Women seen as key to Hamas' success in election

Knight Ridder Newspapers

(KRT)

JABALIYA, Gaza Strip - The girls and women who came to congratulate Hamas' top female candidate, Jamila Shanti, after her party's landslide victory in last week's Palestinian parliamentary election wore veils and robes in the tradition of fundamentalist Islam.

They brought Shanti a floral wreath. She gave them sweets wrapped in paper decorated with Quranic verses about how to lead a virtuous life.

Plastic chairs were arrayed under a leaky lean-to that barely kept out the rain as three dozen voices chanted: "God is great," sang the praises of Hamas leaders killed in Israeli airstrikes, and extolled the virtues of jihad, Hamas' holy war, which has included scores of suicide bombings in which hundreds of Israelis have been killed.

In this scene of sisterly radicalism, say the Hamas party faithful, lies one of the seeds of the group's sweeping electoral success: a targeted effort to get their women to the polls.

"Palestinian society is more than 52 percent women. It is said that women are going to draw the future map of Palestine," said Shanti, 48, a Gaza University professor of philosophy and psychology.

While just 46 percent of the overall vote was cast by women in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, it was disproportionately weighted in favor of Hamas, said Birzeit University pollster Nader Said, citing post-election analyses.

"Women tend to vote Hamas more than men," which is one of the factors behind the crushing defeat of the ruling Fatah party that had dominated Palestinian politics for decades, Said said.

Shanti's tumbledown house, near Gaza's northern border with Israel, has been close to some of the deadliest fighting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Extremist factions, including Hamas, have used the area to launch homemade rockets into Israel, causing deaths, injuries and destruction of property. Israel has responded with airstrikes and artillery attacks that have targeted the extremists and killed civilians.

"In Gaza, we have more than 700 widows because of the conflict with Israel," said Shanti, who believes that women bear the brunt of the suffering when their men are killed, imprisoned, or go into hiding because of the conflict.

By Western standards, the enforced separation of men and women at Hamas rallies, the shrouding of women in head-to-toe abayas and the slitted veils that some women wear, revealing just their eyes, would seem to mitigate against sexual equality.

As a lawmaker-elect, Shanti said, she wants to "correct the misunderstanding" that Islamic women are second-class citizens behind their veils in a purely patriarchial society.

"It means they are respected," she said. "But as women, we have some special issues."

Among the top issues she cited: helping the families of prisoners and deceased fighters she called martyrs; helping women university graduates to find work; helping women who are themselves in prison; helping people with disabilities; and helping women who live in the border areas, like herself, to rebuild homes destroyed in the fighting.

The Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel.

"We are not going to agree to two states," she said.

As for the tactic of suicide bombing, she defended it.

"Aren't Palestinians killed inside their homes and schools? To defend ourselves we should use all means," she said.

"Our children, from primary school, are driven to carry weapons and go to fight the Israelis with all their might," Shanti said.

Among the 74 seats Hamas won in the 132-seat parliament, at least five will go to women.

Perhaps the most contentious of the women who won election on the Hamas slate is Miriam Farhat, also from Gaza, known here as the Mother of Martyrs, because three of her sons died attacking Israelis.

Farhat's campaign video included footage of her helping her son Mohammed, 17, to prepare grenades and his automatic rifle and advising him on the most deadly shooting techniques. His midnight attack on a military academy inside the Gaza Strip Jewish settlement of Atzmona in March 2002 killed five Israelis and wounded 24 before soldiers shot him dead.

Atzmona, like the 20 other Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, was abandoned and dismantled by Israel last summer.

On the campaign trail, Farhat told reporters that her decision to run for the parliament, known as the Palestinian Legislative Council, was in keeping with the struggle she encouraged her sons to die for.

"The jihadist project completes the political one, and the political project cannot be completed without jihad," she told London's Sunday Times. "The resistance needs the political project to support it through the legislative council."

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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.