Understanding Hamas: And Why That Matters

About Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters

In Spring 2024 Just World Educational, a small non-profit based in the United States, launched a project to engage five world-class experts in public conversations on the history and development of Hamas. This book presents the records of those conversations, along with key documentation on the development of Hamas and other materials chosen to make the book accessible to readers who may or may not have a deep fund of knowledge on Palestinian history.

Our five experts have all spent decades researching, and writing very informatively about, Hamas. They are:

• Dr. Paola Caridi, a former journalist who reported from Jerusalem, 2003–2, and author of Hamas: From Resistance to Government.

• Dr. Khaled Hroub, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University in Qatar, and author of Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide.

• Mouin Rabbani, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya and a former senior analyst on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group.

• Dr. Jeroen Gunning, a professor of Middle Eastern Politics at King’s College London, author of a 2010 book on Hamas, and co-founder of the field of critical terrorism studies.

• Dr. Azzam Tamimi, a British-Palestinian-Jordanian political thinker and author of several books including Hamas: A History from Within.

Hosting the conversations were two members of the Just World Ed board who also have long experience of studying Hamas: Helena Cobban, a former columnist for The Christian Science Monitor, and Rami G. Khouri, a longtime Managing Editor of The Jordan Times.

We have designed Understanding Hamas to be as engaging as possible for concerned citizens who share our conviction that the misery of the Palestinian people can be ended only through fact-based and far-sighted political/diplomatic action that includes all relevant Palestinian parties.

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"In a world of information warfare, in which little is true and every slur plausible, reliable access to facts is invaluable... Understanding Hamas and Why that Matters is a primer that tells it like it is—how Hamas came to be, how it relates to other movements seeking self-determination for Palestinians, and its position on negotiated coexistence with the State of Israel. Hamas has a key role to play in determining the future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. To understand what is and isn’t possible, read this book!"

—Amb. Chas W. Freeman, Jr.

retired U.S. diplomat, expert in West Asian, East Asian, and security affairs

The powerful Israeli propaganda machine systematically portrays Hamas as a bunch of Islamic fanatics and terrorists hell-bent on the destruction of the Jewish state. This volume is a most welcome corrective to those stereotypes. Here a group of real experts offer a nuanced, historically-based, and strikingly fair-minded account of the ideology and practice of Hamas... Their book should be required reading for all Western policy-makers.

—Avi Shlaim

Emeritus Professor of IR at the University of Oxford, author, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

What could be more fascinating and relevant right now than a book about Hamas that gets beyond the ‘Hamas is a terrorist group’ catchphrase to explore Hamas’s critical shift from social and religious activism to serious national-political engagement; the delicate balance between Hamas’s political and military wings; and its transformation from early anti-Jewish tendencies to a stance that differentiates between Judaism and Zionism. I couldn’t put it down and highly recommend it to anyone concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people.

—Medea Benjamin

co-founder, CODEPINK, co-author, NATO: What You Need to Know

"Understanding Hamas is a truly important book that should be read by everyone seriously interested in understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel and its Western supporters have done us all a disservice by demonizing Hamas and making it almost impossible to have a reasoned discussion about the movement. One does not have to like Hamas, but it is imperative to understand what it is really all about. This book is a giant step in that direction."

—John J. Mearsheimer

Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science,

University of Chicago

These conversations offer critical views about the history, ideology of Hamas as well as the strategic logic behind its actions. Countering the dominant narrative in the Western media, the experts contextualize Hamas within the anti-colonial struggle, making the case for engaging the movement as opposed to trying to ostracize it and destroy it. The book provides plenty of food for thought.

—Fawaz A. Gerges

Professor of International Relations, LSE, author, What Really Went Wrong:

The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East

"Few political organizations have been as demonized in Western media as Hamas. For those seeking to cut through the haze of war propaganda, Understanding Hamas offers an accessible and thorough primer grounded in genuine expertise on the history of Palestinian resistance."

—Max Blumenthal

editor-in-chief, The Grayzone, author, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

A most vital and timely book. No one can deal with the Palestinian Question, or with Gaza, without understanding and coming to terms with Hamas. The current demonization of Hamas and the official taboo against talking to them has been used to justify daily atrocities, and even the ongoing genocide. Anyone interested in peace between Palestinians and Israelis needs to read this book, and then take action to bring Hamas into the conversation.

