18,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Declared a terrorist menace yet voted into government in a free election, Hamas then used its Gaza power base to launch cross-border attacks that scorched Israel and transformed the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How did a small Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood grow to challenge long-established rivals such as the PLO? Who supports Hamas and what is its agenda? How powerful has it become and how strong will it remain?
With decades of combined experience researching and reporting from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Jerusalem, and around the Middle East, Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell gained unrivalled access to Hamas. Drawing on years of frontline reporting and interviews with members of the group’s founding generation and their successors who now lead it, they trace Hamas’ path to the shocking attacks of 07 October 2023 and their devastating aftermath. Its critics believe Hamas must be ousted to reach a solution to the Middle East conflict. Hamas’s supporters believe it is the solution. Nobody now believes it can be ignored.
Based on their landmark 2010 study which has been thoroughly revised and updated, this book brings the story of Hamas up to the present and will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Middle East today.
Also available as an audiobook.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 683
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Illustrations
Photographs
Maps
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 What is Hamas?
Gaza
Why?
The Everywhere War
Birth. Bomb. Ballot. Border.
Birth
Bomb
Ballot
Border
‘We Are Not in a Hurry’
Notes
2 In the Path of al-Qassam
Upheaval
Fertile Soil
Black Hand Gang
Fury and Retribution
Notes
3 Sowing
Unprepared
Ferment
Swinging Sixties: The Wilderness Years
The 1967 War and Israeli Occupation
The 1970s: Yassin and the Rise of the Islamists
Confrontation
Seizing Control
Growth
Notes
4 The First Intifada
Friend or Foe?
Kidnap and Deportation
Peace and Politics
Notes
5 Oslo and Collapse
Rejecting Oslo
Turning Points
Wreckers
Dual Purpose
First Palestinian Elections
Symbol and Threat
Notes
6 The Second Intifada
Methods
Polarization
Squeezed
Passover Bomb
Walled Off
Redirection
Notes
7 Qassam Brigades
Origins
Qassam Brigades
A Spreading Web
Suicide Bombs
‘Mowing the Grass’
Meet the New Boss
Suicide Bombs to Rockets
Video Wars
Going Underground
Notes
8 Martyrs
Zealots
Culture of Martyrdom
Recruiters
Opponents
Human Shields
Notes
9 Harvesting
Welfare Weddings
Inside and Outside
The Agenda
The Money Trail
Notes
10 Women
Covenant
Historical Role
Acid and Stones
More than the Home
Women Suicide Bombers
Reem
A Rose by Any Other Name
Victory for Women Does Not Equal Liberation or Equality
Why Women Voted for Hamas
Notes
11 Ballot
The Next Generation
al-Khetiyar
Election Preparations
Campaigning
Victory
Notes
12 Pariahs
Money, Money, Money
Siege
Look East
Tunnels and Kidnap: A Foreshadowing
Internal Criticism
Brief Thaw
Notes
13 Hamastan
Power Games
Build Up
Takeover
Aftermath
Consolidation in Gaza
The Other Enemy
To Cease Fire Mutually
Operation Cast Lead
Was it Worth It?
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
Notes
14 ‘A General Rehearsal’
Resistance Credentials
Release
‘I’m Still Twenty-Five’
International Law
Washington
2014 War
Changing of the Guard
Trumped
Great March of Return
Al Aqsa
Notes
15 ‘We Are at War’
Planning and Misdirection
‘Running Towards the Fence’
World Wide Web War
Gaza
War among the Rubble
The Captive Equation
Pause and Release
Back to War
The International Court of Justice
South Gaza
Notes
Conclusion: Fatal Embrace
International Ramifications
Inferno
Notes
Chronology
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
Map 1 1947 UN Partition Plan
Map 2 Gaza pre-disengagement, May 2005
Map 3 Gaza post-disengagement, November 2005
Chapter 1
Photo 1.1 Hamas graffiti in Gaza, March 2008
Chapter 3
Photo 3.1 Hamas’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in his Gaza City home before his assa...
Chapter 6
Photo 6.1 Mosaic outside the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza City of a Palestinian...
Photo 6.2 A bus ‘graveyard’ in Kiryat Ata, where the Israeli public carrier ...
Chapter 7
Photo 7.1 Hamas military wing members in Gaza, July 2005
Chapter 9
Photo 9.1 A Hamas summer camp for boys in Gaza
Photo 9.2 Palestinian bridegrooms at a mass wedding in Rafah, Gaza, paid for by Hamas
Chapter 10
Photo 10.1 A woman wearing a hijab in front of a graffiti-covered wall in Gaza
Chapter 11
Photo 11.1 Hamas Executive Forces training in the abandoned Israeli settlement of Neve Deka...
Photo 11.2 A Hamas banner in Gaza in September 2005, shortly after the Israeli withdrawal f...
Photo 11.3 A Hamas election poster
Photo 11.4 A Hamas youth rally in Gaza in December 2006
Photo 11.5 An image of the newly elected Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, next to a portrait o...
Chapter 13
Photo 13.1 Israeli damage to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Izbit Abed Rabbo in Gaza, Jan...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
i
ii
iv
v
vi
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
Praise
Praise for Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell’s Hamas
‘If there is one book to read on Hamas, this is it: readable, rigorously researched and balanced, essential for the specialist and general reader alike.’
Jason Burke, The Guardian
‘Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell’s thoroughly revised and newly updated landmark study of Hamas is a riveting, first-hand, insightful and, at times, provocative analysis of the history of Hamas and Israeli politics and policies. It is an outstanding book that should – must – be read.’
John Esposito, Georgetown University
‘Fully updated to the present, this superbly written and unflinchingly objective book is an absolute must read for anyone who wants to understand the roots and background of the organization which profoundly traumatized Israel on 7 October 2023, as well as of the catastrophe still unfolding in Gaza.’
