"A husband and wife had reached the airport just in the nick of time to catch the plane for their vacation in the Bahamas. 'I wish we’d brought the piano with us,' said the husband.'Why on earth would we bring the piano?' asked his wife.'I left the tickets on it.'""Arguably, the most dangerous disease for a nation or state is the disease of disagreement and discord. This disease will penetrate ideas and beliefs, morality and behavior, and ways of speaking and interacting. It will affect both short- and long-term goals and objectives. Like a dark specter, it will finally envelop people’s souls. It poisons the atmosphere and leaves hearts sterile and desolate," Jasmine went on when entering the Cave of Hira at Jabal al-Nour, 'Mountain of the Light' or 'Hill of the Illumination', a mountain near Mecca where our beloved Prophet (ﷺ) was having received his (ﷺ) first revelation of the Quran, which consisted of the first five ayat of Surah Al-Alaq from the angel Jibreel (عليه السلام)."After stressing the paramount duty of affirming the oneness of Allah, i.e. Tawheed, both the Qur’an and the Sunnah stress one thing above all: the unity of the Ummah. The aim is to treat and rid the Ummah of any disagreements which disturb the peace and harmony in Muslim relationships and ruin the brotherhood of believers. It may also be true to say that after the abomination of associating others in worship with Allah, there is nothing more repugnant to the teachings of Islam than discord in the Muslim community. The commands of Allah and His Rasool (ﷺ) are abundantly clear in calling for the unity and solidarity of Muslims, reconciling their hearts, and marshaling their efforts in a single cause.Since the Muslims have pure faith in and worship God alone, since their Prophet, their scripture, the direction they turn in salah, and the acknowledged reason for their existence are all one and the same, it must follow that they should be united in a common endeavor. Allah says,اِنَّ هٰذِهٖٓ اُمَّتُكُمْ اُمَّةً وَّاحِدَةًۖ وَّاَنَا۠ رَبُّكُمْ فَاعْبُدُوْنِ'Indeed this, your religion, is one religion [i.e., a collective way of life or course of conduct followed by a community], and I am your Rabb, so worship Me.' [QS. Al-Anbya (21):92]And also,فَاَصْبَحْتُمْ بِنِعْمَتِهٖٓ اِخْوَانًاۚ وَكُنْتُمْ عَلٰى شَفَا حُفْرَةٍ مِّنَ النَّارِ فَاَنْقَذَكُمْ مِّنْهَا ۗ كَذٰلِكَ يُبَيِّنُ اللّٰهُ لَكُمْ اٰيٰتِهٖ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُوْنَ'And hold firmly to the rope [referring either to His covenant or the Qur’an] of Allah all together and do not become divided. And remember the favor of Allāh upon you - when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favor, brothers. And you were on the edge of a pit of the Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus does Allāh make clear to you His verses that you may be guided.' [QS. Al-Anbya (21):92]He, Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, also says,وَتَعَاوَنُوْا عَلَى الْبِرِّ وَالتَّقْوٰىۖ وَلَا تَعَاوَنُوْا عَلَى الْاِثْمِ وَالْعُدْوَانِ ۖوَاتَّقُوا اللّٰهَ ۗاِنَّ اللّٰهَ شَدِيْدُ الْعِقَابِ'... And cooperate in righteousness and piety, but do not cooperate in sin and aggression. And fear Allah; indeed, Allah is severe in penalty.' [QS. Al-Anbiya (21):92]In terms of disagreement, Islam teaches its ethics, or at least, its 'adab', how to deal with it. The term adab contains the idea of standard norms and also connotes discipline, proper etiquette, manners, and training. Adab refers in general to the discipline that comes from recognizing one’s proper place in relation to one’s self, members of the family and others in the community and society. It also refers to the proper etiquette or manner of carrying out particular actions; for example, we speak of the adab of greeting, of eating, of reading the Qur’an, or of dealing with differences of opinion. Loss of adab implies loss of proper behavior and discipline and a failure to act with justice. We'll discus this 'al-ikhtilaf fil islam' in antoher session. Insha Allah.Now we'll go to the topic of Hamas. We begin with a question: Is Hamas a national liberation movement or a religious movement? To study is not necessarily to support, right? Hamas has offered not only a fascinating case for study but more importantly a case of an emerging key player capable of affecting the course and the outcome of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Vacillating between its strong religious foundations and political nationalist agendas, Hamas strives to keep a balance between its ultimate vision and immediate pressing realities.Tareq Baconi tells us that on December 8, 1987, an Israeli army vehicle crashed into a line of cars carrying Palestinian day laborers commuting from their jobs in Israel back to their homes in the Gaza Strip. The accident had killed four Palestinian men, three of whom were from the Jabalia refugee camp. Also located in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, the Jabalia camp, known as the 'camp of the revolution,' is one of the largest refugee camps in the Palestinian territories and one of the most densely populated plots of land in the world. Within hours of the accident, the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, as well as areas within Israel itself, were awash with protests, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience. Spreading from the epicenter of the Jabalia camp, the First Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, had begun.The Intifada was a spontaneous and seemingly leaderless mass upheaval. Almost overnight, Palestinians collectively took to the streets to protest Israel’s occupying presence within their land. Israel’s occupation had begun twenty years prior, in 1967. Although Palestinians had enjoyed periods