Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance

by Tareq Baconi

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright.1 This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground.

I stood in an open plain in north Gaza and looked over at Sderot, a town in southern Israel. If ever there was a reminder of the political nature of Gaza’s tragedy, it was that snapshot. The juxtaposition of Sderot’s manicured tree lines and white houses with Gaza’s postapocalyptic landscape elucidated the stark discrepancy in what constituted “life” across the few kilometers that separated those two places.

The collective punishment of millions has become permissible, comprehensible, and legitimate. Destroying schools and targeting UN shelters, as Israel did in 2014, are military tactics that have been justified as essential for Israel to defend itself against terror. The killing of more than five hundred children during that same operation for many becomes little more than an unfortunate necessity.

Hamas’s actions fit into the definition of terrorism used by the U.S. Department of State, which notes that “terrorism is premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents.”4 While Hamas itself admits that it has used such tactics, it vehemently rejects being designated a terrorist organization. The logic underpinning this seeming contradiction is the absence of a single definition about what constitutes terrorism.5 The term is malleable and subjective, and more importantly, it has been used as a tool of war.6 The definition put forward by the U.S. State Department has consistently and cynically been manipulated to justify illegal and morally reprehensible military measures, in this case by Israel. Furthermore, while the label of “terrorism” under this definition can be applied to Hamas, it fails to account for the terror caused by Israel’s relentless military regime over the Palestinians.

Why is terrorism limited to subnational groups or clandestine agents if states are the biggest perpetrators of organized violence against civilians?7 How does one differentiate between indiscriminate violence aimed solely at terrorizing civilians and legitimate armed resistance aimed at securing internationally sanctioned rights that invariably ends up killing civilians?

Classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization has justified sweeping military action against Palestinians, depoliticizing and dehumanizing their struggle. It has also prevented the possibility of viewing Palestinian armed resistance as a form of self-defense within the context of war. The notions of war and peace are subjective for Israel and the Palestinians. For the former, war begins when rockets fall on its territory or when suicide bombers invade its streets. For the latter, war is constant, manifest through a brutal military occupation that has persisted for more than half a century. The transition between war and peace for Palestinians is an imaginary one.

In one of the carnivals in Gaza before the 2014 escalation, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh blasted through the loudspeakers to a vast crowd, “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life.”10 A few weeks later, as Hamas was boosting the morale of Gazans amid Israel’s onslaught, another Hamas leader called on people to face the occupation “with their bare chests,” and to embrace death if it came their way.11 These remarks were used throughout global media channels to signify that Hamas was using civilians as human shields and that Palestinians revere a culture of death where martyrdom is a goal to be rejoiced.

Stepping away from polemics associated with the use of a deeply charged and ultimately ineffective term such as “terrorism,” this book describes violence, military attacks, occupation, suicide bombings, assassinations, rocket fire, and air-raids in their most basic characteristics, while acknowledging and mourning the devastation and human suffering that underpin these acts. The book will have fulfilled its purpose if it presents Hamas’s counternarrative on its own terms. Such an undertaking is made with the hope that the movement will emerge and be understood in a wider space where such critical examination has so often been lacking.

Through a dual process of containment and pacification, Hamas has been forcefully transformed into little more than an administrative authority in the Gaza Strip, in many ways akin to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. At the time of its thirtieth anniversary, the movement appears temporarily—if not conclusively—pacified, and Israel seems to have succeeded in maintaining the permanence of an occupation long deemed unsustainable.

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 the course of 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.

Israel ultimately emerged victorious, capturing 78 percent of the land of Palestine, significantly more than had been allocated to it under the UN Partition Plan. The 1948 war, known as the “War of Independence” by Israel and “al-Nakba,” or the catastrophe, by Palestinians, marked the independence of Israel, a watershed moment when the Zionist project became a political reality. For the Palestinians, this was a point of rupture, an unthinkable catastrophe which marked the disappearance of their homeland.

Recognizing the extent of the problem, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194 on December 11, 1948, stressing that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” This resolution firmly established the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Israel, however, promptly closed its borders and prevented any such return.

The PLO’s revolution had a liberating effect on the Palestinian psyche. But its practical ability to achieve its stated goals of liberation and the creation of a Palestinian state was less obvious. Given the power disparity with Israel, it became clear even as early as the 1970s that liberation through armed struggle was unlikely. Nonetheless, the PLO’s revolution persisted as a means of asserting Palestinian identity, developing political legitimacy, and broadcasting the Palestinian plight globally.68 For an American administration in the midst of the Cold War, and its view that the Palestinians were allied with the USSR, the PLO’s actions were branded as international terrorism and all forms of diplomatic engagement with the group were banned.

