Obituary: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin: 1938-2004 By Khaled Amayreh The Martyr Sheikh The assassination by Israel of Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza on 22 March will undoubtedly have a profound psychological impact on Hamas, especially in the foreseeable future. Indeed with Yassin's death the movement has lost the spiritual mentor whose patriarchal leadership and moral and political weight shaped it for many years. Yassin was the second most important Palestinian leader after Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasser Arafat. His absence will be felt throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, especially at a psychological level. However, for a staunchly ideological movement like Hamas -- where the idea is more important than the leader -- it is unlikely that Yassin's death will seriously undermine the movement in any permanent way. In fact, he had already effectively stopped running the movement's day-to-day affairs several years ago due to his deteriorating health and relatively old age. Nonetheless, he remained until his death the most effective and eloquent spokesman of Hamas and the entire Palestinian Islamist camp, despite his severe physical disability. Ahmed Ismael Yassin was born in 1938 in the now non- existent hamlet of Al-Joura, near the present-day Israeli town of Ashkelon -- or Askalan in Arabic. In 1948 the young Yassin was forced to flee along with his family and thousands of other refugees southwards to the Gaza Strip after Zionist forces overran his village and threatened to kill its inhabitants. This nightmarish experience seems to have had a particularly strong impact in shaping the psychological build-up of a boy who would later on become one of Israel's most trenchant enemies. "I would fight my own brother if he took over my home. I don't fight Jews because they are Jews. I fight them because they have stolen and arrogated my land, home and orchards and condemned my people to everlasting misery," Yassin told foreign journalists inquiring about his implacable attitude towards Israel. Needless to say, his bitterness and sense of indignation were further enhanced by the abject poverty and rampant misery prevalent in the refugee camps of Gaza where he and his family lived during his teenage years. In 1952, Yassin was injured while playing sport, leaving him quadriplegic for the rest of his life. However, paralysis did not put an end to his ambitions, which in 1959 led him to Egypt where he spent some time studying at Ain Shams University. There he received a college diploma and, more importantly, he was deeply influenced by the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1962, shortly after his return to Gaza, Yassin was briefly detained by the Egyptian authorities in connection with his activities within the Muslim Brotherhood in opposition to the regime of then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Yassin thereafter worked as a teacher of Arabic and Islamic studies and as a preacher at Gaza mosques. This allowed him to propagate the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood and to gather hundreds of supporters who later came to form the nucleus of Hamas. The message he spread was that the loss of Palestine in 1948 was merely a symptom of the stagnation of the Islamic umma. The solution he demanded lay in the reinstatement of Islam as a unifying political force by overthrowing all existing Arab secular regimes which he viewed as un-Islamic or anti-Islamic. In 1982, Yassin started to form local resistance cells under the code name Majd, with the help of some prominent Muslim Brotherhood figures in Jordan who financed his weapons purchases. Soon afterwards the Israeli occupation authorities found out and Yassin was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison for "forming a terrorist group and possessing illegal weapons". Three years later he was released from Israeli custody as part of a prisoner swap between Israel and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- General Command, headed by Ahmed Jebril. A free man -- and with the Israeli repression of Palestinians reaching unprecedented heights of brutality and savagery -- Yassin founded the Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas in mid-1987. The newly founded resistance group carried out a number of effective attacks mainly on Israeli occupation troops in the Gaza Strip, killing a number of Israeli soldiers and officers. In 1989, two years into the first Intifada, Yassin was again arrested by Israeli occupation authorities. This time he was sentenced to 40 years in prison, charged with "inciting to violence" and "ordering the killing of Israeli soldiers". Yassin spent nearly eight years in jail where his health deteriorated significantly as a result of his paralysis and the poor health and living conditions in his cell. He lost vision in one eye, while also suffering from respiratory problems and hearing loss. In 1997, Yassin was freed from prison after the late King Hussein of Jordan insisted that the Israeli government of Benyamin Netanyahu release him in exchange for the release from Jordanian custody of two Mossad agents who carried out an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Khaled Meshaal, the head of the Hamas contingency in Amman. Yassin's subsequent triumphant return to Gaza significantly enhanced Hamas' status and granted the movement the position of "second among equals" vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority. Yassin vehemently opposed the Oslo Accords, which he viewed as a "disgraceful capitulation" and "great deception". Indeed, the intensive construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along with the continued confiscation by successive Israeli governments of large swathes of Palestinian land, seemed to vindicate his views in the eyes of many Palestinians. Prior to the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, Yassin was placed under house arrest, his telephone communications severed by the PA, which was under tremendous pressure from the United States and Israel to "rein in" Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The Hamas leader was always careful not to allow recurrent frictions with the PA to evolve into any kind of civil war, which he viewed as "the ultimate Palestinian red line". During the ongoing Al-Aqsa Intifada, Yassin consistently held fast to the "robe of resistance". He argued that freedom is earned, not granted on a silver platter, and that that which is taken by force can be only recovered by force. He vehemently defended human-bomb attacks -- suicide bombings -- against Israel, especially those carried out on military targets, arguing that they constituted the sole and only weapon available to the Palestinian people in the face of a far more powerful enemy that is hell-bent on exterminating and crushing them. He repeatedly demanded an end to all attacks targeting Palestinian and Israeli civilians. However, Israel consistently rejected all initiatives to that effect. For Israel and its guardian-cum-ally the US, Yassin was an embodiment of terror and evil. For most Palestinians and the bulk of Arab and Muslim peoples, Yassin represented a symbol of resistance against a sinister military occupation. See: Focus: Ahmed Yassin
