Terrorist group Hamas last week won a landslide victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections and will soon take over the reins of power legitimately. That Palestinians chose a radical guerrilla movement to form their next government shows their true colours - they have in their recent history trodden along the path of violence and the election results indicate that they will stay the course.

Hamas, the enfant terrible of the intifada has come a long way in the short time since its formation in 1987 on the back of the first Palestinian uprising. Its underground militant wing Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades has been responsible for scores of suicide bombings and terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

At the elections, Palestine's electorate emphatically threw its weight behind the political wing of Hamas allowing it to trounce Fatah, the faction once controlled by the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and dominating the outgoing Palestinian Authority.

Ideologically, however, where concerns use of violence, there seems to be little difference between the popular Hamas and the corrupt Fatah.

The latter too glorifies suicide bombers by naming streets, parks and schools after those "heroic martyrs". Palestinian society both in the occupied territories and host countries are sympathetic to militants - yesterday Fatah, today Hamas - looking to the Fedayeen (guerrilla) as standard bearers of its cause.

The success of Palestinian propaganda has accustomed the world to viewing its people as homeless and helpless. True, Palestinian resistance forces have been expelled from one country to stew in exile in another. In fact, until September 1999, Hamas had had a political branch in Amman, Jordan before King Abdullah II shut it down and expelled Hamas senior leaders to Qatar. It was a repeat of what Abdullah's father King Hussein did in 1986 closing the Fatah office in Jordan.

Displaced Palestinians have remained stateless partly due to their own penchant for violence. Palestinians living in Jordan had lent their support to militants who formed their own "state within a state" in the refugee districts. The Hashemite monarchy went a long way to accommodate Palestinian demands for autonomy but Fatah overstepped the limits so far as to destabilise the kingdom in its desire to wrest further control of the country.

Blood-soaked history

The relationship between Jordan, with a majority population of Palestinian origin, and its houseguests is strikingly similar to the story of the Arab and the camel. The Arab, feeling sorry for his beast of burden, gives it shelter from the storm but is instead himself pushed out of the tent by his ungrateful animal. The Palestinians in Jordan, like the proverbial camel, were similarly such a guest that repaid hospitality by trying to rob the host of his home, and killing him in the process.

In 1948, the creation of Israel led Palestinians fleeing from the Arab-Israeli fighting to seek shelter in the West Bank and Jordan. In 1951, a Palestinian gunman - possibly angry at Jordan's apparent collusion with Israel to carve up Palestine - assassinated King Abdullah I a year after Jordan annexed the West Bank.

In 1967, there was another major influx of refugees into Jordan after Israel won the Six-Day War and took control of Jerusalem. The Palestinians sooner than not made themselves quite at home. "In the refugee camps and in several Jordanian cities, (Arafat's men) behaved as though they owned the place: They walked around armed and in uniform, set up checkpoints, collected taxes, and refused to travel with Jordanian license plates on their cars" (1). Emboldened, Palestinian gunmen again on Sept 1, 1970 attempted the life of Jordan's ruler, this time Abdullah's grandson King Hussein (who succeeded to the throne after his father King Talal abdicated).

In 1971, terror group Black September - the cover term for operations carried out by its parent organisation Fatah - assassinated Jordanian Prime Minister cum Defence Minister Wasfi al-Tal, who had been tasked by Hussein to deal with revolt in the refugee camps. The group's attempted assassination of Jordan's ambassador to London Zeid al-Rifai the following month failed. Clearly, the Palestinians are not averse to violence as a first resort.

Black September, also responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympic killings, got its name from the crackdown stemming from King Hussein's declaration of martial law on Sept 16, 1970. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - a PLO group - had hijacked four airliners on Sept 6, 1970, landed two in a Jordanian desert airstrip, and later hijacked a fifth plane. At the height of the drama, Palestinian militants pronounced themselves ready for a "showdown" with Jordanian authorities. This was the straw that broke the camel's back.

"The hijackings took place against a background of escalating violence in Jordan as the Fedayeen challenged the government and forces of King Hussein," said BBC News in its UK Confidential in-depth report (Jan 1, 2001). "They claimed Hussein had done too little to help them attack Israel after initially providing them with refuge. With Syria already supporting the Fedayeen cause, the hijack incident was the spark to an already incendiary situation."

To restore law and order, King Hussein ordered the Jordanian army to attack the Palestinian groups' headquarters and launched a full-scale offensive against PLO-dominated refugee camps. Conservative estimates say several hundred Palestinians were killed in the Black September clashes, maximum estimates say several thousands.

After the Jordanian army routed the militants in June 1971, the Fedayeen moved on to Lebanon where they were caught up in the bubbling cauldron of Muslim-Christian blood feuds. In Edward Said's book Peace and its Discontents , the Palestinian academic recalls Arafat's "catastrophic misjudgments and failures" and rues how the "folly of Palestinian involvement in Lebanese affairs was to lead to the disasters of 1982". The September 1982 massacre in the shantytown of Sabra and its adjacent UN refugee camp of Shatila has since become the cornerstone of the Palestinian plea for world sympathy.

