‘Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters’

by Ann Garrison

The West’s dominant media tells us little about Hamas’ history or ideology, relying instead on “terrorist” clichés. This new book cuts through them to explain.

What do we know about Palestine’s Islamic Resistance Movement, commonly known as Hamas? I read independent media every day, but even so, a year after Al-Aqsa Flood and the onset of the Gaza genocide, I found I knew very little. Only that: 

• They are a Palestinian nationalist movement;
• The Palestinian people shocked the West by electing them in 2006; 
• Their political wing is the government in Gaza, but not the West Bank;
• On Oct. 7, 2023, their military wing and its allies launched Al-Aqsa Flood, one battle in the 76-year war that began with the Nakba, the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians after Israel declared itself a state; 
• Israel assassinated their lead negotiator in Tehran; 
• They are part of what’s called “the Axis of Resistance,” which includes Iran, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Ansar Allah (Houthis) in Yemen, and others in Syria and Iraq; and
• Their military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has not succumbed to Israel after more than a year’s fighting. 

In short, I knew very little before reading “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters,” a new title from OR Books. I knew nothing of Hamas’s history or ideology. I didn’t know that it was a political movement born of the Palestinian branch of the region-wide Muslim Brotherhood at the outset of the First Intifada in 1987. I didn’t know that, as Helena Cobban writes, the Western media vilification of Hamas prevented diplomatic initiatives that could have long ago led to peace based on international law. 

This book takes the form of transcriptions of podcast interviews with five world-class experts and is, as such, easy to read. Conversation is often more readily understood than exposition.

It also includes excerpts of Hamas’s founding statement, excerpts of its 2017 “Document of General Principles and Policies,” the “Prisoner’s Document” and other primary source materials, plus several summary explainers and a timeline. I got the timeline on my phone so I could scroll back through it for reference as I read the book.

Rami G. Khouri, longtime managing editor of the The Jordan Times , and Helena Cobban, a former columnist for the The Christian Science Monitor, conducted the interviews in a podcast series organized by the small non-profit Just World Educational.

These are highlights of those interviews, not comprehensive summaries. I hope that none of those interviewed will feel I distorted their viewpoints by my selections.

Dr. Paola Caridi

Dr. Paola Caridi is a historian and journalist who reported from Jerusalem and other parts of the Arab World from 2002-2013 and wrote “Hamas: From Resistance to Government.”

She describes Hamas as an Islamist political movement that has used different tools, political, armed struggle and even terrorism. She also says that it’s pragmatic and capable of negotiation, but within a “very rigid organizational structure, and a very rigid decisional process” involving its four constituencies in the West Bank, Gaza, abroad (leadership and activists in the refugee camps), and the prisons. Rigid seems to mean that Hamas can’t act quickly, without agreement across the four constituencies, but this makes it sound fundamentally democratic. “When they decided to stop the suicide attacks,” she says, “there was a sort of poll among the constituencies.”

She divides the life of Hamas into three chapters. The first started with the First Intifada, the series of 1987-1991 protests against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. The second, which included armed struggle and suicide bombing, began after American Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1994. 

“And then in 2005,” she says, “there was the most important chapter from the political point of view and that was a suspension of the suicide attacks and the idea of participating in the Palestinian Authority (PA) elections for the parliament of the Palestinian Authority. That was a big change because, in a way, it recognized the PA through the parliamentary elections, and nobody in the international community stopped this idea.”

Hamas won, to the horror of Israel, Fatah and the US, who initiated the 2007 coup, which succeeded in putting Fatah back in power in the West Bank, but not in Gaza.  “The mistake of the international community,” Caridi says, “was not in accepting Hamas as part of the elections, but in not accepting Hamas as the winner.” Hamas had at that point tacitly accepted the two-state solution by participating in the election, and accepting Hamas’s victory could have been a step towards a politically negotiated outcome.

Fifty percent of the Palestinian population may be under 30, says Rami Khouri, asking Caridi how they are evolving. She responds that they have been radicalized by the failure of the 2006 elections, the split between the West Bank and Gaza, between Fatah and Hamas, and that they are now committed to muqawama, resistance.

How does she see the various power constituencies or power centers within Hamas with regard to proposals for after Israel’s war on Gaza? This is a difficult question to comprehend because the end of Israel’s war on Gaza seems nowhere in sight, and Caridi herself says that it’s very difficult to answer. She describes the various pressures within the Hamas constituencies, including pressure for an end to the killing from within Gaza, and calls this “a very very delicate moment for the organizational structure of Hamas and the balance of power.”

