MIDDLE EAST: The Islamic movement is expected to emerge as the second largest party after Fatah in elections later this year, reports Nuala Haughey in Beit. Hanoun
Abu Nabil, a Gaza shopkeeper, is a dyed in the wool Arafat man, a lifelong supporter of the secular Fatah political movement that the late Palestinian president founded.
But even he concedes that life has improved in the agricultural town of Beit Hanoun, in the northeastern edge of the Gaza Strip, under the recently installed town council run by Fatah's rivals, the radical Palestinian group Hamas.
"Things are much better, we feel the difference," said the 60-year-old grandfather standing in his general store in front of posters of a smiling Arafat waving to his devoted followers.
"They started cleaning the streets and paving new streets and there are discounts if you pay your water service bills. That's a good idea for those who are able to pay."
The contrast between this municipality and the previous Fatah-run one is clear, said Abu Nabil. "As people, we didn't get anything from the previous municipality. They only served their own families, their clans."
Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement whose armed wing has perpetrated some of the deadliest suicide attacks of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is branded a terrorist organisation by Israel, the EU and the US. However, it has long been respected by Palestinians for its funding of social services such as education and health programmes.
This grassroots popularity was translated into political clout when Hamas won about a third of the overall vote in the local elections in the West Bank and Gaza, which have been held on a staggered basis over the past six months.
Candidates aligned with Fatah, the dominant Palestinian party for decades, won the most local council seats overall. However, Hamas was victorious in the larger, more influential cities where it capitalised on bickering within Fatah and its reputation for corruption.
Now Hamas is expected to emerge as the second largest party after Fatah when it contests parliamentary elections scheduled for later this year.
In Beit Hanoun, where Hamas candidates romped home with 11 of the 13 council seats in local elections last January, the Islamic politicians are making an effort to consolidate electoral gains by following the advice famously delivered by Tip O'Neill, the former US speaker of the House of Representatives, that "all politics is local".
Their tactics are those of parish-pump politics the world over; filling in potholes, cleaning the streets, erecting new bus stop stands, initiating a schoolbus run, creating jobs, offering reductions in utility bills to motivate people to pay them.
Mayor Mohammad Nazek El Kafarna (39) looks like he means business, seated at his large desk with tie and short-sleeved shirt and trimmed beard, and gilded Koranic inscriptions hanging on the walls. The former university Arabic language teacher says educating the children of this dusty low-rise town is his priority.
Dr El Kafarna acknowledges that the problems facing Beit Hanoun's 40,000 residents are deeply rooted, and that he does not have a magic wand.
His administration has inherited a budget deficit of six million shekels (€1.1 million). With 80 per cent unemployment most families depend on charity and are too poor to pay their monthly household water and sanitation bills of around 50 shekels a month (less than €10).
But, he says, the council's efficiency efforts have meant that for the first time in the municipality's history, it was able to pay its employees their salaries for the past two months out of its own revenue.
Beit Hanoun, one of the most easterly built-up areas of the Gaza Strip, still bears the scars of the current Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation, which began more than four years ago. Hamas militants and other Palestinian fighters regularly used the area to launch their crude home-made Qassam rockets at neighbouring Israeli towns, earning Beit Hanoun the nickname, Qassam City.
The Israeli army's response to such attacks was massive incursions. It pummelled the area with tanks and helicopters, damaged wells and electricity, sewerage and telecommunications infrastructure, bulldozed houses, uprooted citrus orchards and razed hothouses to create open space with no cover for rocket launchers.
"Residents of Beit Hanoun depended mainly on agriculture and working in Israel," said the mayor. "Agriculture has been fully destroyed and the workers don't go to Israel anymore." Hamas's critics accuse it of claiming credit for international aid programmes that were offered under the previous Fatah- dominated administration but could not be carried out because of Israeli military operations. It is due to the period of calm ushered in by the election of Mahmoud Abbas as Arafat's successor last year that Hamas can now implement these projects, say Fatah supporters.
Sami Hussein (39), a Beit Hanoun local who voted for Hamas, said the current administration is as prone to nepotism as the old one when it comes to hiring locals to work on multimillion euro donor-funded projects to install sewerage systems, fix bridges, pave roads and plant new citrus groves.
Prof Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, cautions that it is too early to judge whether Hamas will prove more efficient at running local authorities than Fatah, whose members still dominate the Palestinian Authority, the nominal central government of the occupied territories.
"The problem is that Hamas don't have very good contacts within the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and the ministries," he says. "The Authority is still with Fatah and that might hinder the work of Hamas."
At an international level, Hamas's efforts to forge a legitimate political role for itself led in the past week to signals from US and European diplomats that they are easing their hardline approach to the group.
But although the group's military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, has signed up to an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire agreed last February, it has not gone way. On Tuesday it fired a salvo of four home-made Qassam rockets at the southern Israeli town of Sderot, injuring a woman and her two children.
The attack came just hours after the UK's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, drew the ire of Israel by admitting that British diplomats had twice met recently elected Hamas councillors in the territories.
Professor Ali Jarbawi says such moves to bring Hamas in from the diplomatic cold are inevitable given its electoral gains.
"You cannot neglect almost one third of Palestinian society represented by Hamas," he said. "Hamas is a very very pragmatic political movement and they can deal with changes, and if you want to make peace you make peace with your enemy, so it's the wrong approach not to talk to Hamas."