the swords… The people of Gaza constitute our frontline trench for defence, as well as for attack.” This was consistent with a lifetime of planning and inciting violence.
Which brings us to his wisdom on the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Speaking to the frightened people of Gaza from Qatar in the wake of October 7, Haniyeh ranted: “The blood of the children, women and elderly… we need this blood so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution, so that it will arouse within us persistence, so that it will arouse within us defiance and the will to advance.” Whereas for Israel, every civilian death on either side is a tragedy, from Haniyeh’s point of view, each is a little victory. This is the Hamas strategy of human sacrifice writ large.
Then there is his record of leadership. Hamas arose from the Muslim Brotherhood in the late Eighties under the banner of an authentic folk movement of resistance, as opposed to the corrupt jet-setters of Fatah. Hamas chiefs had mostly never been abroad, had little taste for the high life and exhibited the fanaticism and cunning of jihadi street rats. Haniyeh was very close to the founder of the group, the wheelchair-bound terror mastermind Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, until he exited the stage in an Israeli missile strike in 2004.
Haniyeh – whose family has been treated many times in Israeli hospitals – was exiled to Lebanon for a period by the Rabin government in Nineties. This helped bolster his image as a terror statesman, later an elder statesman. For a brief time in 2007, he was the head of a government of national unity that included his factional rivals. Then came the Hamas-Fatah civil war. In 2016, he moved to Qatar and established himself as a pampered political rhetorician, a Palestinian George Galloway, drumming up support from the Arab world and delivering messages of incitement to Gaza.
Haniyeh’s fingerprints are all over Hamas. Over the years, he and his military commanders oversaw a campaign of suicide bombings during the Intifada, as well as countless murder and kidnap attempts, many of which were successful. It set the West Bank aflame until it was subjugated by the IDF and constructed a remarkable network of terror tunnels under Gaza, spanning some 300 miles.
Politically, the organisation never rescinded its official charter of 1988, the preamble of which states that “Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,” and article 13 of which adds that “so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic resistance movement”. For good measure, article 32 adds: “Zionist scheming has no end… Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It is no coincidence that after of 17 years of Hamas rule in Gaza – as an IDF officer who served there recently told me from his own experience – a copy of Mein Kampf can be found in almost every home. If Haniyeh, the group’s political leader, was indeed a moderate, one might have expected some sign of this in his shaping of Hamas.
Seen in this context, the way the world’s media has reported the story is all a bit Alice Through the Looking-Glass. “Tough-talking Haniyeh was seen as the much moderate (sic) face of Hamas,” gushed Reuters. The Guardian followed, labelling him a “moderate figure within the movement, one whose role had become vital in sustained diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire”. One wonders what evidence the newspaper had to support those claims. Not to be outdone, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Yolande Knell, praised the “pragmatic” ways of the terrorist mastermind, imploring readers not to be fooled by the man’s “tough rhetoric.”
So the claims of “moderation” are entirely without foundation in the western meaning of the term. However, although Haniyeh certainly supported, encouraged, orchestrated and promoted the most depraved violence against civilians, and he was certainly a fanatical jihadi, he was the group’s political figurehead, not a bloodstained killer like Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif. He is not known to have taken many lives with his own hands. He is not known to have spent much time hiding in a tunnel. Does that make him a “moderate”? It does not. But it speaks of a certain urbane sophistication and political fingerspitzengefühl, which is about the best compliment one could muster when speaking of one of the most evil men of our times.
As the bearded debauchee enjoyed a life of luxury in Qatar, he presented a much more swaddled and less aggressive leader than the vampiric Sinwar and Deif. There was often daylight, and sometimes bad blood, between the two factions. In 2014, after Hamas was badly degraded by Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, the two military chiefs wrote a chastened letter to Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani which blamed the fiasco on the political leadership. Haniyeh had prevented them from mounting a pre-emptive attack, they claimed, promising not to make the same mistake again. As October 7 showed, they didn’t.
Who is the more depraved, the killer or the man who instructs him? The executioner or the hanging judge? Whatever the western media would have you believe, if Haniyeh was a moderate, so was Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution who was famously squeamish at the sight of blood. Both men did not deserve the fates that came to them. They deserved much worse.
drjakewallis@gmail.com
I wish this was published in the Guardian on the BBC website