Six weeks after the attacks of 7 October, with a punishing war in full swing, Jordan’s deputy prime minister
issued a warning. “Hamas is an idea,” Ayman Safadi said. “It cannot be bombed out of existence.”
Hamas is today one of the most important nationalist and Islamic movements in the world. Its enemies denounce it as the equivalent of Islamic State. Its supporters call it “the resistance”.
Part history, part analysis,
Hamas: The Quest for Power draws from the authors’ first-hand, on-the-ground research and reporting. Originally published in 2010 in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a three-week war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, this edition has been revised and updated throughout.
Violent opposition to Israel is baked into the group’s identity, but is not, the authors argue, its raison d’etre. Do not mistake a milestone for a destination, they warn. To establish an Islamic Palestinian state, the ideologies of secular and leftist movements must be fought off as well.
There are also competing visions within Hamas about how to achieve its goals. Palestinian society is diverse, and Hamas is eager to present itself as a representative national movement. Its leadership, therefore, is broad and drawn from varied constituencies that range from Gaza to the West Bank, Israeli prison cells to the diaspora. Some Hamas leaders are presented by Milton-Edwards and Farrell as more “pragmatic”, others as more hardline or fundamentalist. Though it is tempting to imagine these divisions as being drawn between Hamas’s military wing and its more outfacing political bureau, the authors detail interesting tensions within the Qassam brigades soon after Hamas took control of Gaza.
Mohammed Deif, the brigades’ shadowy leader and the architect of 7 October, returned to Gaza in 2007 to confront his “radical” lieutenants, who had gained power as he recovered from an Israeli attack. In private, the authors report, Deif bemoaned the Salafist radicalisation of his rivals, which he feared could be reputationally ruinous for Hamas by linking it to terror group al-Qaida.
They make a compelling argument that Hamas’s rise was aided by Israeli complacency, if not complicity. In the late 80s and early 90s, a blind eye was turned to inflows of cash from supporters abroad, and Hamas’s social projects operated undisturbed. “Israel regarded Hamas as a convenient foil to the PLO,” the authors write, hoping the newcomers could chip away at support for Arafat. Similarly, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has
reportedly boasted that allowing Qatar to fund Hamas helped undermine the Palestinian national project by stoking divisions and separating authorities in the West Bank from Gaza. For Israeli critics of Netanyahu’s government, 7 October proved this policy a disaster.