Inside Hamas; Casualty

Andrew Billen

Hamas does not enjoy a good press, and probably does not deserve to. “Best known in Israel and the West for its suicide bombings,” says Wikipedia pretty unarguably. According to the brave and revealing documentary Inside Hamas on Sunday night on Channel 4, it doesn't even these days generate many positive headlines in Gaza, which it has run since last summer. Journalists have recently taken to the streets demanding the right to free speech after five of their number were detained by the local police, the sinisterly named Executive Force.

I sympathise with the local journalists as I sympathise with Rodrigo Vázquez, the award-winning documentary-maker who made this programme. He will doubtless be criticised for this exposé, although I could see no bias on his part, indeed he carefully described Hamas as “the armed Palestinian resistance movement” rather than a terrorist organisation. A few years back he made The Killing Zone, which was deeply critical of the tactics of the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza. I doubt that with a name like Vázquez he has a dog in this fight.

The facts seem to be that while Hamas, after 20 years, has become a very good “resistance movement” it is making a hopeless government and has turned its brutality on its own people. In the early sequences we witnessed Executive Force members questioning their own leaders as they cleared local traders off the streets. In later ones, we saw them beat up protesters outside a mosque. Meanwhile, the Force's political masters conspicuously failed to provide the essentials for the million and-a-half citizens crammed into Gaza's 150 square miles: electricity, food, wages.

The Hamas Government is not even providing much in the way of ideological sustenance. There are signs that families are sickening of offering up their sons for martyrdom in return for scant political progress. One protester, Ramzi Nasser, beaten up for talking to the documentary, announced that although he came from a family of 11 Hamas “martyrs” he was off to join Fatah, the movement's more moderate rival. The only surge in Hamas recruitment is occurring in prison, where a convicted drug dealer spoke enthusiastically of a government scheme by which his sentence was reduced by two months for every chapter of the Koran he memorised.

That said, Hamas is not helped either by the West's refusal to deal with it, nor by Fatah, which as the Government of the West Bank channels international aid to the Palestinians and keeps most of it for its own. Among Fatah's uncomradely tactics have been organising strikes in Gaza. Thank Allah for Israel, Ismail Haniya, Prime Minister and part-time mullah, must think. For Israel is still making converts by accidentally killing innocent children in its attempts to bomb Gaza's missile launch sites.

Hamas has officially declared a ceasefire with Israel but is more than happy to allow other extremists, such as the Jerusalem Brigade, to keep firing on Israel, and that remains popular locally. Hamas looked morally and politically bankrupt to me. Still, I would not disagree with Sharif Nashashibi, chairman of Arab Media Watch, who reasoned that Hamas needs to be talked to. As he said, in a conflict you negotiate with your enemies, not with your friends.

Casualty (BBC One) has not been able to decide this season whether it is a hospital soap or something better. It was something very much better on Saturday when the writer Mark Catley spent the episode reflecting on the suicide attempt of the junior doctor Ruth Winters, found hanging from a ceiling at the end of last week's episode. The story was told largely in flashbacks based on her diary. Many small incidents over the past 24 weeks were seen afresh from the perspective of a young woman determined to over-achieve in order to compensate for her lack of self-esteem.

The plotting was comparable to ER at its best and there were striking lines. Was she called Bambi at school because of her eyes? “No, because my mum was dead.” Impressively too, the episode was almost entirely free from sentimentality. At the episode's end, Ruth was still just about alive. I hope she makes it. It is rare to see such a rounded character on screen or, indeed, such rounded eyes as those of the actor Georgia Taylor.