Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has elicited some positive headlines with two recent moves. The first was to say that in the event of war between Iran and Israel, it would not intervene on behalf of Iran. The second was not to participate in the recent rocket attacks on Israel by Islamic Jihad militants in the Gaza Strip. Some Arab commentators have talked about Hamas moving from the ‘axis of evil’ to the ‘axis of moderation’. In fact what has happened is that in response to the triumph in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), Hamas is tacking back towards its own Muslim Brotherhood roots, not out of moderaton but because MB-controlled Egypt can provide the Palestinians with much more significant long-term support than distant – and much mistrusted in the Arab world – Iran.

It was the pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi that talked about Hamas joining the ‘axis of moderation’ after quoting the two Hamas officials who have distanced the group from Iran. One, Ahmad Yusuf, adviser to the foreign ministry of the Gaza government, said that Hamas “is not part of any political or military axis; its actions are restricted to Palestine alone”. A second politburo member, Salah al-Bardawil, specifically said that Hamas would not retaliate on behalf of Iran if it were attacked by Israel because “Iran is Shiite while Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are Sunnis”.

There is no doubt about Hamas’s sharp turn away from Iran and its Syrian ally towards the Muslim Brotherhood. All the movement’s leaders outside the Palestinian territories have now left Damascus and are living in other Arab capitals. Hamas’s politburo chief Khaled Meshal is in Doha, together with two other politburo members, Mohammad Nasr and Izzat ar-Rashiq, while Meshal’s deputy, Musa Abu-Marzouk is now in Cairo. Imad al-Alami has returned to the Gaza Strip.

But whether Israel would define this as a sign of moderation is doubtful given the increasingly outspoken nature of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. On the contrary, our sources in Jerusalem say the government views this development as a dangerous rather than a moderating trend – and given recent developments in Cairo it is difficult to argue with this assessment. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-controlled parliament is pushing for more say in government, and in a move of unequivocal hostility to Israel, on 12 March it unanimously approved a text calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Cairo and the recall of Egypt’s envoy from Tel Aviv. The text also called for a halt to gas exports to Israel and stated that “Egypt will never be the friend, partner, or ally of the Zionist entity which we consider as the first enemy of Egypt and the Arab nation”.

Two weeks ago, in a report discussing the row with the US over the treatment of foreign NGOs in Egypt, we reported that Gamal Hishmat, a Brotherhood parliamentarian who sits on the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs had said that “even with the threat to the US aid, we are not intimidated in the way the previous regime used to be”. Now, on 9 March, Foreign Minister Muhammad Kamel Amr has said that US aid to Egypt is not “eternal” and “distorts the nature of bilateral relations” between the two.