The Hamas Document of General Principles and Policies

Hamas has issued two founding texts. The 1988 charter was religious in idiom, addressed to the Muslim nation, and carried antisemitic material that the movement has spent thirty years being asked about. The “Document of General Principles and Policies,” announced by Khalid Mishal in Doha on 1 May 2017, is a political programme of forty-two numbered paragraphs and a preamble, written in the vocabulary of anti-colonial national liberation. Hamas did not repeal the older document. It wrote a second one and let the world compare them.

The comparison starts with the definition of the country. The 1988 charter called Palestine an Islamic endowment — a waqf — belonging to Muslims everywhere. The 2017 preamble says something narrower and more national:

“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 then redefines itself in the same terms, and in doing so publicly cuts the organizational cord to the Muslim Brotherhood that the 1988 charter had advertised:

“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. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means.”

On the question that had done the movement most damage abroad, the document is unambiguous: “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.”

The paragraph that drew the headlines is deliberately built to face two ways at once, and it should be read whole rather than in halves:

“Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. 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.”

A state on the 1967 lines is accepted as national consensus; Israel is not recognised; nothing is formally conceded. Oslo is rejected as before, 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” — and armed resistance is defended not as religious duty but as “a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws.” Writing in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Khaled Hroub read the document as a piece of careful calibration addressed simultaneously to Hamas’s own base, its Islamist allies, regional governments, and Western and Israeli policymakers — and noted that criticism duly arrived from every one of those directions at once. Benjamin Netanyahu tore up a copy in front of a camera. The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine said it gave away too much.

Sources

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