Hamas, Palestine, and Israel

PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 10 Mar 2025

Vladislav B. Sotirovic – TRANSCEND Media Service

7 Mar 2025 – Hamas, or according to its full name, “Islamic Resistance Movement”, is a Palestinian political-national organization with a military wing of a conservative Islamic nature and orientation. Its purpose is to resist the Israeli occupation, maintain resistance, and fight for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. It was officially established on December 10^th, 1987, with the Gaza City at the Gaza Strip headquarters. What is Gaza? Gaza can define either a strip of Palestinian-controlled land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt or can be used to designate a city of the same name within the so-called “strip”. The Gaza City is the largest in the disputed Palestinian Territories. It lies along the Mediterranean Sea coast in the Gaza Strip. The Arabic word hamās itself means “bravery”, “zeal”, or/and “strength”. The political ideology of the organization is multifaceted: Islamism, anti-Zionism, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic nationalism, but above all Palestinian nationalism. It is important to stress that Hamas’s religion (as of all Muslim Palestinians) is Sunni Islam, not Shiia Islam, and, therefore, the organization does not enjoy direct support from Shiia Iran (like Shiia Hezbollah in South Lebanon does).

Although Hamas was founded in Egypt, the organization is focused on Palestinian nationalism and resistance to Israel as an occupying force and the creation of an independent Palestinian national state. However, the stated purpose of Hamas is not just to free Palestine but to destroy the Zionist state of Israel and replace it with an independent Islamic state. Together with its political task, Hamas as well as maintains an important network of different and useful social services for Palestinians living within the Occupied Territories, and in this way, it seeks to support the Palestinian people while at the same time undermining the Israeli government. Nevertheless, Hamas’s military wing often deals in violent activities like rocket attacks or suicide bombings in order to realize its political goals. The organization has two wings – one of them is a military faction, the Izz ad-Dim al-Qassam Brigades, while the civil faction deals with humanitarian-social services.

Hamas as an organization was originally affiliated with the non-violent Muslim Brotherhood, but in 1988, it broke its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood as choosing to start armed resistance and violent activities in the quest for independence and the State of Palestine. Hamas attracted both regional and international attention after its victory in the 2006 general legislative elections among the Palestinians (autonomous Palestinian National Authority), but at the same time, the electoral triumph (according to which Hamas had a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council) fostered a new wave of Islamophobic politics in Zionist Israel. The more important point of the issue was that after the electoral victory of Hamas, whose crucial political program is the liberation of Palestine from the Israeli occupation, the Zionist demonization of all Palestinians as something like detested Arabs became now fostered with a new negative term – “fanatical Muslims”. From that time onward, the Israeli government combined the hate anti-Palestinian speech with aggressive policies against the Palestinians. Consequently, the political situation in the Occupied Territories (since 1967) became aggravated, accompanied by an already depressing and horrible situation in which the Palestinians lived.

The direct ideological, racial, political, and human demonization of the Middle Eastern Muslim Arab Palestinians from the Zionist Israeli authorities immediately after the Declaration of Israeli Independence on May 14^th, 1948 lasted till 1982 when Palestinians were described as the local anti-Semitic Nazis regardless on the very fact that exactly the new Israeli government adopted anti-Semitic policy against the Semitic Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed and physically exterminated by the Zionists in Israel for the reason to create a greater pure Zionist-Jewish national state of Israel “from the river to the river” (from Euphrates to Nile). The appropriation of Arabic place names in Palestine is, for instance, a part of a Zionist strategy to erase all traces of the non-Jewish history of the region (ex.: Palestinian Fuleh/Jewish Afula; Palestinian Arab Masha and Sajara/Israeli Kfar Tavor and Ilaniya, etc.).

However, in the recent history of the Zionist-Palestinian relations, there were more expressions of Islamophobia. For instance, the case from the late 1980s, when some 40 Arab Palestinian workers (out of a community of 150,000) became involved in murdering their Jewish employers and bystanders. The Israeli Jewish reaction of some academics, politicians, and journalists was immediately to connect the case with Islamic culture and religion, but without any reference to the military occupation of the slavish labor market developed on the ground by the Zionist masters. The next outburst of Zionist Islamophobia in Israel was during the Second Palestinian Intifada in October 2000, when it was much easier for the Israeli political establishment and media to demonize in front of the world both Islam and Muslim Palestinians, as the Second Intifada was, in fact, a militarized uprising mainly by some Islamic groups, including suicide bombers.

