Among Palestinians, Freed Hamas Founder’s Grasp Exceeds His Reach

After eight years in an Israeli prison, Sheik Ahmed Yassin is home and living under Palestinian rule for the first time in his life. But the Hamas spiritual leader is not celebrating his freedom.

Yassin, who turned down many conditional Israeli offers for his release over the years, says he has merely exchanged a small jail cell for the “big prison” of Gaza.

“Israeli soldiers control the roads and borders and prevent our freedom of movement,” the Islamic leader said in an interview. “True, they do not come into my house anymore, but the Israelis are still here, working through their collaborators. Do not confuse appearances with reality.”

The same should be said about Yassin.

A quadriplegic who is nearly deaf and has failing eyesight, the 61-year-old sheik would seem to be powerless. He sits in a wheelchair with a plaid wool blanket draped over his legs as an aide writes a visitor’s questions on a pad for him to read with his good eye. He answers in a high-pitched rasp that makes it sound as if his voice will fail him next.

But the immobile body belies a charisma that is widely appealing to Palestinians and a sharpness of mind familiar to Israeli and Palestinian leaders alike. Yassin’s face conveys a wide range of emotions as well as the gestures his limbs cannot express; his words reveal political savvy.

The founder of the militant Islamic movement Hamas, Yassin was freed in an exchange for Israeli agents who were caught in Jordan after a failed attempt to assassinate another Hamas figure, Khaled Meshaal. Since his return to Gaza a month ago, Yassin has reasserted his position as the group’s spiritual and political leader and is injecting new life into an organization that has violently opposed the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.

The Palestinian public’s respect for Yassin is so great as to make him a powerful man--a potential rival to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

The question is how the sheik plans to wield that power, and to what end.

Yassin appears to play politics in much the same way his old university schoolmate Arafat does, with ambiguous statements meant to appeal to diverse Palestinian audiences. He is at once moderate and militant, offering an opening toward peace with the Israelis while justifying the use of terrorism in the Palestinian battle for an independent state.

He calls the suicide bombers who have blown themselves up in downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv “martyrs.” In contrast to most Palestinians, however, Yassin reminds his listeners that the Palestinians are engaged not in a religious war against the Jews but in a territorial war with the Israelis.

“We are not fighting the Jews because they are Jews. We are fighting to remove the occupation over us and our people. We, the Palestinian people, are the victims of an Israeli aggression, a Zionist aggression on our homeland,” he said.

At home, with his sons and grandsons about him, the Hamas leader still reserves a few hours each day to receive the stream of disciples, well-wishers and reporters who make their way through the dusty, unpaved streets of Gaza to see him. In these conversations, Yassin repeatedly has raised the possibility of a hudna, or cease-fire, with Israel--a proposal that no other Hamas leader has dared, or perhaps desired, to make.

He is offering a temporary truce of up to 10 years on terms that mirror Arafat’s negotiating position for a final peace treaty: an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 border; the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; the release of all political prisoners from Israeli jails; and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

The demands far exceed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would agree to even for a final peace treaty. Nonetheless, some Israeli officials and political observers view Yassin’s proposal as a hint of moderation from the leader of a group dedicated to replacing Israel with an Islamic Palestinian state.

Yassin’s discourse focuses on recovering the territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 Mideast War, although he has by no means abandoned the traditional Hamas claim to all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. He also has stressed Palestinian unity and Arafat’s leadership role--messages that some political observers take as an indication that Yassin is giving Arafat a green light for so-called “final status” negotiations with the Israelis.

Menachem Klein, an Israeli expert on Hamas, notes that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic trip to Israel in 1977 with a ruling from Egypt’s most powerful sheik that a hudna was allowed by the Prophet Muhammad, as spelled out in the Koran. Yassin makes the same argument.

“At the moment, Yassin is representing a dovish attitude,” Klein said. “The question is whether a hudna is a ladder to climb down from the tree and end the war, or whether it is another word for continuing the war later on.”

Klein said Yassin must know that his terms are an opening position subject to change in the give-and-take of negotiations. Yassin insists not, saying that “if even one point is dropped, then the whole initiative does not exist.”

But if those are his terms for a cease-fire, what would it take for Hamas to recognize the state of Israel, as Arafat’s Palestinian Authority already has done?

“Is there any justice in demanding that the Palestinian people who have been expelled from their homeland recognize the criminals, when the criminals do not recognize the existence of the victims? First ask the Israelis to recognize our rights, and then we will talk. For every action there is a reaction,” Yassin said.

By the same logic, Yassin justifies Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel as a response to Israel’s violent arrests of Palestinians, to its land confiscations, house demolitions and assassinations, such as the 1996 killing of the Hamas bomb-maker Yehiya Ayash. Ayash was blown up by an exploding mobile telephone in an operation attributed to Israel’s Shin Bet security service.

“We have the right to protect our people and deal in the same way they [the Israelis] do,” Yassin said.

Yassin said his role in the coming months will be “to work for Palestinian unity and the building of a homeland, and to resist the occupation until they redeploy from our land.”

He dismissed any suggestion of a rivalry with Arafat, who, under pressure from the United States and Israel, arrested scores of Hamas activists and closed more than a dozen of the group’s social service organizations after summer suicide bombings in Jerusalem. He described their relationship as “good and getting better.”

In fact, Arafat has offered him a car that is specially outfitted to carry his wheelchair, Yassin said. But he is not certain he will accept.

“The Israelis have us in a big prison,” he said. “If they don’t allow us to move, I guess I have no need for a car.”