This was it: as soon as I stepped through the door of the offices of Khaled Mishal I held out my flimsy plastic folder and jabbered away in English to the four slick-suited men who were my reception committee, trying desperately to make clear that, yes, there was a potentially lethal weapon in there. I smiled and pointed sheepishly to the scissors, and they were confiscated before my cameraman and I were allowed to pass through the airport-style security portal.
It was hardly surprising we were tense: it was the autumn of last year and we were making a film about Hamas for Channel 4. Khaled Mishal, the unofficial leader of Hamas, was in some ways a dangerous man to be talking to. Indeed, the reason he was unofficial leader was that his two predecessors had been assassinated by the Israelis and he himself had almost been killed in Jordan when a Mossad agent sprayed poison into his left ear.
When Mishal arrived in his office — which doubled as a TV studio — the first thing I noticed was that he looks surprisingly like George Clooney in Syriana. That calmed me a bit, but all the same I was nervous as I started to interview him. He was, and is, the leader of what much of the world calls a terrorist organisation — and he’s probably still high up on the Israeli hit list. In the event everything went smoothly.
I was here, in this small office in Damascus, because a couple of years earlier I had become interested in the mechanism of how an armed guerrilla or ‘terrorist’ group can make the transition to a non-armed political organisation, and had been looking into the possibility of making a film about Hamas. At a conference on terrorism in London, I had been directed by Conciliation Resources, a brilliant but underfunded peacemaking group, to a man who knew Hamas intimately and might be able to facilitate access to this organisation. The man was Alastair Crooke, an ex-MI6 officer, who personally negotiated a number of Israel–Palestinian ceasefires while serving as a special adviser to the EU’s Javier Solana. He was instrumental, for example, in the negotiations that ended the siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. He is also charming and extremely intelligent and — crucially for my purposes — Hamas seemed to trust him.
In the general election in the Palestinian Territories in January 2006, Hamas beat Fatah in the West Bank and in Gaza. Yet there were no attempts by the international community to start serious talks with Hamas. Indeed, the West refused to recognise the organisation as the legitimate government, and the European Union, the UN and the United States effectively cut off all existing aid to the Palestinian government. Financial assistance was then channelled to Hamas’s opposition, Fatah, led by President Mahmoud Abbas. A powder keg was being primed.
Later that year I booked a flight to Beirut where one of the Hamas top brass, Osama Hamdan, was in exile. (Half the Hamas leadership is inside the Palestinian Territories or in prison in Israel; the other half is based in Lebanon and Syria, where their cabinet meets). Then war intervened: in July the Hamas military kidnapped an Israeli army corporal from just over the Gaza border and that was followed swiftly by Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. Israel retaliated — and the second Israel–Lebanon war was on. I cancelled my flight, but as soon as the bombing of Beirut ended I hopped on a plane to Jordan and went by taxi through Syria to Lebanon. I was accompanied by Alastair Crooke and another conciliator-in-the-making, Tom Clark, of Clarks shoes, whose family trust sponsors conflict resolution initiatives in the Middle East.
On our second night in Beirut a battered old Mercedes pulled up outside our hotel and a scruffy young man ushered Tom and me in. Squeezed in the back with an old fridge, we were driven to the Shia-dominated southern suburbs. On the way to our destination I scanned the dark horizon for black-clad ninja-style Israeli secret service agents. Pretty soon we were dropped outside a mock castle, which turned out to be a kind of shopping complex with, at its heart, an eating place nicknamed the ‘Hezbollah Restaurant’.
It was three days after the war had finished, but the restaurant was packed full of young couples, gossiping girls and families. We were led to a door guarded by two men. Behind that door was Osama Hamdan, the man I had to see before being granted the kind of access I’d need to do an in-depth documentary on Hamas. Fortunately, he had a sense of humour, which was rather relaxing. He apologised for the location for the meeting, explaining that during the four-week-long war his home and office had both been bombed to bits by the Israelis, so all his meetings were now held in a selection of cafés and restaurants across the city. Smart and polite in a grey suit and no tie, and university-educated as all the leadership seem to be, he chatted amiably but briefly. Next morning I had coffee with Alastair. ‘You know it’s a “Yes” don’t you?’ he said. We were going to be allowed to get as ‘inside’ as we had hoped, but not immediately and not before events had taken another interesting turn on the ground.
