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HAMAS

ALTERNATE NAME: Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah

LEADER: Mohammed Deif

YEAR ESTABLISHED OR BECAME ACTIVE: 1987

USUAL AREA OF OPERATION: Israel; Gaza Strip; West Bank; Qatar; Syria; Lebanon; Jordan; Iran

OVERVIEW

HAMAS (an acronym of Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, which translates to Islamic Resistance Movement) is a Palestinian resistance movement that emerged during the first intifada (uprising) in 1987–1990. It regards the land of Palestine as an Islamic homeland that can never be surrendered to non-Muslims and believes that it is the religious duty of all Muslims to wage jihad (holy war) to wrest control of Palestine back from Israel. Since its formation, HAMAS has waged a violent campaign against Israel. It has carried out guerilla attacks against military installations, and shootings and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. Although it is primarily based in the Gaza Strip, it carries out attacks on Israeli soil and also operates to a lesser extent from the West Bank.

HISTORY

The acronym HAMAS first appeared in a 1987 leaflet accusing Shin Bet (Israeli Secret Service) agents of undermining the morality of Palestinian youths by recruiting "collaborators." It emerged as a formally constituted organization the following year, but in reality its origins lay further back.

Its roots lie with the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1960s. The Brotherhood is an Egyptian charitable and educational organization that had formed in opposition to British colonial rule in the late 1920s, but been made illegal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser after he came to power in 1954. At various stages, it was reformist and revolutionary, but by the time it had started establishing roots in Gaza following the Six Day War of 1967, it was in one of its reformist periods. Over the next fifteen years, it helped establish a variety of institutions in Gaza and the West Bank, including Gaza's Islamic University and various hospitals and schools.

The Muslim Brotherhood also operated as a kind of umbrella organization for a variety of professional societies, working men's groups, and charitable organizations in the occupied territories and also, to a degree, among the Arab population of Israel itself. Its constituency varied considerably between the two occupied territories, however, in Gaza it was more working class in makeup, while in the West Bank it consisted largely of professional and merchant classes.

One of the most prominent charitable networks was al-Mujamma, headed by a quadriplegic Palestinian cleric, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Ironically, given what was to follow, Israel's Likud government of the late 1970s and early 1980s had assisted Yassin in creating a network of social service and humanitarian projects as a way of building him up as a counterpoint to Yasser Arafat. Yassin disliked the attempts of Arafat to impose secularism on Palestinian politics and feared he may use his overwhelming position of power to sign away territories to Israel. The intention of the Israelis was to help assert a degree of control over the Palestinian populations of Israel and the occupied territories through their benevolence toward Yassin. What they in fact did was help build up a mass movement, which the cleric could tap into to recruit militants.

By the mid-1980s, however, the Israeli government had desisted from its benevolent attitude toward Yassin after they uncovered that he had been amassing arms under the cover of al-Mujamma. They briefly imprisoned him, but he was released in 1984 under a prisoner exchange. In Gaza, Yassin made his increasing militancy felt, setting up al-Majd in 1986, a vigilante group to hunt down Israeli collaborators in Gaza.

A year later, in October 1987, the first Palestinian intifada broke out. This was a largely spontaneous street revolution, consisting mostly of violent, but low-tech street protests and attacks on Israeli military personnel. It also saw Palestinian merchants in the occupied territories resisting the illegal taxes imposed on them by the Israeli government. There was also a spate of inter-Arab violence, with up to a thousand alleged informers killed by Palestinian death squads.

Against this backdrop, HAMAS was formed in December 1987, claiming to be the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine, a misleading claim given that it represented only a minority of members of the relatively well-established organization. In its covenant published the following year, it stated that its aim was to "raise the banner of God over every inch of Israel" and replace it with an Islamic Republic. It explicitly rejected the prospect of a secular Palestinian state. The document is steeped in both Islamic rhetoric—it repeatedly states the primacy of Islam—but also long-discredited anti-Semitism, including citations from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It also rejects a negotiated settlement stating that "there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad."

The fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) recognized Israel's right to exist in November 1988 helped add to HAMAS's preeminence. This was a first step toward the peace deal brokered in the Oslo Accords five years later in 1993, but was not universally welcomed among Palestinians in the thrall of an uprising.

By contrast to its brutal role in the second intifada, however, HAMAS's part in the first Palestinian uprising was comparatively minor. It organized the Izzedine al-Qassam Battalions, which carried out a number of shootings against Israelis in 1989, but was as active directing violence against its own people for alleged collaboration. At the same time, HAMAS continued its more benevolent activities through its network of schools, universities, and mosques at a time when civil life in the occupied territories was at a breaking point.

In 1989, Yassin was arrested by the Israeli authorities and convicted and sentenced for life for ordering the execution of two Israeli soldiers HAMAS had kidnapped. This came as part of a wider Israeli crackdown on the organization, and other militants were detained.

