Analysis Wilson Center, 20.10.2023
Since its creation in December 1987, Hamas has invoked militant interpretations of Islam to spearhead a Sunni extremist movement committed to destroying Israel. Hamas distanced itself from the longstanding Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—an umbrella organization for disparate Palestinian factions that ranged from Marxist to secular nationalists—by propagating resistance in the religious context of jihad, or a holy struggle and martyrdom. “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” Hamas said in its first statement in the late 1980s. Predominantly Shiite Iran has armed, trained and funded Hamas since the late 1980s largely due to its opposition to Israel and Islamic ideology.
Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It has called on members of the other two Abrahamic faiths—Judaism and Christianity—to accept Islamic rule in the Middle East. “It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror,” it decreed. Hamas also rejected any prospect of peace or coexistence with the state of Israel. “Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.”
Hamas was founded—in the early days of the first Intifada uprising—amid growing Palestinian fury over the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Hamas Covenant was largely crafted by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and partially blind cleric who was the founder and spiritual leader of the militant militia in Gaza. The first Intifada raged sporadically until 1993, when Yasser Arafat of the PLO signed a partial peace agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House. Hamas rejected the so-called Oslo Accords. As the peace process deadlocked, Hamas deployed suicide bombers against Israeli civilian and military targets. A second Intifada erupted in 2000 after Ariel Sharon, the right-wing opposition leader and former general, made a trip to the Temple Mount to declare Israel’s sovereignty over the third holiest site in Islam. In 2004, Israel assassinated Yassin in a missile strike. The second Intifada ended in 2005, and Israel opted to unilaterally end its military occupation of Gaza, which it had captured during the 1967 war.
In 2006, Hamas ran openly for the first time in legislative elections and won the largest number of seats—over Arafat’s Fatah and other secular parties—in the Palestinian Authority’s legislature. It wrested physical control of Gaza away from the PA a year later, thereby cementing its political and military control of an area that is about the size of Philadelphia. Its statements since then have often sounded contradictory—in one moment calling for liberation of all the lands that were part of historic Palestine and in another moment claiming Hamas could live alongside another state based on the 1967 borders, when Israel seized Gaza from Egypt. In December 2012, Khaled Mashaal, a leader in exile, reflected the traditional Hamas hardline, “The state will come from resistance, not negotiation. Liberation first, then statehood. Palestine is ours from the river to the sea and from the south to the north,” he said in a speech. “There will be no concession on any inch of the land. We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation, and therefore there is no legitimacy for Israel… We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”
In 2017, a revised Hamas manifesto included three departures from the 1988 charter, former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller told The Islamists. First, Hamas accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state separate from Israel —although only provisionally. Its statement on principles and policies said, “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” Second, it attempted to distinguish between Jews or Judaism and modern Zionism. Hamas said that its fight was against the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project, Israel, but not against Judaism or Jews. The updated platform also lacked some of the anti-Semitic language of the 1988 charter. Third, the document did not reference the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas was originally an offshoot.
After the deadly offensive by Hamas against Israel in October 2023, Ismail Haniyeh, who replaced Mashaal as head of the Hamas political bureau in exile, again invoked religious rhetoric. “Today, the enemy has had a political, military, intelligence, security and moral defeat inflicted upon it, and we shall crown it, with the grace of God, with a crushing defeat that will expel it from our lands, our holy city of al Quds, our al Aqsa mosque, and the release of our prisoners from the jails of the Zionist occupation,” he said.
