Hamas: A History of Horror

NEWS

• The US State Department condemned China’s sentencing of Uyghur folklorist Rahile Dawut to life in prison.

• Zelenskyy said Hamas and Russia are “the same evil.”

• Russia upheld the detention of WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich after six months.

• The Colombian army apologised for killing 6,402 people and falsely claiming they were leftist rebels to boost its kill rate from 2002 to 2008.

• Myanmar launched an artillery attack on a refugee camp, killing 29 people including women and children.

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FEATURE

On the morning of October 7, the terrorist group Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel then blew up sections of the Gaza barrier and sent 1,000 gunmen pouring into the Jewish state where they rampaged for hours, murdering more than 260 people at the Re’im music festival, kidnapping toddlers, gang raping teens, taking grandmothers, using the victims’ phones to send images to their loved ones, parading their half-naked corpses around as they sang and danced.

This is the first direct conflict within Israel since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. When Israel formally declared war on Sunday, it was the first time in 50 years since the Yom Kippur War that began on October 6, 1973.

Hamas cited as justification for the atrocities the fact that Israel has killed 247 Palestinians over the past nine months. In this attack, Hamas has killed more than 900 Israelis in a matter of hours.

Moreover, those 247 deaths involved attacks by Jewish mobs in Jenin and at al-Aqsa mosque. They were not ordered by Israeli officials in the way that Hamas planned and carried out these recent atrocities for up to a year.

In the West, leftist activists have praised the violence. Most shocking of all has been that many did not merely support Palestinian armed resistance while objecting to collateral death or atrocity. As videos rolled in of dazed Israeli teens being led around by Hamas troops with blood-soaked pants, US leftists openly celebrated.

At an “All Out For Palestine” protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York, one speaker said, referring to the Re’im music festival massacre:

As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.

Other did not openly celebrate the horrors, but their silence spoke volumes. This included many of the nation’s finest universities.

Progressive politicians such as Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others also remained deafeningly silent. This is not an accident. This is the result of years of progressive rot.

The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones reposted a data visualization of “Zionist colonization.” Ibram X. Kendi, who became famous for arguing that it is not enough to not be racist, but that you must be anti-racist, has had nothing to say as Jews are rakishly slaughtered and raped. Black Lives Matter groups have been silent or supportive. The Anti Police-Terror Project, an anti-police group in Oakland, which is currently drowning in crime, and which describes itself as “a Black-led multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to end police terror,” came out in support for “All Out For Palestine,” the same group that celebrated the massacres.

“Our heroes in Palestine have changed our peoples history forever in the course of a single night,” the group wrote on their Facebook wall.

Imagine my lack of surprise when I noticed some of the very same X accounts that had called for my blood when I criticized Vladimir Lenin now celebrating as racists murder Jewish children. These are the same accounts that whipped up a frenzy on X, over which The Seattle Times reprehensibly fired me. I shared my thoughts in a thread:

The Leninists-Hamas connection is worth a lengthier discussion, but today I’m going to keep it very simple because I’ve seen a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about Hamas.

So what is Hamas, in what historical context did it evolve and what does this group ultimately want?

The Washington Post’s answer

The Washington Post published an article yesterday, “What is Hamas, and why did it attack Israel now?” Here is the section “What is Hamas?”

Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, is a militant group that governs the Gaza Strip, a 25-mile-long, densely populated enclave of more than 2.1 million people. Hamas emerged in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. It was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian cleric. Its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, was established around 1991.

Unlike the Palestinian Authority, Hamas does not recognize the existence of Israel and is committed to replacing it through armed struggle with a Palestinian state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

In October 1997, the United States designated Hamas a terrorist organization. The group, supported by Iran, has used explosives and rockets, along with suicide bombings and kidnappings, to target Israel.

Hamas won elections in Gaza in 2006, defeating Fatah, the main Palestinian party that still controls the West Bank.