Donald Macintyre, author of Gaza: Preparing for Dawn
‘A deeply reported, insightful and up-to-date analysis of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas. The authors craft a persuasive account of how this religiously inspired, nationalist group has used both politics and violence to advance its cause. They assess the origins and impact of the latest devastating war in Gaza and explain why an independent Palestinian state remains so elusive. A vital study of a highly influential political actor.’
Rory McCarthy, Durham University
‘This detailed and meticulously researched account of Hamas’s development since its establishment in the late 1980s should be required reading for anyone engaging with the Gaza issue. Understanding the causes of, and the form taken by, the movement’s incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023 is not possible without the sound historical perspective provided by this book.’
Tim Niblock, University of Exeter
‘Hamas continues to polarise global debate and even more so since its bloody attacks of 7 October 2023 shattered the choreographed status quo of resistance, deterrence, and limited governance vis-à-vis Israel. But we need to go beyond these polarised debates if we are to fully contextualise the essence of Hamas and why its ideas, if not its military power, will continue to resonate. In this carefully calibrated analysis, Milton-Edwards and Farrell have again produced the go-to guide to a movement whose very essence cuts to the core of the Palestine-Israel conflict.’
Clive Jones, Durham University
‘Balanced and hard-hitting, drawing on decades of engagement with Hamas activists and their adversaries to reveal the aims and appeal of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Essential reading for understanding the past, present and future of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.’
Eugene Rogan, University of Oxford
‘Hamas remains one of the main Islamist organizations of the Arab world whose status, voice and influence far exceed its current base in the Gaza Strip. As Milton-Edwards and Farrell expertly show in their outstanding analysis of Hamas, the rest of the world ignores it at its peril.’
Anoush Ehteshami, Durham University
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Reem Makhoul – an extra-ordinary wedding gift to you, Reem, from the authors.
HAMAS
The Quest for Power
Beverley Milton-Edwards
and
Stephen Farrell
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell 2024
The right of Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6492-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6493-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024933946
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Illustrations
Photographs
1.1 Hamas graffiti in Gaza, March 2008
3.1 Hamas’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in his Gaza City home
6.1 Mosaic outside the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza City
6.2 A bus ‘graveyard’ in Kiryat Ata
7.1 Hamas military wing members in Gaza, July 2005
9.1 A Hamas summer camp for boys in Gaza
9.2 Palestinian bridegrooms at a mass wedding paid for by Hamas
10.1 A woman wearing a hijab, Gaza
11.1 Hamas Executive Forces training in Neve Dekalim, 2005
11.2 A Hamas banner in Gaza, September 2005
11.3 A Hamas election poster
11.4 A Hamas youth rally in Gaza in December 2006
11.5 An image of the newly elected Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, beamed from Gaza, next to a portrait of the jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, March 2006
13.1 Israeli damage to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Izbit Abed Rabbo in Gaza, January 2009
Maps
Map 1 1947 UN Partition Plan
Map 2 Gaza pre-disengagement, May 2005
Map 3 Gaza post-disengagement, November 2005
Preface and Acknowledgements
There is no middle ground with Hamas. In the decades since the Islamist organization emerged from the crucible of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, it has polarized opinion and will continue to do so.
Hamas’s credo can be defined simply as ‘Islam is the solution.’ It offers an Islamic plan to Palestinians living under an Israeli military occupation, wrapping itself in the twin banners of religion and nationalism. Hamas’s enemies define it as a terrorist organization that has killed and maimed Israelis for decades, and perpetrating by far its deadliest attack on 7 October 2023. They argue that it is little more than the proxy of a regional Middle East power – Iran – and shares with its patron an all-consuming desire to bring about the destruction of the state of Israel. Hamas’s supporters see it through another prism entirely: for them, it is an uncompromising, yet clear-sighted organization founded by a leadership which spent decades in the political wilderness telling the unpopular truth that the political orthodoxies of their time were misguided and that, in Israel, the Palestinian people faced an enemy that had to be resisted, not accommodated. Hamas argues that it alone is prepared to stand up to win statehood and independence for the Palestinians.
But it ill behoves either enemy or friend to make simplistic generalizations about an organization that, whatever its true nature, in 2006 became the first Islamist movement to ascend to power in the Middle East by democratic means and two decades later demonstrated that it had the strategic capacity to deliver a humiliating body blow to a military machine that claims to be the best in the Middle East. It is neither ISIS, al-Qaeda, nor the Taliban. It owes something to Hezbollah and much to the Muslim Brotherhood. It is Islamist, but nationalist; Sunni, yet supported by a Shi’a power; has participated in democratic elections, yet remains opaque; and populist, yet cruel. Many see Hamas as a significant obstacle to peace with Israel and wider hopes for stability in the Middle East. Others, particularly in the Global South, believe that, until it is recognized as a legitimate political force and included in the accommodation of power, there can never be peace in the region.
To study is not to support. For enemies and friends – and in both camps passions often cloud reasoned debate – Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is a phenomenon worthy of analysis. Part political, part social, part military, it has proved adaptable and resilient in the face of opposition from regional and world superpowers. It has won parliamentary, municipal, student and professional elections, and it has emerged as a genuine threat to much longer-established Palestinian political movements.
The purpose of this book, through hundreds of interviews conducted over four decades, is to present first-hand accounts of Hamas’s founders, leaders, fighters, social activists, victims, political supporters and opponents, and in so doing to give insights into how Hamas was born, grew and thrived in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – the Palestinian Territories occupied and controlled through Israel’s all-pervasive military, settlement and civil apparatus since the 1967 Six Day War. Many of the interviews with the founders and senior leadership of Hamas can never be repeated. Such leaders are dead, mostly assassinated in Israel’s attempts, over the decades, to degrade and destroy the senior leadership of the organization. Other interviews are with leaders who rarely speak in public.
