Azzam Tamimi | Alhiwar TV Channel
On 7 October 2023, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine, shook the word with a surprise attack on what Israel considers to be its south, an area of historic Palestine from which most of the Gaza population hailed upon their dispassion during the 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe that led, with the help of Western imperialism, to the occupation of Palestine and the creation of the Zionist state). For many years to come, political analysts and historians will, undoubtedly, continue to talk about the immediate impact of that attack and its long-term ramifications.
In their very initial response to the attack staged by Hamas fighters against Israeli settlements and towns in the environs of Gaza, some commentators compared what happened that day to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Two main aspects were highlighted: the element of surprise and the course-changing repercussions. Some believe that just as the Tet Offensive provoked a massive change in US public opinion prompting the Administration to contemplate withdrawal of troops from that part of the world, the Gaza offensive will likely stir up a global uprising against Zionism and US imperialism.
Yet while the 7 October attack was truly surprising to everyone, above all to the Israelis themselves, an eruption had long been expected because of the constantly deteriorating conditions for the Palestinians both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. However, few people expected Hamas to unleash such a stunning, well-planned, and most daring offensive that gave the immediate impression that Israel, despite all the US and European support and pampering, proved to be so fragile and vulnerable.
The skill with which the movement managed to penetrate the fence and paralyse Israel’s electronic surveillance was truly astonishing. Equally surprising was the level of secrecy with which the operation was conducted. This shows that Israeli intelligence had no access whatsoever to the units who had been preparing for the operation for many months.
Hamas came into existence in December 1987 upon the eruption of the Palestinian uprising (Intifada). It was born out of the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine. The reason behind such transformation was the deteriorating situation in Gaza under Israeli occupation since 1967.
The Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine was established around the mid-forties of the last century, several years before the creation of Israel. Since then, it grew into a grassroots organisation focused primarily on religious education and social reform. Except for the volunteers who joined the endeavour to prevent the creation of a Zionist state in 1948, the movement opted to stay away from armed struggle. Yet, gradually, and since the early 1970’s, the young affiliates of the movement had grown restless and unhappy, as the conditions under occupation were getting worse day after day. Confining activity to education and social work was no longer tenable and they yearned to join in the resistance activities of the leftist and nationalist factions. The creation of Islamic Jihad by formerly disgruntled members of the Brotherhood in the early 1980’s might have played a role in precipitating this sense of discontent.
The 8th of December 1987 Israeli murder of Palestinian workers while they were heading home from work triggered not only the intifada but also the transformation of the Brotherhood into Hamas.
Initially, Hamas resorted to passive resistance but gradually, and as the Israeli occupation authorities cracked down brutally on peaceful protesters, the young men of Hamas started planning knife attacks on Israeli soldiers, in what became known as “The War of the Knives”. Some of them managed to snatch rifles from Israeli soldiers and used them to attack and kidnap Israeli occupation soldiers. This marked the birth of the military wing of the movement, which was given the name of Izziddin Al-Qassam Brigades, called after a Syrian Muslim scholar who had come to Palestine to join the Palestinians in their struggle against British colonialism and was killed in a battle with the British occupation troops in 1935 in the village of Ya’bad, twenty kilometres to the west of Jenin in northern Palestine.
When a Jewish settler from New York called Baruch Goldstein massacred Palestinian worshippers in Al-Ibrahimi Mosque of Hebron on 25 February 1994, Hamas responded with a new tactic: the “Martyrdom Operations” (referred to in the West as suicide bombings). At the time, the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin had been serving a long prison sentence for the past five years. He was visited in his prison cell by Israeli officials who asked him how he believed this mayhem could be stopped. He answered: “Stop killing us and we’ll stop killing you.” He proposed to them a “hudnah”, or long-term truce. He said: “End occupation, withdraw your settlers and release our prisoners and we shall sign a truce for 10, 20 or 30 years with you.”
The Israelis did not think much of his offer. Just a year earlier they had signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO and a Palestinian Authority had been set up.[2] The Israelis believed that the Oslo arrangement was a sufficient remedy for their predicament they had been entangled in as a result of occupying majority Palestinian population territories since the 5 June 1967 so-called six-day war. Indeed, the promise by Oslo of a forthcoming independent Palestinian state did pacify the Palestinian public and extinguished the Palestinian first intifada (uprising).
Over the years, Hamas continued to grow both in size and in popularity. Polls conducted locally show that its popularity had not waned, despite the increasingly dire economic conditions inside the Strip under its rule since 2007.
It is worth noting that Hamas popularity was, at least in part, the product of the failure of the peace process between Israel and the PLO, whose leadership had been under the illusion that the Oslo peace treaty would pave the way for the two-state solution. Yet, it became obvious with the passage of time that Israel was not serious about giving the Palestinians a state and only wanted a Palestinian Authority that served as a security collaboration agency, to relieves Israel of the burden of occupation. This is what Yassir Arafat came to realise by the year 2000 during the Camp David talks with Israel’s Ehud Barak under the auspices of the Clinton Administration. Upon returning home from a failed summit, he decided to play the card of resistance to force the hand of the Israelis, triggering the second intifada of September 2000 in coordination with Hamas. He was eventually poisoned and killed.
In January 2006, just about one year after the Israelis withdrew unilaterally from the entire Gaza Strip, Hamas scored a sweeping victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections.[3]
Immediately, the Israelis and their Western allies came up with three conditions for dealing with Hamas after its electoral win. What became known as the conditions of the World Quartet (US, UN, Russia and the EU) stipulated that 1) Hamas should recognise Israel’s right to exist; 2) Hamas should disarm and renounce all forms of violence; 3) Hamas should recognise all the treaties and agreements signed by the PLO with Israel. When Hamas rejected all three conditions, the PA in Ramallah was told to shun the Hamas administration.
