Hamas Has Only Grown In Strength Since 1987 To Israel's Dismay
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
14 October
2023
Israel
Needs An Imaginative Alternative To Rein In The Militant Outfit
-----
Hamas ‘terrorists’ riding seized Israeli military vehicle in northern
Gaza Strip on 7 October, 2023 | REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot
-----
Hamas has
been a continuous source of headache for Israel since 1987 when it came to prominence
as a militant group.
In 1989, it
carried out its first operation of kidnap and murder of two Israeli officers.
Prior to it
Yasser Arafat's Fateh was popular among the Palestinians as they outsmarted the
Muslim Brotherhood. Fateh reached an accord with Israel headed by Yizak Rabin
in Oslo under which the two countries agreed to work as two nation states. But
after Yasser Arafat and Yizak Rabin, Netanyahu sabotaged the accord and a new
round of hostilities began.
Hamas
filled the vacuum and rose to prominence. In 2006 elections, it won and reduced
Mahmood Abbas's government to an unrepresentative autocracy. Since then it has
been at loggerheads with Israel and has remained a constant threat to Israel's
security.
Netanyahu's
ambitious plans of creating a greater Israel has also caused a heightened
confrontation between the two. Over the years, Hamas developed indigenous
weapon manufacturing capability with assistance from Iran. It has also built
underground tunnels across Gaza strip to dodge the Israeli army. Therefore,
Israel just needs political and diplomatic tools more than tanks and missiles
to tackle a demon it had created.
-----
Hamas Isn’t Just A Blood Cult. More Than Tanks, Israel Needs Political Imagination To Crush It
By
Praveen Swami
11 October
2023
The story
began with a burial, just as so many Gaza stories do. The bodies of the Sufi
preacher Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, and the two comrades-in-arms killed with
him fighting the Palestine Police in November 1935, were laid out in the Al
Jarina mosque in the shadow of the city’s Abd al-Hamid clock-tower. Thousands
from the areas surrounding the Haifa docks joined the funeral procession. The
Governor of the Arab Bank, Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, solemnly laid the flags of
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen on the bodies.
“Friend and
martyr,” one eulogy documented by the scholar Mark Sanagan records, “I have
heard you preach from this platform, resting on your sword; now that you have
left us you have become, by God, a greater preacher.”
Last week,
Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, claimed the lives of over
1,200 Israelis—many brutally executed at point-blank executions. Even though
the savagery of the killings has led many to compare Hamas to the Islamic
State, the organisation is much more than a blood cult. Through its decades-old
story, Hamas has battled Palestinian nationalism, allied itself with Israeli
intelligence, and capitalised on regional geopolitics. The jihadist group has
been a skilled practitioner not just of terrorism, but also politics.
To defeat
Hamas in its Gaza heartland, Israel is going to need a weapon much more
powerful than tanks: An imaginative alternative to the toxic politics of
despair and rage that has led young Palestinians to embrace the jihadist
message.
Born
from the Brotherhood
The morning
show at the Samer Cinema, the brand-new movie theatre at the centre of
Westernised life in Gaza, was an unusual one. Elderly greybeards who would not
normally be caught dead in such a den of impiety, like judge Shaykh Omar Sawan
and preacher Shaykh Abdallah al-Qaychawi, had taken their seats to witness the
founding of the Gaza chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Eighteen
months after the meeting in November 1946, the state of Israel would be
founded. The Brotherhood had begun to prepare Gaza for jihad, historian
Jean-Pierre Filiu has noted.
The group
led by Izz al-Din had waged a losing battle against that outcome, assassinating
Jews and British officials. The Brotherhood-linked Gaza Islamists did not do
much better. Led by Egyptian military officers, insurgents staged unsuccessful
attacks against the Kfar Darom kibbutz in the summer of 1948 and briefly
captured the immigrant Jewish colony of Yad Mordechai.
Gaza—some
360 square kilometres—became home to over 2,00,000 Palestinians evicted from
their lands in Israel, overwhelming the 80,000-odd inhabitants.
Following
the Arab defeat, the charismatic young Zafer Sahwa, appointed secretary-general
of the Gaza Brotherhood at the Samer Cinema meeting, became its leader. Zafer
focussed on proselytisation and recruitment activities, organising youth camps
and cultural events. The Brotherhood distanced itself from cross-border
operations to the irritation of its young radicals in its ranks.
Tensions
rose after February 1955 when a raid by the young military officer Ariel
Sharon—later to become Israel’s Prime Minister—claimed the lives of 38
Palestinians. Large-scale protests broke out in Gaza, made up of Palestinians
enraged by Egypt’s failure to protect them.
Figures
like Khalil al-Wazir, Salah Khalaf, Yussef al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan, and Assad
Saftawi formed new secret terror groups like the Shabaab al-tha’r, or Avenging
Generation, outside the Brotherhood umbrella. Later, after meeting a Cairo
merchant’s son named Yasir Arafat, they found Fateh—the bedrock of the
Palestinian nationalist movement.
Egypt’s
decimation in the war of 1967 led a wide spectrum of nationalist and Left-wing
Palestinian groups to unite in the hope of shaping their own destiny. The
Brotherhood, now led by the refugee and Gaza cleric Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, refused
to join in, expert Ahmed Qassem Hussein records.
