The Islamic Resistance Movement

Hamas was made by twenty years of occupation and by a specific Israeli calculation. After 1967 the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, led from 1968 by a paralysed schoolteacher named Ahmed Yassin, concentrated on institutions rather than on fighting: Yassin founded al-Mujamma’ al-Islami, the Islamic Centre, in 1973 — a mosque, a clinic, nurseries and a zakat committee — followed by al-Jam’iyya al-Islamiyya in 1976, and he had a hand in establishing the Islamic University of Gaza in 1978. By 1979 the Islamic Centre had some 2,000 members and, as the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedia records, an official permit from the Israeli occupation authorities, who calculated that tolerating Islamist social activism would weaken the PLO. It is one of the better-documented ironies of the conflict, and Israeli officials of the period have acknowledged it in their own memoirs. Meanwhile the Brotherhood’s insistence that Palestine could be liberated only after Palestinian society had been Islamised — that it was still, in its own words, “in the preparatory stage of grooming a generation of Islamists” — was driving its most impatient young members out, into Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The First Intifada forced the decision. Rioting began in Jabalia camp on 8 December 1987 after an Israeli army truck killed four Palestinian workers. The next day, 9 December, seven Brotherhood leaders headed by Sheikh Yassin met in Gaza City and agreed the organisational framework for a body that would let the Brotherhood conduct armed resistance to the occupation. The name — Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, of which Hamas is the acronym and also the Arabic word for zeal — appeared publicly in its first communiqué on 14 December, and by January 1988 the movement was operating in the West Bank. Its charter followed on 18 August 1988. It is a document the movement’s own leaders have spent three decades explaining away, and it should be read as it stands: Article Two declares that “the Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine”; Article One that “the Movement’s programme is Islam. From it, it draws its ideas, ways of thinking and understanding of the universe, life and man.” It defines Palestine as an Islamic waqf until the Day of Judgement, rejects negotiated settlement in principle, and — this is the part that matters most and is least defensible — reproduces classic European antisemitic material, including the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and speaks of Jews rather than of Zionists when it describes the enemy.

What Hamas did over the next thirty-five years divides into three records that have to be stated together. It built the largest welfare network in the occupied territories: clinics, schools, orphan sponsorships, food distribution, mosques. Its armed wing, formed as the Palestinian Mujahideen under Salah Shehadeh and renamed the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in May 1990, fought the occupation and, from 1994, adopted the suicide bombing of buses, markets and restaurants inside Israel — a campaign that peaked during the Second Intifada and killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, and which the movement justified as reciprocity for the killing of Palestinian civilians. On 7 October 2023 Hamas-led fighters broke out of Gaza and killed about 1,200 people in Israel, the large majority of them civilians, and took some 250 hostages; the Israeli campaign that followed has killed, according to the Gaza health ministry’s records, tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the Strip. The third record is what was done to the movement: Israel deported 415 Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists to Marj al-Zuhur in south Lebanon in December 1992; assassinated Yahya Ayyash in 1996, Salah Shehadeh in 2002 with a one-tonne bomb dropped on a Gaza apartment block that killed fourteen others, nine of them children, Sheikh Yassin as he was wheeled out of dawn prayers in March 2004, and Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi a month later; and killed Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024 and Yahya Sinwar in Rafah that October.

The internal argument was real, and the 2017 document is its product. After winning the Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006 with 74 of 132 seats, taking sole control of Gaza in June 2007 after the collapse of the unity government, and governing a besieged territory for a decade, Hamas issued on 1 May 2017 in Doha a Document of General Principles and Policies, presented by the outgoing political bureau chief Khaled Mishal after years of internal debate. Its first article states: “The Islamic Resistance Movement ‘Hamas’ is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project.” Article 16 states: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Article 20 is the political core: “Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded… 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.” Article 29 calls for the PLO to be “preserved, developed and rebuilt on democratic foundations.” The document makes no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood. Article 25 is equally explicit the other way: armed resistance is “the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.” The 1988 charter was not formally repealed; the movement’s position is that the 2017 document supersedes it in practice, and its critics reply that a charter not withdrawn is a charter still standing. Both statements are true and the archive records both.

Hamas has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United States (the movement was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in October 1997), the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and others; it is not so designated by Russia, China, Turkey, Brazil, Norway, Switzerland or most of the Arab and Muslim world, and it has held ministerial office won at a monitored election that international observers, including the EU and the Carter Center, judged free and fair. As of the ceasefire and hostage-release arrangements that followed the Gaza war, its military structure in the Strip has been shattered and its political future is the open question of Palestinian politics. Any account of it that omits either the welfare committees or the buses, either the 2017 document or the 1988 charter, either 7 October or the sixteen years of blockade that preceded it, is not an account. It is an argument wearing one.

Sources

• The Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, 18 August 1988 — Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Hamas, A Document of General Principles and Policies, 1 May 2017 — palquest
• 2017 Hamas charter — Wikipedia
• Hamas — Wikipedia
• Ahmed Yassin — Wikipedia
• Foreign Terrorist Organizations — U.S. Department of State