Power-sharing formula

As Said commented, the road to Sabra and Shatila came by route of Palestinian involvement in Lebanese affairs. The Fedayeen behaved in Lebanon as they had in Jordan, and this time killing Christian villagers, defacing churches, and burning and looting homes. The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) had been one fought largely along religious lines.

The roots of the war can be traced back to the very foundation of the republic itself. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the area that is Lebanon today fell to France. Together with the country's independence from European dominance in 1943, there came a "National Pact" for a sectarian division of power. The Lebanese President would always be a Christian, the Prime Minister always a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the National Assembly, a Shiite (2). The influential and prosperous Christians - the Maronite and other sects - would always slightly predominate (6:5 ratio) in Parliament. Even up to today, parliamentary seats and senior government positions in Lebanon are allocated through a faith-based quota (3).

The 1943 pact, made when Lebanon's population was roughly 50 percent Christian, 50 percent Muslim, was challenged in the 1970s after the Christians shrunk from representing half to a little more than one third of the inhabitants. The Shiites' soaring birth rate, on the other hand, pushed them from third biggest religious community to becoming Lebanon's largest (4). Since they now outnumbered the Christians, the Muslims demanded greater power. To buttress the status quo, the Christians battened down the hatches and formed private armies. One such militia was the Phalange founded by Maronite warlord Pierre Gemayel, and led by his son Bashir.

In the jostle for control over Lebanon, the strong arm of the Palestinian guerrillas was useful to their co-religionists the Lebanese Muslims who now acquired their own private militia. In return, the PLO got permission to stay in town.

Lebanon's communal conflict came to a boil on April 13, 1975 when gunmen opened fire on a church in East Beirut's Christian suburb, killing four. Late that same day, the Phalangists retaliated by ambushing a bus, killing its Palestinian passengers. The next morning saw fighting in the streets of Beirut, pitting Palestinian guerrillas and Muslim militiamen against the Phalangists and their Christian allies. Muslim elements in the Lebanese army sided with the former, Christian elements with the latter.

Amidst the resulting power struggle, the PLO consolidated its stronghold in West Beirut and southern Lebanon. Dubbed "Fatahland", the PLO-controlled areas provided the base from which the Fedayeen fired their mortars across the border into Israel's northernmost villages. Meanwhile the friendly boy next door, the Syrians, came marching in.

Lebanon quagmire

A Palestinian initiative, or call it hallmark assassination, opened the door a crack for Israel to slip into Lebanon [see Note A]. On June 3, 1982, gunmen belonging to PLO breakaway group Abu Nidal shot and seriously wounded Israel's ambassador to London. This furnished Israel an excuse for air strikes on PLO targets in and around Beirut. The PLO retaliated by shelling Israeli settlements in Galilee. This led the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to advance northwards in the direction of the Beirut-Damascus road, alarming the Syrians. The Syrian response gave the IDF an opening to return fire (5).

Israeli troops had manoeuvred themselves into a war. On June 5, the cabinet of Menachem Begin in an emergency session authorised the invasion of Lebanon. Defence Minister Ariel Sharon was the architect of that war.

The engagement with Syria was short, with a ceasefire declared on June 11. The Israelis bombed and shelled West Beirut but for political reasons fought shy of entering the capital. Instead, the IDF laid siege to the PLO's quarters. To preserve their city, the Lebanese Muslims regretfully decided the Fedayeen had to go.

With this ceding of the fight, Palestinian guerrillas were spared their lives but exiled from yet another independent base of operations. American marines and French and Italian peacekeepers oversaw the evacuation of some 15,000 PLO fighters beginning August 21, 1982. Arafat and his officials moved on to Tunis, headquartering in the five-star Salwa Beach Hotel.

Following the PLO expulsion, the Phalangists held the upper hand. The National Assembly elected Bashir as President on Aug 23. The last of the Fedayeen dispersed to Arab countries by the first week of September. American marines were withdrawn on September 10 and the other peacekeeping forces on the following day.

Soon after, all hell broke loose in Sabra and Shatila.

Violence is its own reward

By solely reading historiography sympathetic to the Palestinians, our understanding of the narrative is as full of holes as roti jala. I daresay many Malaysians believe Ariel Sharon personally ordered the IDF to mow down the Palestinians in Lebanon. This is inaccurate, not to mention sorely lacking in context. It was the Phalangists commanded by Elie Hobeika who attacked Sabra and Shatila on Sept 16-17, 1982.

Hobeika was seeking revenge. His family and fianc were murdered by the Fedayeen in Damour, a Christian town 20km south of Beirut. About 330 souls were butchered in Damour in 1976 - babies shot at close range, civilians sprayed by machine-gun fire and surviving women traumatised by gang-rape. Lebanon was in the throes of tit-for-tat massacres, perpetrated by Palestinians against Lebanese Christians and vice versa (6).