of relative prosperity during this time, the occupation itself was premised on the economic subjugation of the territories and the denial to Palestinians of their political rights. Over two decades, Israel had expropriated Arab land; expanded an illegal settlement enterprise that fragmented the Palestinian territories; and maintained a repressive military occupation that routinized human rights violations of Palestinians under its rule, including arrests, deportations, home demolitions, indefinite detentions, curfews, and killings. With the intifada, Palestinians rose to shake off the yoke of military rule. They boycotted Israeli goods and refused to comply with the administrative processes underwriting their oppression, including procedures such as the issuance of ID cards and tax collection by the Israeli authorities.The image of Palestinian youth hurtling stones at Israeli tanks, Tareq added, came to denote the spirit of this period. Over four years, the Intifada resembled an anti-colonial struggle. Protesters clashed with the Israeli army using stones, sticks, and occasionally Molotov cocktails as the Israeli military struggled to quash what was predominantly a civilian uprising. Throughout the territories, decentralized popular committees emerged to organize mass action and shelter the identities of local leaders for fear of reprisals. Demonstrations were soon coordinated clandestinely. Appeals for strikes and instructions for acts of civil disobedience surfaced almost surreptitiously in leaflets left on car windscreens and graffiti sprayed on shop shutters. These memos often carried the imprint of the United National Leadership of the Uprising, a coalition of factions that was created early in the intifada to coordinate activities among the different towns and villages in the occupied territories. The intifada’s leaflets articulated the political goals of the uprising: to achieve independence from Israel’s occupation and establish a Palestinian state.According to Khaled Hroub, a Palestinian academic, a senior research fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies, Hamas is a blend of a national liberation movement and an Islamist religious group. By such a nature, its driving forces are dual, its daily functioning is biaxial and its end goals are bifocal, where each side of each binary serves the other.The dual driving reasons for Palestinians to join Hamas are to actively engage in the ‘liberation of Palestine’ by resisting the Israeli occupation and whatever else that may take, and to serve Islam and spread its word. The word ‘and’ is pivotal here and cannot be replaced by the word ‘or’, though the balance between the two motives need not be equal or the same in everyone. Hamas considers that its power is to be found in this link, the strengthened alloy of these two separate strands of Palestinian political activism: the national secular liberation movement that has confronted Israel, and the Islamist religious movement that largely has not. The desired thinking is that in struggling for the liberation of Palestine, an individual is serving Islam, and in strengthening the call of Islam this individual serves the liberation struggle.Founded in the late 1980s, says Khaled, Hamas emerged as a doubly driven religious-nationalist liberation movement that peacefully preaches the Islamic religious call while harmoniously embracing the strategy of armed struggle against an occupying Israel. Its critics thought it seemed as if Hamas started where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO ) [Arabic: منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية Munazzamat at-Tahrir al-Filastiniyyah] had left off. Its supporters felt that Hamas came at just the right time to salvage the Palestinian national struggle from complete capitulation to Israel. On the ground, Hamas hacked its path in almost the opposite direction to the peaceful route then being taken by the PLO and other Arab countries that had concluded peace treaties with Israel, namely Egypt and Jordan. It refused to come under the PLO as the wider umbrella of the Palestinian nationalist struggle and adopted the ‘old’ call for the ‘liberation of Palestine’ as it had been originally enshrined by the PLO founders back in the mid-1960s. Hamas rejected the idea of concluding peace treaties with Israel that were conditional on full Palestinian recognition of the right of Israel to exist.With the lack of any serious breakthrough toward achieving even a minimum level of Palestinian rights, Hamas has sustained a continuous rise since its inception. After years of persistent struggle, it has become a key player both within the parameters of the Arab and Palestinian-Israeli conflict and in the arena of political Islam in the region. At the Palestinian level, it has shown a continuing popular appeal. By using myriad and interconnected strategies spanning military attacks, educational, social, and charitable work in addition to religious propagation, it has succeeded in popularizing itself across the Palestinian constituencies inside and outside Palestine. With the gradual erosion of both the legitimacy and popularity of the PLO, Hamas’s power has manifested itself in landslide victories in municipal elections, student union elections, syndications, and other elections held in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.In the area of political Islam and its various approaches to politics, Hamas has offered a unique contemporary case of an Islamist movement that is engaged in a liberation struggle against a foreign occupation. Islamist movements have been driven by a host of various causes, the vast majority of which were focused on the corrupt regimes of their own countries. Another stream of movements, the ‘globalized