—Jonathan Kuttab

human rights activist,

Executive Director, Friends of Sabeel, North America

©2024 Just World Educational

Published by OR Books, New York and London

Visit our website at www.orbooks.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in nay form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

First printing 2024

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Lapiz Digital Services.

paperback ISBN 9781682196342 • ebook ISBN 9781682196359

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Helena Cobban and Rami G. Khouri

Timeline of key points in Hamas’s history

Chapter 1. Conversation with Dr. Paola Caridi

Chapter 2. Conversation with Dr. Khaled Hroub

Chapter 3. Conversation with Dr. Jeroen Gunning

Chapter 4. Conversation with Mouin Rabbani

Chapter 5. Conversation with Dr. Azzam Tamimi

Appendix 1: The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), excerpts

Appendix 2: U.S. National Democratic Institute Final Report on the Palestinian Legislative Council Elections, excerpts

Appendix 3: Hamas’s 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies, excerpts

Appendix 4: Explainer: How Hamas Ended Up on U.S. List of Terrorist Groups

Appendix 5: Hamas’s Our Narrative... Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, excerpts

Appendix 6: Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Public Opinion Poll No. 92, excerpts

List of People

Glossary of political terms

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Introduction

For many years now, and especially since October 7, 2023, Israel’s leaders and their supporters worldwide have kept up an often harsh campaign aimed at demonizing the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, as part of their effort to win broad international backing for their push to destroy the movement. This demonization echoes how earlier generations of Israelis tried for decades to discredit the (more secular) Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO—though in 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin concluded a landmark, Norwegian-mediated agreement with the PLO that gave some Palestinians a measure of self-government in some of the territories that Israel occupied in 1967. (That was supposed to lead to eventual political independence, which never happened.) Israel’s demonization of Hamas also echoed how numerous European and American leaders earlier tried to excoriate and exclude movements across the Global South, such as in Vietnam, Algeria, or Kenya, that battled to throw off colonial rule and win their national independence.

Such demonization efforts impede diplomacy and keep the populations suffering colonial rule or military occupation trapped for decades in devastating conflict at the hands of their far more violent and heavily armed oppressors. This has certainly been the case in Palestine, too, as we witness daily.

These demonization campaigns always rely on flattening or eliding the substantial and relevant political history of the targeted national liberation movements. In Vietnam, people who resisted the U.S. military were widely dismissed as gooks. In Kenya, the British military painted organizers of the Mau Mau Land and Freedom Party as violent and primitive harbingers of pure evil... In more recent times, Israeli, American, and many European governments have described most movements that resist their diktats as terrorists, and heighten people’s fears by describing resisters in Muslim lands as jihadi terrorists.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and its allies from Gaza launched a multi-pronged, technically daring attack to break out of the tight Israeli siege that had suffocated the territory and its people for decades. They over-ran several of the permanent Israeli military command posts around Gaza; took captive many key military personnel staffing those command posts, along with many civilians; and dealt a punishing gut-punch to Israel’s longstanding national security concept, from which the country’s leadership has yet to recover. Hamas-led forces and other Palestinians who poured through Gaza’s now-breached fence also attacked kibbutzim and other civilian targets in Israel and, according to a UN commission of inquiry, deliberately killed many civilians. Not surprisingly, as Israel’s leaders scrambled to react to that blow they also orchestrated broad information campaigns built around two elements: amplifying the accusations (some or many of which later proved unfounded) that Hamas and its allies had committed several types of gross atrocity during the breakout; and a campaign to hide the degree to which the Israeli military had itself significantly harmed Israeli civilians in its fierce and often chaotic battles to regain control of the areas around Gaza.¹

At the U.N. Security Council and all around the world, Israelis and their allies called loudly on all parties to Condemn Hamas—in order to shut down any deeper consideration of how Israel’s decades-long oppression of Palestine’s indigenous Arab majority had led to the events of October 7, or of how any successful diplomacy to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict must necessarily involve including all the major Palestinian political currents, rather than continuing the decades-long effort to demonize and exclude Hamas and its significant role in national politics.

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In Spring of 2024, the board of Just World Educational decided to challenge head-on the reluctance of so many North Americans—including many purportedly pro-Palestinian groupings—who hesitated to even start to discuss Hamas. We built on the expertise we had gained from launching probing public-education campaigns on other crucial global issues,² and we organized and presented a new campaign titled Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters. Its first phase comprised webinar-based conversations that the two of us conducted with five deeply respected, independent scholarly experts on the history and development of Hamas, which we presented to a global audience during May 2024.

The five experts whose immense, first-hand, knowledge of Hamas defined our project included three Palestinian academics now resident outside Palestine and two European experts who spent years in Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank during the early and later years of Hamas. All five have researched the Hamas movement deeply, including by interviewing its activists and leaders at many levels.

These experts were:

Dr. Paola Caridi, a Lecturer at the University of Palermo, and formerly a journalist who reported from Cairo, 2001-03, and Jerusalem, 2003-12. The second of Dr. Caridi’s three books was Hamas: From Resistance to Government, which appeared in Italian in 2009, and in English in 2012. (An updated version was released last October 10.)

Dr. Khaled Hroub, 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. Hroub’s numerous books include Hamas: Political Thought and Practice and Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide.

Dr. Jeroen Gunning, a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Conflict Studies at King’s College London and a Visiting Professor at both Aarhus University and the London School of Economics. Gunning is one of the founders of the field of critical terrorism studies and has taught and advised policy-makers and numerous civil society organizations.