Israel has targeted Hamas leaders over the years. In 1997, Khaled Meshal, a top official, survived an assassination attempt by the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, which poisoned him in Amman, Jordan. Meshal was saved after Jordan detained the Israeli agents and President Bill Clinton pressed Israel to hand over the antidote.

Israel assassinated Yassin and another founding member, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, in 2004 and killed Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari in November 2012.

This is a decent summary if you already know the basics, and it includes some information that I won’t rehash, so it is helpful, but otherwise it’s not very useful because it doesn’t explain the deeper context of how or why. Allow me.

The historical context

Jewish immigration to Palestine increased during the 1920s and 1930s as more Jews fled European antisemitism and eventually Nazi genocide. This led to growing conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The British controlled the region but after World War II, London could no longer afford the high cost of keeping the peace.

There was also a heavy push for Britain to stop micromanaging immigration. The British had signed the Balfour Declaration in 1917, committing to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Many therefore argued Britain was obligated to let Jews resettle in the region. Also, the Holocaust had intensified global sympathy for Jewish survivors, which heightened demands for Britain to allow more Jews to return to their ancestral homeland. But the British didn’t want to upset their ties with Arab nations, so they restricted Jewish immigration instead.

This led to the creation of Jewish terrorist groups such as the Haganah, Irgun and Stern Gang. Even the Soviet Union urged Britain to ease border restrictions, but the United States applied the most pressure, and Britain was losing its appetite anyway as its strategic interests shifted west to Egypt’s Suez Canal and the transit of Persian Gulf oil.

In 1947, Britain announced plans to end its mandate in Palestine and turned the issue over to the United Nations, which proposed the partitioning of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, but Arab leaders refused.

One day before the British Mandate expired, Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948. The following day, neighboring Arab states including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria attacked. During the war, Egypt captured Gaza.

In May 1967, the Soviet Union falsely told Egypt that Israel was amassing troops on the Syrian border to invade. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser responded by kicking UN peacekeepers out of the Sinai Peninsula, mobilizing forces there, shutting off the Straits of Tiran to blockade Eilat Port, which Israel had said would be considered an act of war, and forming a military alliance against Israel with Jordan and Syria.

As if this wasn’t enough, Nasser made his objective clear in a May 26 speech:

The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel. I probably could not have said such things five or even three years ago. If I had said such things and had been unable to carry them out my words would have been empty and worthless. Today . . . I say such things because I am confident.

Israel decided to attack before it could be destroyed, achieving air superiority against Egypt by wiping out a significant portion of the Egyptian Air Force while it was on the ground. So began the Six-Day War, during which Israel captured Gaza.

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlements and military presence from Gaza but kept control over Gaza’s airspace, waters and border crossings into Israel. Gaza also borders Egypt, but this border crossing is often not open.

In 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza.

Palestine includes two territories, the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is internationally recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people. In 1993, the PLO recognized Israeli statehood with the Oslo I Accord and no longer seeks to eliminate it, but to coexist in the West Bank and Gaza.

The largest PLO faction, Fatah, now controls the West Bank, but not Gaza. This is because in 2006, Fatah lost the parliamentary elections to Hamas, and when Fatah tried to remove Hamas by force, the Battle of Gaza ensued and Hamas was eventually won.

The political context

To understand the political origin of Hamas, you have to understand the intifada (Arabic for “uprising”), which was a series of Palestinian riots that lasted almost six years, starting in December 1987, marking 20 years under Israel since the Six-Day War.

In May 1998, Palestinian studies scholar Anita Vitullo Khoury explained the intifada.

Israeli military authorities must have sensed that resistance was about to escalate; when demonstrations became irritatingly frequent, they increased punitive measures and violence against Gaza Strip residents, particularly against boys between 13 and 20 years old.

On December 4, 1986, the Israeli army shot dead two Birzeit University students on campus. Both young men happened to live in the Gaza Strip, and their killing set off demonstrations that grew from their home towns to encompass most of the camps and schools in Gaza in the days that followed.