The
Brotherhood instead condemned “false prophets of liberation and revolution,
deceitful heroes who have misled their people, who have exiled the preachers of
Islam, thrown into prison the purest Muslim youth, combatted any sincere
Islamic sermon, all the while encouraging moral corruption, intellectual
deviance, and imported lifestyles”.
The
building storm
Even though
the Brotherhood sat out the storms of the 1970s—when Fateh seized the global
stage through a series of spectacular violent actions, thoughtfully chronicled
by historian Helena Cobban—it wasn’t idle. The organisation steadily gained
support among the pious middle class made up of merchants and professionals.
The early 1980s, journalist Asmaa al-Ghoul reports, saw campaigns to turn the
al-Hurriyat cinema into a Quran study circle. Islamist activists slowly began
campaigning to shut down beaches and enforce hijab.
While
al-Fatah and other nationalists were being bled by Israel’s intelligence and
security services, Sheikh Yasin’s Al-Mujamma’ al-Islami, or Islamic Circle,
gained official recognition in 1979. Four years later, it won student union
elections. Israeli military personnel, Filiu notes, would benignly observe as
Hamas cadre attacked local communists.
Although
Sheikh Yasin was arrested in 1984 for stockpiling weapons, he was released from
jail in a prisoner swap the following year. The cleric maintained a low profile
for a time, but events would soon overtake him.
In 1987,
the outbreak of the First Intifada, or uprising, in Gaza, took both the
nationalists and Hamas by surprise. Even though Hamas’ first reaction was to
sit out the crisis, Sheikh Yasin finally decided to participate in the
Intifada. In December of that year, Yasin dissolved Al-Mujamma, relaunching it
as the group we now know by the initials Hamas, or Harakat al-Muqawama
al-Islamiyya, Hamas.
Hamas’
first military actions—the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers in
1989—ended in disaster, with security services rapidly locating the
perpetrators and unravelling the Islamist group.
But Hamas
rode the popular tide of the Intifada and drew new recruits. The slogan Yasin
invented for the uprising in 1989—Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yehud, Jaysh Muḥammad Sawf Ya’ud (“Khaybar, Khaybar,
Oh Jews, the army of Muḥammad will return”) would resonate across the world.
Fugitive
jihadist Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Muhammad, which twice brought India and
Pakistan to the edge of war, would name itself after the army of the Prophet.
Yasin’s slogan would be plastered across its headquarters in Bahawalpur, with a
few emendations: Yehud was replaced with Hunood, or Hindus, and Khayber with
Delhi.
The Path
Of Death
Following
the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that culminated in the Oslo Accords of
1993, signed by Arafat and Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin, both sides appeared
committed to a deal that would allow two nation-states to coexist. The accords,
though, were sabotaged by PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who came to power in 1996, and
his successor Ehud Barak. To them, it seemed possible to play off Palestinian
nationalism against Islamism—and emerge triumphant.
That
calculation backfired. Husein has shown that despite multiple blows delivered
by the Israeli security services, Hamas was able to bounce back on the
resentment of youth against the failures of the Oslo process. To make things
worse, the lack of progress also weakened the Palestinian Authority, the
quasi-government established under the accords.
From 2000,
when the Second Intifada broke out, Hamas rapidly expanded its military
presence, using largely autonomous cells to shield itself from intelligence
penetration. The organisation also used Iranian assistance to develop an
indigenous weapons-manufacturing capability. Ever since 2001, Israeli expert
Yiftah Shapir notes, Hamas has been able to produce large numbers of cheap
rockets and mortar, harrying Israeli forward positions.
Hamas also
successfully used suicide bombers to retaliate against the killings and arrests
of its own leadership and sabotage efforts at peacemaking by its adversaries.
Electoral
victory by Hamas over Fatah in 2006 reduced President Mahmoud Abbas’ government
to an unrepresentative autocracy. Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza was, among other
things, an effort to stop Fatah from seeking a rapprochement with Hamas. At the
same time, Israel has had to countenance de-facto Hamas rule in Gaza, which is
underwritten by subsidies from Qatar.
Ever since
the first skirmishes in 1949, Israel has gone to war 14 times in Gaza. Long-running
occupation, like in 1956-1957 or 2001, as well as punitive exercises of force
like in 2008-2009, have failed to degrade the group. That means Israel has had
to constantly live in fear of security threats from its south.
Although
top Hamas leaders have been killed, including Yasin and his successor Abd
al-‘Aziz Rantisi, new figures have emerged. The commander of last week’s
killings, Mohamed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, is thought to have helped create
Hamas’ theatre group al-Ayedun in 1988 as a student. Thousands followed in his
path.
Killing
hasn’t served to deter — 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza are estimated to have died
in the Second Intifda, over 1,500 in the Israeli 2014 campaign, and well above
1,000 in 1956-1957.
As Israel
sets out to avenge the violence on its people, it also needs to find the
political imagination to marginalise the monster it helped create.
-----
Praveen
Swami is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited
by Humra Laeeq)
Source: Hamas
Isn’t Just A Blood Cult. More Than Tanks, Israel Needs Political Imagination To
Crush It
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/hamas-strength--israel-dismay/d/130904
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism