The Islamic Resistance Movement, popularly known by its Arabic acronym as Hamas, has been in the spotlight since its unprovoked, savage attack in southern Israel on 7 October, killing some 1,400 people and seizing over 200 hostages ~ of all ages.

As the Israeli military after weeks of relentless air-strikes prepares to launch a ground offensive in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, many wonder if its ultimate goal of eradicating Hamas would ever be achieved. For, Hamas is more than a terror organization; it is part of a religious nationalist movement, which represents the region’s counter-hegemonic challenge articulated on the basis of, and expressed through Islam.

Having emerged in the latter half of the 1980s, Hamas is today the leading Palestinian voice of unyielding war with Israel. It believes that Palestine is an ‘Islamic trust’ consecrated for the future generations of Muslims until the Day of Judgment and any negotiations with the enemy over Palestine amount to treason.

The problem of Palestine is thus a religious problem, which defies any political settlement. Underlying the religious sanctity conferred by the Islamists, there is an irreducible attachment not just to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but to the whole of Palestine. Reflective of this, the 1988 Charter of Hamas describes the Jewish state on Palestinian territory as an utter absurdity that will be inevitably destroyed.

Destruction of Israel is not just the goal but the precondition of liberating Palestine. And this will be accomplished by spreading the spirit of Jihad through which Hamas aspires to raise the banner of Allah on every inch of Palestinian land.

Hamas’s commitment to an Islamic solution is based on the notion that nationalism is an element of religious belief and defence of Muslim land is the sacred duty of all Muslims. The Charter places the struggle for Palestine within the context of the pan-Islamic liberation movement and traces the roots of Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood, the longest surviving Islamist movement founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in the late 1920s. By identifying the movement as the activist arm of the Brotherhood, Hamas legitimizes its claim to direct the Palestinian revolt.

Offering the vision of an allIslamic Palestine to be realized through the sacred struggle of Jihad, Hamas appeared on the political scene during the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. With a large, organized social base that the Islamists had built up prior to its formation, Hamas strove to establish its presence in the Palestinian political landscape as an alternative to the nationalist Fatah, a dominant faction within the Yasser Arafat-led Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

Contesting the latter’s claim to be the sole representative of the Palestinian people, Hamas enforced its own strike days and resistance agendas. At the same time, it concentrated its efforts on popularizing Islamic virtues and forging close links with the community through networks of educational institutions, charitable societies, consumer operatives and study circles.

In all the institutions under its sway, Hamas worked to denationalize Palestinian politics, and put in its place, a moral agenda stressing the bedrock theme, ‘Islam is the solution.’ Above and all, Hamas owed its political prominence in the initial years of its formation to the Israeli government, which, ironically, played no small part in letting the Islamic genie out of the bottle.

Several studies reveal that Israel in the first two decades of its occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967 tolerated and in some cases, endorsed the presence of Islamists, particularly in the Gaza Strip. As explained by Beverley Milton-Edwards, author of the book, Islamic Politics in Palestine, “Israel’s benign encouragement of the Islamic movement was designed to strengthen Islam in the face of nationalists in the form of the Palestinian Liberation Movement.

By nurturing a conservative and traditional trend, the Israeli authorities hoped to diminish the progressive and radical appeal of the movement for national liberation.” Hamas emerged as a formidable opponent of the Fatah during the first intifada, posing a serious challenge to the secular nationalist ideology as well as the concept of coexistence with Israel.

It was, indeed, the threat of a flourishing Islamist movement that created the common ground amongst two erstwhile enemies, propelling the PLO and Israel to engage in the US-mediated peace negotiations that resulted in the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Holding on to its rejectionist line, Hamas tried to undermine the process of accommodation with Israel by unleashing a spate of suicide strikes through its military wing, known as the Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades.

Named after a Syrian cleric who fought the British and Jews in Palestine in the 1930s, the alQassam Brigades are Hamas’s hardest group of cells dedicated to suicide missions and armed struggle. In the post-Oslo years, Fatah became a state-party with its focus gradually shifting from the liberation agenda to building state institutions, distributing benefits and guaranteeing security for Israel by suppressing the Islamist movement the Israelis originally nurtured.

While saddled with a moribund peace process, Fatah failed to revitalize the nationalist presence on the ground partly because of Israel’s relentless destruction of its institutions and local cadres in the wake of the second intifada in September 2000 and partly, Fatah’s internal divisions following the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004.

Hamas, in contrast, grew in strength less because of its policy of martyrdom and emphasis on social puritanism than the dissipating legitimacy of nationalist ideology represented by the Fatah, which dominated the Palestinian national movement for decades. Subsequently, when Fatah lost to its rival, Hamas in the 2006 Parliamentary elections, it made systematic attempts to obstruct Hamas integration into the PNA. The power struggle between two factions finally ended with the territorial and political division of the PNA into two separate entities, Fatahland and Hamastan.

While Fatah remains in charge of the West Bank under President Mahmoud Abbas since 2005, Hamas has consolidated its hold over Gaza Strip since its forcible takeover in June 2007. Several rounds of reconciliation efforts initiated by Saudi Arabia and Egypt have not yielded desired results largely because Israel refuses to negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas.

Unlike the Fatah-controlled PNA, which chooses to rely on the international community for resuscitating the peace process, Hamas is persistent with its armed struggle to liberate Palestine despite the non-recognition of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority in Gaza and repeated Israeli reprisals.

In all, Hamas represents the lone Palestinian voice at a time when the PNA is enfeebled, the two-state solution enshrined by the Oslo deal has become defunct and several Arab countries have opted to normalize relations with Israel disregarding the expansion of Jewish settlements, forcible relocation of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and severe restrictions on Palestinian residents in West Bank and Gaza. Unless and until the core issue of the Palestinian statehood is resolved, religious nationalism ~ Islamism in West Asian context ~ will remain a potent political ideology, giving rise to a variety of other such radical outfits amid a growing sense of abandonment and disillusionment regardless of whether Hamas as an organization is eventually wiped out or not.

(The writer is former Dean, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)