The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Hamas

Hamas (zeal) is the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. Founded weeks after the start of the Intifada, the “uprising” of 1987–93, Hamas quickly emerged as the institutional and ideological anchor of al-tayyār al-islāmī, “the Islamic tendency,” a phrase referring to all political movements bearing an Islamist orientation. The Intifada began as a spontaneous outbreak of protest and street violence following an incident occuring on December 6, 1987, in which an Israeli truck driver crashed into and killed four Palestinian laborers. Secular-nationalist political organizations quickly asserted control over the protests, issuing weekly leaflets in the name of the United National Command (UNC) of the Intifada. The goal of the UNC was to end Israel’s 20-year-old military rule over the Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights. Israel initiated its occupation, which entailed massive land expropriations and settlement building, following its defeat of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian forces during the Six Day War in June 1967. Responding quickly to the UNC’s assertion of leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood, at the behest largely of younger Islamist activists, announced the establishment of Hamas. Combining strategic use of violence, including devastating suicide bombings in Israeli cities, with pragmatic participation within existing political processes, such as local and national elections, the movement eventually became the main challenger of Fatah, the secular-nationalist faction that had dominated Palestinian nationalism since the late 1960s. In June 2007, 18 months after it won Palestinian Legislative Council elections, Hamas, seeking to consolidate its power, forcibly expelled Fatah-associated militias from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian political field thereafter cleaved geographically and institutionally between the Islamists in Gaza and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank.

The origins of Hamas lie in the Islamic Collective (al-Mujamma‘ al-Islami). Founded by Shaykh Ahmad Yasin in 1973, the collective sought to revive moribund Muslim Brotherhood groups in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Ironically, the Israeli occupation that ensued provided circumstances favorable to Islamist mobilization. Perceiving a chance to divide Palestinians politically, Israel initially provided Yasin and the collective space to organize. For its part, the collective strategically avoided Israeli repression by choosing to make the spread of secularism among Palestinians, not the occupation, its primary enemy. Reorient Palestinian hearts and minds toward Islam first, so the thinking went, and all else would follow. To achieve its objective, the movement engaged in da‘wa (calling to the straight path), charity work, network formation, and assertion of control over associational life (such as unions, universities, mosques, and professional societies). It also clandestinely collected weapons in anticipation of an eventual transition to an armed struggle. These initiatives brought the collective into violent conflict with Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) factions throughout the period leading up to the first Intifada.

At the heart of the alternative offered by the collective was a political theodicy that explained Palestinian suffering as a direct result of the failure of Muslims to uphold taqwā (the “fear of God” evidenced through acts of personal piety as prescribed in the Qur’an and sunna). This failure had led God to favor other nations, principally “the Jews.” Israel’s success, then, was a sign of God’s displeasure with the Arabs and Muslims and with the Palestinians in particular. Implicit in this formulation was the idea that rectification of the current state of inverted affairs required a turning away from error (e.g., secularist ideologies) and a return to piety. The Islamic Collective justified its apolitical “culturalist” activism precisely in these terms: Palestine would return to the Muslims only after Muslims had returned to Islam. An authentic jihad demanded this type of deep individual and collective conversion. The explosion of the Intifada forced a reevaluation, however, of the sequence envisioned by the collective. Confronted by the demands of a younger generation of activists to engage the occupation directly, Islamic Collective leaders revised their ideology, stressing the immediate necessity of jihad. Through jihad the nation would return to taqwā, and thereby Israel would be overcome and an Islamic state would arise in Palestine. The return of Palestine would mark the first stage in the revival of the global Islamic religiopolitical community (umma). Palestine, indeed, was the key to an Islamic awakening (saḥwa). In this move, Hamas essentially articulated an Islamic analogue of the PLO’s vision that saw the liberation of Palestine as the first step toward uniting the transnational Arab nation.

The ideological flexibility shown by the collective in adapting to the new realities of the Intifada by creating Hamas has remained a defining characteristic of Islamist politics in Palestine. Hamas has repeatedly shown itself capable of adapting its ideological positions to new political realities in the interest of survival. Perhaps the best example of its flexibility is its proposal to agree to an indefinite “truce” with Israel, an idea that effectively recognizes the reality of Israel and provides a path toward achieving some form of peaceful coexistence even if the movement continues to assert its commitment to achieving an Islamic state within the entirety of pre-1948 Palestine. At the same time, however, Hamas has maintained its armed wing as well as its control over the police forces in the Gaza Strip. It has also allowed proxies, such as Islamic Jihad units, to fire rockets across the boundary fence into Israel proper or has initiated such actions on its own, directly, in response to the continuing Israeli blockade. In a bid to crush Hamas’s military capacity, Israel launched a three-week armed invasion of Gaza in the winter of 2008–9. Named “Operation Cast Lead,” the invasion inflicted heavy damage to infrastructure and, according to an Amnesty International report, caused more than 1,400 civilian deaths and 5,000 civilian injuries. Hamas, however, remained intact, organizationally, and arguably strengthened its control in the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of Israel’s tactical withdrawal. Hamas continues to confront a total Israeli blockade and refusal by the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Arab states to accord it any official diplomatic recognition. Syria and Iran, however, provide financial and political support for the movement, and Islamist movements globally have maintained solidarity with it. Attempts to restart Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations have repeatedly floundered due not only to Israel’s continuing efforts to expropriate land and build settlements but also to the persisting Palestinian political disunity and Hamas’s undeniable capacity to use violence to counter its diplomatic isolation.