Hamas cannot be understood in isolation from other Islamist actors who preceded it. Context, no matter how controversial, does matter. There has been a history of Muslim opposition to foreign rule and occupation since the British were awarded political control of Palestine after the First World War and the Zionists sought to make their homeland there. Its roots lie in the radicalism of little-known Islamist sheikhs in the 1930s who called for ‘jihad’ to liberate Palestine long before the word entered the Western lexicon. A generation later, refugees of the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–9 came to believe that, through a pious adherence to Islam, they could achieve political freedom and create a state ruled according to their Islamic principles. After the 1967 war, some of these early Islamists were tolerated, encouraged even, by Israel. Under the age-old principle of ‘divide and rule’, Israel saw in the fledgling Islamists an opportunity to undermine its then principal Palestinian enemy, Yasser Arafat, head of Fatah and chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Out of these antecedents the modern Hamas movement emerged in 1987 from the tumult of the First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) against Israel’s then twenty-year-old military occupation regime. Hamas claimed the Intifada in its name and embarked on a competition to wrest Palestinian hearts and minds from the PLO. It became a formidable foe, waging a murderous armed campaign of suicide bombings against Israel and, later, missile bombardment of Israeli towns.
But Hamas has won support from Palestinians, not just because of what they see as a legitimate campaign of violent resistance against Israeli military occupation, but also because Hamas is – at one and the same time – a movement with a powerful, highly motivated and well-organized social welfare network, which it used to support people during years of deprivation and enforced statelessness, earning their gratitude and trust. In this book we detail the ways in which Hamas forged these links with the Palestinian people, slowly ousting the PLO from its hitherto unchallenged position of pre-eminence.
Hamas has developed a powerful military wing and instilled in many Palestinians the belief that only through violent armed struggle and the reward of martyrdom will they achieve their political goals of freedom and independence. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Hamas suicide bombing campaigns encouraged hundreds of willing volunteers to sacrifice themselves, in a self-declared holy war, in attacks on Israeli targets. Hamas leaders defended their actions, coldly warning that, if Palestinian civilians continued to die at the hands of Israeli tank commanders, F16 pilots and snipers, then Israel’s civilians would suffer the same fate.
In January 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, demonstrating that it could marshal its supporters – including thousands of women who turned out for rallies under the green banner of the movement. It also attracted the votes of many other Palestinians who were disillusioned by corruption in the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) and lack of progress in peace talks with Israel. The Western world refused to accept Hamas’s victory at the ballot box, and Hamas refused to bow to the international community’s demands that it should recognize Israel and renounce violence. The outcome was a double deadlock – internal and external – which saw a higher death toll and even more despair among Israelis and Palestinians about any prospect of a peace settlement.
Internally, Islamist Hamas and secular Fatah consistently refused to share power. Nor was this likely, given that each had forms of dependence on patrons with conflicting agendas – Iran and the United States. Two armed forces sharing a tiny slice of land, each ambitious for total control, was a dynamic that could not be contained. In 2007 – just eighteen months after it won the election – Hamas’s armed forces routed Fatah in Gaza and seized full military control of the Gaza Strip. When the dust settled, there was a two-headed Palestinian Authority – Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. Externally, there was also a stand-off between Hamas and Israel, with the West supporting Israel.
Israel sought to isolate Hamas with an economic and military blockade imposed on the whole population of the Gaza Strip. Hamas hit back with rockets into Israel. The nearest either side came to any form of agreement was a six-month ceasefire, which ended in December 2008. Hamas immediately began firing hundreds of rockets into Israeli towns and villages, and Israel hit back with a three-week military offensive which left more than 1,300 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis dead. Gaza was shattered, but Hamas remained in power and as defiant as ever. This cycle of attack and counter-attack between the two sides continued in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021 and, of course, from 7 October 2023 into 2024.
Hamas can be excoriated, but it should not be underestimated. As we demonstrate throughout this book, it rose from a Muslim Brotherhood seed planted in mandate Palestine to become one of the most important Islamic and nationalist organizations in the Middle East. Its credentials mean that it is admired by Islamic and other liberation groups active not just in the Middle East but in the wider Global South and beyond.
For them, Hamas’s brand of religious nationalism echoes their own political aspirations more than the worldwide jihad of ISIS or al-Qaeda. But it also highlights the consequences for the West of refusing to acknowledge the role that such movements play in shaping and governing their societies and influencing their relationship with the regional and global order.
Militarily, Hamas has fatally exposed the weakness of a hitherto far more powerful enemy – Israel. Israel has suffered huge losses at the hands of Hamas, and this legacy of harm and humiliation will endure to reshape the future of relations between Israelis and Palestinians. While it is true that Hamas cannot conquer Israel, questions still linger over whether Israel can achieve its aim of eradicating Hamas. Past attempts to degrade and destruct killed neither the movement nor the idea behind it.
***
We want to thank the many people who helped us in the realization and writing of both the first and second editions of this book. Particular thanks to Nabil Feidy of Jerusalem, for inspiring the collaboration and friendship that has developed during the course of this project. Nabil’s emporium was a unique meeting place of calm and companionship in a tense and uneasy world. We also want to thank many colleagues and friends who have been so generous in supporting us and sharing their own work and insights, giving us advice, views and resources which it has taken many decades in the field to amass.
