Concomitant with the first Intifada, the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine decided it was time to create an organization prioritizing the armed struggle.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 4 of 8. Read article 1, article 2, and article 3.
The date of December 8, 1987, marks the beginning of the first Intifada (“uprising”), and Hamas literature also makes it the date of Yassin’s founding of the organization. In fact, the founding meeting actually took place on December 9. The relevant communiqué was distributed on December 11 in Gaza and December 14 in the West Bank. Backdating the foundation to December 8 serves the propagandistic purpose of implying that the creation of Hamas is at the origins of the Intifada. In fact, the Intifada did not have a single organizer and erupted for a number of concomitant reasons, including discontent with the PLO’s diplomatic strategy, disappointment with the inaction of Arab countries regarding the Palestinian issue after the 1986 Amman summit, and protest against the arrogant behavior of some in the Israeli forces. It started as a spontaneous revolt that took all Palestinian political organizations by surprise.
The casus belli was offered by the death of an Israeli settler stabbed in an Islamic Jihad attack on December 6, 1987, and the subsequent bloody Israeli response on December 8. On December 9, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political bureau met in Gaza and decided to come up with an acronym that defined as its first priority the struggle against the Israeli occupation. In fact, the Brotherhood was finally accepting after thirty years the proposals of the 1957 al-Wazir Memorandum. The communiqué released on December 11 made the new name known for the first time: Hamas, a word that both means “Fervor” and is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”).
In the months that followed, Hamas became the organization that ran much of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Palestine. Its original 1988 charter (amended in 2017 to remove some of the most controversial parts) in Article 2 defined Hamas as “a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Palestine,” itself a Palestinian branch of the “international organization” of the same name. The choice for the expression “a branch” instead of “the branch” left open the possibility of conducting activities in Palestine under the acronym “Muslim Brotherhood” outside Hamas. However, in essence, since 1988 Muslim Brotherhood activities in Palestine were coordinated and managed by Hamas.
The charter, dated August 18, 1988, was a typical document of Islamic fundamentalism. Article 8 stated that Hamas has “God as its purpose, the Prophet as its leader, the Quran as its constitution, jihad as its method, and death for the glory of God as its dearest desire.” The ideas of the al-Wazir memorandum were taken up, but with some important distinctions. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation was presented not simply as a Palestinian national cause but as “an obligation for all Muslims, in whatever country of the world they live” (Article 14). Palestinian land was defined as sacred land, “Islamic land entrusted to the generations of Islam until the day of judgment” (Article 11).
All of Palestine was regarded as Islamic land, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan: “No Arab state, nor all Arab states as a whole, no king or president, nor all kings and presidents put together, no organization, nor all Palestinian or Arab united organizations have the right to dispose of or cede even a single piece of it because Palestine is Islamic land entrusted to the generations of Islam until the day of judgment. Who, after all, could arrogate to themselves the right to act on behalf of all the generations of Islam until the day of judgment?”(Article 11). For this reason, the charter stated that Hamas refused to participate in diplomatic peace initiatives or international conferences: “These conferences are nothing more than a means of imposing the power of the unbelievers on the territories of Muslims”; “there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except jihad. As for international initiatives and conferences, they are wastes of time and child’s play” (Article 13).
For the future, the charter advocated an Islamic society in Palestine and the restoration of the caliphate for the umma, but it is true that these points were not particularly elaborate. For the present, Hamas pledged to continue the work of Islamic education of the Palestinian population in the tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood (Article 16), including through the promotion of Islamic art (Article 19) and the struggle for social justice (Article 20).
Hamas was also committed to spreading an interpretation of history, the tones of which recalled a vast international literature on the Jewish conspiracy. Article 22 of the charter stated that Jews “were behind the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution,” control Freemasonry, the Rotary Club and the Lions Clubs (organizations to which Hamas members cannot belong); “organized World War I to destroy the Caliphate”; “organized World War II, in which they became fabulously wealthy through the arms trade”; and “ordered the formation of the United Nations Organization […] through which they dominate the world.”
Hamas declared itself ready to cooperate with any other Islamic organization. About the PLO, Article 27 stated on the one hand that “it is closer to us than any other organization: it includes our fathers, brothers, relatives, and friends. How could good Muslims reject their fathers, their brothers, their relatives, or their friends?” On the other hand, Hamas stated that the PLO has succumbed to the Western “ideological invasion” that began with the Crusades and continued with “orientalism, missionary work, and imperialism,” to the point of accepting the prospect of “a secular state.” Now, the Hamas charter continues, “secular ideology is diametrically opposed to religious thinking”; “the Islamic nature of the Palestinian question is an integral part of our religion, and those who neglect an integral part of their religion are certainly lost.”