Ostensibly driven by a policy of noninterference with social Islamic organizations, Israel approved the license and the association was established that same year.76 Israel had other reasons to support the growth of Islamic movements, particularly in Gaza, as it hoped that cultivating the brotherhood would produce a counterforce that could weaken other Palestinian nationalist movements.

Israel’s accelerated colonization commenced shortly after the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fell under Israeli control in 1967, but began in earnest with the rise to power of the right-wing Likud political party within Israel in 1977.87 Israeli policies toward the occupied territories signaled to Palestinians the intention of the Israeli government to hold on to the territories it had acquired following the 1967 war.

Hamas’s charter offered no explicit indication of the nature of the Islamic Palestinian state or entity it was seeking, in terms of its theological and political structures, neither did it signal that Hamas was looking to break from the modern trappings of a nation-state model.102 The charter spoke of how such an Islamic polity would allow for Christians and Jews to live in peace and harmony under Muslim rule.

Jihad comprised political, economic, social, and cultural facets, or what Hamas often described as an “Islamic renaissance” project.111 Waging jihad was understood as a way of being, as existing in a state of war or espousing a belligerent relationship with the enemy. Jihad was not limited to armed struggle, although this did comprise a central element of Hamas’s mission. Even in the absence of military operations, evoking jihad conjured a sense of identity and purpose that reaffirmed the Palestinian rejection of Israeli control.

The intifada was for the most part a popular uprising.120 Palestinians used the means at their disposal to disrupt the occupation. Facing a largely civilian uprising, Israel’s response was often brutal. Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Rabin infamously called on the army to “break the bones” of the protestors to deter their actions, sanctioning the use of plastic-covered bullets and live ammunition.121 The Israeli military imposed crippling curfews and carried out large-scale administrative detention against Palestinians.122

In early 1989, Hamas captured and murdered two Israeli soldiers. Despite the military nature of Hamas’s targets, this prompted Israel to declare Hamas a terrorist organization as it moved to arrest three hundred members, including Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who was sentenced to a lifetime plus fifteen years in prison. Israel also declared dealings with Hamas a punishable offense.

The Oslo Accords made history by enshrining mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel.6 Through the agreement, the PLO’s recalibration was completed as the group formally recognized Israel and adopted diplomatic negotiations as the path toward securing a political settlement. In return, Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians, making no formal indication with regard to Palestinian statehood.

After signing the Oslo Accords, Arafat and the exiled leadership were allowed to return to the Gaza Strip from Tunis and, for the first time, to lead the Palestinian struggle from within the occupied territories.11 Palestinians under occupation were hopeful the Oslo Accords would bring statehood.12 The economy had suffered during the intifada, and Palestinians had watched Israel expand its settlement enterprise on land that was presumably to make up their future state. Israel’s settlement expansion persisted even after the right-wing Likud government was replaced by a left-leaning Labor cabinet under Yitzhak Rabin in 1992.

On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish Israeli ultranationalist at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

Hamas’s campaign of suicide bombing had a powerful impact on the Israeli electorate, which in 1996 voted to replace the Labor government with a more security-oriented and right-wing Likud government under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hamas’s opposition was vindicated in May 2000, when Ehud Barak unexpectedly decided to withdraw Israel’s occupying forces from south Lebanon after years of explosive confrontations with Hezbollah.35 The swiftness of Israel’s retreat in the absence of a peace agreement with Lebanon left the impression that it was pressured to let go of the territory because of Hezbollah’s armed struggle. Hamas hailed the success of the “Lebanese model” as proof that resistance was the only way to liberate Palestine.

Rapidly, however, the Second Intifada (referred to as the al-Aqsa Intifada given its birthplace) militarized. The Israeli army fired between twenty-eight and thirty-three thousand bullets per day against Palestinian stones and light arms throughout October, strategically using disproportionate force to break up protests.46 Ever the tactician, Arafat moved to harness the bubbling anger on the street.

Rather than a blip on the diplomatic path, the uprising was seen by Hamas as final proof of the demise of the peace process and of the futility of the PLO’s chosen path. Publications proclaimed that “al-Aqsa Intifada crushe[d] with stones the settlement process” and united the Muslim nation behind resistance.65 As Hamas’s spokesman explained, after the Oslo Accords had “interrupted the natural evolution of Hamas’s Islamic jihadist program,” the Second Intifada marked its resumption.66

Hamas’s statements indicated both that its military operations during the Second Intifada were limited to the goal of liberating the occupied territories, rather than to the destruction of Israel, and that the movement was ready to end violence in return for an end to the occupation. In this way, Hamas accepted the notion of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, much as the PLO had done before it, without conceding the goal of liberating historic Palestine by recognizing Israel.

