On Religious Fundamentalism… Dance of Death (2/3)

The Muslim Brotherhood moved from preaching and proselytizing to political and jihadist activity in Palestine by restructuring its organization, which took the form of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas. This transformation was accompanied by a considerable expansion of its popular base. The movement then sought to impose its own conception of the Palestinian interest, as discussed in the first part of this analysis.

In its declared political stance, Hamas relied on two main pillars: overturning the Oslo Accords and denouncing the Palestinian Authority’s governance failures and corruption. At the same time, it promoted the slogans of reform and change, targeting the Authority, its ministries and agencies, as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the institutional framework of Palestinian representation endowed with official status and international legitimacy.

As for its jihadist, military, and security activities, these provided the emerging movement with the gateway through which it transformed itself from a closed, elitist partisan group into a broad-based popular movement. This transformation took place through the use of violence during what it called the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Hamas then pushed its use of violence as far as its capabilities allowed, convinced that suicidal jihad would lead to the liberation of Jerusalem and the entirety of Palestinian territory from Zionist occupation.

This orientation followed the revolutionary model of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the alliance with Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria, as though these two experiences alone embodied both the Arab and Islamic worlds!

By the end of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and after the death of President Yasser Arafat, the internal Palestinian balance of power was shifting in Hamas’s favor. As the January 2006 legislative elections approached, a fatwa was issued authorizing participation in the vote, without dwelling on the laws governing it, its connection to the Oslo Accords, or the Palestinian Authority’s commitments toward Israel and the international community.

The movement relied on its broad popular base, which supported armed struggle in all its forms, while maintaining its slogan calling for the “downfall of the agreement of betrayal.” Drawing strength from this new popular footing, it entered the elections under the banner of “Change and Reform.”

The Test of Power

Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats in the Legislative Council, securing a majority. Its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, became prime minister alongside the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas did not demand that Hamas alter its party platform, any more than he required this of the other factions participating in government. He did, however, stress the need for the government and all institutions of the Authority to abide by the agreements signed with Israel and by existing commitments toward the international community.

This position rested on an essential distinction between, on the one hand, parties and factions with their respective programs and, on the other, the institution exercising governmental authority, which was supposed to represent the Palestinian political entity. In principle, this is a distinction observed in parliamentary systems and modern states.

Looking back at the electoral platform under which Hamas ran beneath the banner of “Change and Reform,” one finds a political document containing provisions on national principles and resistance, the protection of political freedoms and pluralism, the peaceful transfer of power, the rejection of internal fighting, respect for minority rights, the prohibition of political arrests, the fight against corruption, and judicial reform.

The platform also called for Islamic Sharia to become the sole source of legislation, alongside a range of social and economic provisions that, for the most part, scarcely differed from those supported by other Palestinian political forces.

The program contained eighteen sections, each broken down into a number of detailed points. Yet this document, which represented Hamas’s first major democratic test in the exercise of power, did not long withstand the reality of the institutional duality that emerged between the presidency of the Authority and the premiership.

Less than a year and a half later, this duality culminated in armed confrontation, followed by Hamas’s forcible takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

The events surrounding this internal conflict exposed a stark contradiction between the electoral platform’s pledges to uphold pluralism, reject internecine fighting, and ensure the peaceful transfer of power, and a political practice that ultimately resorted to force to settle the struggle for power.

Hundreds of members of the security forces, factional militants, and civilians were killed or wounded in those clashes. Since then, the Palestinian arena has entered a phase of political and geographical division between two rival authorities.

The problem did not lie in Hamas’s transition from opposition to government as such. That is, after all, the essence of democracy. But taking power confronted its ideological discourse with a very different test: how does a political doctrine become a governing project?

There is a fundamental difference between possessing a mobilizing discourse capable of rallying public support while in opposition and governing a society afflicted by poverty, unemployment, blockade, occupation, and deteriorating public services, a society that needs, above all, education, healthcare, jobs, development, justice, and sound administration.

Here lies one of the structural dilemmas of religious fundamentalism: its capacity to produce a political discourse that derives much of its strength from a religious frame of reference, set against the difficulty of translating that frame of reference into a coherent program for economics, development, culture, and public administration.

