Word: mashaal
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...allowed Israelis to enter it the previous day. The confrontation may have had less to do with keeping Jews from praying at al-Aqsa, however, than with the erosion in Palestinian faith in President Mahmoud Abbas' path of negotiating peace with the Israelis and Americans. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal set the tone that day by declaring, "Jerusalem's fate will be decided with jihad and resistance, and not negotiations." The symbolic power of the Jerusalem issue has a radicalizing effect not only on the Palestinians, but all across the Arab and Muslim world, with anti-Israel sentiment at a fever...
...asked Mashaal if his language implied that he accepted, de facto, a Jewish state called Israel. "Don't conclude this," he said. "These are the names they call themselves ... Once the Palestinians are enabled to have a sovereign state, then they can be asked whom they recognize." And yet, calling Israelis by the name they call themselves seemed a different sort of body language. The meaning of this new tone can be debated. Part of it may be attributable to the terrible military defeat Hamas suffered in Gaza, a recognition, finally, that Israel is simply not going away. Or Mashaal...
...majlis on the second floor of the Hamas office in a quiet Damascus neighborhood. Mashaal, a handsome, soft-spoken man with salt-and-pepper hair, sat flanked by Palestinian and Hamas flags. I asked about his reaction to the Obama speech. He was officially skeptical. He acknowledged the President's new tone, but wanted to know what the Obama Administration would do to pressure the Israeli government to stop building settlements on Palestinian lands. "The Americans have an abundance of experience in pressuring countries around the world," he said. "Why is it only in the case of Israel that America...
...Obviously, he wasn't going to offer any concessions, publicly, to Obama. In fact, Mashaal is facing more immediate problems than the final-status negotiations that Obama is proposing. Gaza, which Hamas controls, lies in ruins. The border crossings are still sealed by Israel, except for some humanitarian goods, despite entreaties by Hillary Clinton, and the Gazans are unable to rebuild. Mashaal is also enmeshed in his own local political struggle, against Fatah, the moderate Palestinian party, which receives the bulk of international donations for reconstruction and whose security forces are armed and trained by the U.S. Hamas violently expelled...
...what are our options, given Mashaal's refusal to yield on any of the demands made by Obama? Hamas has some inconvenient facts in its favor: it exists, it remains strong in Gaza - as a direct consequence of the real social services it provides and its relative lack of corruption compared with Fatah - and it has a legitimate complaint. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is inhumane and outrageous. Palestinians are imprisoned behind a barrier wall that does not conform to the 1967 lines; they are forced to endure hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks whose purpose seems humiliation...