“How was your journey?” he asks, proffering glasses of Coke and settling back on the couch for a chat. But his expression turns steely as the subject turns to the intifada and the leading role that his radical Islamic group has taken in the campaign of violence against Israel. “First we concentrated on military operations against soldiers and against settlers who had built their homes on our territory,” Shami says. “But because the Israelis have declared war against all of the Palestinian people, we now consider all Israelis targets.”
Israel is taking that warning seriously. After a period of dormancy, Islamic Jihad and its radical partner Hamas have reemerged during the past three months as Israel’s most implacable enemies. In one March week alone, the hard-line groups dispatched five suicide bombers into Israel: one, a student at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, insinuated himself into a group of Israeli teenagers waiting at a bus stop near Netanya, then blew himself up with a nail bomb concealed under his coat, killing two teenage boys along with himself.
Steadfast in their rejection of territorial compromise with Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad also mean potential trouble for Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Seeking a way to perpetuate the intifada last fall, Arafat freed more than 100 Hamas and Islamic Jihad zealots from Palestinian jails. But now the Palestinian leader has become the radicals’ hostage, incapable of controlling them. And as moderate Palestinian and Israeli leaders search for ways to jump-start the peace process, their biggest obstacle may be the hundreds of well-armed cadres now at large in the West Bank and Gaza. “They are protectors and defenders of the Palestinian people,” says the sheik, framed by a huge Islamic Jihad banner displaying the group’s logo: the black barrels of twin Kalashnikov rifles protruding from the golden Dome of the Rock.
That’s a label that Shami also wears proudly. In an hour-long conversation with NEWSWEEK, the tall, avuncular sheik spoke candidly about his tumultuous two decades at the forefront of the Mideast’s most militant Islamic organization. Dressed austerely in a simple gray robe and white cotton skull cap, Shami sat upright, on the edge of his couch as he traced a journey that began when he was a student activist at Cairo University in the 1970s. “I was one of the founders of the movement,” he says proudly.
Shami spent five years in and out of Israeli prisons during the intifada years of the late 1980s. After a series of attacks against Israel in 1992, the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin packed him and other militants into buses and deported them to Beirut. There, he became an admirer of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, remaining in Lebanon until the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord in 1993.
Returning to Gaza, he agitated against the peace deal and called for more attacks against Israel. He was locked up nine times by the Palestinian Authority, the last time in May 2000, when he was held for a month. “When your enemy arrests you it’s an honor,” he says. “But when your brother arrests you, and you feel you’ve been protecting him, it’s very hard.”
Shami’s time in prison has not softened him. Rejecting Israel’s right to exist, he implies that Arafat betrayed the cause for trading away parts of historic Palestine for peace.
Shami’s time in prison has not softened him. Rejecting Israel’s right to exist, he implies that Arafat betrayed the cause for trading away parts of historic Palestine for peace. “I told him that his way was wrong but he refused to listen to me,” he says. “He put me in prison instead.”
Nor does he offer any apologies for the campaign of violence that Islamic Jihad is carrying out against Israeli civilian targets. “If somebody comes to your home uninvited, should you smile at him?” he says. Shami stresses that he does not advocate the total expulsion of the Jews from the region: “The Jews who were here before 1948 have a right to stay on the land, but those who came later, such as these Russian immigrants, have no relationship to the land, and we will not allow it.”
Although Shami says he takes no part in military strategy and insists he has no communication with Islamic Jihad guerrillas, he is clearly in the loop. Asked about last week’s mortar attack on a Jewish settlement in Gaza by a group that called itself “Hezbollah Palestine,” the sheik denied that the militant Lebanese group-which specialized in such attacks against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon-had established a presence in Gaza. “We don’t need Hezbollah here,” he said. “The settlers are a very easy target for us. It’s not like Lebanon, where the Israeli targets were far away, and heavy weapons were needed. The settlers are very close to us, and we can fight them with the light weapons we have.”
The Sharon government, meanwhile, is desperately searching for ways to strike back. Last week the Israeli Defense Force unleashed a series of counterattacks in the West Bank and Gaza against suspected key leaders of the intifada-including one of the top military commanders of Islamic Jihad. Shortly after noon on Tuesday, an IDF Apache helicopter swept down over the Gaza Strip town of Rafah from the sea and fired three missiles at a car driven by Mohammed Attiya Abed el-Al, 27, incinerating the vehicle and killing him instantly. Abed was described by Israeli sources as a senior terrorist responsible for a string of deadly attacks against Jews.
Shami acknowledges that Israelis were right to consider him a threat. “He had a relationship with the military wing of Islamic Jihad,” acknowledges the sheik, “He was one of the main defenders.”
On Thursday, Israeli forces struck again, killing another Islamic Jihad military figure, Iyhad Hardan, with a booby trap planted inside a telephone booth near the West Bank town of Jenin.
The calling of afternoon prayers from a nearby mosque is Shami’s cue to wrap things up. Escorting his visitors to the door, the sheik says that he and his confreres are prepared for a protracted war. “We will finish the struggle when we expel the occupiers,” he vows, shaking hands as the muezzin wails the verses of the Quran. “We will continue however long it takes.” Both Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat will have to reckon with that fearsome dedication.