Jihadists’, have expanded their ‘holy campaigns’ across geopolitical lines, furthering pan-Islamic notions that reject ideas of individual Muslim nation-states. Contrary to both of these, Hamas has somehow remained nation-state based, limiting its struggle to one for and within Palestine, and fighting not a local regime but a foreign occupier. This differentiation is important as it exposes the shallowness of the widespread (mostly Western) trivializing conflation of all Islamist movements into one single ‘terrorist’ category.Led by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, according to Tareq, Hamas’s cofounders viewed the Intifada as an opportune time to leverage all the preparation that had been taking place clandestinely for years to create an organization dedicated to 'raising the banner of God over every inch of Palestine.' Their leaflets were inconsistently signed at first as the leaders experimented with what to call their nascent organization. Names such as 'The Islamic Faction,' 'Path of Islam,' and 'Islamic Defense' were tried and tested. In January 1988, a few weeks after the Intifada had begun, the name HAMAS was finally chosen. Hamas’s creation was built on a solid institutional base that had been developed, primarily within the Gaza Strip, over several decades. The new movement was defined as the latest 'link in a long chain of the Jihad against the Zionist occupation.' To bolster Hamas’s standing, the founders reached back to the turn of the century and constructed a rich lineage that could be traced to the early days of the Zionist project.In the past, militarily, Hamas adopted the controversial tactic of ‘suicide bombing’, to which its name had become attached in the West and the rest of the world. The first used of this tactic was in 1994, in retaliation for a massacre of Palestinians praying in a mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron. A fanatical Jewish settler opened machine gun fire upon the worshippers, killing 29 and injuring many more. Hamas vowed to revenge these killings, and so it did. Since then all and each of Hamas’s vicious attacks against Israeli civilians have been directly linked to specific Israeli atrocities against Palestinian civilians.Tareq then tells us that on February 25, 1994, an American Jewish settler named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron during prayer time. Standing behind the rows of kneeling figures in front of him, Goldstein opened fire. Within minutes, twenty-nine Muslim worshippers had been killed and close to one hundred injured. The atrocity jolted the nascent Israeli-Palestinian bilateral negotiations that had gathered pace in the wake of the First Intifada, prompted by the PLO’s strategic redirection in 1988. Less than six months before the Hebron attack, in September 1993, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had awkwardly shaken hands in a widely publicized event on the South Lawn of the White House. The leaders had assembled in the American capital to sign the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, popularly known as the Oslo Accords, referring to the capital city where the secretive talks leading to the agreement had taken place.Following the signing, negotiations between Israel and the PLO in the form of a 'peace process' were launched. Goldstein’s attack served as a reminder of the bloody challenges this process faced. Forty-one days after the shooting, once the time allotted for Muslim ritual mourning had been respected, a member of Hamas approached a bus stop in Afula, a city in northern Israel. Standing next to fellow passengers, the man detonated a suicide vest, killing seven Israelis. This was on April 6, 1994, a day that marked Hamas’s first lethal suicide bombing in Israel. With the PLO’s engagement in diplomacy and Hamas’s escalation of armed resistance, the divergent paths of the Palestinian struggle were elucidated. One week later, another Hamas suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a bus stop in Hadera, again in northern Israel, killing five Israelis.These bombs had been assembled by 'the Engineer,' as their creator Yehya Ayyash was known. Ayyash, who was Hamas’s first bomb-maker, was born in the West Bank and had shown great talents in electrical and mechanical work in his childhood. After his studies, he joined the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing led by Salah Shehadeh. Ayyash had a powerful influence on al-Qassam’s military tactics and ultimately became responsible for the movement’s adoption of suicide bombing, what Hamas called its 'trademark' or 'signature' operations. As the fighter Izz al-Din al-Qassam had done more than half a century prior, Hamas extended religious legitimacy to its military tactics, in this case to suicide bombings, and increased their permis- sibility among Palestinians. Rather than referring to these attacks as suicidal, which is sinful in Islam, Hamas called them martyrdom operations and celebrated them as heroic self-sacrifice. Hamas’s glorification of suicide bombing fostered an environment where they were highly regarded actions, ensuring both the supply of volunteers and the enhanced execution of operations. Before long, they were adopted by non-Islamic movements, including Fatah, the main party in the PLO, which had ostensibly “renounced terrorism” in 1988.Although no more brutal than what the Israelis have been doing to Palestinians for decades, the suicide attacks have damaged the reputation of both Hamas and the Palestinians worldwide. Hamas’s justification for conducting these kinds of operations has many grounds. First, it says that these operations are the exception to the rule and were only driven by the need to retaliate. It was an ‘eye for an eye’ policy in response to the