The third tendency of Islamophobia started after the 2006 general elections for the Palestinian Authority when Hamas won the elections for the Palestinian representative political body when more or less the same or very similar pattern of anti-Islamism and anti-Palestinian attitude was used like the previous two. However, after the case of October 7^th, 2003, when the Israeli-Hamas War started, the Zionist rhetoric on Islam and Palestinians was put under the framework of view that absolutely everything Muslim or/and Palestinian is in direct association with terrorism, violence, anti-Semitism, and inhumanity. Moreover, the previous rhetorics of Nazification of everything that is Palestinian and Islamic are once again applied. Nevertheless, in general, the demonization of Islam and the Palestinians is a practice in Israel as long as Hamas and its clone organization, Islamic Jihad, are engaged in military guerrilla activities, which are seen by the Israeli Zionists as terroristic. Such harsh, extremist rhetoric, in fact, has the final aim to erase both the very rich history of Palestinians and the historical inheritance of Islamic culture on the territory of Palestine under the political umbrella of fighting Hamas as a “terrorist” organization.

Usually, the Israeli Zionists create the picture of Hamas as a terrorist organization composed of a group of barbaric and insane religious (Islamic) fanatics. However, in reality, Hamas, like other regional organizations and movements within the framework of political Islam, reflects the reaction of local Arab Palestinians to the cruel realities of occupation by the Zionist Israeli state authorities (with direct and open assistance by the USA and silent approval by the EU), and a response to the inefficient solutions designed by the secular segment of the Palestinian national body (Fatah/PLO). In general, it became extremely strange that the Israeli, US, and EU authorities were not prepared for the Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and, therefore, were taken by surprise by the results of the elections. Another surprise was the democratic feature of the victory in the elections as all Zionist sources were spreading propaganda that radical-fanatical Islamists cannot be either democratic or popular, which meant they were not be able to win the elections by democratic means. That was, basically, a result of misunderstandings and false predictions by the Israeli experts of the Palestinian issue, especially concerning the influence of political Islam and his forces, for a long time, even before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The Israeli government allowed in 1976 municipal elections on the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as the government was in a wrong opinion that the old politicians of pro-Jordanian standpoint were going to be elected in the West Bank and the pro-Egyptian politicians in the Gaza Strip, but the people voted in clear majority for the representatives of the PLO. That was, however, not surprising except for the Israeli authorities, as the expansion of the popularity of the PLO was parallel to the efforts by Israel to eliminate the secular Palestinian movements in both refugee camps and the Occupied Territories.

It has to be clearly noted that Hamas became a serious political force very much due to the Israeli policy to support the functioning of the Islamic educational system in the Gaza Strip for the very reason to be a counterbalance to the influence of secular Fatah movement on the Gazan Palestinians. Yasser Arafat and four more founding members established Fatah (or the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine) as an organization in the 1960s, but unofficially, Fatah existed in Kuwait since 1957 as a consequence and influence of the crises caused by the Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian refugee question has its historical roots in 1948 when the Zionist Israel, under the umbrella of the War of Independence, committed ethnic cleansing of ethnic Semitic Arab Palestinians. The division of Palestine in 1947 into Zionist Jewish and Arab Palestinian states displaced local inhabitants and caused bitterness for up to 800,000 Palestinians. However, up to today, the number of Palestinian refugees is estimated to be around 4 million. The refugee crises continued during the next wars in 1967 and 1973 and continues today by displacement of Palestinians by the Zionist Israeli settlements in the West Bank and, since October 2023, by the barbaric destruction of the Gaza Strip by the IDF when 60% of housing was destroyed. However, not all of the displaced Palestinians reside in refugee camps as, in fact, only a little over a million reside in UNO-run camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. It has to be noted that the Kingdom of Jordan is the only country to have allowed the Palestinian refugees to settle permanently within the country.

According to UNRWA, the Palestinian refugees are officially understood as:

“…persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood in the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict”.      

