From its establishment in 1987 through today’s sneak attack, Hamas has sought to destroy Israel.
We are still receiving initial reports, but it appears that at around 6:30 a.m. Jerusalem time, as Israelis were awaking on the sabbath during a holy-day observance, Hamas launched a large-scale sneak attack on the 50th anniversary of the October 6, 1973, sneak attack that launched the Yom Kippur War. Hamas is the Palestinian jihadist branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (the Society of the Muslim Brothers, often referred to as the Ikhwan – its Arabic name is Jamā’at al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn). My 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, is about the Brotherhood and its infiltration of the West, often in collaboration with the transnational-progressive Left. In it, I recounted the emergence of Hamas:
In late 1987, a new injection of energy and urgency coursed through the Brotherhood movement. The Intifada was launched, stirring visions of that fondest Islamist wish: annihilation of the “Zionist entity.”
The siege was ignited by two unconnected events in the powder keg of Gaza: the December 6 murder of an Israeli, followed four days later by a tragic car accident, in which four Palestinians lost their lives. Falsely but unrelentingly, the accident was hyped as a revenge killing. Skirmishes broke out and quickly spilled into the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The violence, a roller-coaster of lulls and explosions, lasted over six years.
Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat well understood the fervor of Islam, having spent his youth in its milieu of Jew-hatred. As an engineering student in Cairo during World War II, he’d been powerfully influenced by Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem (and probably a blood relative of Arafat’s). Husseini had aligned with Hitler and schemed from Berlin to import the Führer’s genocidal program to the Holy Land.
Yet the fully formed Arafat was a Marxist totalitarian in the Nasserite mold. To be sure, he made opportunistic use of jihadist rhetoric and imagery. The constitution of his PLO faction, Fatah, casts the liberation of “Palestine” as a “religious” obligation (at least in part), and requires members to pledge their loyalty before Allah. But Arafat’s overall program was, at most, a simulacrum of Islam, bearing more the stamp of Moscow than Mecca. In “Palestine,” deemed by Islamists to be Muslim territory and thus an obligatory field of jihad against the infidels, the Saudi-backed Brothers were certain they could do better. Thus, they formed their own faction, Hamas.
HAMAS is a transliteral acronym for “Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya,” meaning the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” The invocation of “resistance” is noteworthy. The Saudis, the Ikhwan (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood), and other Islamists often effect condemnations of “terrorism.” What they mean, though, is “terrorism” as they define it. That definition does not include the “defensive” use of force whenever “Islam is under siege.” That brand of savagery is called “resistance.” In carrying it out, Islamists reserve the right to decide for themselves what constitutes “defense” and when “Islam is under siege” — an Israeli walking into a coffee shop in Tel Aviv or an American soldier protecting an Islamic school in Kandahar may not realize that, in so doing, they are besieging Islam. Thus, the way this game works, any act of terrorism, no matter how offensive and brutal, can be rationalized as “resistance.” The condemnation of “terrorism” by poseurs who lionize “resistance” is worse than meaningless. It is strategic deceit in the service of the global Islamist project.
Officially, Hamas came into being in mid-December 1987. Yet, as Matthew Levitt relates in Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas sprang had been boring its roots into Palestinian soil for decades. In Gaza, under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s thumb, the Ikhwan became more secretive and hostile. On the west and east banks of the Jordan River, the Brothers developed “an equivocal relationship” with the Jordanian monarchy.
Two longtime Brotherhood hands, Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Azziz al-Rantisi, are credited with establishing Hamas. Yassin had been rendered blind and paraplegic by a childhood accident. He was thus unable to complete his studies at al-Azhar University in Cairo (the cradle of Sunni sharia Islamic jurisprudence for over a millennium); his followers nevertheless bestowed the honorific “Sheikh” on him. Rantisi, a medical doctor, discovered the Ikhwan while attending university in Alexandria. Hence his avocation, the destruction of Israel, became his life’s calling.
That avocation has always been Hamas’s top priority. Leftists and dreamy internationalists seize on this fact as a rationale for distinguishing Hamas from al-Qaeda. Hamas, the French Arabist Olivier Roy maintains, is a local political movement engaged in the mere “political ideologisation of Islam . . . which has nothing to do with terrorism.” It must be contrasted with the “pure” terrorism of al-Qaeda which, by his lights, is more anarchist than Islamist. While it cannot be appeased, Hamas, he argues, should be cultivated.