continual killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army. Second, Hamas says that it keeps extending an offer to Israel by which civilians on both sides would be spared from being targeted, but Israel has never accepted this offer. Third, Hamas leaders say that Israeli society as a whole should pay the price of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, just as much as Palestinian society is paying the price for that occupation: fear and suffering should be felt on both sides.At the socio-cultural level, Hamas has had mixed fortunes. Its grassroots social work in helping the poor and supporting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians has been admired and praised. This sustained work, which has been marked by competence and dedicated sincerity, has bestowed on the movement a high level of popularity. At election times this has paid off considerably. Combined with its military and confrontational action against Israel, Hamas has been functioning on several fronts at the same time, and this has not failed to impress the Palestinians. However, many secular Palestinians have feared that Hamas has been indirectly, if incrementally, transforming the cultural and social fabric of Palestinian society. Many Palestinians support the nationalist/liberationist and social work of Hamas, but not its religious ideal. Hamas purposefully overlooks this fact and instead considers any vote for its political agenda as a vote for its religious one too.In January 2006 Hamas stunned the world by winning the democratic elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council of the limited Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Bringing Hamas into the unprecedented glare of the limelight, this victory shocked many Palestinians, Israel, the United States, Europe, and Arab countries. It also left the defeated Palestinian Fatah movement, Hamas’s main rival which had led the Palestinian national movement for more than 40 years, completely shattered.The reasons behind the Hamas victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections, and the significance of this victory, merit a closer look. Hamas triumphed for a host of reasons. In the first place, the movement has indeed reaped the benefits of long years of devoted work and popularity among the Palestinians. At least half the voters supported Hamas for its program and its declared objectives; also for its warmth and the helping hands that it has kept close to the poor and needy. The other half of Hamas’s voters was driven by other forces. The fail- ure of the peace process, combined with the ever-increasing brutality of the Israeli occupation, left the Palestinians with no faith in the option of negotiating a peaceful settlement with Israel.Another major factor that helped Hamas in winning those elections was the failure of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in almost in all aspects. It failed not only externally, on the front of the peace talks with Israel, but also internally, with its management of day-to-day services to the Palestinian people. Mismanagement, corruption and theft were the ‘attributes’ that came to mark Fatah’s top leaders, ministers and high-ranking staff. As unemployment and poverty reached unprecedented levels, the extravagant lifestyle of senior Palestinian officials infuriated the public. The elections gave the people the chance to punish those officials. The chickens were coming home to roost, and Hamas was to be the beneficiary. Thus, it can hardly be said that the Palestinian people voted for Hamas primarily on religious grounds.We might ask, was Hamas popular when it won in 2006? According to Khaled, Hamas’s popularity matched the levels of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As an indirect indicator, many Palestinians who were supposedly Hamas supporters typically voted for the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, whose average shared of the Jordanian Parliamentary seats ranged between 30 and 35 percent. The Palestine issued and supported for the Palestinian struggle against Israel normally figured on the top of any electoral platform of the Jordanian Islamists.By contrast, Palestinians who lived in the United States, Europe, and other places far from Palestine were relatively less supportive of Hamas. Yet again there was no concrete evidence that could be used to identify general trends for the extent to which those Palestinians support Hamas, or Fatah for that matter. Many Palestinians had been living in these areas since well before the establishment of Hamas, leading secular and non-religious styles of life. It is safe to suggest that the observance of religious teachings, which is indicative of supporting Hamas, was visibly less in evidence among European and US-based Palestinians than among those who lived in Palestine or the Arab countries.So, how much money does it take to run Hamas? According to Matthew Levitt, it’s impossible to say with certainty. Hamas is not a publicly held corporation subject to transparent accounting obligations, independent audits, and government oversight. It is an organization that engages in a covert activity designed to thwart precisely such an analysis. What information available about Hamas’ finances is the result of investigations that necessarily rely sometimes on uncooperative sources.Norman G. Finkelstein writes that in April 2009, the President of the UN Human Rights Council appointed a 'Fact-Finding Mission' to 'investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law' during Operation Cast Lead. Richard Goldstone, ex-judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and ex-prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was named head of the Mission. Its original mandate