Summary
The Hamas leader whose December 2012 Gaza visit and rally speech, set against his interview statements, are the subject of Falk’s post “Khaled Mashaal and Prospects for a Sustainable Israel–Palestine Peace” (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.44-51). Falk accords the moderate interview record greater weight than the rally speech and argues Hamas should be explored as a political actor.
Details
- As Falk presents the visit: Mashaal came to Gaza for Hamas’s twenty-fifth anniversary, pledged at a rally to recover the whole of historic Palestine “inch by inch”, challenged the Zionist project’s legitimacy and justified resistance, while disavowing the intention to attack civilians as such and denying Hamas complicity in the November 21, 2012 bombing of a Jerusalem bus (PDF p.44-45).
- Biography as Falk gives it: born in 1956 in, as printed, “the Selwad neighborhood of Ramallah, then under Jordanian control”; in exile since he was eleven; in 1997 Israel tried to murder him in Jordan, and the capture of the Mossad perpetrators induced Israel to supply the antidote to the poison sprayed into his ear in exchange for their release; the Gaza return was his “third birth” (PDF p.45).
- After the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin — dated in the post, as printed, to May 22, 2003 — Mashaal was declared “world leader” of Hamas (PDF p.46).
- In interviews, Falk reports, Mashaal indicated readiness for a long-term hudna, or truce, if Israel ended the occupation and upheld Palestinian rights including return, and told CNN: “We are ready to resort to a peaceful way, purely peaceful way without blood and weapons, as long as we obtain our Palestinian demands.” (PDF p.46)
- Falk’s assessment: in Gaza Mashaal likely expressed a maximalist version of the Palestinian narrative, while in reflective arenas Hamas’s dominant emphasis since 2006 has been a political track envisioning long-term peaceful coexistence with Israel (PDF p.47-48).
Related pages
Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Hamas, Gaza, Right of Return