Globally Isolated and Economically Crippled: Why Hamas is Losing Gaza
When the islamist movement known as Hamas first took control of Gaza in 2006, the family of Ahmed Ayyash, a third-year engineering student at the Hamas-controlled Islamic University, gave the party their full backing. Like a solid plurality of Palestinian voters, they thought the Islamists would provide clean government, in contrast to the corruption-riddled Fatah that had ruled for years. Then Ayyash’s mother applied for a teaching job. She was offered it immediately: to the Hamas official who interviewed her, all that mattered was that her husband knew people in the new government. A principled woman, Ayyash’s mother turned down the job because, he says, “it was through wasta.” That’s Arabic for connections, and in Gaza it symbolized everything that was wrong with the old administration, everything Hamas claimed to oppose. “This was their slogan at election time, to end the wasta,” Ayyash recalls.
Ayyash lost faith in the Islamists early, and in the six years since, he’s been joined by many other Gazans who complain that Hamas’ patronage politics favors the few while the majority suffer. “Some homes have four or five family members working, and some have none. That’s not fair,” says Safaa Abu Elaish, 23, an engineer who has been unable to find a job since getting a degree at Islamic University this year. Those who have jobs have other complaints. Ansaf-Bash Bash, 66, a receptionist at the same university, says she’s spent eight years on the waiting list for a government-sponsored pilgrimage flight to Mecca. “Some people go almost every year,” she says. “If you know someone strong, they forward your name.”
Such complaints, damaging to any political party, are potentially fatal to the Islamists. Besieged by Israel and the West, which regards it as a terrorist group, and cut off from the Palestinian majority in the West Bank, Hamas has little to offer beyond its jihadist credentials — and the promise of clean government…