was to scrutinize only Israeli violations of human rights during Cast Lead, but Goldstone conditioned his acceptance of the job on broadening the mandate to include violations on all sides. The council president invited Goldstone to write the mandate himself, which he proceeded to do, and which the president then accepted.The Goldstone Report found that much of the devastation Israel inflicted during Cast Lead was premeditated. It also found that the operation was anchored in a military doctrine that 'views disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals,' and that it was 'designed to have inevitably dire consequences for the non-combatants in Gaza.' The 'disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians' sprang from a 'deliberate policy,' as did the 'humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population.' Although Israel justified the attack on grounds of self-defense against Hamas rocket attacks, the Report pointed to a different motive. The 'primary purpose' of the Israeli blockade was to 'bring about a situation in which the civilian population would find life so intolerable that they would leave (if that were possible) or turn Hamas out of office, as well as to collectively punish the civilian population,' while Cast Lead itself was 'aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support.' The Report concluded that the Israeli assault constituted 'a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.' It also paid tribute to 'the resilience and dignity” of the Gazan people “in the face of dire circumstances.'In its legal determinations, the Goldstone Report found that Israel had committed numerous violations of customary and conventional international law. It also ticked off a considerable list of war crimes committed by Israel, including 'willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment,' 'willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health,' 'extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly,' and 'use of human shields.' It further determined that Israeli actions that 'deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of sustenance, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their access to courts of law and effective remedies ... might justify a competent court finding that crimes against humanity have been committed.'So, is Hamas a terrorist? According to Bjorn Brenner, running parallel to the much-debated issue of Islamism and its compatibility with liberal democracy, the core values of Hamas itself have also been a matter of great contention. In 2016—still, an armed movement, asserting its right to violent resistance against Israel and the perpetrator of suicide bombings in the past—some argue that Hamas is fundamentalist in outlook, inherently violent, and incapable of change. Others, however, assert that Hamas is just as capable of change and pragmatism as any other political movement.The religious characteristics displayed by the Hamas government were not aimed at directly establishing an Islamic state. They were instead part of a more discrete, though reasonably active, pursuit of Islamic norms and values. There was no evidence that the Hamas government was seeking to reform the institutions of the state in any formal way where, for instance, un-elected religious institutions would take precedence over elected ones. It nevertheless awarded the association of Muslim scholars in Gaza a semi-formal role through which they could exert increased influence over society. These considerations suggest that Hamas’s governing style does not fully correspond to the Islamic-Theocratic type. Being both religious—but only up to a point—and authoritarian—but still showing certain democratic traits—Hamas’s governing style must be situated mid-way between the Islamic-Theocratic and Demo-Islamic ones.While by 2006 Hamas itself had expressed a desire to respect democratic principles, says Brenner, it was subjected to extreme political pressures from both international and domestic forces. A point of particular interest here, in addition to its own claims to govern democratically, is Hamas’s emphasis on its Islamic identity. The new government declared that Islamic values would underpin all its political actions. Hamas further argued that Islamic and democratic values could coexist within the same framework, and announced that it would create an ‘Islamic democracy’ in Palestine.Given the apparent proofs of its ability—abiding by democratic procedures during the 2006 elections; embracing democratic principles in its public statements; and asserting in its government manifesto that Islam and democracy are compatible—Hamas, as the first case of an Islamist group achieving power by democratic means in the Arab world, constituted an experiment and a showcase of how Islamist governance might turn out in practice.Let's finish with our topic about Hamas, and in the following fragment, we'll continue with another theme, bi 'idhnillah."Then, Jasmine sang,We will not go downIn the night, without a fightYou can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schoolsBut our spirit will never dieWe will not go downIn Gaza tonight *)
Citations & References:
- Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, 2018, Stanford University Press
- Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom, 2018, University of California Press
- Bjorn Brenner, Gaza Under Hamas: From Islamic Democracy to Islamist Governance, 2017, I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
- Khaled Hroub, Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide, 2006, Pluto Press
- Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, 2006, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
*) "We Will Not Go Down" written by Michael Heart