Roy couldn’t be more wrong. Hamas has been committed to the global Islamist project from the very start. As Khalid al-Mishal has explained, “Hamas is not a local organization but the spearhead of a national project, which has Arab, Islamic, and international ambitions as well.” That is, it is very much in the Muslim Brotherhood fold. Yes, it had started in its own backyard, Palestine — just as the leader al-Qaeda’s global jihad, Osama bin Laden (of Saudi Arabia by way of Yemen) and Ayman al-Zawahiri (of Egypt) started with operations close to home. But Hamas’s ambitions are Islamist, not merely Palestinian. They are hegemonic. Indeed, the Hamas charter, which reads as if it were written by Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, makes that explicit:
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all other domains of life.
Jihad is the mission of imposing Allah’s law across the earth, not across just a few square miles. That is the Brotherhood’s raison d’être, and the Hamas charter reaffirms the Brotherhood’s motto: Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Quran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Thus is the charter blunt in proclaiming:
Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.
Unabashedly, Hamas vows to “raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors, so that they would rid the land and the people of their uncleanliness, vileness and evils.” The charter roots this mission of Hamas in Muslim scripture:
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders . . . [I]f the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
This story is drawn from the al-Bukhari and Muslim hadiths — collections of the sayings and doings of Mohamed. (ACM note: The story was a favorite of the late Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni Islamic jurisprudent in modern history — a Brotherhood icon revered by Hamas, whose suicide bombings against Israel he heartily endorsed, explaining, “The martyr operations [are] the greatest of all sorts of jihad in the cause of Allah.”)
Like other Islamist organizations structured in accordance with Brotherhood theory, Hamas is multi-tiered. Atop its hierarchy is a political bureau. It coordinates terrorist activities by directing two nominally compartmentalized entities: military forces, called the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which carry out attacks against Israel; and a dawa wing, which (as the Justice Department’s original 2004 indictment in the Holy Land Foundation case put it) operates as a “welfare agency, providing food, medical care and education to Palestinians in order to generate loyalty and support for the organization and its overall goals.”
The military and social activities, in fact, liberally cross-pollinate. Dawa indoctrination starts at the cradle. Palestinian children are marinated in Islamic supremacism and a dehumanizing hatred of Jews, whom they are taught to regard as the descendants of filthy animals — lessons that are replete with Koranic citations in which Allah does indeed transmute Islam-resistant Jews into monkeys and pigs. Tykes are also schooled in the glories of shahada: “martyrdom” — or, to be more precise, suicide terrorism — in the noble struggle against the Zionist entity. Hamas, in fact, sponsors children’s summer camps that quite consciously inculcate the martial ethos of paramilitary camps run by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas itself. As night follows day, these aspects of the dawa regimen generate recruitment momentum for the military wing. That they masquerade as public education and “social welfare” cannot obscure that reality — at least if we are open to seeing reality.
Hamas and Fatah (the Arafat party in the PLO now run by Mohammed Abbas) have come to despise each other. (ACM note: Though I published TGJ 13 years ago, Abbas remains the president of the Palestinian Authority — still serving the “term” he won in the “democratic” election conducted in 2005.) This internecine struggle was an inevitability from Hamas’s earliest days, when Mishal tirelessly challenged Arafat’s aging, debauched grip. Despite their intramural enmity, though, the Palestinian rivals’ joint commitment to the obliteration of Israel enabled them to work together in the early days, under Arafat’s “Unified Leadership of the Intifada.”
In the first four years — that is, the period before the ebb that marked the onset of the 1991 Gulf War — Israeli defense forces responded to more than 3,600 Molotov-cocktail attacks, 100 hand-grenade attacks, and 600 assaults with guns or explosives, all of which killed 27 and wounded over 3000. (ACM note: It is being reported that Hamas and its jihadist allies started their war of aggression against Israel this morning by, among other things, launching 5,000 rockets at Israel, targeting civilian population centers. Hamas, of course, is backed by the revolutionary “Death to America” jihadist regime in Iran, which — as our recent editorial relates — was just granted a $6 billion windfall by the Biden administration.)
Insatiable hatred of the Jewish state remains to this day the glue that holds Palestinian society together. Indeed, when Arafat finally succumbed in 2004, Mishal took pains to attend the funeral . . . in the company of the Saudi royal family.* The joint ambition of destroying the Jewish state was a force greater than their deep differences. Polling in 2007 found that up to 93 percent of young Palestinian adults (aged 18 to 25) deny Israel’s right to exist — as compared with “only” 75 percent when the total population is factored in. Given the bile on which Palestinian children are weaned, how on earth could it be otherwise?
___
*ACM note: In recent years, spurred by their mutual interest in security against Iranian aggression, Saudi-Israeli relations have dramatically improved, to the point where they are widely reported to be on the cusp of normalizing diplomatic relations. Whether that prospect factored into Iran-backed Hamas’s attack today is not yet clear. The Saudi reaction to the outbreak of war must be closely watched.