Israeli authorities tried to contain the protests by arresting hundreds of boys and young men, picking them up off the streets, from their schoolyards and classrooms and homes, and taking them to police stations, military headquarters and the central prison in Gaza. When the demonstrations still continued, a second wave of arrests targeted ex-prisoners and known activists. An army camp on the edge of Gaza City was hastily converted to hold the overflow of young detainees. By the end of December 1986, authorities had detained more than 250 men of all ages in the four room-sized cells inside the army camp.

Palestinians in Gaza quickly dubbed the camp “Ansar II,” after the notorious POW camp Israel had set up in south Lebanon. The Hebrew press reported widely on the inhuman conditions, regular beatings and sadistic treatment by soldiers, disregard for prison rules and regulations, arbitrary arrests and releases, and lack of legal rights. Gaza lawyers and popular organizations regularly appealed for better conditions, and detainees went on hunger strike several times.

Hamas was officially founded on December 9, two days after the start of the intifada, naming itself Ḥarakah al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, literally the Islamic Resistance Movement. The acronym Hamas is Arabic for “enthusiasm.”

The group emerged as an offshoot of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which tells you Hamas has been interested in destroying Israel since its inception. After all, Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s founder, is known for saying, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”

And yet, before Hamas came along, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gaza branch had avoided conflict with Israel and was more focused on religious and social issues. But Hamas changed all that. It was immediately political founded its military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, in 1991.

Who are its leaders and how is it funded?

The Council on Foreign Relations has this information on Hamas funding:

For years after the blockade began, Hamas collected revenue by taxing goods moving through a sophisticated network of tunnels that circumvented the Egyptian crossing into Gaza; this brought staples such as food, medicine, and cheap gas for electricity production into the territory, as well as construction materials, cash, and arms. After Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi took power in 2013, Cairo became hostile toward Hamas, which it saw as an extension of its chief domestic rival, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian army shut down most of the tunnels breaching its territory while it waged a counterterrorism campaign against a branch of the self-proclaimed Islamic State on its side of the border, on the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt began to allow some commercial goods to enter Gaza through its Salah al-Din border crossing in 2018. As of 2021, Hamas reportedly collected upward of $12 million per month from taxes on Egyptian goods imported into Gaza.

Today, Iran is one of Hamas’s biggest benefactors, contributing funds, weapons, and training. Though Iran and Hamas briefly fell out after backing opposing sides in Syria’s civil war, Iran currently provides some $100 million annually to Hamas, PIJ, and other Palestinian groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United States. Iran was quick to praise Hamas’s assault on Israel in late 2023 and pledge its continuing support for the Palestinian group.

Turkey has been another stalwart backer of Hamas—and a critic of Israel—following President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power in 2002.

What does Hamas want?

There are two philosophies on this question. One says pay attention to what Hamas tells us they want. The other instructs us to look at what Hamas does.

The best way to see what Hamas says it wants is by looking at the group’s own Covenant. Here’s an excerpt from the preamble.

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.

Clearly, Hamas views Israel as its sworn enemy and the destruction of Israel as its endgame. But is this simply about regaining territory or is this racist hatred of all Jews?

Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

If you are unaware, the Protocols are a fabricated antisemitic text that purports to be the secret Jewish blueprints for world domination. Nazi schoolteachers used to teach German children. But what does Hamas plan to do if it gains control? We find the answer in the main section, “Definition of the Movement,” article seven:

The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation 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 Judgement 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.”

But is there any hope for negotiation or are we facing a group that is fully committed to completing the project Adolf Hitler began? Article thirteen in unmistakable here:

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.

That’s leaves the other philosophy, judging them by their actions. Yesterday in an essay for The Telegraph, British journalist Martin Bright wrote about this week’s events:

The following statement should be uncontroversial. An organisation that kidnaps unarmed women, children and old people then parades the naked bodies of its dead victims should not be considered as a resistance movement. Hamas is what Hamas does: it is a violent Islamist terror cult. It has shown itself, in its actions in Southern Israel over the Jewish sabbath in its true anti-Semitic, misogynist colours.

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