They include, among nameless others, Hein Knegt, Franz Makkan, Tor Wennesland, Colin Smith, Jonathan McIvor, Colonel Michael Pearson, Colonel Barry Southern, Khadr Musleh, Bob and Mary Mitchell, Rema Hammami, Alex Pollock, Ray Dolphin, Aileen and Scott Martin, Mouin Rabbani, Jeff Aronson, Ilan and Galia Katsir, Don Macintyre, Rory McCarthy, James Hider, Jason Burke, Yonit Farago, Ilan Mizrahi, Ronen Zvulun, Quique Kierszenbaum, Sarah El Deeb, Diaa Hadid, Alan Johnston, Tarik Yousef, Hend Amry, Freddie Alpert, Bu Abdallah, Bu Chairman Mao, Dana, Vladimir Pran and colleagues on The Times (London), the New York Times and Reuters.
We have been enormously lucky to benefit from the help of a unique crew of people in Gaza who have put themselves at risk in their attempt to bring us to some of the most illuminating and important voices in this battered and brutalized conflict zone. For years, Azmi Keshawi has been a fantastic help in squirrelling out a range of usually reticent and publicity-shy Islamist sources to tell us their stories and share their experiences in Gaza, often at great risk to himself and his wonderfully phlegmatic driver, Abu Hanafi. In Gaza, Hassan Jabr and Fares Akram have also played an extremely important role in facilitating our research. Our thanks also to driver/bodyguard extraordinaire Ashraf al-Masri, who accompanied us on our many visits to the Gaza Strip and made sure we didn’t get kidnapped, even during the most lawless times. Without Azmi, Ashraf, Fares, Hassan, Abu Hanafi and their unflagging sense of determination and bravery – and others whom we keep anonymous to protect them, this book would not have been possible. Since 2008 and to the present day our Gazan friends have endured huge losses resulting from the wars with Israel in Gaza. They have had family members, close relatives killed in Israeli attacks on them, their homes, and livelihoods destroyed – gone forever. They, like their fellow Gazans, have suffered displacement in war, injury, hunger, communications blackout and, increasingly, a loss of hope.
In the West Bank, Nuha Awadallah also cuts a unique figure and has been a dear friend in helping us to realize this project. Her many changes of fashion and headgear make her instantly recognizable, along with her deep passion for bringing the light of truth out of the darkness. She has gone to extraordinary lengths to introduce us to the great cast of actors that all have a place on the stage in this particular account of Hamas.
Most of the people we have cited in the text have been identified, but there were some instances when, for security reasons, interviewees requested anonymity. To those interviewees – Palestinian, Israeli, Qatari, Egyptian, European, Canadian, American – and to others who gave their time to listen to our questions and talk to us, we offer our profound thanks.
All the photographs in the book were taken by Stephen Farrell, apart from photo 6.2, for which we extend our thanks to Ronen Zvulun. At Polity we would very much like to extend our deep gratitude to Louise Knight, especially for helping us to produce this new and very thoroughly revised edition. Our sincere gratitude also to Caroline Richmond for her copyediting and Neil de Cort, once again, for his dedication to the printing of this book.
We would also like to give our thanks to Cara Milton-Edwards and Joshua Milton-Edwards for keeping the authors grounded in the real world of throwaway culture, sushi, chocolate, MIKA music, hi-energy drinks, more chocolate, mini-clips, ice cream, children’s DVDs, mp3 players, more chocolate, and the everyday challenges of learning homework, taking school exams, playing rugby and acting, refining the fine arts of debating and film-making. And to Sheherazade and Nairouz Farrell for taking up the mantle when Cara and Josh grew up, as children should.
Map 11947 UN Partition Plan
Map 2Gaza pre-disengagement, May 2005
Map 3Gaza post-disengagement, November 2005
1What is Hamas?
We will come to you, God willing, in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets, we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers.
Yahya Sinwar1
Shortly after dawn in southern Israel and music from an all-night festival lingers in the air. Suddenly the peace of a holiday sabbath is broken by sirens – harbingers of incoming rockets from nearby Gaza. Soon there’s a buzzing in the sky, but this time it isn’t surveillance drones monitoring the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped behind Israel’s fortified border that seals off the Gaza Strip from the outside world. Instead, it’s the unimaginable sight of motorized paragliders soaring over the gates of Gaza bearing armed militants belonging to the Palestinian group Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, better known to the world as Hamas.
A fusillade of gunfire soon alerts residents of border kibbutzim that the rockets were cover for a concerted sea, air and ground attack orchestrated by Hamas, unprecedented in its scale. In full view of the Israeli watchtowers and automated gun turrets, coordinated groups of Hamas militants blow holes in the Israeli fortifications and attack the military bases and checkpoints along Israel’s 37-mile land border with Gaza.
As scores of gunmen overwhelm Israel’s defences, around 3,000 Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other raiders pour through breaches of the fence in pickup trucks, on tractors and on motorbikes. Armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, some set up bandit checkpoints on roads to seal off the area. Emptying their magazines into passing cars, they drag survivors out and finish them off in the street. Some use body cameras to record the carnage and later stream it worldwide, making real life and real death look like a First-Person Shooter video game.
With the roads sealed, raiding parties storm into Israeli border villages such as Netiv HaAsara, Kfar Aza, Nirim, Be’eri, Nahal Oz and Re’im. Using guns, knives, machetes, grenades and even garden tools, they hunt down and kill, including pensioners, women, children, migrant workers, security forces and paramedics. Even – especially – Israeli military bases were attacked: the army’s Gaza divisional headquarters near Re’im, the Nahal Oz surveillance post and the huge Erez checkpoint in the north. Larger border towns such as Sderot also fall prey to the assault, Israelis locking themselves inside their homes as armed groups drive around the streets, taking over the police station and killing dozens inside.