From prison, Yassin continued to direct HAMAS's policy and vigorously opposed the peace process initiated at Oslo in 1993. This opposition was grounded in the organization's covenant, but Yassin's group was the main beneficiary of the growing disenchantment with Arafat and astutely waged a campaign in which they portrayed themselves as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. As leader of both the PLO and Palestinian National Authority, Yasser Arafat used his power to appoint various cronies to positions of authority in his top-heavy bureaucracy; HAMAS, by contrast, portrayed the PLO as "outsiders" (an allusion to the fact that Arafat and many within the PLO had spent years in exile in Lebanon and Tunisia) reaping the benefits of the homegrown intifada HAMAS members had waged at huge sacrifice. HAMAS also emphasized its grassroots social welfare activities, a direct contrast to the perceived venality and corruptness of the PLO, which was now "selling out" to the Israelis.

From spring in 1994, however, HAMAS used its influence in more insidious ways in an attempt to derail the peace process. First, as revenge for the slaughter of twenty-nine Muslim worshipers in Hebron in February by Baruch Goldstein, a fundamentalist Jewish terrorist, the group waged a series of bomb attacks against Israeli civilians, targeting public transport where masses of Israeli citizens would be gathered together. A car bomb next to a bus in the town of Afula on April 6, which killed eight, marked the opening chapter of a horrific catalog of slaughter. Five were killed by a suicide bomber in Hadera eight days later, twenty-two were killed by a suicide bomber on a Tel Aviv bus on October 19, and so it went on. Even on Christmas Day, HAMAS would not desist, when a suicide bomber wounded thirteen at a bus stop in Jerusalem.

In part because of HAMAS's campaign and partly because of Jewish opposition—culminating in the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in November 1995—hopes for peace were all but over by late 1995. In spite of this, Israel continued its operations against HAMAS members, including its notorious strategy of targeted assassinations, which were frequently more potent in killing innocent bystanders than actual targets. Nevertheless, on January 5, 1996, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) succeeded in killing HAMAS chief bomb maker, Yahya Ayyash, by detonating explosives they had placed in his cell phone. Following this attack, HAMAS went on another campaign of bloodletting, killing more than sixty Israelis in a six-week period in February and March.

A year later, in September 1997, two Mossad agents were arrested in Jordan, following an aborted assassination attempt on Khaled Mishaal, political bureau chief of the HAMAS. As part of the deal to release the agents, Jordan demanded and got the release of Sheik Yassin. Yassin returned to Gaza where he resumed his leadership of HAMAS.

The breakdown of further moves toward peace at Camp David in the summer of 2000 helped prompt a second intifada. Israel used the insurgency to dismantle the existing civil structure of the occupied territories with a series of ferocious raids. When HAMAS or its fellow militants, Islamic Jihad and the secular al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, responded with a suicide bombing on Israeli territory, the Israeli government would accuse Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Authority (PNA) of failing to control the militants and would strike with a reprisal attack, usually aimed at the ever-weakening government of Gaza or the West Bank. That HAMAS and Arafat were avowed enemies seemed to mean little to the Israeli government; nor did the fact that the destruction of Palestinian police stations and such merely increased the hold of HAMAS in an increasingly decimated Gaza Strip, where it was one of the few organizations that provided any sort of social welfare.

HAMAS, for its part, struck with brutality into the heart of Israeli society, meeting IDF attacks in Gaza with horrific reprisals of its own. These usually consisted of suicide bomb attacks in shopping malls, discotheques, and the public transport system, and were sometimes undertaken in partnership with other militant groups. Since 2000, around one hundred suicide bombings have taken place, with half involving HAMAS. Often, its logic has been confused: at times, it claims bombings are revenge for Israeli attacks on its people, while at others, they are reprisals for Israel's "disregard" of the Oslo accords, an agreement, which, ironically, HAMAS refused to recognize and has done its utmost to undermine.

On March 22, 2004, Sheik Yassin was assassinated, along with three others, by an Israeli missile attack. His murder prompted global outrage and was the subject of condemnatory UN Security Resolution (eventually blocked by the United States). In the week that followed, HAMAS launched two massive suicide bomb attacks, killing thirty-six Israelis and wounding nearly 200.

The following month, a senior HAMAS official, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, was assassinated by an Israeli air strike. This served as the prelude for another series of IDF raids in Gaza, with the apparent aim of severely weakening HAMAS forces ahead of the planned Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005.

In the weeks running up to Israel's final withdrawal from Gaza on September 12, 2005, a number of HAMAS leaders appeared in public and in the press vowing to fight on. Ismail Haniya, a senior figure in the movement, told reporters in Gaza City: "HAMAS confirms it is committed to armed resistance, it is our strategic choice until the end of the occupation of our land."

After the 2004 assassinations of HAMAS leaders Yassin and Adel-Aziz Rantissi, HAMAS formed a shared "collective leadership."

