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Ḥamās
[This entry contains two subentries:
Overview
The organization Harakat al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmīyah (Movement of Islamic Resistance), the most important Palestinian Islamist organization in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is known by its acronym “Hamās.” A non- Qurʿān word, hamās means “zeal.” The organization was established in December 1987, at the very beginning of the first Palestinian uprising (intifāḍah), as the organizational expression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, for participation in the anti-Israeli resistance after two decades of Islamic political quietism. Since 2006, Hamās has formed the majority party of the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority. Its armed wing is known as the ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām Brigades, a reference to the shaykh killed by the British at the beginning of the great Palestinian revolt in 1936.
Emergence of Ḥamās.
Before the emergence of Hamās, Islam had rarely constituted the primary justification for the contemporary liberation struggle of the Palestinians; rather, Arab or Palestinian nationalism was used. At the end of the 1970s, however, new types of Islamic activism appeared. Present in Jerusalem as a benevolent organization since the 1940s, the Muslim Brotherhood had as its primary goal reinvigorating Islamic identity and practice. As political Islam and Islamism expanded in the region in the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood became more active but confined its political activities to the struggle against the Palestinian Communist Party. The group 's failure to confront Israel 's occupation of the Palestinian territories (i.e., the West Bank and Gaza), ongoing since 1967 in violation of U.N. Security Regulations, cost the group political legitimacy in the view of many Palestinians. But its large social welfare network (consisting of schools, orphanages, healthcare clinics, and the like) in the Gaza Strip, established under the charismatic leadership of the handicapped schoolmaster Shaykh Aḥmad Yāsīn (killed by the Israeli army in 2004), endeared the group to others. The Brotherhood also became leaders in the majority of mosques in Gaza and came to control Gaza 's Islamic University. In the West Bank, however, the group failed to establish a strong network or find a charismatic leader; its only strongholds were in the universities. At this time, Fatah, the dominant wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and Jordan, still linked to the West Bank, encouraged the Islamist attacks on the leftists, and Israel encouraged the religious group to counter the militant nationlist leaders.
At the same time, some new Islamist groups adopted a strongly anti-Israeli discourse, arguing that Israel constituted the spearhead of Western aggression against Islam, making the liberation of Palestine a fundamentally religious question. Under the leadership of the physician Dr. Fathī Shiqāqī (1951–1995), various small groups made jihād against Israel, including initiating armed struggle, the central religious duty. In doing so, the activists claimed to be acting on the authority of Sayyid Quṭb, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader executed in 1966 and the inspiration of the Egyptian Islamic Jihād and the Islamic revolution in Iran. In 1986 and 1987, Jihād cells engaged in a series of anti-Israeli guerrilla operations.
In 1987, the whole Palestinian population mobilized itself against the Israeli occupation through the intifāḍah. The Muslim Brotherhood considered then that its survival as an associative movement dedicated to preaching depended upon its political mobilization. As the “strong arm” of the Brotherhood in the Palestinian Uprising, Hamās was created in Gaza by the physician Dr. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rantīsī (killed by the Israeli army in 2004); Salah Shihādah (killed by the Israeli army in 2002), chief of the security apparatus of the Brotherhood; and other young Brotherhood members who obtained the approval of Shaykh Yāsīn.
With the political, military, and social commitment of the Brotherhood, Hamās integrated religion and patriotism, monopolized until then by the nationalists, and secured a growing popular support. Shortly after its foundation, Hamās opened representative bureaus outside Palestine, and entered (and won) student and professional elections.
Ḥamās 's Political Involvement.
Hamās 's aims and strategies, which are very similar to those of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, are summarized in a covenant (mīthāq) published in August 1988. Palestine is declared essentially and eternally a religious trust, no part of which may be given up. Therefore, recognizing the legitimacy of the Israeli state—as the PLO did in 1988—is deemed unacceptable. Hamās leaders have nevertheless declared, in the mid-1990s, that they will accept a long-term truce in return for a complete withdrawal by Israel from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Hamās originally boycotted Palestine 's 1996 presidential and legislative elections and 2005 presidential election in the name of its condemnation of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreements. However, in 2005, Hamās participated in Palestine 's municipal elections—with the justification that its participation was in the social interest of the Palestinian people—and took control of many municipalities. In 2006 it gained the majority of seats in the Palestinian legislature, and Ismāʿīl Haniyyah (1962–), one of Hamās 's leaders in Gaza, became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.
