The West Bank’s secular rulers want to stop preachers backing the Islamists

Reuters

She’d better not be a Hamas girl in Hebron

THE religious-affairs ministry of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) recently thought it had found the perfect sermon to rally the faithful to strengthen its grip over the West Bank. The ministry told all the imams across the West Bank that it was their religious duty to dedicate their Friday prayer to campaign for Palestinian political prisoners.

The plan backfired. In Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city, the PA authorities were outsmarted by the Islamists of Hamas. Before the PA’s appointed preacher could reach the pulpit of Ansar, one of the town’s largest mosques, a popular Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament, Mahir al-Badr, who had recently been released from an Israeli jail, got there instead. Far from following the PA’s script, he began to lambast Egypt for pleasing Israel by building siege walls around the Gaza Strip, the enclave run by Hamas to the exclusion of Fatah, its secular-minded rival headed by the PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas. “We couldn’t do anything to stop him,” bemoaned a religious-affairs official. “He had parliamentary immunity.” The PA’s Western-trained security forces had to make do with detaining Mr Badr’s son.

The PA’s effort to control the mosques is a big part of its bid to stamp its authority on the West Bank, muzzle its Islamist foes, and convince friendly and cash-providing Arab and Western governments that it can be trusted to run a would-be state. The PA’s religious-affairs minister, Mahmoud Habbash, has dispatched 200 new imams, armed with security clearance, to manage mosques hitherto run by their pro-Hamas rivals. He issues scripted weekly sermons and instructs censors to monitor mosques and verify compliance. “A Muslim must respect the sultan,” says the minister. “There is no place for politics in the mosque.” All the West Bank’s 1,700 mosques, including nearly 300 in conservative Hebron, are now, he says, in government hands.

The PA says it is bringing order after the chaos wrought by the Palestinian intifada (uprising) that ended in 2002. In those days, virtually anyone could build and run a mosque. But Hamas and its Islamist allies say the PA is curbing religious and political liberty and creating a typical Arab security state in hock to the West. In the 2006, when Hamas beat Fatah in a general election, many mosques doubled as offices for Hamas. And the Hamas government that then briefly held power gave acolytes jobs administering government mosques.

As part of its crackdown, the PA has also dissolved the 92 zakat (charitable) committees that used to provide Hamas with its social and patronage network. In their place the PA has appointed 12 of its own committees, which have removed the Hamas-dominated boards that offered services such as kindergartens, schools, bakeries and cheap rental accommodation for the poor. After a shaky start when cash from Gulf countries ran dry, the PA is injecting funds from Western and Arab aid-givers to revive dormant charities in its thrall. “Instead of encouraging civil society, they are throttling it,” says another Hamas parliamentarian, Hatem Qafishah, who has been ousted from his post as deputy head of the Islamic Youth Association.

Disturbing Abraham

The PA’s burgeoning security forces add a helping hand. They recently shot their way into a Hebron mosque during a search for a Hamas man wanted by both Israel and the PA. They fired on the Mercedes of the irrepressible spokesman for the Liberation Party (Hizb ut-Tahrir), an up-and-coming Islamist group that wants to replace the parliamentary system with a caliphate, and beat him up. When worshippers interrupted a PA-endorsed preacher in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque, the fabled resting place of Abraham, and told him to speak out against Israel’s continuing siege of Gaza, the PA’s local religious-affairs official summoned heavies to boot them out.

Not everything has gone the PA’s way. Worshippers in two of the West Bank’s main towns, Nablus and Ramallah, have ejected imams who condemned the Islamists in Friday sermons. Elsewhere official imams have had shoes thrown at them.

Still, the PA’s government of Salam Fayyad, a former IMF man credited with reviving the West Bank economy, has managed to contain Hamas more thoroughly than many expected when he took office in 2007. Islamists feel hunted. Hamas, on the defensive in the West Bank, has closed its media offices and retreated beneath the parapet. “The PA has ended the public existence of Hamas,” says a former finance minister of the brief Islamist government.

Unable to use school buses, Hamas can no longer bring thousands of supporters to rallies. The Liberation Party, too, has suspended protests. Since protests during Israel’s war on Gaza a year ago, demonstrations have all but ceased. “They permit beauty pageants but ban recitals of the Koran,” moans a Liberation Party leader.

It is unclear whether the PA’s muzzling of the Islamists has dented their popularity. Some former recipients of Hamas charities admit they have switched allegiance since the Islamists’ social services have run dry. Opinion polls show Fatah well ahead, but pollsters reckon many Hamas sympathisers are shy of identifying themselves. A recent survey shows that, though the PA is praised for bringing stability by cutting crime and clan feuding, three-quarters of the people still agree with Hamas that Islamic law should be applied. “More and more Palestinians, particularly women and the young, are identifying with a religious rather than national struggle,” says a pollster at Near East Consulting, a leading West Bank barometer.

Moreover, many dissenters have gone underground. The Liberation Party, which damns elections as a man-made affront to the divine, says it has taken support from Hamas, many of whose backers lost faith in democracy after their election victory in 2006 was, in effect, torpedoed. Though the Liberation Party says it is non-violent, some suspect it—and a plethora of other Islamist groups—of offering cover for those who want to resume an armed fight against both Fatah and Israel. Hamas, too, may rethink its strategy of lying low. “We won’t wage civil war,” says a senior Hamas man. “But we could rebuild our military cells to resume attacks against Israel.”

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