Immediately following the HAMAS upset victory in the January, 2006, Palestinian election, Mahmoud Zahhar (a surgeon and along with Yassin, a co-founder of HAMAS) and Ismail Haniya (a dean of Gaza's Islamic University also injured in an earlier Israeli assassination attempt on Yassin) publicly moved toward greater party leadership.

PHILOSOPHY AND TACTICS

HAMAS regards Palestine as an Islamic homeland that can never be surrendered to non-Muslims, and asserts that it is the religious duty of Palestinian Muslims to wage jihad in order to regain control of the lands from Israel. Its outlook is uncompromising and radical and it refuses to recognize the sovereignty of Israel, referring to it as the "Zionist entity."

The covenant of HAMAS, published in August 1988, is steeped in religious rhetoric: "The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam," reads article six. "It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine." It explicitly rejects a negotiated peace settlement and repeatedly affirms its commitment to jihad. It is also marked by a high degree of anti-Semitism.

HAMAS has sought to avert the possibility of a peace settlement between the Palestinian people and Israel with a calculated campaign of suicide bombings, designed to shock Israelis away from striking any further deal. Its roots as a community-based organization with popular support, particularly in Gaza, have seen its leaders portrayed as the true protectors of the Palestinian people. Just as the IDF has often launched reprisal attacks on Gaza, so HAMAS has felt obligated to do the same to Israeli targets.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

Writing in al-Ahram Weekly following the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Khaled Amayreh believed that the killing had created such anger that it virtually bred the next generation of HAMAS militants. Yassin's killing "has undoubtedly pushed most Palestinians to the edge, believing Israel has now gone too far," wrote Amayreh. "The murder is also likely to weaken moderate Palestinians and boost the popularity and strength of HAMAS and other resistance groups. It is very likely that HAMAS will now be able to recruit hundreds, if not thousands, of young men, who have been inspired by Yassin's glorious martyrdom. Hence, it is quite possible that the killing of Yassin may eventually prove a blessing in disguise for HAMAS, especially at a strategic level.

"The massive demonstrations throughout the Arab world protesting Yassin's assassination seem to have surprised even HAMAS's leaders. The movement will undoubtedly seek to utilize that massive support and sympathy in one way or the other in the hope of translating it into tangible results. The assassination of Yassin is also likely to serve as a setback to the so-called American war on terror, prompting millions of angry Arabs and Muslims to conclude that Osama bin Laden may have been right after all."

According to an editorial in the right-wing Jerusalem Post: "Ahmed Yassin's death is a signal victory for Israel and for the war against terrorism. He was the military and spiritual leader of the terror war against Israel, just as Osama bin Laden is, or was, the military and spiritual leader of the war against the West.

"The killing of Yassin by an IDF missile has spawned the usual flurry of claims that it was a futile and foolish act … This is insanity … Does anyone really think that HAMAS needed further excuses to kill as many Israeli men, women, and children as possible?… Intent, as Americans learned on 9/11, is not a limiting factor for the jihadis the West faces today … The idea that by not fighting back we can limit the terrorists' appetite for death is exactly what they want us to believe. The engendering of such beliefs is precisely the jihadis' theory of victory, the tipping point at which terror has won and will only worsen in order to deepen the victory and the West's subjugation.

"[K]illing Ahmed Yassin will not end the war. No single battle ever does. Pay no attention to those who say that because a battle did not win the war, it was not worth fighting. It was not a counterproductive act, even though HAMAS will attempt to 'retaliate.' What is counterproductive is to allow leaders who organize and fuel terror and call for Israel's destruction to enjoy personal immunity."

SUMMARY

HAMAS in 2005 is arguably Gaza's preeminent political movement. To the outside world and particularly Israel, by contrast, the group that had formerly existed as a kind of humanitarian organization (and still, to an extent, does) is known almost wholly for the savagery of its suicide attacks.

Israel's withdrawal from the HAMAS stronghold of Gaza in September 2005 marked a victory of sorts for the group, just as Israel's retreat from south Lebanon five years earlier was characterized as a relative success for Palestinian interests. Yet, Israel left territory even more wracked by war, lacking in civil apparatus, and marked by want than the land that had originally given birth to HAMAS almost eighteen years earlier.

In January, 2006, HAMAS backed candidates achieved a political upset in Palestinian elections. HAMAS, holding a majority of parliamentary seats, immediately clashed with Fatah over control of security forces and foreign policy. U.S. and European governments (mutually designating HAMAS as a terrorist organization) vowed not to deal with HAMAS and threatened to withdraw aid to Palestine as long as HAMAS advocated armed struggle and refused to recognize Israel's right to exist. Israel reasserted its right to assassinate militant HAMAS leaders.

SOURCES

Books

Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East. New York: Westview, 2000.

Mishal, Shaul, and Avraham Sela. The Palestinian HAMAS: Vision, Violence and Co-Existence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Nusse, Andrea. Muslim Palestine: Ideology of HAMAS. London: Taylor & Francis, 1999.

SEE ALSO

Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)