WATCHING HAMAS.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 06-FEB-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Shalom Harari is a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer who has been following the rise of Hamas--the Islamic Resistance Movement--for almost a quarter century. An awkward, voluble man of nearly sixty, Harari gained a measure of fame in intelligence circles when he began to tell his colleagues in internal reports that Hamas, founded in 1987, and initially a small outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, would, with its platform of armed resistance, grassroots politics, and Islamic ideology, come to dominate Palestinian politics. Six years ago, while most of his colleagues were anticipating peace, Harari was rightly predicting a second intifada; that uprising led to the decline of Yasir Arafat's creation and power base, the Fatah Party.

Last Thursday night, just hours after it was announced that Hamas had crushed Fatah in legislative elections––an event that caused some right-wing Israeli politicians to declare the birth of a terrorist "Hamastan"--Harari welcomed a visitor to his home, in the...

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