‘On Black Saturday, I was in my home in Nirim when terrorists infiltrated the kibbutz and homes. While they set fires, killed, kidnapped, looted, and vandalized, we hid in the safe room,’ recalled Israeli survivor Avi Dabush. ‘The only weapon we had against the terrorists – who gathered under our window for long minutes and hours, attempting to break into our house – was my sweaty hand on the door of the safe room. It is a horror that is hard to put into words and it lasted for eight hours.’2
As the scale of the assault emerges, the Israeli military escalates the level of its alerts, first telling people to stay near protected areas, then to ‘remain in their homes’ before, at 8.23 am on 7 October 2023, declaring a ‘state of alert for war’. All on the Jewish high holiday of Simchat Torah.3
By the time the sun rose again the following day, a new reality was also dawning. Hamas had carried out the deadliest-ever attack on Israel in a single day. They killed more than 1,200 people, including thirty-six children. Families were hunted down in their homes. More than 300 youngsters attending the Nova music festival were killed as gunmen emptied magazines into tents and toilet cubicles and hunted others down as they fled. One victim was beheaded on film, others were mutilated. At least 240 were kidnapped and taken into Gaza as hostages, humiliated on camera as they were led into captivity. Police opened investigations to assess the sexual violence reported.
‘Massacring civilians is a war crime and there can be no justification for these reprehensible attacks,’ declared Agnès Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International:
armed men shooting at civilians and dragging people away as hostages … armed men parading a woman through central Gaza, like a scene from a nightmare. All civilians who were abducted, including children, must be released immediately. These crimes must be investigated as part of the International Criminal Court’s ongoing investigation into [the] crimes committed.4
Israelis were left feeling humiliated, vengeful and enraged at being made to feel fearful in one of the strongest military nations in the Middle East. Not only at the shock of what Hamas had done, but disbelief at the magnitude of the failure by the political, military and intelligence leadership of Israel, a world leader in surveillance technology that was supposed to be able to detect threats in advance. ‘This is Israel’s 9/11 and Israel will do everything to bring our sons and daughters back home,’ said Gilad Erdan, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations, outside a Security Council meeting on 8 October. ‘We will not let the world forget the atrocities our country suffered.’5
Hamas, so it appeared, hadn’t forgotten either, basing their justification for what they called ‘Operation Al Aqsa Flood’ on both historic and legitimate grievances. Usama Hamdan, a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau, told one of the authors, ‘It doesn’t matter what Israel’s military capacity or power is, the Palestinian people will achieve their liberation.’ Pressed on why Hamas attacked Israeli civilians that day, Hamdan restated the long-standing Hamas position that all of historic Palestine belonged to the Palestinians:
The whole world knows and recognizes that our land has been occupied since 1948. Israel occupied our whole complete land from the River to the Sea. Israel has built settlements on these Palestinian Territories. Those are settlements on our occupied land. Hamas considers these all to be settlements that deny the Palestinians their rights. These are settlements that Israel has built on stolen land, homes, and futures of our people.6
Gaza
Forced to put aside for the moment the domestic political fallout that would inevitably come for those in charge during such a security debacle, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government launched a devastating air, sea and land bombardment of the Gaza Strip, calling it ‘Operation Swords of Iron’. The barrage turned into a full-scale ground invasion that redrew the map of Gaza and hit the reset button on Israeli–Palestinian relations, probably forever. Through the winter of 2023 and into 2024, more than 35,000 Palestinians were killed, most of them children and women. By November 2023, as the United Nations Security Council debated the situation in Gaza, briefers fed through situation reports from the ground. Catherine Russell, the executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), called for an urgent humanitarian ceasefire. Drawing attention to the plight of children, she stated, ‘No place is safe in the Gaza Strip,’ then went on to describe it as the world’s most dangerous place for a child to be. She ended by noting that an unprecedented 40 per cent of killings in Gaza were of children.7 Tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians were injured, with little by way of functioning hospitals and the risk of being hit by missile attacks even inside the ones that still worked. As Israel razed apartment blocks, refugee camps and neighbourhoods, reducing much of Gaza to rubble, more than 2 million Palestinians were displaced from their homes.
Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant ordered a total closure of Gaza while the bombardment continued. ‘I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,’ he said.8 He was as good as his word, leaving humanitarian organizations struggling to deliver enough food and medical supplies through the one lifeline that Gaza still had to the outside world – to Egypt. Many Palestinians were forced into huge tent camps that sprang up in the south of the Gaza Strip as they fled near incessant bombing in the north.
According to the International Rescue Committee six weeks after Israel’s bombardment began: ‘Civilians are bearing the brunt. Hamas has reportedly mixed military personnel and facilities with civilians and is holding over 200 hostages. Israel continues to use weapons with wide area effects in densely populated areas, is attacking hospitals, schools, and refugee camps and has cut the supply of water, fuel, and electricity to over 2 million people.’9
For older Palestinians, the scenes were a painful reminder of the tented refugee camps that they first lived in when they arrived in Gaza seventy-five years earlier as refugees from the 1948–9 war that accompanied the birth of the modern state of Israel. That mass dispossession saw around 750,000 Palestinians flee or forced from their homes in pre-1948 Palestine in a communal trauma known as the Nakbah (Catastrophe), which became the defining experience of Palestinian identity. Future generations vowed never to repeat it, but with their apartment blocks, refugee camps and neighbourhoods reduced to rubble they now found themselves bombed back into tents, and talk of a ‘second Nakbah’ became commonplace.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank also bore the brunt. United Nations human rights monitors said 300 were killed from 7 October to late December 2023, amid airstrikes and Israeli military raids on refugee camps and Palestinian cities. A report also found there had been a ‘sharp rise in settler attacks with an average of six incidents per day, such as shootings, burning of homes and vehicles, and uprooting of trees.’10
Israel said the goal of its Gaza operation was to destroy Hamas’s tunnel, rocket-firing and military infrastructure. Specifically, to kill the Hamas leaders who planned the 7 October attack: military-wing leader Mohammed Deif and Hamas’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar.
