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Khaled Meshaal, the exile-based leader of Hamas, is, if nothing else, a political survivor. As the head of a religious militant group that prioritizes party discipline and organizational cohesiveness, Meshaal has operated for most of his career within the confines of a fairly rigid box. When Hamas introduced suicide bombing into the arsenal of politically motivated violence in an effort to undermine the advancement of the peace process, Meshaal became a fierce public defender of the tactic.
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Yet at other times he has proven himself a shrewd-tactician and for some opportunistic voice within an otherwise ideological movement, avoiding the religious sermonizing typical of others and advancing, however limitedly, elements of change. Deftly straddling popular opinion throughout his career, it is little wonder that Meshaal was in charge of Hamas’s political bureau and a central figure within the movement before reaching the age of forty. Today, however, Khaled Meshaal is facing a new challenge as the turmoil in Syria has unseated him from his regional base and changing internal power dynamics within Hamas has him once again jockeying for position.
Early life and career
Born in the West Bank village of Silwad in 1956, Khaled Meshaal is the eldest of eleven children. In 1967, after the West Bank was captured from Jordan in the Six-Day War, Meshaal’s father moved his family to Amman and later Kuwait. At Kuwait University, Meshaal studied physics and was actively involved in student politics, co-founding the Bloc of Islamic Students on campus. For years afterwards he taught high-school physics until the First Gulf War forced thousands of Palestinians to leave Kuwait following Yasser Arafat’s decision to side with Saddam Hussein during the conflict.
Relocating to Amman, Meshaal became active in the Muslim Brotherhood and the nascent Hamas movement, as well as being a vocal critic of Arafat and the Peace Process. By the mid-1990s Meshaal had become a prominent voice within Hamas and assumed leadership of the diaspora-based political bureau in 1996. As the Hamas leadership sought to undermine the nascent Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Accords through the use of suicide bombings against the Israeli population, Meshaal became a staunch public advocate of the brutal tactic.
“Hamas’s spokespeople keep emphasizing the ‘collective leadership’ nature of their movement over personalities, and in practice they have shown a significant amount of adherence to this principle,” says Khaled Hroub, in his book, Hamas: a beginner’s guide. “As yet, there have been no authoritarian personalities or ultra charismatic leaders who have used their influence to impose any individual vision on the entire movement, such as was the case with the PLO, Fatah and Yasser Arafat, for example.”
On September 25, 1997, then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Khaled Meshaal. In front of his office in Amman, the Hamas leader was attacked by two Mossad agents who injected a liquid poison known as levofentanyl into his ear. Ensuing outrage by King Hussein of Jordan—in which he threatened to abrogate the 1994 Peace Treaty between the two countries—and subsequent involvement of US President Bill Clinton, compelled Netanyahu to provide the antidote to the poison in time to save Meshaal’s life. The two Israeli operatives were later apprehended and traded in a prisoner exchange deal that involved the release of Hamas’s spiritual leader and mentor, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.
The botched assassination attempt catapulted Khaled Meshaal into the limelight of Palestinian politics where he enjoyed increased popularity. Nonetheless, not long after King Abdullah II of Jordan inherited the throne from his father, the new monarch banned Hamas in Jordan, after the unveiling of a plot aimed at undermining the security of Jordan and its commitment to the peace process, arresting and exiling its top officials, including Meshaal. The Hamas leader initially moved to Qatar but eventually made his way to Damascus by 2001.
For over a decade Meshaal enjoyed the patronage of the Syrian regime, a distinct advantage over Hamas figures in Gaza who were subject to harassment, arrest, and extra-judicial assassination by Israel. Meshaal moved freely and was received in friendly capitals around the world, building a network of support and financiers for Hamas. In March 2004, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas was killed in a targeted assassination by Israel. Yassin, who was a near-blind quadriplegic, was being wheeled from early morning prayers at a Gaza mosque when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired missiles killing him, his body guards and several bystanders.
Following his death, leadership was briefly split between Abdel Aziz Rantissi in Gaza and Khaled Meshaal in Damascus. However, a month later in April 2004, Rantissi was assassinated in similar fashion when an Israeli helicopter targeted his vehicle. After the killing of Rantissi, Meshaal had become the undisputed leader of Hamas.
Hamas under his leadership
Under Meshaal’s stewardship, Hamas continued to increase its presence in Palestinian politics as well as market the organization to the outside world. Meshaal was instrumental in trying to rebrand Hamas by hinting at the militant group’s acceptance of a two-state formula and hudna, or truce with Israel. However, while never accepting Israel or the principle of negotiation, these attempts to moderate Hamas’ position using its hardline language, have largely been rebuffed.