Zionist-Israeli policy of settler-colonialism is for the majority of Palestinian nationalists at the heart of the conflict in Palestine since the late 19^th century onward as settler-colonialism is a political projection, not an individual episode. Zionist settler-colonialism is, actually, rooted in the long-time policy of West European colonialism around the world. The Zionists were ignoring the existence and rights of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. They wrongly understood a large part of the area as “nobody land” and, therefore, sovereignty over such land could be acquired through occupation and settler-colonialism. Consequently, all Palestinian national organizations and movements, from Fatah and the PLO to today’s Hamas, included the struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism as a necessary part of their political programs.

Fatah was founded as a focal secular organization for Palestinian resistance and the formation of an independent national state of the Palestinians, which became a popular movement that gave a voice and power to the people. Fatah did not have an armed organization until 1964 when it started attacking Israel, assuming the leadership of (as well as secular) the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968 (after the 1967 Seven-Day War). The PLO was formed in 1964 by the Palestinian National Congress in Jerusalem with its first leader, the Egyptian Ahmed Shukairy. In fact, the PLO was the brainchild of the Arab League, which met in January 1964 to discuss ways to help the Palestinians without hurting the member states of the League. The focal political aim of the PLO was to establish an independent secular national state of the Palestinians with the claim not to allow Palestinian refugees to be expelled forever from their homes and land. Using, in many cases, violent actions against Israel, the Fatah/PLO extended its activities to Palestine refugee camps in neighboring states like Lebanon, which were used as training camps for attacks launched on Israel. Fatah suffered a major setback in 1970−1971 when it was expelled from Jordan. However, Fatah retained political leadership of the PLO under Y. Arafat. In the 1980s, the ideology was softened as Israel was no longer considered not to exist, but rather to be respected and allow the independence of secular Arab Palestine. The Palestinian Authority governs greater parts of the Palestinian Territory. The Authority was dominated till 2006 by members of the PLO. Nonetheless, after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, what remained of the PLO was incorporated into other Palestinian organizations, with the bulk of power being absorbed by anti-secular Islamist Hamas.

The most important thing is to stress that there are many experts on the Palestinian Question followed by some Israeli officials who believe that Hamas was, in fact, an Israeli creation in both direct or indirect ways. More precisely, the Israeli authorities assisted the charity organization named the Islamic Society that was founded by Islamic cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1979 to become an influential political movement, out of which in 1987, Hamas as an organization was created. Ahmed Yassin established Hamas and became its spiritual leader till his death (being assassinated) in 2004. However, he was contacted by Israeli officials with the offer to collaborate and later expand his activity as they believed that via his charity and educational activity, Ahmed Yassin, as a very influential person, would participate in the making of counterbalance of the power to the secular Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip and even to non-Gazan Palestinians. The reason was simple but wrong: Israel thought that secular movements of the Palestinians and all other surrounding Arabs were the dead enemy to the Israeli security. A. Yassin’s society, under the deal achieved with the Israeli authorities, even opened an Islamic shape university in 1979, followed by an independent (from Israel) school, club, and mosque network for the Palestinians.

The PLO, following the Oslo Accords (achieved between the PLO and Israel on September 13^th, 1993) obtained the majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 1996, on the one hand taking a leading role in making a deal with Israel but also playing the crucial role in the 2000 (Second) Intifada. Nevertheless, Hamas, as the offspring of the Islamic Society, became in 1993 the focal social critic and political enemy to the Oslo Accords. As the Israeli government wanted to alter the majority of the accords followed by a brutal Israeli settlement policy on the West Bank (using armed forces against the Palestinian natives), the Palestinian national support for Hamas was boosted. In other words, Hamas, by the mid-1990s, was seen by the Palestinians as the only genuine political organization to protect Palestinian rights and national interests. An additional reason for the growing popularity of Hamas among the Palestinians living within the Occupied Territories was an unsuccessful policy of other Palestinian organizations running with the secular agenda in solving the Palestinian Question regarding the political status, statehood, employment, welfare, and economic security. Therefore, the majority of Palestinians turned their hopes to solve these problems into religion, which offered politics of support, charity, and (Islamic) solidarity. Consequently, Hamas defeated secular Fatah for control of the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, and a brief civil war saw Fatah lose control of the Gaza Strip while retaining its leading position in the West Bank.