Mouin Rabbani, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, Managing Editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and a Contributing Editor of Middle East Report. Among other previous positions, Rabbani served as Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group.

Dr. Azzam Tamimi, a British-Palestinian-Jordanian academic and political thinker who headed the Institute of Islamic Political Thought until 2008. Tamimi has written several books on Middle Eastern and Islamic politics, including Power-Sharing Islam, Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, and Hamas: A History from Within.

During the last of our public conversations, the one with Dr. Azzam Tamimi, we were pleased to be joined by three of our Just World Ed board colleagues: Nora Barrows-Friedman, an experienced radio journalist and author who is a staff editor with Electronic Intifada; Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, a veteran struggler for civil and political rights worldwide and Professor Emerita of African American Religions & Islamic Studies at the University of Florida; and Rick Sterling, a writer and activist who is board chair of California’s Mount Diablo Peace & Justice Center. (Find fuller bios for all Just World Ed’s board members, including the two of us, at justworldeducational.org/about/.)

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During our public conversations we explored many aspects of Hamas’s history and practice that are little known by the general publics in North America and Western Europe, and little (if at all) understood by their political leaders. These included:

• Hamas’s origins within a Palestinian Islamist movement, the Palestinian chapter of the region-wide Muslim Brotherhood movement, that had earlier been politically quietist, focusing on social and religious issues rather than on political engagement.

• The factors that in 1987 drove Hamas’s founders to start to pursue serious, national-political activism and to formally found this movement, while it also remained deeply engaged in many longstanding charitable and community-service projects across Palestine.

• The broad geographic spread of Hamas’s networks, which span Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and all the other parts of West Asia (the Middle East) where large concentrations of Palestinian refugees live and work.

• The balance between the political and military-resistance wings within Hamas, and how at different times decisions have been made (and followed) to launch or to end particular forms of militant activity.

• The evolution of Hamas’s political thought, from views that in 1987-88 still retained a strong emphasis on piety and presented marked anti-Jewish tendencies, to views that were expressed and endorsed in 2017 that were much more evidently national-political and went to pains to distance the movement from anti-Semitism and to draw a clear distinction between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a colonial-political project.

• Continuities and discontinuities between the program and path of action of Hamas over the years and those that the PLO leaders had earlier taken; and the complex, sometimes fraught but never binary, course of relations between these strands of the Palestinian national movement.

• Hamas’s practice of maintaining alliances with others in the Palestinian movement who do not share its strongly Islamist leadings but who do share its liberation and resistance priorities within the nationalist political arena.

• The strong focus within the Palestinian body politic on the need to free the thousands of Palestinians, including scores of respected political leaders, who have been held in Israeli jails; and linked with this, the deeply respected role that imprisoned Palestinian leaders and activists hold within Palestinian nationalist politics.

• The relationships that Hamas has pursued with other state and non-state actors in West Asia including members of the Axis of Resistance that includes Iran, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Ansar Allah (Houthis) in Yemen, and others in Syria and Iraq.

• Hamas’s support for women’s rights and empowerment; its views on women’s place in society; and its views and practice on other social issues.

• Hamas’s legacy of participating in elections in Palestine—at the OPTs-wide level in 2006, and in many more local/ sectoral races at other times; and the broad degree of political support that the movement and its leaders have continued to enjoy in the Gaza Strip and also in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem.)

• The policies that Hamas and its leaders have pursued to integrate their movement into the broader umbrella structure of the PLO.

• Whether and under what circumstances Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel; or conversely, whether and under what circumstances it might be open to supporting (or possibly even participating in) the kind of negotiations the international community has called for since 1967, that would result in two states living side-by-side within the area of British Mandate Palestine—one, the Jewish-majority State of Israel, and the other, a Palestinian Arab state.

We hope that we have piqued your interest and motivated you to read the rest of this book in order to gain a richer, more historically based, and multi-dimensional understanding of this important movement in Palestinian public life than the one peddled so broadly by the corporate media in Western countries.

* * *

As we indicated above, the initial format of this Understanding Hamas project was planned to be an Online Learning Hub, similar to the ones Just World Educational had earlier presented on our website, on other issues. Thus, as we completed each of our five Public Conversations on Hamas in May 2024, we presented their multimedia records (video, audio, speedy transcript) on the Online Learning Hub for this project, along with some other supporting materials;³ and we have been very pleased to see the viewership numbers that these online resources speedily achieved. Several of the people who read the transcripts on the website remarked that, even in the barely edited versions in which they appeared there, they had found them engaging, informative, and valuable. That was what persuaded us to produce a slightly better edited version of the transcripts and pull them together in this book. We cut out some of the organizational/fundraising portions of the earlier transcripts but tried to keep largely intact the substance and flow of the very rich conversations we had had with our Guest Experts. Then at the back of this book, we appended some key texts from and on Hamas, a Glossary of Political Terms, a short bibliography, and other materials. We hope that these will (a) make the book accessible for a broad range of readers including non-specialists, and (b) provide first signposts for further research for those interested in pursuing that. We