My Last Encounter with Ismail Abu Shanab

By Johanna McGeary Sunday, Aug. 24, 2003
    • When you're one of the few public faces of Hamas and your organization kills Israeli civilians, you've got to know you loom large in the enemy's gunsights. But when I asked Ismail Abu Shanab if that worried him, he merely shrugged. "If you expect me to worry about my life, that is terror," he said on a late-June day just a week after Israel had tried and failed to take out his colleague, Abdel Aziz Rantisi. "I do not pay any attention to this. It's not courage, but we have gotten used to this. Is it clever to come with their planes and their missiles to destroy me? They can come. We have no missiles to fire back. So we defend ourselves by the only means we have." Those means, as everyone knows, include suicide bombings.

    Abu Shanab was not the most obvious target for assassination. He had promoted the cease-fire, which he called a test of Israeli and U.S. intentions to deliver on the road map to peace. Among the top four political leaders of Hamas, he was never a gunman himself. But the U.S.-educated engineer and university professor had emerged as the organization's most visible spokesman, thanks to his excellent command of English, his understanding of the Western mind and, on the hard scale of Hamas, his softer tone. Israelis dismissed his mild pragmatism as nothing but smart p.r. Yet it was Abu Shanab who often hinted at how Hamas might accept something less than its maximal demands. As he explained a few days before the June 29 hudna, or cease-fire, went into effect, the same kind of "religious truce" could be extended indefinitely if "Israel would let us build our own state" in the old 1967 boundaries. Then his generation would "leave it to future generations" to decide whether the struggle would continue until Israel ceased to exist. "Theoretically, that would not be enough," he said. "But as a practical matter, let's have a Palestinian state on whatever land can be liberated and see."


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    The calm, bearded 53-year-old I met at his Gaza home had bodyguards at his doors who impounded my cell phone before I got close to the boss. Abu Shanab was outspoken in his passionate support of violence. "The military wing is central to our resistance," he said. "They are more powerful than us, but we couldn't stand still to what Israel does to us without any reaction. We are sending the message that we are refusing to be occupied. Military victory is not possible, but the only alternative is surrender." When I asked how martyrdom advanced Hamas' aims, he replied with the kind of logic that makes the most optimistic despair of Middle East peace: "What of your soldiers in Iraq who are being killed day after day? Those are martyrs sacrificing their lives for 'American interests.' So why do you call Palestinians murderers if they sacrifice their lives for our interests?"

    I wondered how a man of his sophistication and education had come to such beliefs. "I was born in Gaza one year after my parents were expelled from their town," he answered. "From the day I opened my eyes, I faced Israeli threats all the time." Like most Palestinian men of his generation, he spent his formative years in Israel's prisons: eight years in an Ashkelon jail, two in a solitary cell underground. And like most of those exiled to the miseries of Gaza, he said he would never give up the right to return to his home village of al-Jayeh near Ashkelon. "If we fear Israel," he said, "that will leave them in our place. That's what happened to our fathers and grandfathers. So one of the lessons for us is never to let go of our land under fear of Israel." Living by that logic has cost Ismail Abu Shanab the chance ever to go home again.