After the death of Yasser Arafat (a leader of PLO) in 2004, a vacuum was created on the political scene among the Palestinians, which Hamas was able to fill relatively soon as Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, was not as charismatic a person as Arafat was and, therefore, did not enjoy enough of respect and full legitimacy. However, on the other hand, Yasser Arafat was delegitimized by the Israeli and American authorities, while they accepted M. Abbas as a legal president of all Palestinians. That was the time of the Second Intifada (2000−2005) when Israel erected the wall and used roadblocks followed by organized assassinations of the Palestinian politicians and national workers. Such a situation diminished the support for the Palestinian National Authority and, in fact, did not offer Abbas a huge popularity, especially in rural areas and refugee camps, and on the contrary, it increased the prestige of Hamas, which became the only political organization ready and able to struggle for Palestinian freedom. It means the Palestinians were left with no real option for voting and trust except Hamas. However, Zionist Israeli propaganda described Palestinians as irrational and undemocratic people (contrary to the rational and democratic Jews) who chose the wrong side of history and, therefore, the cultural and moral deep hole was separating these two peoples.

Since 2006 up to today, among the Palestinians is a hope that the political and even military success of different Islamic militant and fundamentalist organizations in driving the Israelis out of the Gaza Strip is possible, but Hamas is seen as the most prosperous in this matter. Regardless of the final results of the current Israeli-Hamas War (started on October 7^th, 2023), Hamas became deeply embedded in Palestinian society, mostly thanks to its successful attempts to improve the miserable life conditions of ordinary people by providing medical assistance, organized education, welfare, and fighting with the clear language for the rights of Palestinian refugees (since 1948) to return home (unlike the indefinite standpoint of the Palestinian National Authority).

Finally, what is Palestine? Palestine (in Arab, Al-Filastīniyya) is a self-proclaimed independent and self-governed nation in the Middle East between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The self-proclaimed borders of Palestine as a state formally include parts of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. The Palestinian ethnic name is derived from an ancient term for the land and people who settled on it – Philistines, 3000 years ago. Many states around the world officially recognized Palestine. However, the majority of Western states did not for political reasons, especially the USA. Constant animosity and strife between Palestine and Israel since 1948 have fundamentally contributed to Palestinian instability and efforts to reach a final peace between the Palestinian self-administrative authorities and the occupying and governmental forces of the Zionist Israel overwhelmingly supported by the US administration. Having more than 4 million people with a republican form of government, Palestine is today mainly an occupied territory, with large strips of lands under the Israeli military occupation and the Zionist illegal settlements. In general, Palestine is tightly controlled by Israeli occupation forces. Palestine has a president, a prime minister, and a legislative council with formal capital in Ramallah, but the majority of its administrative offices work out of the Gaza City because the nation is divided by the Israeli occupation forces mainly into two parts: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The Palestinian territories (after the Ottoman occupation) were split up by the British mandate after WWI. Historical Palestine was once again divided in 1947 by the creation of a Palestinian state, a Jewish (Zionist) state of Israel, and a separate entity for the shared holy city of Jerusalem. However, this plan was controversial and became the foundation of the current struggle for the land between Israel and the Palestine Territories. The First Israeli-Arab War broke out in 1948 when a Jewish section of the British Mandate over Palestine declared its independence on May 14^th (the Nakba Day or the Palestinian Catastrophe is May 15^th, 1948, when the war started with ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians), depriving the Palestinian section of the mandate of even more territory. Sections of the Palestinian Territory were being controlled by Israel and others by Egypt. During the new war between Israel and Arab countries in 1967, Israel occupied, among others, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Palestine economically very much depends on Israel. The territory has natural gas reserves and agricultural production with a lack of large industries. In essence, any economic prosperity of Palestine directly depends on political relations between Israel and the Palestinian authorities. The Israeli general embargoes are more or less constant and, therefore, limit the available natural resources and economic potentials to be properly used, causing starvation and dehumanization of the Palestinians.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic is an ex-university professor and a research fellow at the Centre for Geostrategic Studies, Belgrade, Serbia. Email: sotirovic1967@gmail.com – www.geostrategy.rs

Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.

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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 10 Mar 2025.

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