On Sept 14, 1982, Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel was blown apart in a massive explosion. The attack was suspected at that time to be carried out by Palestinians, only natural, given their track record. An alleged Syrian intelligence agent - Syria is the Palestinian backer - was to later confess to the bombing.

Two days after Bashir's assassination, the Israeli army general staff on Sept 16 issued an order which prohibited the IDF from entering Sabra and Shatila which they had sealed off. "Searching and mopping up of the camps will be done by the Phalangists and the Lebanese army", Order No.6 stated.

This disastrous mistake allowed the Maronite leader's murder to be tragically avenged on the Palestinians as well as Lebanese Shiites encamped in Sabra and Shatila who comprised a quarter of the dwellers. Old scores like the Damour massacre was settled too. The IDF had allowed their Phalangist allies to carry out the tribal revenge for 36 hours under their watch. The Red Cross counted 328 bodies in the aftermath. Its personnel put the death toll unofficially at between 800 and 1,000. The Israeli estimate was 700-800, and the Palestinian Red Crescent 2,000. Arafat, quick to exploit the tragedy, inflated the figure to 5,000 dead.

The tragedy in Sabra and Shatila threw up two painful lessons for the parties to the conflict. For Israelis, the massacre brought on international condemnation and gave the biased press a field day in vilifying Ariel Sharon. A domestic judicial inquiry headed by a former Supreme Court justice also held the Israeli army indirectly responsible for the killings. It was the outrage of Israeli civil society that prompted the setting up of Kahan Commission which, after investigation, recommended Sharon as Defence Minister to be sacked. One week after Sabra and Shatila, some 300,000 (other reports say 400,000) Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv against their government.

On the other hand for the Palestinians, the September bloodstain on their history carried a different and bitter writing. They were warned how catastrophe befalls when their own fighting men are disarmed and refugees left to the protection of peacekeepers. Over the intervening years, however, they have learned that disregarding international threats to dismantle their terror networks would not bring about any repercussions but could well force Israel into making a unilateral withdrawal.

Should it be altogether surprising then that the Palestinians, given their first stab at democracy, would have handed their votes to a terrorist group? They can and have elected Hamas in the guarantee that EU aid will continue to pour in. The last words of the Jordanian Prime Minister assassinated by Black September were "Murderers, they believe only in fire and destruction" (7). And so it was that on another black September day when close to 3,000 New Yorkers of diverse origins were "massacred", the Palestinians celebrated and cheered. It does seem that they are a people fettered by a cycle of violence begetting more violence, and Hamas' recent victory is only another link in the chain.

Endnotes:

1."Out of Jordan" by Uriya Shavit in "Haaretz" (May 28, 2002).

2."Lebanese National Pact." Compton's Desk Reference from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

3."International Religious Freedom Report 2005" released by Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, US Department of State.

4."From Beirut to Jerusalem" by Thomas Friedman, Anchor Books/Random House (1995)

5."A History of Israel" by Ahron Bregman, Palgrave Macmillan (2002).

6.Palestinian militants laid siege to Damour on Jan 9, 1976 and stormed the town on Jan 23. Commanding the PLO was Zuhayr Muhsin, chief of al-Sa'iqa, known since then as "the Butcher of Damour". Other sources say the Damour massacre follows the mass murder of Palestinians in Karantina on Jan 18, 1976. The Phalangists, with Syrian backing, also massacred Palestinians at the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp on Aug 12, 1976.

7.Shavit, op cited.

Note A:

Why did Israel commit herself to an aggressor war that was unpopular at home and which bogged her down in a self-defeating occupation?

First and foremost, Israel wanted to reduce the PLO terrorist attacks launched from southern Lebanon. Next, for strategic purposes, she wanted to neutralise the Syrian threat. After the Lebanese civil war erupted in 1975, Syria occupied a part of Lebanon, stationing troops and installing an anti-aircraft missile system in Bekaa Valley. Last but not least, Israel wished to see Bashir Gemayel, the Maronite leader of the Phalange, installed as President and have him sign a groundbreaking peace treaty with the Jewish state.

With strongman Bashir's death however, some Phalangist factions switched their allegiance to Syria, and Israel's hope of a peace settlement lay in tatters. The Israel Defence Forces could no longer hope to rely on the Maronite militia which it had earlier supported to counterbalance the PLO in Lebanon. On Sept 15, 1982 Israeli troops fanned out across the western half of Beirut and ringed Sabra and Shatila, the PLO's main bases of support. Ariel Sharon claimed he had intelligence that the PLO left 2,000 guerrillas in the camps. It was either an exaggeration or an outright lie fed him by the Phalangists.

For his role in the massacre, Sharon was found to bear indirect responsibility and forced to step down as Defence Minister. Prime Minister Begin resigned six months later for a combination of reasons.