Khalid Mishal: The Making of a Palestinian Islamic Leader

Khalid Mishal (Abu Walid), a founder of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the head of its politbureau since 1996, has been the recognized head of the movement since the assassination of Shaykh Ahmad Yasin in spring 2004. Despite his considerable influence within the organization, at least dating back to the early 1990s, Mishal did not attract attention in the West until he survived Israel’s botched assassination attempt in Amman in September 1997, which made headlines when King Hussein (with possible help from U.S. President Bill Clinton) compelled Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to provide the antidote to the poison with which he had been injected in broad daylight by Mossad agents disguised as Canadian tourists. Mishal’s prominence has only increased following the Hamas victory in the January 2006 legislative elections in the occupied territories. Despite the U.S.-led campaign to isolate the Islamist movement internationally, Mishal has functioned as the main interlocutor with regional and international actors seeking direct or informal contact with the organization, as well as with the international media.

Since Hamas’s “external leadership” was expelled from Jordan in August 1999 following the ascension of King Abdallah II, Mishal has been based in Damascus. I met him there several times in 2006 and 2007 in my then capacity as senior Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group, and I had been impressed by his willingness to engage in substantive discussion to a degree rare among political leaders (of whatever nationality). He seemed less interested in convincing his listeners that he was right than in presenting his views as clearly as possible, leaving it to them to draw their own conclusions. More than once questions were posed that one would expect him to dodge or dismiss, or at least rebut, but consistently he answered them head on.

Despite his straightforward and accessible manner, and although he agreed from the outset to a formal interview, it was not easy to arrange. Because of last-minute scheduling conflicts and unexpected changes in his plans, two earlier interview attempts were aborted or cut short, the second when he had suddenly to travel abroad to deal with the diplomatic crisis that resulted from the Gaza border breach in late January. (A high point of one of these visits was that the driver sent to fetch me at my hotel turned out to be a longtime Mishal bodyguard who had helped foil the 1997 assassination attempt by grabbing the Mossad agents responsible after a lengthy chase through the streets of Amman. Though he still took obvious pride in his achievement, he did point out that if the attempt had been made in a country other than Jordan—which had signed a peace treaty with Israel only a few years before—Mossad would not have hesitated to use guns, and the outcome might have been very different.)

The assassination on 14 February 2008 in broad daylight of Hizballah’s former intelligence and external operations chief Imad Mughniyah on a visit to Damascus—an assassination whose precision and execution could only bring home to Mishal his own vulnerability—threatened another delay, but in fact our interview went ahead on 8–9 March. That the Mughniyah assassination did have an impact, however, was clear from the heightened security measures of this visit compared to previous ones. The interview began at 9:30 at night as opposed to the planned afternoon hour, and though I do not know Damascus well enough to know where I was taken, the drive to the same office in the same leafy suburb took twice as long on account of what seemed to be deliberate detours. I was searched more thoroughly than on previous occasions and with procedures resembling those at a U.S. airport under Code Red security alert. Also in contrast to previous encounters, my cigarettes were not returned despite my repeated requests. Fortunately, Mishal—who despite his personal aversion to the habit had never previously prevented guests from smoking—arranged for their swift return when coffee was served.

As on earlier occasions, Mishal was highly personable, presenting his views and thoughts in the logical, systematic manner befitting a man who was trained as a physicist. Though by no means devoid of humor, he does not pepper his conversation with jokes and laughter the way Yasir Arafat, for example, used to do. Interestingly, although I had been asked to submit a list of topics to his office beforehand, this seemed to be for purposes of perusal rather than vetting, as it elicited no comments or restrictions. I had, however, avoided as a waste of time asking him about the one issue I knew from others that he was not prepared to discuss seriously whether on or off the record: namely, differences and tensions within Hamas. What I was particularly interested in exploring, since I had seen so little of it in his previous interviews, was his personal background and political history. He turned out to be willing to do so in some detail, providing insights into his political formation and the founding of Hamas, and, in the process, an interesting window on the Palestinian community in Kuwait during the 1970s and 1980s. Part II—which will appear in JPS 148—will focus on the Islamist movement’s more recent experiences and political strategy, particularly after Arafat’s death in November 2004.

What is striking about Mishal is that while he is as close as one gets to the heart and soul of the Hamas movement, it’s easy to imagine in his presence that one is speaking not with an Islamist leader of the 21st century, but with a leader of Fatah in the 1970s or the PFLP in the 1980s. As a colleague who spent some time with him once noted, his exegesis in discussion is Palestinian nationalist rather than Quranic. Though like other Islamists he scrupulously avoids the term “imperialism” (apparently seen as a leftist marker), he repeatedly insisted over the next three or four hours that Islamism and nationalism are complementary rather than contradictory. It bears mentioning that not so long ago other Islamists were denouncing nationalism as the scourge of the umma. This was also the first time I heard a Hamas leader use the term “Palestinian revolution.”

Few who have met Khalid Mishal question his leadership qualities. A senior Arab official with decades of experience came away particularly impressed with his “willingness to learn,” which he noted was rare indeed for those at Mishal’s level. The question, rather, is whether time, circumstances, and Mossad’s learning curve will conspire with or against what seems to be his ambition to lead the Palestinian national movement. No less important is the question of whether Mishal’s brand of militant pragmatism will continue to hold sway within the Hamas leadership, or whether the combination of conflict, siege, and isolation—or a successful second attempt by Mossad—will bequeath to us a different Palestinian Islamist movement or movements, with a very different kind of leadership.

Mouin Rabbani, an independent analyst and writer based in Amman, Jordan, conducted this interview in Arabic on 8­–9 March and translated it into English.