The Hamās movement is banned by Israel and is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. After the 2004 killings of the Hamās founder Yāsīn and his successor al-Rantīsī, the identity of Hamās 's leader is not officially known. Many believe that Mahmud al-Zahhār, a Gaza physician who was Palestine 's minister of foreign affairs in 2006, leads the group. Khālid Mishʿal, living in Damascus and Qatar, is known to be the chief of its political bureau.
Bibliography
- The Palestinian Information Center (http://palestine-info.info/ar) (Arabic, English, French, Urdu, Persian, Russian, and Malay) is the nonofficial Web site of Hamās. The ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām Brigades Information Office has an official Web site (http://www.alqassam.ps) (Arabic, English).
- Abu Amr, Ziad. Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
- Chehab, Zaki. Inside Hamās: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement. London and New York: Nation Books, 2007.
- Hroub, Khaled. Hamās: Political Thought and Practice. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000.
- Hroub, Khaled. Hamās: A Beginner 's Guide. London: Pluto Press, 2006.
- Legrain, Jean-FranÇois. “Palestinian Islamisms: Patriotism as a Condition of Their Expansion.” In Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. University of Chicago Press, 1993.
- Mishal, Shaul, and Avraham Sela. The Palestinian Hamās: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
- Shadid, Mohammed. “The Muslim Brotherhood Movement in the West Bank and Gaza.” Third World Quarterly 10, no. 2 (April 1988): 658–682.
- Tamimi, Azzam. Hamās: Unwritten Chapters. London: Hurst & Company, 2007.
Jean-FranÇois Legrain
Parliamentary Reform
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmīyah), commonly known by its acronym ḥamās (meaning “zeal”), won the Palestinian legislative elections of January 25, 2006. In doing so, it became one of the first Islamic movements in the Arab world to assume majority control of a government following a series of internationally verified elections. Running under the parliamentary bloc name “Change and Reform,” Hamās won seventy-four out of the 132 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) seats, gaining a 56 percent majority position with over 42 percent of the popular vote. Hamās 's unexpected and unprecedented victory—called by some an “electoral tsunami”—ended more than four decades of political domination by Fatah, Hamās 's most formidable electoral opponent and a secular-nationalist rival. Fatah 's widespread reputation for incompetence, cronyism, and corruption was widely perceived as contributing to Hamās 's sweeping electoral victory.
The decision to participate in the 2006 PLC elections marked a transformational moment for Hamās, a twenty-year-old Palestinian Islamic nationalist movement established in the early months of the first Palestinian intifāḍah (uprising). In 1996, the group had boycotted the Palestinian legislative elections because of their affiliation with the Oslo peace process, which Hamās ideologically and militantly opposed. In March 2005, Hamās leaders reversed this oppositional stance, justifying their decision by disassociating the 2006 elections from the Oslo peace process, which was declared obsolete, and by emphasizing the exigencies and benefits of further extending its diversified array of activist work within the electoral sphere. Hamās, which had always engaged in humanitarian, social, and educational outreach alongside its militant activities, now added legislative participation to its cache of strategies. These strategies were designed to achieve two core goals: ensuring the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state and improving the plight of Palestinians within and outside of the occupied territories.
Despite Hamās 's previous rejection of electoral participation at the legislative level, it had neither opposed nor boycotted such participation at the societal, local, or municipal levels; indeed, it had vigorously participated in such elections since its founding. Hamās leaders repeatedly called for municipal-level elections during Yasir Arafat 's tenure, calls that went unheeded until shortly after his death in 2004. Once such elections were announced, Hamās immediately affirmed its participation, launched a well-orchestrated campaign, and eventually achieved numerous electoral victories in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Despite gaining fewer votes overall than Fatah in the municipal elections of 2004–2005, Hamās 's successful performance signaled two new trends within the Palestinian territories: the end of Fatah 's unilateral political domination and the beginning of Hamās 's political participation—perhaps even domination—at the highest levels of the Palestinian government.