This difficulty is not unique to the Palestinian experience. It has appeared, to varying degrees, in other Islamist experiences, from Iran to Sudan, Somalia, and Tunisia, whenever ideology collided with the realities and complexities of society, and whenever politics became an extension of doctrine rather than a sphere for managing competing interests within society.

In the Palestinian case, the dilemma was even more complex. Hamas had not taken power in a fully sovereign state, but within an Authority with limited powers, under occupation, in a society subjected to blockade, while Israel continued to control borders, airspace, waters, and crossings and retained the ability to separate Palestinian territories and control the movement of people, goods, and resources.

In such an environment, any political project aspiring to govern should have placed development, improved living conditions, and institutional management at the top of its priorities, while clearly defining the relationship between resistance and the requirements of governance.

Yet Hamas gradually came to place the armed conflict with Israel at the center of its political and security activity.

Thus, the transition to power did not lead to a separation between the movement’s partisan and ideological function and the role of governmental institutions. Instead, it reproduced the conflict within the institutions of power themselves.

From that point on, the paradox that would accompany the Hamas experience became increasingly clear: a movement that came to power through elections, yet proved unable to establish a stable separation between its ideological project as a movement and the requirements of governance as an authority.

This paradox would ultimately lead from “Change and Reform” as an electoral slogan to the establishment of a de facto authority born of division and military force.

Power and War

Since taking control of the Gaza Strip, Hamas has fought four major wars and dozens of intermittent clashes, in addition to two wars during which it remained on the sidelines while Islamic Jihad confronted the Israeli military alone.

Just as major Israeli operations bore symbolic names drawn from Zionist religious imagery, Hamas, too, gave its battles names laden with Islamic religious references: Al-Furqan in 2009, Hijarat al-Sijjil in 2012, Al-Asf al-Ma’kul in 2014, Sword of Jerusalem in 2021, and finally the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

Over the course of these confrontations, the al-Qassam Brigades developed their rocket-launching capabilities and tunnel network, devoting considerable sums of money and significant human resources to both.

Across the first four wars, whose combined duration approached one hundred days, the death toll exceeded 4,000, while tens of thousands more, civilians and combatants alike, were wounded. The wars also caused extensive destruction of buildings, infrastructure, and homes.

If these wars were subjected to serious study and analysis in terms of their causes, immediate consequences, and long-term effects, one would find that they constituted the principal factor holding together Hamas’s military and security apparatus.

Ongoing confrontation with the Israeli military allows Hamas to preserve this cohesion and prolong its rule, while also allowing it to deflect responsibility for its failures in governing a blockaded territory whose economy relied heavily on tunnels and smuggling.

The poverty rate in the Gaza Strip reached 60 percent, while unemployment rose to 45 percent, three times the level recorded in the West Bank. Whereas Gaza’s gross domestic product represented 31 percent of total Palestinian GDP in 2006, its share had fallen to 17 percent of the Palestinian economy by 2022 under Hamas rule.

These figures reveal the reality of failure in the management of public affairs when political choices are elevated to the status of religious obligations and linked to slogans invoking the afterlife.

Death then becomes a form of spiritual ascent to be celebrated, with congratulations offered to the organization and the family when the fallen is a fighter. By contrast, the death of a civilian is merely mourned, although that civilian was never entrusted with any mission and, above all, was never consulted, whether single or responsible for a family, losing his life, or even the lives of his family, without ever having chosen such a fate.

In this way, the impasses of governance are projected onto the permanent conflict with the occupation. Any criticism, objection, or demand can then be cast as an assault on the sacred or, at the very least, as an abandonment of the struggle against the occupation and, more often than not, as high treason.

However harsh and bitter the consequences may be, the movement’s leaders continue, in their political discourse and public statements, to mobilize religious terminology, Quranic verses, and Prophetic hadiths in order to convince the population that it is advancing toward Israel’s defeat and the liberation of Jerusalem.

They even proclaim “the inevitable disappearance of the Zionist entity”, just as some nationalists and leftists once proclaimed “the coming defeat of global imperialism and its protégé, Israel”.

This pattern was reproduced year after year under Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, until the “Al-Aqsa Flood” of October 2023.