In 2006, Hamas decided to enter the political foray for the first time by contesting Palestinian Authority parliamentary elections, which it won, unseating the Fatah party that had dominated Palestinian politics for decades. After a violent split between Fatah and Hamas occurred in 2007 on the streets of Gaza, the latter assumed uncontested control over the coastal territory.
“After Hamas came to power in 2006, the inside leadership was strengthened even further,” writes Khroub. “Well, while it is safe to say that the two-branched inside leadership (in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) controls the muscles of the movement, the outside leadership controls financial resources and external contacts.”
While Hamas has had three distinct camps for most of its existence, the structure of the organization is also changing as the dichotomy in roles between Hamas in Gaza, the West Bank and Damascus continue to evolve. Traditionally, Gaza and the West Bank were the bases of the armed branch of Hamas, while Syria remained its political-diplomatic center outside the reach of Israel. In recent years, however, while the West Bank leadership has been suppressed, Gaza has developed strong political foundations of its own, basically operating a mini-state in the coastal territory. With the changes to the regime in Egypt, Hamas officials from Gaza have been given more freedom of movement, as well. Indeed, Ismail Haniyyeh, the current President of the Hamas government has been visiting capitals from Tehran to Moscow, where he is received as a head of state.
The change is very similar to what happened between the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, with the latter superseding the power of the former once it began to govern a population in the manner of a state. And in many ways Meshaal has come to resemble Yasser Arafat, the man he once criticized. Those who have met him personally say he embodies many of the same traits of giving everyone around him the feeling of being important, for which the deceased leader of the Palestinian national movement was famous. Others point to his need to change from a populist to a statesman capable of making unpopular decisions.
Shifting political winds
The Syrian uprising has made life tenuous for the Damascus-based Hamas leadership. According to Nabil Al-Araby, Meshaal tried to posit himself as a negotiator between Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian rebels, which Assad dismissed by refusing to even meet Meshaal in person. Meshaal was reluctant to side publicly with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad against the wishes of the regime and its regional ally, Iran. It has been reported that nearly the entire leadership core of Hamas has left Damascus, settling in various Arab capitals including Amman, Cairo, Doha, Beirut and even Gaza.
In searching for a new base of operations, Meshaal’s past positions within Hamas have come back to haunt him. The Damascus leadership headed by Meshaal has not been able to regroup and setup shop anywhere else, owing to the liability of sheltering Hamas. Like Arafat before him, Meshaal is quickly running out of room and may be trying to shed the clothes of Hamas as the armed group and don those of Hamas the legitimate government.
In doing so, ideological and political differences have been exposed inside Hamas between the circle of Meshaal and that of the Gaza based leadership. This power struggle was put on full display after Khaled Meshaal signed a reconciliation agreement with Mahmoud Abbas in May 2011 in Cairo and then again in Doha in February of this year. Meshaal’s decision to push for reconciliation with Fatah is extremely popular among Palestinians everywhere and perceived as forward looking, contrasting sharply with the narrow political goals of Hamas leaders in Gaza who are not eager to reconcile with Fatah or hold elections. Yet, despite Meshaal’s signature the reconciliation process has made little headway on the ground. By determining the success of its implementation, Hamas leaders in Gaza have demonstrated their power to the world and to Khaled Meshaal. Meshaal later retreated from the confrontational stance by postponing implementation of the reconciliation.
At the beginning of 2012, Meshaal intimated that he would step down from the helm of Hamas’ political bureau, causing wide speculation about internal Hamas politics and the future of its leader. After actively pushing reconciliation between political factions and creating inroads for Hamas within the PLO, some analysts perceived Meshaal had his eyes set on broadening his appeal to all Palestinians in order to take over the PLO leadership after Mahmoud Abbas, now 76 years old, stepped down from office.
Meshaal also stunned observers around the world and within his own party when he discussed the possibility of Hamas adopting a non-violent resistance platform. All these changes seem engineered to court a much wider audience than the Hamas base and continue to gain support among Palestinians in general at a time when his strength within Hamas is weakening. These developments are also in line with wider changes in the region and the rhetoric of other Islamist parties that are entering the mainstream for the first time.
With so many transformations occurring simultaneously, it is probably too early to surmise the fate of Khaled Meshaal in Palestinian politics. No one within the movement enjoys unparalleled popular support and Meshaal’s chances of remaining at the helm are as good as any. Yet, with the results of internal Hamas elections from early April still a secret, we may find out sooner rather than later what the future has in store.
