In 1992–93, international and domestic factors persuaded the leaders of Hamas that terrorism had become the best option.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 5 of 8. Read article 1, article 2, article 3, and article 4.


The crisis of the PLO, the largely secular umbrella organization of Palestinian forces whose largest component was Fatah, in the years immediately following the publication of the first Hamas charter in 1988 is often attributed to internal Palestinian factors, from the 1988 Algiers Declaration to rumors of corruption involving its leader Yasser Arafat’s top aides.
However, at least as important were two external factors that neither the PLO nor Hamas could have foreseen in 1988: the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 and the Gulf War. The PLO had in the Soviet Bloc its main international referent and, with others, financial backer. The events of 1989 therefore could not fail to hit it both politically and economically. In 1990, Hamas also deftly played its cards after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a state that was among its main external financiers. Hamas kept a low profile and avoided openly siding with Saddam Hussein’s (1937–2006) regime, as Arafat, who received support from Iraq, did. With the Gulf War, Arafat lost much of the funding from the Arab states that sided against Saddam and, at the same time, the aid from Iraq itself. These losses were added to the already severe loss of Soviet aid.
Hamas’ finances in the 1990s did not depend primarily on foreign states but on contributions from Palestinians coming both from within the Territories and from the diaspora. It could also rely on the social network of the mosques. Thus, Hamas took advantage of the PLO crisis to challenge its hegemony. In trouble, Arafat invited Hamas to join the Palestinian National Council. Negotiations, started in 1990, but failed when Hamas leader Abu Marzuq demanded half of the Council seats and an explicit repudiation of the 1988 Algiers Declaration. As part of the negotiations, however, a “Pact of Honor” was signed in September 1990, the result of a mediation by Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Jordan. It was the first of several similar pacts that will be frequently signed and even more often violated in the following years. Hamas and the PLO pledged to recognize each other’s equal dignity and to avoid clashes and violence between them that would only play into Israel’s hands.
In fact, the PLO’s participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991 was the occasion for new clashes with Hamas. In the meantime, Hamas was drawing closer to the regime in Tehran, which was hostile to any possibility of negotiated peace, and in November 1991 opened an office in the Iranian capital. From this succession of events Hamas gained considerable prestige at home and abroad. It appeared to be the holder of the pure hardline position, while the PLO was criticized for seeking a compromise whose immediate and concrete benefits the Palestinian population failed to see. Hamas’s intransigence was not only appreciated politically. The fundamentalist leadership managed to win a reputation as incorruptible, while there was certainly no shortage of corruption in Arafat’s entourage.


It was on this double register of intransigence, political and moral, that Islamic fundamentalist movements in general played in the 1990s to win a wide global popular following. They criticized the non-fundamentalist ruling classes accused of being both “moderate” and corrupt, or rather forced into “moderation” precisely because they were vulnerable to blackmail. However, the renewed popularity of Hamas in Palestine was matched by a new escalation of Israeli repression during and after the Gulf War.
Hamas responded in 1991 with the founding of the ‘Izz-Id-Din al-Qassam Battalions, a new military instrument that was supposed to represent a quantum leap in the armed struggle against Israel. Among other things, the Hamas leadership realized that calls for armed struggle gained it popularity in the Territories, unlike the OLP’s suggestions of boycotts of economic relations with Israel and strikes, which were greeted with skepticism by a population where for many resources were already at the limit of physical survival.
The al-Qassam Battalions initially operated only in Gaza. However, during the year 1992 branches were opened in the West Bank, first in Hebron and later in Nablus. Gradually, the Battalions shifted the focus of their attention from the identification and subsequent assassination of Palestinian informants to Israel to the killing of Israeli settlers and soldiers, particularly with the use of car bombs. In June 1992, Israeli authorities arrested an agent of Hamas who had arrived from the United States charged with planning new car bomb attacks, including inside Israel. A first attempt in a Tel Aviv suburb will be foiled in November 1992. The car bombs became a symbol, for many Palestinians, of the possibility of continuing militarily a struggle whose possibility of success the OLP continued to doubt, pursuing rather the path of negotiation and compromise.
In the same year 1992, a series of elections took place within universities, chambers of commerce and professional associations, an opportunity for Hamas and Fatah/OLP to count themselves. Faced with the real prospect of resounding reversals, Fatah established alliances in a “Nationalist Bloc” with several Palestinian parties of socialist and communist leanings, which were largely hostile to Arafat-led peace talks.


In Gaza, the Bloc won the elections in the professional associations of doctors, engineers, and lawyers, with Hamas holding firm at around 40 percent, but lost those in the Chamber of Commerce. In Hebron, by contrast, Hamas won all the elections in which it participated—universities, associations, Chamber of Commerce—except for the local board of the Red Crescent, the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross. The results were reversed in Nablus, a city traditionally not favorable to Hamas. However, in the elections for the Nablus Chamber of Commerce the Bloc won with 48 percent of the votes against a more than respectable 45 percent for Hamas. Hamas surprisingly won at the Ramallah Chamber of Commerce, where there was a significant Christian presence in the electorate, and prevailed in East Jerusalem in the universities and hospitals, losing by a narrow margin (43% vs. 47%) only the elections among Electric Company workers. Understandably, the results did not leave Arafat calm—and they had been achieved only through the alliance with Marxist parties.
The elections did not change the underlying dialectic between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas’ attacks continued, but so did the Israeli repression, which culminated in December 1992 with the deportation of 415 Palestinian leaders, with a strong Hamas and Islamic Jihad presence, to South Lebanon. The decision will prove catastrophic both politically and diplomatically for Israel. The year-long stay of Hamas leaders in South Lebanon fostered, under the auspices of Tehran, contacts between Palestinian Sunni fundamentalists and Lebanese Shiite fundamentalists of the Hezbollah movement, who had launched the new strategy of suicide terrorism since 1982. Popular outrage over the deportation provided the political and emotional framework within which Hamas shifted from attacks involving high risks of being captured for the terrorists carrying them out to suicide bombings, where the fate of the terrorist by definition did not matter. Hamas was adopting down to the smallest details—the choice of the martyrdom candidate, the letter of greeting, the videotape with the “martyr’s” message—the Hezbollah technique of suicide attacks.


On the other hand, Arafat’s ability in political maneuvering allowed the PLO to credit itself as the spokesperson for all Palestinians protesting deportations. In this climate, Hamas was almost compelled to participate in two conferences in which it started a dialogue with the PLO (in Tunis, in December 1992 itself) and with Fatah (in Khartoum, Sudan, in January 1993). The Khartoum conference took place under the supervision of the Sudanese fundamentalist leader Hassan al-Turabi (1932–2016). Highly respected in fundamentalist circles, al-Turabi placed Hamas in a bind when he surprisingly declared that he recognized the UN resolutions on the coexistence of Israel and a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, although he maintained some ambiguity about the provisional or final nature of this recognition. The worst, for Hamas, was to come in the same year 1993, with the Oslo Accords.