The Hamas Document of General Principles

On the evening of 1 May 2017, in Doha, Khalid Mishal — then in his final weeks as head of the Hamas political bureau — announced a “Document of General Principles and Policies.” It did not formally repeal the movement’s 1988 charter, and Hamas has never said that it did. But the two texts read as if written by different organizations. Where the 1988 charter was religious in idiom, universalist in its enemies and studded with antisemitic tropes, the 2017 document is a political programme of forty-two numbered paragraphs and a preamble, written in the register of national liberation movements.

The change begins with the definition of the country. The 1988 charter called Palestine an Islamic endowment, a waqf belonging to the Muslim nation at large. The 2017 preamble instead opens: “Palestine is the land of the Arab Palestinian people, from it they originate, to it they adhere and belong, and about it they reach out and communicate.” The movement redefines itself in the same national register — “a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means” — and, in doing so, publicly severs the overt organizational tie to the Muslim Brotherhood that the 1988 charter had proclaimed.

The document also draws a line the 1988 text had blurred. “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion,” it states. “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Hamas leaders had been making this distinction since the 1990s; putting it in a founding text was the point.

The most consequential paragraph is the one on political solutions, and it is carefully double-edged. The document refuses to concede any part of Palestine and rejects “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” In the same breath, it continues: “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.” A state on the 1967 lines is accepted as national consensus; Israel is not recognised. Oslo is rejected too, but on new grounds — that the accords “contravene the governing rules of international law in that they generate commitments that violate the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” — rather than on the older ground that they surrendered Islamic land.

The reception was as divided as the audiences the text was written for. The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine attacked it for undermining Palestinian fundamentals; Benjamin Netanyahu tore up a copy on camera; American and European responses were, in Khaled Hroub’s phrase in the Journal of Palestine Studies, “lackadaisical” in public while close attention was paid behind the scenes. Later that year Hamas dissolved the administrative committee running Gaza under Egyptian pressure, in another attempt at a unity government that also failed. The document remains the fullest statement of what Hamas says it is — read closely by researchers, and largely ignored by the states that had asked for exactly this kind of text.

Sources

• Khaled Hroub, “A Newer Hamas? The Revised Charter,” Journal of Palestine Studies vol. 46 no. 4 — full text, Institute for Palestine Studies
• The Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest), Institute for Palestine Studies
• Hamas accepts Palestinian state with 1967 borders — Al Jazeera, 2 May 2017