She also says she’s heartened that Israel and Palestine are now part of a far larger national and international conversation. “It’s an unprecedented moment where Palestine has become a domestic issue, not only in terms of the public debate, but could influence the election in November. We’ve never had this situation.”

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Dr. Khaled Hroub is a senior research fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University in Qatar. His books include “Hamas: Political Thought and Practice” and “Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide,” and he has a book coming out later this year on the Gaza tunnels.

How does he see the two main strands in Hamas’s thinking, the Islamist and the Palestinian nationalist?

Hamas, he says, is multifaceted – a political party, a charity and a military organization – in which the Islamist and nationalist strands can’t be disentangled for long. The nationalist strand is manifest when Hamas is talking to governments, but the Islamist strand takes the lead when it is talking to the Muslim constituency globally. 

For the sake of argument, he is willing to consider the two binary elements, nationalist and Islamist, and to say that, over the past two or three decades, the nationalist force has been increasing at the expense of the religious tendency. 

Hamas, Helene Cobban notes, fights alongside the secular Popular Front, which includes Palestinian Christians, as ISIS would not. 

Hroub thinks that “what marginalizes or centralizes any political movement within the Palestinian colonized scene is resistance.” Hence, when Fatah was organized in the 1960s, “the main issue, the main slogan, the main mantra was resistance.” However, Fatah “put resistance aside” when it negotiated the 1993 Oslo Accords, which Hamas opposed absolutely, and Hamas then became the group identified with resistance, which may have explained its success in the 2006 election.

Do Palestinians in Gaza blame Hamas for what has happened to them since Oct. 7?  Or do they see this as the inevitable cost of resistance? Do they feel that no one has ever freed themselves from occupation without going through something like this?

This is one of the most interesting questions raised in the interview with Dr. Hroub. It has also been widely asked by non-Palestinians and non-Muslims outside Palestine. What did Hamas expect to happen? Could anything be worth this? I’ve asked this question myself, but not to condemn, and not as a rhetorical question with an implied answer. I’ve simply asked it in horror, as many others have. Could anything be worth this?

Hroub says that we will have to wait to see any surveys or perhaps even an election to know how the people in Gaza will judge what Hamas has done, what Oct. 7 has brought upon them.

There is a significant segment of Palestinians in the Strip, he says, who do blame Hamas in part for the magnitude of pain and destruction. This is such brutality that you can’t expect them not to cry out to blame all people left, right and center – the situation, the occupation, and even Hamas. Hamas has to justify and answer many questions.

He cites a poll, however, in which Palestinians in the West Bank indicate 70% support for Hamas, seeing it in the context of resistance to occupation.

Could Hamas regain trust and rule after the end of the genocidal attack?  

Hamas has never been interested in ruling the Strip exclusively, he says. They were interested in a kind of coalition. Even before Oct. 7, there were signs that Hamas was fatigued with managing every detail in the Strip. Electoral victory had forced what was essentially a resistance movement to administrate. 

At this point, with no end in sight, it’s difficult to imagine life after the genocide, but Hroub believes we may see a new administration in which Hamas is an element but sharing the burden of administration with other parties.

Dr. Jeroen Gunning

Dr. Jeroen Gunning is a professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Conflict Studies on the faculty of King’s College, London, a visiting professor at both Aarhus University and the London School of Economics, and the author of “Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence.” He also co-founded the field of critical terrorism studies in response to 9/11 and the turn to a terrorist narrative.

Why, Rami Khouri asks him, is it important to understand Hamas? And what is the main point he’d like to make? 

It matters, Gunning says, “because deliberate dis- and misinformation has been used to justify Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and its stated goal of eradicating Hamas at all costs.” However, eradicating Hamas “would require a full genocide because the majority of Palestinians would support Hamas actions in spite of Israel’s genocidal response.” 

Outlandish claims about Hamas beheading babies were readily accepted in the West, showing that Orientalist and Islamophobic prejudices and anti-Arab racism are still very much alive.

“Whether Hamas has grassroots support and would participate in elections matters both for assessing what happened and looking to the future.”

It’s also important to understand, he says, what’s happened on the Israeli side, whether, for instance, Israeli armed forces killed significant numbers of their own citizens on Oct. 7, because that changes the narrative.

