My meeting with Shaikh Yasin
by Faisal Bodi
Monday 22 March 2004 10:14 AM GMT
I had the professional privilege of meeting Shaikh Ahmad Yasin in October
2000, just weeks after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada.
To his enemies he was the epitome of evil, but the man I met was the
embodiment of one of the most unequal struggles of our times.
Sitting hunched in a wheelchair in his breezeblock Gaza home, the frail
shaikh symbolised the Palestinians’ apparently hopeless resistance against
the Middle East’s military superpower, Israel.
Enfeebled by flu and straining to speak, the Hamas leader explained the
second Palestinian uprising as a reaction to the failure of the Oslo peace
accords in 1993 to change conditions in the Palestinian territories.
However, the trigger for the popular uprising, according to Yasin, was now
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s intrusion into Al-Aqsa, one of
Islam’s three holy mosques, and the killings of Palestinians in protests
that followed.
Since those early days, the Hamas leader remained the inspiration behind
the Intifada, refusing to accept what others felt was a road to collective
suicide. Fighting from a much weaker position, the Palestinians must be
prepared to accept much greater losses.
Tough choices
“The Palestinian people have two choices; either they surrender or they
continue to resist”, he told me.
In our interview, Yasin also strove to reverse popular Western
misconceptions of the conflict by addressing its root causes.
“They [the West] consider the stand of the Palestinian people, who defend
themselves with stones and all other means, to be unjustified violence
against the Israelis,” he said.
“This is an awful misunderstanding of the conflict. The West demands from
us that we stop the resistance. Instead of asking the occupiers to leave
our land, they ask us to surrender to the occupier.”
Yasin opposed Oslo because it did not restore the right of return to the
Palestinian diaspora nor guarantee Palestinians exclusive sovereignty over
Al-Aqsa.
He saw it as an “oppressive settlement” that had been imposed on the
Palestinians and saw its break-up and the return to arms by Fatah, the
main arm of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, as a vindication of
his view.
No real peace
“The peace that reinforces occupation and settlement and the exiling of
the Palestinian people, that is not really peace,” he said.
But this did not mean he rejected peace outright with his avowed enemy.
That was possible so long as the Palestinians did not sign away their
rights in perpetuity. Temporary truces could be negotiated with the
Israeli leadership and could form the basis of bigger settlements in the
future.
Nor did he rule out mutual coexistence between Jews and Palestinians in a
future Islamic state, with full rights accorded to everyone as equal
citizens.
When I bluntly asked him why his group failed to distinguish between
civilians and combatants in resistance operations, Yasin remained unfazed
by the implied criticism.
Israel’s grey area
Israel’s militaristic society, he said, had blurred the line between
civilians and soldiers.
“All the Israeli people are combatants in the field of battle,” he said.
“Those who do not wear a military uniform, male or female, have all been
trained for battle. They are soldiers on call who will be called up when
the time comes”, he said, referring to Israel’s strict conscription
policy.
Hamas did not target civilians, he insisted, except in direct retaliation
for Israeli killings of Palestinian civilians, a tactic “necessary to show
the Israelis they could not get away without a price for killing our
people”.
Our brief session ended with a call on Muslims worldwide to continue to
help the Palestinians. Firm in his conviction that Israelis could not
deliver a just peace he asked Muslims worldwide to “awaken inside
themselves the intention for jihad and prepare for it in order to liberate
al-Aqsa and Jerusalem when the time comes.”
His death has deprived him of witnessing that pleasure, but his legacy of
unflinching resistance will inspire thousands in years to come.
Faisal Bodi is a senior editor at Aljazeera.net
on this board) from a gora or you can be politically correct and show how just and fair you are by remaining indifferent and saying that this old man is like that old man…This will get you the cherished smile, applaud or a :)…