The following year, in the summer of 2007, the US and Israel supported a coup attempt against Hamas led by former Fatah security chief Muhammad Dahlan. The coup attempt backfired and ignited a brief battle that ended with Hamas left in charge of Gaza and being outlawed and almost uprooted in the West Bank. Since then, the Gaza Strip has been under siege.
Thirty years since the Oslo deal was signed, Israel is still occupying the West Bank and oppressing the Palestinians. In more recent years its settlers and troops have been desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest shrine, and have been violating Palestinians’ basic rights; harassing and attacking them; uprooting their olive trees and burning their crops; confiscating their properties and demolishing their houses; and detaining thousands of them for very long periods, many without ever being charged or brought to court. And above all the entire 2.2 million people of Gaza are held in a cage, or a concentration camp. What has added to the frustration of the Palestinians is that while their own cause is ignored, Israel, with the help of the United States, has been reaching out to Arab governments across the region in pursuit of normalisation.
It was no wonder that what happened on the 7th of October was celebrated in the West Bank, in Gaza and in much of the Arab world.
Hamas sees itself as an organization of Pale-stinians who happen to be both Arab and Muslim and who perceive themselves as the immediate victims of an unjust world order that saw fit to create a ‘European’ Jewish state in their own country at the very centre of Arab and Muslim heartlands. Hamas founders and affiliates see the Israelis as their oppressors who dispossessed them and their fellow countrymen and who have, since then, been persecuting them generation after generation. Resisting Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and Israeli oppression of the people of the land is one of several elements that inform the thinking of the movement and instruct its activism. Although Islam, as a religion, plays a significant role in motivating Hamas members to resist occupation and make big sacrifices, it is widely recognized that the conflict in Palestine is not a religious one. It is simply the result of a foreign invasion that installed in Palestine a settler colonial and racist entity that justifies itself in the name of the Jews and Judaism.
Evidently, until the beginning of the twentieth century Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisted peacefully throughout the Muslim world where, for many centuries, the Islamic empire, whose terrain extended over three continents, provided a milieu of tolerance under a system that guaranteed protection for what is today referred to as religious or ethnic minorities. Islam, whose values, and principles governed the public and private conduct of Muslim individuals and communities, recognized Christians and Jews as legitimate communities within the Islamic State and accorded them inalienable rights. The followers of both Christianity and Judaism participated on equal footing with the Muslims in building the Arab-Islamic civilization on whose fruits European renaissance philosophers were nourished.
In contrast, Jews repeatedly suffered persecution in the European lands. Whenever that happened, they sought refuge in the Muslim lands where they were welcomed and treated as ‘people of the book’ in accordance with the ‘Covenant of God and His Messenger’. Such Muslim perception of the Jews remained unchanged until the Zionist movement, which was born in Europe, started recruiting Jews in the Muslim lands for a project that was seen by the Muslims as an attack on their faith and homeland.
Despite the secular origins of the Zionist project and the atheism of many of its founding fathers, the Zionist discourse justified the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians in religious terms. The Bible was invoked by Zionist pioneers, although few of them really believed in it or showed any respect for it, in a bid to bestow religious legitimacy on their project and gain the support of the world’s Jews, most of whom had initially been opposed to political Zionism.[4]
As a matter of principle Muslims, Christians and Jews can live together in the region as they lived together for many centuries before as equally dignified human beings. While Israel as an exclusive state for the Jews in Palestine is something Hamas can never recognize as legitimate, the Jews can, and should be, accommodated as legitimate citizens of a multi-faith, multi-racial state in which citizens are equal before the law. Post-Israel Palestine is a state that will have a Jewish population but no Zionism. This is a vision inspired by the South African experience that brought an end to Apartheid but kept all communities living together. Like Apartheid, Zionism is racist, inhumane, and fascist, and its removal is seen as the only way forward. This is the only way the conflict can truly be resolved and all inhabitants, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, will ever coexist in peace in the region.
Notes
[1] Dr. Azzam Tamimi is the Director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought (IIPT). Until 31 March 2006 he was visiting professor at Nagoya University for three months. Prior to that, he was visiting professor at Kyoto University from 1 April to 30 September 2004. He has published several books the most recent of which has been on Islam and democracy entitled: Rachid Ghannouchi, Democrat within Islamism, Oxford University Press, New York, Autumn 2001. He also co-edited Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, Hurst, London. and NY Univ Press in New York, Autumn 2000. His forthcoming book: Hamas Unwritten Chapters is due in late October 2006. He writes and lectures on issues related to Islamic political thought and Middle Eastern politics. He is a regular commentator on the Arabic satellite channel Aljazeera and frequently makes appearance on a number of other channels both English and Arabic.
[2] The martyrdom operations were, later, abandoned by Hamas upon the development of home-made rockets. With the passage of time, the movement incorporated modern warfare technology, equipping itself, despite the siege, with an arsenal of drones and much improved missiles. The recent attack on 7 October 2023 involved, perhaps for the first time, the use of paragliders.
[3] Those elections were held under pressure from the George W. Bush Administration, despite objections from the Palestinian Authority and some Arab governments. Following his invasion of Iraq, Bush wanted to improve his image by encouraging democratic transformations in the region having been convinced that only liberal pro-Western elites were capable of scoring victory in those elections.
[4] For the secular origins and biblical justifications of political Zionism see the following: Abdelwahab Elmessiri, The Land of Promise: A Critique of Political Zionism; New Brunswick, N.J., 1997; Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: a moral critique; Sheffield Academic Press, 1997; and John Rose, The Myths of Zionism; London: Pluto Press, 2004.