In June last year, civil war broke out. Gaza is Hamas’s stronghold and, since the election victory, it had been hit much harder than the West Bank, as Israel and Egypt virtually cut it off and the international embargo withheld aid except essential food. Security forces controlled by Fatah had also been strengthened. In response Hamas unleashed its much smaller force against Fatah’s fighters. Eight days later, Fatah was routed and Hamas controlled Gaza.
At this typically unpredictable moment, my brave director Rodrigo Vasquez set off to film there. The democratically elected Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, was now in charge of a rump state — one that his party had been compelled to take by force. Rodrigo got the kind of access that would be anathema to most governments, let alone a militant/‘terrorist’ organisation under siege conditions. There were no spin doctors in sight, as Rodrigo filmed internal meetings of the police and private parliamentary discussions. He accompanied the senior military commander as his men placed booby-trapped roadside bombs. We got to see the Prime Minister in his other role as Sheikh as he dispensed advice and favours to his flock in the manner of a friendly godfather.
The police unit we tracked had only weeks earlier been members of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s frontline fighters. They were ill-prepared to cope with a population who were either their official enemies in Fatah or were hungry, jobless or just angry with the siege. Some members of the unit ended up fomenting violence, clubbing defenceless people with 4ft-long sticks. The violence we captured from this police unit seemed to be excused by the Prime Minister, but a young female Hamas MP spoke out against it and for human rights. Other MPs affirmed the rights of protest and of freedom of speech.
Hamas again made things worse for themselves, however, by turning a blind eye when a small militant faction, Islamic Jihad, fired crude rockets from Gaza into Israel. That, of course, doesn’t seem like the policy of a government that wants to change Western opinion. But Hamas took no notice precisely in order to maintain their credibility as an authentic resistance group.
Then there is the problem of Hamas’s notorious charter. We asked Khaled Mishal about it in Damascus. Written 20 years ago by one of its hardliners, Fattah Al Dukhan, who is seen in the film, the charter is a fairly unreconstructed rant about Israel and Jews in general. Yet Hamas hasn’t changed it or updated it, despite many attempts by the more PR-aware senior Hamas members to do so. So it remains a basis upon which to dismiss them as uncompromising extremists — a reason to exclude them from any talks.
The charter is not quoted or even mentioned by the leadership these days and doesn’t appear to chime with their present policies. But Mishal was adamant that the charter was none of our business; it was an internal matter for Hamas alone to consider. As we pressed him, I laughed and said, ‘You’re just being stubborn, aren’t you?’ He blurted out in English, ‘Well yes.’ Then he regained his composure, smiled and replied, ‘We will change it when we want to change it, not when others want us to.’ Later on, he offered Israel a traditional Islamic truce — 10, 20, 30 years without fighting, if Israel would retreat back to the 1967 borders. ‘We will talk with anyone,’ he said.
Hamas’s politics are Islamist but democratic. These ‘modern Islamists’, as they style themselves, are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the extremists who want to turn the clock back 1,200 years, overthrow the whole corrupt Western system and let Islam rule the world. Such headline-grabbers have no widespread support in the Islamic world. But Hamas does, and so, by the way, does Hezbollah. Both have a popular mandate and both present themselves as national liberation movements.
Of course, Hamas is no ordinary organisation and the situation in the Palestinian territories is no ordinary situation. I hope the documentary will demonstrate that Hamas are human. Their politics are unquestionably foreign to a Western audience, but that in itself does not mean they must be dismissed out of hand. I was lucky to have such remarkable access to Hamas. After all, and whatever your views on their methods and politics, they are here to stay, and the more we understand such organisations the less scary they will seem and the easier it will be to engage them in dialogue when the time comes — as it inevitably will.