What Palestinians think matters as Israeli, US and EU elites discuss plans for their future. In these Western elites’ narrative, “Palestinians are allowed to have their own state only if the government is made up of pliant technocrats that do Israel’s and the U.S. bidding.”

What is the relationship of his work on Hamas to the field of critical terrorism studies?

The terrorism narrative, he says, doesn’t explain very much, and it has disastrous political consequences, all of which apply to Hamas. It strips violence of its historical and political context, portraying it as coming out of nowhere and delegitimizing anyone who tries to put it in context. “Remember the Israeli ambassador’s anger at the statement by UN Secretary General Guterres that Hamas’s violence did not come out of nowhere.” 

The terrorism narrative also means that there’s no political solution, only a military or surveillance policing solution. It is “a colonial echo.” 

What’s the history of Hamas in negotiations?

Gunning gives many examples. It negotiated with Fatah, he says, during the lead up to the 1996 Palestinian elections. It negotiated a short-lived ceasefire in 2003, then again in 2005, with Fatah, in the lead up to the second national election in 2006. Every war on Gaza since 2006 has ended with a ceasefire indirectly negotiated between Hamas and Israel. There have also been hostage negotiations. Hamas has also attempted to negotiate a national unity government with Fatah since 2006, making increasingly significant concessions.

It has even indicated that its military wing, the Qassam Brigades, could be disarmed if there were a permanent ceasefire, an end of the blockade of Gaza, and a Palestinian state.

These negotiations are not the undertakings of innate terrorists. Gunning cites other anti-colonial histories in which anti-colonial movements have laid down their arms and become political parties after winning independence. 

What does the Oct. 7 attack tell you about how Hamas operates? Rami Khouri asks. They must have expected a huge reprisal. Have they alienated a lot of people who have suffered or left?

They had to know, Gunning says, that “Israel’s response would have been more brutal than anything before.” He cites Hamas leaders who have talked about wanting to change the equation to show that Israel was not invincible, that Palestinians would not be forgotten. He also cites a poll taken seven months into the war on Gaza, in which 71 percent of Gazans believe that Hamas’s decision to attack was the correct one.

Mouin Rabbani 

Mouin Rabbani is the Dutch Palestinian co-editor of Jadaliyya and a former senior analyst on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group. He has also served as principal political affairs officer with the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria.

Rami Khouri asks him about the nature of Hamas and whether it coordinates with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and other smaller groups. 

Rabbani answers that these groups have coordinated more closely in recent years, particularly in the Gaza Strip. They have established “a joint operations room, where they actively coordinate” and plan joint operations. Hamas, however, is by far the largest armed force and the best armed, so we can assume that it ultimately makes key decisions. 

How has Hamas survived massive attacks by the Israelis?

There is no definitive response, says Rabbani. However, Israel is a particularly effective killing machine, reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble and killing tens of thousands of people, but it’s not particularly effective at ground operations, seizing and holding territory.

Before Oct. 7, Hamas prepared for a prolonged Israeli onslaught, and they still seem to have the capacity to manufacture many of their rudimentary weapons within the Gaza Strip. 

They’re also fighting on their own turf, defending their own territory against a foreign invader.

Israel’s claims about how many thousands of Hamas and other Palestinian armed militants it has killed and captured are clearly exaggerated, and the sheer savagery of Israel’s onslaught has helped the armed groups recruit.

Hamas has also built an extensive tunnel system where they are capable of withstanding massive Israeli air raids. Anticipating Israel’s response to Oct. 7, they managed to dig significantly deeper than Israel’s bombs could reach.

Have they, like Hizbullah, developed more sophisticated weaponry over the years?

Clearly yes. They now have not only the capacity to use drones, but also electronic warfare systems that have allowed them to down a number of Israeli drones intact. Their missile and rocket systems could barely reach the boundaries of Gaza and Israel during the Second Intifada, but now they can reach Beersheba, Tel Aviv, north of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv airport and so on.

These are still, however, fairly rudimentary weapons and an “absolute shadow” of Hizbullah’s.

There are reports that Hamas was able to bring in quite a few more advanced weapons from Libya after the Libyan state’s collapse, and that they’ve received supplies from Hizbullah and Iran, as well as training and advice, but their military capabilities still don’t approach those of, for example, Hizbullah. 