Ten months before the cross-border attack, Sinwar had publicly trailed hints of what was to come. But he veiled them in the kind of bellicose rhetoric that Hamas leaders had delivered from the rally lectern for decades, ensuring that it was a warning only fully appreciated in the aftermath. ‘We will come to you, God willing, in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets, we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers, we will come to you with millions of our people, like the repeating tide,’ he declaimed at a Gaza rally in December 2022.11
Particularly galling for Israel was that Sinwar, an implacable Hamas hardliner, had spent nearly a quarter of a century in Israeli jails until he was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2011. The day after his release Sinwar told one of the authors that he had ‘learned a lot’ about Israelis during his time in their custody, learning Hebrew and studying history. ‘We turned the prison into sanctuaries of worship and to academies for study,’ he said, with his customary sense of certainty and self-assurance. ‘You can say I am a specialist in the Jewish people’s history, more than many of them.’12
While Israel held the entire Hamas leadership responsible, Sinwar was singled out for special vilification. ‘This heinous attack was orchestrated by Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. And so he, and the entire system underneath him, are dead men. We will target them, break them, and dismantle their system,’ said Israel’s chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, in an address to the nation a few days after the attack. ‘Gaza will not look the same. We will achieve a situation where those who led Gaza will suffer greatly, and we will dismantle it. And whoever remains there will understand that such a thing is not to be done to the State of Israel.’13 His meaning was clear. For Israel, 7 October meant that there would be no return to the way things were before.
Why?
Shattering the status quo was also what Hamas sought, although for very different reasons. Just as Israel’s messaging sought to project strength with biblical resonances, so Hamas’s name for its cross-border attack – ‘Operation Al Aqsa Flood’ – was a declaration to the Muslim world that it was setting itself up as the principal defender of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
Al Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, is the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. But, unlike them, it is no longer under Muslim control since Israel captured East Jerusalem with the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War. That loss is still felt keenly by Muslims worldwide, and it is one that Hamas has sought to tap into.
On 7 October, Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, gave a lengthy televised speech suffused with religious and nationalistic rhetoric outlining Hamas’s public rationale for the attack. In an address of a length and complexity that suggested advance preparation, he praised Sinwar and Deif as architects of the attack and excoriated Netanyahu’s government, accusing it of having let Israeli ‘settlers and usurpers loose to sow corruption in the holy Al Aqsa Mosque’ and of intensifying a ‘colonization’ of the West Bank by expanding Jewish settlements there.14
Haniyeh, himself a refugee, also said Hamas was punishing Israel for its ‘unjust’ blockade on the Gaza Strip. ‘How many times have we warned them of the existence of a Palestinian people who, for 75 years, have been living in the diaspora in tents and refugee camps? You don’t recognise our people, and you don’t recognise our rights.’ And he made it clear that one of Hamas’s goals was to highlight Israel’s weaknesses and to demonstrate – to its own supporters and to Israelis – Hamas’s willingness and ability to scare them. ‘God came to them from where they did not expect, and cast terror into their hearts,’ he said, referencing a verse from the Koran.
But it was significant that the first people Haniyeh singled out for criticism were the Arab regimes who, since 2020, had signed ‘normalization’ deals with Israel. These US-brokered agreements were viewed with alarm by Palestinians, who feared Gulf Arab states such as the UAE and Bahrain were increasingly becoming concerned more with the economic and diplomatic benefits of doing business with Israel than in the Palestinian cause.
Even more worrying to Hamas were reports that Saudi Arabia was in talks with US President Joe Biden’s administration to follow suit, a move that would further realign the Middle East to bring Israel, Sunni Arab regimes and Washington together in an axis of shared interests against Shia Iran, a sponsor of Hamas. Haniyeh pointedly contrasted the ‘defeatists’ of normalizing regimes with Hamas militants fighting on the ground: ‘This entity which is incapable of protecting itself from our fighters is incapable of providing you with security or protection,’ he told the viewing audience. ‘All the normalisation and recognition processes, all the agreements that have been signed can never put an end to this battle.’15
Israeli officials brushed aside Hamas’s rationales, accusing its leadership of being motivated by hatred and of dragging their own people down with them. Defending Israel against mounting international criticism for the scale of its attack on Gaza, Netanyahu’s senior adviser, Mark Regev, said of Hamas:
It said no to any peace with Israel, no to negotiations, an extremist, militant, totally inflexible approach that says my country must be destroyed and every Israeli is a legitimate target for murder.
But, more than that, what have they done for the people of Gaza? They’ve been in power for sixteen years, they’ve been running the Gaza Strip, they’ve brought pain. They’ve brought suffering, and they’ve brought impoverishment to the people of Gaza. When this is over and we’ve defeated Hamas, and we will, it will be better for the people of southern Israel of course who won’t have to live next to this terror enclave, next to Hamas and its violence and its brutality. But, ultimately, it will also be better for the people of Gaza, who deserve better than this terrible terrorist regime.16
However, as the war dragged on, many questioned whether Israel’s humiliated political leadership had fallen into a Hamas trap by being sucked into a protracted war on Hamas’s home turf in Gaza, where a vast network of tunnels awaited them, allowing militants to emerge from tunnels and rubble to attack Israeli tanks and troops and then disappear again.
