Hebron, West Bank -- I first met Aziz Dweik in the winter of 1991-92. The man who is the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and who was released from an Israeli prison last Tuesday, was then teaching urban geography at an-Najah University in Nablus.
He was pointed out to me as the man who spoke for Hamas in his home town of Hebron, which is why I went looking for him.
Hamas, an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, was only four years old at the time, having been established at the start of the first intifada , or Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The Muslim Brotherhood had long existed in the Palestinian territories, and Hamas was really just the Brotherhood with a new name. In those early years, it encouraged Palestinian youth, armed only with rocks, to stand up against Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
Hundreds of those youths were killed, but the world got the message: Palestinians were willing to lay down their lives in pursuit of freedom.
The impact was far greater than all the years of terrorism carried out by the many factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
(Ultimately, it forced the PLO to change its tactics, accept Israel and negotiate for its own state – the result was the 1993 Oslo Accords.) Hamas's early military raids were directed at Israeli occupation forces, not at civilians. (The group's first of many suicide attacks on Israeli civilians would take place in Afula in April, 1994.) But its ambushes of Israeli patrols had become effective, and deadly.
Hebron was always known as the most religious of Palestinian communities and I wanted to find out what made the organization tick.
I was surprised by what I found in Dr. Dweik (PhD from the University of Pennsylvania). An affable, humorous family man, he invited me to his home. As I recall, his wife was pregnant with their seventh (and last) child. With children running around, he outlined what Hamas was looking for: a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
While the Hamas charter specifically calls for a Palestinian state to be created in all the land of Palestine, including Israel, Dr. Dweik said he considered that nothing but a dream, and unrealistic.
Palestinian parliament speaker Aziz Dweik is carried on the shoulders of Hamas supporters who came to greet him in the West Bank town of Hebron after he was released from Israeli prison last week.
Dr. Dweik was no fire-breathing religious leader and never actually said he was a member of Hamas, which had been banned by Israel. He spoke, he said, as one who was knowledgeable about the organization. (Even in the 2006 Palestinian elections he ran as a member of something called the Change and Reform List, the cover for all Hamas candidates.) He also carefully dissociated himself from the military actions that had been carried out in Hamas's name. (In fact, that year, 1992, a separate military wing called the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades was created, so all political members of Hamas could do the same.) I was never quite sure how influential this moderate man really was in the notorious Hamas – until the end of 1992.
That was when the recently elected Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, took action he hoped would stop Hamas's assaults on Israeli troops. He had 415 Palestinian men associated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad rounded up in one day and deported. Aziz Dweik was one of them. As Mr. Rabin acknowledged at the time, these were not the gun-toting militants, but the people that represented the “infrastructure” of Hamas.