Helene Cobban notes that people in Washington talk about “day after” plans based on the annihilation of Hamas in Gaza, and preferably worldwide, and the restoration of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. What, she asks, does Rabbani think of these plans?

They fail to see, he responds, that Israel’s plan is making the Gaza Strip unfit for human habitation, with a degree of chaos and anarchy that will make Gazans “compelled to leave by hook or crook.” 

These American plans, he says, are of no interest to the Israelis.

Also, these plans cannot be imposed because even if Hamas can be driven out of the Gaza Strip, it’s a movement with roots wherever there are significant concentrations of Palestinians.

These Washington planners are also unrealistic in expecting other nations to keep paying to rebuild the Strip with no expectation that they won’t have to do it again in another five years.

Dr. Azzam Tamimi

Dr. Azzam Tamimi is a British-Palestinian-Jordanian academic and political thinker who headed the Institute of Islamic Political Thought until 2008. He is the author of “Power-Sharing Islam,” “Islam and Secularism in the Middle East” and “Hamas: A History from Within.” He is currently the editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Hiwar (“Dialogue”) TV channel.

Several other members of the Just World Educational board joined Helene Cobban and Rami Khouri for their conversation with him.

Rami Khouri asked Dr. Tamimi what he thinks of the intentions of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas who breached the Israeli defenses and led the Oct. 7 military operation in southern Israel. What was its aim?

Dr. Tamimi says that Hamas leaders didn’t expect it to be such a big operation. Their goal had been to capture a few Israeli soldiers to exchange for Palestinian prisoners. You can hardly find a Palestinian family in Gaza or the West Bank who doesn’t have a family member incarcerated by the Israelis, so this is always a very important issue, and history has shown that a hostage swap is the only way to get Israel to release any of them.

The other motivation, of course, was that Israel had long been suffocating Gaza.

The Qassam Brigades, he says, are highly disciplined, and probably some of the things they’re accused of, if they ever took place, were in fact perpetrated by others, including the Israelis themselves. Most of the people shot were actually shot by helicopter gunships. And some of the houses in which hostages were held inside the kibbutz were bombarded with Israeli tank fire.

“Many of the hostages taken into Gaza were not actually taken by Al-Qassam fighters but by ordinary citizens who crossed the line after the fence came down and were in a sense jubilant that they managed to set foot on the homeland of their ancestors.” They were, unlike the Qassam Brigades, behaving in an undisciplined, “disorderly” manner.

What about the Israeli civilians who were killed or taken hostage? Were they targeted specifically or just randomly taken hostage?

Tamimi answers that Hamas’s target was the army or people in the army, and that the children and elderly who were taken into Gaza were taken by ordinary Gazans. Hamas, from day one, asked for an international commission to investigate what happened, because the Israelis were claiming all sorts of things to justify their hugely disproportionate response in Gaza.

Hamas said that they would be willing to answer to anything an international commission determined they had done, but Israel refused as it seized on the event to crush Gaza.

Just World Educational board member Rick Sterling noted that the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants against two Israeli leaders and three Hamas leaders. What did Tamimi think of that and could adjudication be fair?

Tamimi noted that Hamas responded by saying this is unfair because it equates aggressors and victims, but it’s not surprising that the prosecutor added Hamas names to the request to make it more palatable to the so-called international community, especially the US. Neither the US nor the Israelis accepted it anyway, and it was probably more symbolic than practical.

How does Tamimi assess the effects of Oct. 7?

Oct. 7 is, he said, having a huge impact on the world’s perception of the conflict, which has always been portrayed as religious or communal, or a conflict over territory, or a conflict resulting from Arab or Islamic anti-Semitism or some such. Now young people, particularly university students in the US and elsewhere in the world, are going to libraries and going online looking for information and discovering that this is actually another Western colonial project and that the Palestinians have been victims all along. 

Not only that, he believes that the initial solidarity with Gaza is slowly turning into a revolution against the current world order whose leaders in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in the West have proven that this world order and all their talk of democracy and human rights is based on hypocrisy and double standards.

I have to ask whether the hypocrisy of that world order hasn’t already been exposed over and over again, most vividly in recent memory by the Iraq War, which 20 million people worldwide protested but failed to stop. I nevertheless hope he’s right that this – the first live-streamed genocide – will indeed be a tipping point.

In conclusion, I’d like to repeat that these are only highlights of five much longer and more enlightening conversations collected to encourage readers to order “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters.”

Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can help support her work on Patreon.

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