The Tikkun Interview Sami Awad Palestinian Activist for Nonviolence

S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 19 T hisisaconversationwhichtookplaceinTikkun’s officeinCaliforniainMay2008.SamiAwad(SA)isthe chair of Holy Land Trust, a not-for-profit Palestinian organization established in 1998 in the holy city of Bethlehem. Michael Lerner (ML) is editor of Tikkun magazine. Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have been working with Holy Land Trust to support their campaign for nonviolence. SA:ThePalestiniancommunityinthelastthreeorfouryearshas becomemoreandmoreawarethatengaginginarmedresistancehas notachievedanythingonthestrategiclevelasapragmaticapproach to ending the occupation. More and more Palestinians are seeing that engaging in armed resistance is not doing anything. ML:Iamgoingtoaskafewofthequestionsthatwillpopintothe minds of people who don’t share Tikkun’s perspective, thus “playing devil’s advocate” in this interview. Here goes: “What do you mean, more people? Didn’t they just vote Hamas into power, and Hamas says that the armed struggle is the way to go forward.” SA:ManyPalestinianschoseHamastoprotestthecorruptedPalestinianAuthority(PA) governmentdominatedbyFatah.ThePAgovernmenthasexistedforsomanyyearsandhas not achieved anything since it was put in place in the mid-90s. The campaign that Hamas actually ran on was not a campaign that was dealing with the methods of organized resistance but rather a campaign of reform of the PA government. And people chose Hamas because they supported that focus. Another set of people chose Hamas as a protest vote against Fatah, but the biggest reason why Fatah was defeated and Hamas won was that therewasasplitwithinFatah.Fatahhadopenprimariesbeforetheelection,andinthisprimarythegrassrootsmembersofFatahelectedpeoplewhowereonthegroundandnotpart oftheFatahestablishment.Sowhenpeoplewerechosentorunwhowerenotpartoftheestablishment ,theestablishmentdeclaredacancellationoftheprimaryandputinplacetheir own candidates, so now you have two sets of candidates from Fatah running against each other.Thosechosenintheprimariesdidnotstepdown,becausetheysaidtheywerechosen by the people, and the establishment said no, we want our people to run. And you can see the split voting that happened within Fatah in the elections. In Bethlehem for example, for every two candidates who ran for Hamas there were four candidates for Fatah. And that reallysplitthevote.IntermsofthenumbersofvotesthatHamasgotitisassumedthatthey onlygotbetween25and30percentofthevote.Thisistheleveloftheirpopularity,andhow it has been for many years. They have never been a majority in the Palestinian political environment . ML: And how do you understand then why Hamas, if they didn’t represent the majority , decided that they could and should take over Gaza? SA: They did not take over Gaza. They did not represent the majority of the people, but they ended up with the majority of seats in the Parliament which gave them, in our Sami Awad Palestinian Activist for Nonviolence The Tikkun Interview WWW.HOLYLANDTRUST.ORG Sami Awad Politics_3.qxd:Politics 8/10/08 1:39 PM Page 19 constitution, the legal right and responsibility to form the government. They did form the government and it was made up of people from Hamas and outside Hamas. It was the first technocratgovernmentinPalestine,withexpertsfromdifferentfieldswhowereinvolvedin forming the government. It wasn’t just party people. TheworldcamedownharshlyonHamasafterthiselection,andsaid,“Wewillonlyallow youtooperateandfunctionasagovernmentifyouacceptourconditions,whicharetheend to violence and terrorism and recognition of the State of Israel.” Very similar to what had happened to Arafat a few years back. While I believe there was a real possibility and openness for Hamas to engage in a process that would lead it up to that, for it to jump into accepting those conditions immediately was something that it could not accept, because it would mean that it would have to renounce and deny all of its history. Which means it would have to show itself as a failed movement. There was a real openness to negotiate and toslowlybringthemintothatdiscussion,buttheworldpushedHamasinacornerandsaid that if you don’t do this in the next ten days we will boycott you. And when you push a cat into a corner, it starts crouching. That’s what happened with Hamas. Of course, the PA (meaning Fatah) did not help in that situation, they wanted an opportunitytogetbackintopower .Thiswasthefirsttimetheyhadbeenoutofpowerforsomany years. So they helped to create the pressure on Hamas that led to the explosion that we saw lastyearinGaza.ThesituationinthatareathentotallycollapsedandHamasfounditselfin a position that it had actually declared that it did not want to be in, which was taking over the Gaza Strip. ML:Well, if it doesn’t want to be in it, why doesn’t it cede back the power to Fatah? SA: Hamas still won the election, so it isn’t handing over the...