As for non-Muslim Palestinians, Article 31 dealt with them without explicitly using the expression “dhimmi,” “protected”: a traditional Islamic notion that implies important limitations for Christians and Jews living in shari’a-regulated countries. The 1988 charter offered them “the magnanimity of Islam” and “peace in the shadow of Islam,” not without recalling Quranic verses that threaten God’s chastisements to Christians and Jews who “show hostility toward Islam, stand in its way to halt it, or hinder its efforts.” Subsequent interpretative documents from the Hamas Political Bureau have clarified that nothing prevents Christians who accept their status from becoming members of the organization. In fact, however, the number of Christian members of Hamas had always been limited.
As is evident from an analysis of the 1988 charter, Hamas’ identity was defined in confrontation and opposition to Fatah and the PLO. Ostensibly, the opposition was presented in clear and purely doctrinal terms. The PLO represented surrender to Western secularist ideologies. Hamas rejected the notion of secular nation-states and intended to establish a state in Palestine governed by the shari’a, in the tradition of Islamic fundamentalism and the Muslim Brotherhood. The PLO is a nationalist movement not interested in the issue of the caliphate. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of a global Islamic movement that operates from the perspective of the restoration of the caliphate. For the PLO, the Palestinian question is primarily a political and national issue. For Hamas, it is “an integral part of religion” and, as such, transnational. Hence the different attitude toward diplomatic solutions: while on political issues one can compromise, on religious issues any transaction is a sin and a betrayal.
In fact, however, things are more complicated. Hamas, as has been noted, always maintained a complex relationship with the PLO and operated simultaneously in the mode of confrontation and dialogue. For Yassin, avoiding a civil war in Palestine was a priority, even though there has been no shortage of assassinations of leaders attributed to both sides. The PLO and Hamas even suspected each other of collaborating with Israeli services to eliminate members of the opposing faction.
Theoretically, the political perspective was hopelessly different. The PLO, albeit amid ups and downs and not without ambiguity, has since 1988 accepted the idea of the coexistence in Palestine of two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian, within the limits marked by UN resolutions. Hamas denounces the UN as the main instrument of the international Jewish conspiracy and considers it religiously sinful to settle for any solution that does not contemplate the end of the State of Israel and the establishment of a unified Islamic state “from the river to the sea,” from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
However, as noted by a well-informed German scholar, Andrea Nüsse, who approached Hamas with some sympathy in her 1999 book “Muslim Palestine: The Ideology of Hamas” (London: Routledge), there was at that time “a huge margin between Hamas’s proclamations and its realpolitik.” From a theoretical standpoint, Yassin found in Islamic law the idea of “hudna,” “truce” or “armistice.” “We could sign an armistice for ten or twenty years,” Yassin stated in 1993, “on the condition that Israel unconditionally gives up the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, returns to the 1967 borders and leaves the Palestinian people full freedom of self-determination to decide their future.”
The position may seem similar to the one officially adopted by the PLO in the 1988 Algiers Declaration. The difference, however, is that the “hudna” is not a peace treaty but a provisional suspension of hostilities, which are supposed to resume at the end of a period that would allow the Islamic forces to reorganize and consolidate. However, since twenty or even ten years appeared to be really long periods in the face of the rapid changes in the Palestinian scenarios, the idea of “hudna” was the key that allowed Hamas’ realpolitik to enter the national and international political game concerning the future of Palestine as a credible participant (at least until 2023).
According to Italian sociologist Renzo Guolo, not only (as noted in a previous article) before 1984, but until the publication of the charter in 1988, “the Israeli government did not fully understand the role of the new organization [Hamas] in the Intifada and continued to attribute to the secular PLO the role of main enemy.” Still at the beginning of the Intifada, “Israel believed that the Muslim Brotherhood […] opposed Palestinian nationalism and was not involved in acts of ‘political subversion.’”
The situation changed, however, with the publication of the charter, and degenerated in 1989, when Hamas was responsible for the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers. Israel had underestimated the military potential of Islamic fundamentalism for years and had thought it could use it as an element to destabilize the PLO. Finally, it realized that it was facing a “new” and more implacable enemy. Repression was then triggered, culminating in the arrest of Yassin and his sentencing in 1990 to life imprisonment.
In the period between his arrest in 1989 and 1997, when Israel released him to Jordan in exchange of two Mossad agents, Yassin continued to be active and to send letters from captivity that were read with considerable attention by Hamas members. Meanwhile, Hamas provided itself with a new head of the political bureau, Musa Mohammed Abu Marzuq (born in 1951), an engineer with a degree from the United States.
The United States was even slower than Israel in recognizing Hamas’ terrorist potential. Until 1993, Abu Marzuq effectively ram Hamas from Springfield, Virginia, and for nearly two years, in 1992 and 1993, Hamas’ military command operated from London. This structure reproduced that of the PLO, which amid criticism from the Muslim Brotherhood, had for years had a dual chain of command, one “external” outside Palestine and one “internal.” In 1993, under Israeli pressure, the United States included Hamas on its list of terrorist organizations and the movement’s “external” leadership moved to Amman, Jordan.