‘There is no military solution to this,’ predicted Bilal Y. Saab, with London’s Chatham House policy institute. ‘The issue here is the day after. Let’s just say you do massively degrade Hamas. What happens the day after? Israel is not going to own Gaza; they are not going to occupy Gaza. This is not the Third Reich; this is not Imperial Japan. We’re not going to turn Gaza into a democracy. And so Hamas 2.0 is very much a possibility, as long as Iran supplies weapons to Palestinians who are willing to take arms and do battle with the Israelis.’17
‘Hamas is an idea. You cannot bomb an idea out of existence,’ said Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s deputy prime minister. ‘If you are not happy with what Hamas is doing, convince the Palestinian people that they have a future and that Hamas is standing between them and that future. Thus far, that argument has not been made. Reality has not shown that. Palestinian people have been left with nothing left to lose on the West Bank and in Gaza. Are we not going to learn?’18
The Everywhere War
What the attack also did was to put the name of Hamas front and centre of any discussion about Israel and the Palestinians.
By filming its trail of destruction on 7 October and posting footage of its operatives carrying out attacks on Israeli troops – sometimes with martial music and taunting on-screen messages in Arabic, English and Hebrew – Hamas ensured that the scenes would be seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide on television and social media, both supporters and opponents.
In similar vein, Israel’s sophisticated and multilingual hasbara (advocacy) messaging operation moved into high gear, pushing out its dispatches through embassies, television, newspapers and social media, including the hashtag #standwithisrael. Supporters were mobilized on both sides, and opinions polarized amid acrimonious debate. The conflict triggered global debates about blame, international law, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, censorship, freedom of expression, the global rules-based order and the limits of protest and academic freedom. And the aftershocks reverberated from the shell-scarred hills of south Lebanon to Red Sea shipping corridors and to university campuses, and all the way up to the international criminal and justice system at The Hague.
In one of the United Nations Security Council’s first debates after the attack, UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned what he called ‘the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas’ in Israel: ‘Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,’ he said. But he added:
It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing. But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.19
Israel was furious at Guterres’s attempt to give historical context – its UN ambassador accused the Secretary-General of showing ‘an understanding for terrorism and murder’ and called on him to resign immediately.20
But around the world the questions kept coming. Governments, policymakers and military analysts wanted information to strategize against Hamas or to prepare for possible regional escalation of the conflict. Others sought evidence to support arguments in favour of one side or the other. Some wanted to bring about a shift in their country’s policy or a new alignment in the global order. But the core questions remained: What is Hamas? Where did it come from? And how did a relatively small Palestinian movement overwhelm the defences of the strongest military power in the Middle East?
Birth. Bomb. Ballot. Border.
Hamas has sprung several major surprises on the world since it was created in 1987, the 2023 attack being by far the largest, but certainly not the first. It was not a complex plan. In fact, it was a somewhat counterintuitive one – a militant group with an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 fighters overwhelming the defences of a superpower-backed state with a standing army, navy and warplanes. But its execution bore hallmarks of a long-established Hamas methodology: plan carefully, prepare thoroughly and in secret, lull enemies foreign and domestic into a false sense of security, and then use the benefit of surprise to maximize its advantage in any given situation.
At its simplest, Hamas executed on the ground what it had been testing for years in the air. Faced with Israel’s advanced Iron Dome missile defence system that intercepted rockets fired from Gaza, during major hostilities it would fire so many that some would get through.
A variant of that tactic is what happened on 7 October. Cross-border attacks would scarcely get past the first border fence if Israel was expecting them. But such a plan could work – once – if the border was rushed with surprise and in overwhelming numbers.
Birth
The first surprise Hamas sprang on the world was its sudden creation in Gaza in the opening days of the First Palestinian Intifada in December 1987. It was set up as a Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Islamic revival movement founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. The key Brotherhood figure in Gaza was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, an inspirational preacher and organizational genius who spent the 1970s and 1980s setting up a grassroots network of mosques and institutions in the Gaza refugee camps where he had grown up. These were seeds planted early with a long-term view of later harvesting hearts, minds, and souls.
Yassin made the strategic calculation that he needed time to Islamize Palestinian society from the grassroots up, so he decided not to jeopardize his fledgling network by risking immediate conflict with Israel. But when the Intifada (uprising, or ‘shaking off’) broke out in Gaza and spread to the West Bank, Yassin saw an opportunity to capitalize on – and take control of – the spontaneous outburst of anger. So he accelerated the Islamization process and created Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya – ‘The Islamic Resistance Movement’.
From the outset it was an Islamist alternative to the secular brand of nationalism represented by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and Palestine Liberation Organization, and it caught them off guard. Unlike Yassin, Arafat and the PLO leaders were not in Gaza. Instead, they had spent decades in Israeli-enforced exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia, and they did not grasp the daily humiliations of Palestinians chafing at two decades of Israeli military occupation, or the inexorable and quickening expansion of Jewish settlements that Israel was building across the territory that it had occupied in the 1967 Six Day War – the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
And while the PLO leadership viewed Hamas as an irritant, it did not appreciate the scale of the threat posed by an organized Islamist newcomer with a long-term plan to undermine, supplant and eventually replace the PLO as leaders of the Palestinian people.
Key to Hamas’s appeal to its support base of refugees, religious fundamentalists and stateless Palestinians was its refusal to recognize Israel or to accept any compromise that would settle for some of the territory of pre-1948 Palestine rather than all of it.