A deeply controversial figure within Israel itself, Sharon was despised by Palestinians as he had built a military and political career rooted in destroying Palestinian nationalism.74 His ideal outcome for Israel entailed the pacification of the Palestinian territories and their inhabitants, subjugating them to Israeli rule without conferring any collective political rights. His vision for Israel was often interpreted as aiming to secure maximum Palestinian territory with minimal Palestinian inhabitants in an effort to sustain Israel’s demographic reality as a Jewish-majority nation.75 Before his political comeback as prime minister, he had been publicly disgraced for leading the Israelis into the disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Elaborating on the “philosophical premise” underlying the balance of terror, Hamas’s magazines wrote that “Zionist invaders are able, with their vast military and their limitless American support, to attack, destroy, decimate. But in return, they cannot protect themselves from being targeted, from providing safety and security to their people, who now live in an unprecedented state of horror, fear, and panic.”82

Comforted by an American administration under George W. Bush that was unwilling to step into Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy after Clinton’s debacle, Sharon effectively brushed the report aside and maintained his military response to the uprising.83 Arafat, in contrast, accepted the report.

Hamas elaborated that “this crisis is not between two neighboring warriors. . . . In reality it is the aggression of an oppressive occupation on an unarmed population. . . . The occupation itself is the highest form of terrorism, violence and aggression.”86 Hamas’s publications condemned the implicit “equalization of power” that they inferred from demanding that both parties cease violence: that was akin to “compar[ing] the victim to the executioner, the murderer to the murdered.”87 Hamas insisted that to end violence, the occupation itself had to be dismantled. Its own attacks were portrayed as self-defense against the inherently violent nature of the occupation.88

Overnight, the Second Intifada came to be presented as Israel’s “War on Terror.” Arafat condemned al-Qaeda’s actions, as did Hamas, which de-escalated its military front.113 Nonetheless, evoking the U.S.-Israeli special relationship, Sharon portrayed the Palestinian armed factions as Israel’s own al-Qaeda. In a post–9/11 Bush administration, this analogy carried a great deal of weight. Conflating what constituted “Islamic extremism,” Hamas’s bombs in Jerusalem were described as being one symptom of global “Islamic terrorism.”114 This parity overlooked Hamas’s articulation that its military operations were perpetrated solely to end Israel’s illegal occupation. It also elided Israel’s own lethal operations within the occupied territories, thereby highlighting the violence of only one of the two parties involved in attrition.

Paradoxically, while Israel’s offensive targeted the Palestinian Authority’s infrastructure, pressure was sustained on the increasingly ineffectual Arafat to rein in the factions.

A few hours before Hamas purportedly agreed to formalize a prospective ceasefire, Israel assassinated al-Qassam’s leader Salah Shehadeh on July 22. He was killed alongside thirteen others, including nine children.159 Palestinians saw what they called the “Gaza massacre” as proof that Israel was intent on undermining the delicate transformation the Palestinian Authority was trying to orchestrate.160 “It is true that Hamas was preparing to announce a ceasefire in exchange for some conditions,” Yassin confirmed, “but after the Gaza massacre and this crime against humanity, there is nothing but jihad.”

Mahmoud Abbas, a senior PLO leader who was favored by the Americans and Israelis for his explicit condemnation of armed resistance, became the Palestinian prime minister. This post was created specifically to curtail Arafat’s presidential power.

Abbas stressed the need for Israeli cooperation before finalizing his agreement with Hamas. He implored Sharon to meet his obligations under the roadmap as he tried to shatter the illusion that violence could be controlled while Israel maintained its aggressive policies and settlement building. On June 10, just a few days after the Aqaba summit, Israel carried out an assassination attempt on Rantissi in Gaza, once again ensuring that no ceasefire could emerge. Claiming “utmost provocation,” al-Qassam called for the mobilization of their cells against all Israeli civilians.

In response to suicide bombing, Israel presented Palestinian resistance broadly, and Hamas specifically, as a form of international terrorism, akin to al-Qaeda, bent on its destruction. Any sense that Hamas was using armed struggle to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land was circumvented, as Israel positioned its response to the Second Intifada as an existential battle.