Hamās outlined its electoral strategy and political agenda in “The 2005 Electoral Platform for Change and Reform,” a twenty-page document addressing eighteen substantive topics in roughly 8,000 words. With the exception of two topics, “Our Essential Principles” (Article 1) and “Religious Guidance and Preaching” (Article 8), the eighteen subjects addressed (i.e., domestic policy, administrative reform, legislative policy, educational policy, citizens ’ rights and liberties) are typical of ordinary secular political movements, both Western and non-Western. The text is notable for its minimal religious and militant content, expansive scope, substantive detail, and predominantly mundane tone, all of which stand in stark contrast to the more inflammatory rhetoric and sectarian-militant phraseology characteristic of older Hamas publications, especially its 1988 founding charter. Showing a newfound level of political sophistication and intellectual maturity, Hamās 's Change and Reform agenda represented a new phase in the movement 's ideological evolution; namely, an embrace of legislative and electoral politics as additional ways to effect change and ultimately bring about an independent Palestinian state.
Mired in controversy since its January 2006 electoral victory, the Change and Reform government led by Hamās has been unable to implement the program outlined in its Electoral Platform. Preoccupied with the ever-present threat of civil war, the increasingly dire effects of an international economic boycott imposed by Israel and the International Quartet (the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia), the detention of many of its elected members by Israel, and intensified Israeli retaliatory incursions into the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the Hamās government has been unable to test or implement substantive components of its Change and Reform agenda.
Instead, during its first year in power, the Hamās-led government focused almost exclusively on political survival, leading to numerous attempts to forge a unity government with other Palestinian political factions. After many failed attempts to do so, a national unity government was finally announced, with the assistance of Saudi mediation, in March 2007. Despite hopes that this would lead to the cessation of both the international economic boycott and domestic factional infighting, internal violence and ongoing clashes with the Israeli army escalated, the economic boycott persisted, and international criticism of Hamās 's involvement in politics continued to mount.
By June 2007, domestic infighting led to the demise of the national unity government formed and headed by Hamās and resulted in an unprecedented phenomenon—a military and political split between the Gaza Strip and West Bank, with Hamās assuming control of the Gaza Strip and Fatah assuming control of the West Bank. In response to Hamās 's military takeover of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the national unity government, replaced the Hamās-appointed prime minister, outlawed Hamās 's newly appointed security force (the so-called Executive Force), and declared a state of emergency. This internal disunity was exacerbated by the response of Israel and many Western nations, most notably the United States, which moved to further isolate Hamās, including its democratically elected politicians, while financially, politically, and militarily bolstering the Fatah-affiliated Abbas. Consequently, Hamās 's parliamentary bloc remained not only excommunicated but outlawed from participating in the Palestinian government it legitimately and democratically gained access to in the elections of January 2006.
Bibliography
- Brown, Nathon J. “Aftermath of the Hamas Tsunami.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Feb. 2006. http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/ index.cfm?fa=view&id=17975&prog=zgp&proj=zdrl,zme.
- Fuller, Graham E. “Hamas Comes to Power: Breakthrough or Setback?” Strategic Insights 5, no. 2 (February 2006).
- Hroub, Khaled. “A New Hamas Through its New Documents.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 35, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 6–27.
- Hroub, Khaled. Hamas: A Beginner 's Guide. London, and Ann Arbor, Mich., 2006.
- Hroub, Khaled. Hamas: Political Thought and Practice. Washington, D.C., 2000.
- International Crisis Group. After Mecca: Engaging Hamās. Report No. 62. International Crisis Group. Brussels, 2007.
- International Crisis Group. “Enter Hamas: The Challenges of Political Integration.” Report No. 49. International Crisis Group, Brussels, 2006.
- Malka, Haim. “Forcing Choices: Testing the Transformation of Hamas.” The Washington Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Autumn 2005).
- Milton-Edwards, Beverly. “Prepared for Power: Hamas, Governance, and Conflict.” Civil Wars 7, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 311–329.
- Mishal, Shaul, and Abraham Sela. The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence. New York, 2006.
- Roy, Sara. “Hamas and the Transformation(s) of Political Islam in Palestine.” Current History 101, no. 13 (January 2003): 13–20.
- Tamimi, Azzam. Hamas: Unwritten Chapter. London, 2006.
Chrystie Flournoy Swiney