Hamas’s founding Covenant spells out that it claims all the land:
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [endowment] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.21
In 2002, Dr Abdel Aziz Rantissi, then Hamas’s deputy leader in Gaza, voiced its position even more explicitly during an interview with one of the authors:
In the name of Allah we will fight the Jews and liberate our land in the name of Islam. We will rid this land of the Jews and with Allah’s strength our land will be returned to us and the Muslim peoples of the world. By God, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine. We will fight them with all the strength we have. This is our land, not the Jews’ … We have Allah on our side, and we have the sons of the Arab and Islamic nation on our side.22
Yassin’s early strategic calculation to avoid taking on Israel worked in the Islamists’ favour. For years his network of Islamic charities in Gaza was overlooked, or even tacitly encouraged, by Israel, which was seemingly content to see the emergence of an internal rival to Arafat, on the principle of divide and rule. ‘When Hamas laid out its charter, it made it an alternative to the secular PLO charter,’ said Ibrahim Ibrach, a Gaza political analyst. ‘Right from the start it considered itself an alternative to the PLO, but it didn’t declare it because both parties were busy with the first intifada, fighting the Israelis.’23
Bomb
But by the 1990s the situation had changed. Arafat’s PLO had negotiated its way home, raising hopes for a negotiated solution that would deliver both an end to occupation and Israel and Palestine living side by side. This ‘two-state solution’ envisaged Israel in roughly its existing borders – 78 per cent of pre-1948 Palestine – and the Palestinians in 22 per cent – Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
It was Arafat who led the PLO into the Madrid and Oslo peace negotiations with Israel, and it was he who stood on the White House lawn with US President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to attend the signing of the Declaration of Principles in 1993, the undoubted high point of Israeli–Palestinian relations. The PLO promised peace dividends that would deliver Palestinians independence and a state to call their own, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
For Hamas such a compromise was anathema. But throughout that era it stood marginalized on the sidelines, with most Palestinians too optimistic to listen to its warnings that Israel could not be trusted, and that armed resistance, as they term it, was the only way to achieve the Palestinians’ goals. Determined to carry the fight to Israel without the PLO, Yassin formed his own military wing, the soon to be infamous Qassam Brigades. During the 1990s its bombers ripped through the peace process. It was not the only Palestinian faction to do so, but the name Hamas soon became synonymous with suicide bombers, as it remained resolutely outside the Palestinian political mainstream, refusing to participate in any political process with its Zionist enemy.
And gradually through the 1990s the era of optimism came to an end; Israeli troop redeployments did not occur as planned, Palestinian elections were delayed, and Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli gunman who, like many on the far right, bitterly opposed giving any land to Palestinians. And Israel’s settlements continued to grow, in contravention of international law.
Israel, for its part, accused the Palestinians of failing to meet their obligations under security agreements by multiplying their armed forces and of failing to stop Hamas suicide bombings. Peace talks were deadlocked or produced little tangible for either side, and a Second Palestinian Intifada broke out in 2000. In such conditions, Hamas’s implacable world view found more supporters than during the era of peace and optimism. ‘Israel has already taken a decision never to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,’ Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri, the founder of Hamas’s military wing in the West Bank, told one of the authors in 2007.
Fatah is saying ‘One Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, resolve the issue of refugees and that is enough for them to recognise and justify the existence of the state of Israel.’ Hamas’s position is that the existence of the state of Israel is bigger than it seems because it involves the whole Arab world and the Islamic world. And what is apparent right now is that the Israelis are refusing Hamas’s position, and Fatah’s position also.24
Arouri, speaking just after he was released from jail, was later deported by Israel and rose through the ranks to become Hamas’s deputy leader. He was killed by a drone strike in Beirut in January 2024.
Sometimes in the middle of fast-paced events such as the Second Intifada it is hard to pinpoint exactly the incident that shifted a momentum or hardened a transition into a new reality. But sometimes it is immediately clear. On 27 March 2002 Hamas carried out its deadliest attack on Israel up to that point, one which transformed the dynamic of the then eighteen-month-old Palestinian uprising.
On the day that the Arab League was gathering for a summit in Beirut at which it endorsed a Saudi proposal for Israel to have normalization of relations with the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal from the occupied territories, Hamas upstaged them by sending a suicide bomber who killed thirty Jewish celebrants at a Passover dinner in the Israeli town of Netanya. As in 2023, the 2002 Passover bomb struck to the core of Israel’s religious, cultural and national identity. In response, Israel’s government launched a full-scale reinvasion of West Bank cities and soon afterwards began building a 500-mile razor wire and concrete military barrier around – and in many places deep into – the West Bank. There were to be no more Israelis and Palestinians at signing ceremonies on White House lawns, and Hamas’s main domestic rival, Arafat, besieged by Israel in his Ramallah headquarters the Muqata, became increasingly isolated until his death, taking with him much of the energy of the Fatah movement he founded and had dominated for so long. Hamas had effectively turned its pessimism about the peace process into a self-fulfilling prophecy by shooting and bombing it out of existence, in parallel with rejectionists on the Israeli side whose opposition to allowing a Palestinian state to come into existence matched that of Hamas refusing to recognize the Israeli one that already did.
Ballot
Then, just as Hamas had spent years demonstrating its proficiency with the bomb and the bullet, it pivoted to embrace the ballot box. In the five years leading up to the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, its militants, according to Israel, had killed more than 400 people and carried out more than fifty suicide bombings.25 True, Fatah was handicapped by Arafat’s death and a reputation for mismanagement, nepotism and corruption over its stewardship of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), and the near-impenetrable alphabet soup of organizations through which Fatah had long exercised control over Palestinian affairs. But Fatah’s leaders remained confident to the point of complacency about the election. And many in Hamas also expected Fatah to win.
So it did not come to pass. Once Hamas decided to follow the path of other armed groups – such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Provisional IRA and, indeed, some of Israel’s own founding fathers – from bomb to ballot box, the rhetoric, planning and sophistication of the political newcomer proved far superior to that of its veteran secular rival.
It mobilized women supporters, told its followers to lie to opinion pollsters and positioned itself as a new broom standing under the banner ‘Change and Reform’. And, amid the near universal perception among Palestinians that Arafat’s cadres had siphoned off millions of dollars in foreign aid that should have gone to their people, it benefited from its image of being intolerant of corruption. But while Hamas could win, it could not change how it was seen. It was immediately treated as a pariah by Israel, the United States and much of the international community, which demanded that it lay down arms and recognize Israel before they would deal with it.