Sharon’s unexpected declaration coincided with Israel’s hasty construction of a separation wall that disconnected it from the West Bank. The wall, which Israelis refer to as the “security fence” and Palestinians as the “apartheid wall,” is an imposing eight-meter-high, seven-hundred-kilometer concrete structure fitted with electronic fences, barbed wire, and highly sophisticated surveillance equipment.2 Israel ostensibly built this wall to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering its cities. Rather than building the wall on Israeli land or along the 1967 borders, however, the structure snaked through Palestinian territories, unilaterally seizing more than 10 percent of the West Bank, including whole neighborhoods around East Jerusalem as well as major settlement blocs that were integrated into this de facto border.

Sharon’s initiative also reflected a continuation of his use of the pretext of security to unilaterally consolidate Israel’s grip on the territories while avoiding any form of political engagement with the Palestinians.10 This goal was explicitly articulated by Sharon’s top aide, Dov Weisglass, in an interview several months later. “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” Weisglass told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

Yasser Arafat’s death, after two years in confinement in a compound that had been bombarded by Israel’s army, was symbolic of the state of Palestinian politics. After the third burial of a major leader in 2004, factions turned their attention to rebuilding their institutions. Municipal elections were the first point of departure. These were to proceed in four rounds in 2004 and 2005. The first took place in December 2004 and January 2005 in twenty-six districts in the West Bank and ten in the Gaza Strip. Hamas had historically always participated in municipal, student, and union elections as they complemented its extensive social and charitable arm. Through this participation, Hamas buttressed its grassroots credibility, maintaining a strong presence in institutions focused on local administration and municipal services while nurturing the connection to its popular base. Building on its message of reconstituting the incumbent leadership, Hamas ran under the banner of “Change and Reform.”

In elections in Gaza, for instance, Hamas raised banners stating, “The Choice: Qassam Rocket or a Policeman Protecting Israel,” in a clear jibe at the Palestinian Authority’s security coordination with Israel.

Alongside this round of municipal elections, presidential elections were set to take place in January 2005. Hamas decided to boycott the search for a presidential candidate and kept with its traditional rhetoric that elections for posts within the Palestinian Authority merely legitimated the institution and produced a new cadre of leadership serving Israeli and American interests.

Abbas and his supporters had also begun speaking of the monopolization of arms under the Palestinian Authority as the single governing entity in the territories.104 Hamas was adamantly opposed to disarming or integrating its military wing into the Palestinian security forces unless the institution was reformed in a manner that did not undermine Hamas’s capacity to wage armed struggle. This of course ran counter to the Palestinian Authority’s commitment under the Oslo Accords to safeguard Israel’s security. While being open to ceasefires, Hamas’s fundamental belief in the righteousness of armed struggle against the military occupation remained unshakeable.

The American approach was rooted in the belief that Palestinians had voted for change, seeking a less corrupt government than Fatah’s, but that they still desired a negotiated peace settlement in the form of a two-state solution, unlike Hamas.4 In reality, Palestinians had voted Hamas in for a number of reasons, including frustration with Fatah’s corruption, resentment at the failed and endless peace talks, Hamas’s reliability in providing welfare services, and indeed its defiant rhetoric against the occupation.

After congratulating the Palestinians on their successful democratic election, and following intensive discussions and pressure from Secretary Rice, the Quartet issued a statement noting “that it was inevitable that future assistance to any new government would be reviewed by donors against that government’s commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Roadmap.”

Publications declared that the international community had to respect the will of the Palestinian people given its habit of preaching the virtues of democracy.17 Anxiety that a “terrorist organization” had been democratically elected was seen by Hamas as proof that the prevalent paradigm through which the Palestinian struggle was perceived in the West was flawed. For Hamas and its supporters, their actions constituted armed resistance against a terroristic occupation.18

Fatah’s monopolization of the political establishment meant that Hamas faced enormous institutional inertia. This was exacerbated by the international community’s overt and clandestine support of the incumbent. As discussions among factions progressed, the Palestinian Authority’s leadership initiated measures to mitigate Hamas’s entry into politics.

In essence, Hamas sought to reverse the institutional inertia that had pacified the Palestinian leadership, and to resuscitate the calls for liberation that had marked the PLO’s early history. The core of Hamas’s aspiration rested on institutionalizing the notion of “resistance” into the very philosophy of the order it envisioned.

The blockade was particularly harsh in Gaza, where Israel shuttered all access into or from the strip for 60 percent of the time from the moment Hamas was elected. This was criticized as a form of collective punishment against civilians to penalize them for their democratic choice.

Olmert’s aide, Dov Weisglass, explained that Israel’s approach was “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”