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.
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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”.
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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)