With a reported 15,500 people in Gaza killed by Israel and the number rising every day, millions of people will tend to sympathize with anybody who stands up to Israel’s genocidal death machine. 

According to a recent Harris Poll 51% of respondents 18-24 years old in the U.S. say Hamas Oct. 7 attack “can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians”. The same poll showed similar attitudes towards Hamas itself. This attitude sharply conflicts with that of older people here in the U.S. In order to effectively organize opposition to US support for the terrorist State of Israel, we must be clear on the origins of Hamas.

What does it represent today? What are its methods?  What are the alternatives? 

Gaza

For all the hardship caused by Israel’s blockade, people of Gaza were somewhat free of Israeli daily harassment and violence.

One point should never be forgotten: In his introduction to his important book “Hamas Contained”, Tareq Baconi points out that for all its hardship and poverty, Gaza is the only part of Israel/Palestine whose Palestinian residents were free of the daily indignities of Israeli occupation. They are the only Palestinians who didn’t endure daily harassment, discrimination, Israeli “checkpoints”, threats, or raids on their homes by the Israeli Occupying Force. They legitimately take great pride in that fact. Israel sees this dignity – or defiance – as a threat, a threat that must be removed. The attack of Oct. 7 provided Israel with an excuse to eliminate that threat by any means necessary.

Origins of Hamas
Hamas, whose full name is the Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in 1987 out of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood. The impetus for its founding was the first Intifada or mass uprising of that year. However neither Hamas nor its predecessor, the Muslim Brotherhood, have ever really supported such mass movements. 

As far back as Israel’s 1967 war, the Brotherhood played no role in resistance to the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, preferring to focus on charitable actions instead. After 1987, Hamas was forced to take political action. But what sort of action did it take? In 1990, Israeli settlers moved to take over the al Aqsa Mosque in the West Bank. The Israeli military then killed 17 Palestinians to suppress the resulting protests.

 This only led to even greater protests. Hamas played no role in building those protests. Instead they moved to carry out individual terrorist actions, mainly abductions.

In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, and Hamas won a plurality of the seats in the parliament there the following year. It initially ruled jointly with Fatah/the Palestine Authority. In the following years, Hamas focused on administering Gaza – providing police enforcement, collecting taxes and electric bills, collecting garbage, etc. It also unofficially accepted the “two state solution” and in fact in 2006 it sent a letter to then-president George Bush to that effect. Bush did not respond.

For roughly a year, Gaza was ruled by a Hamas-Palestine Authority government, but there were continual conflicts between these two rivals. Israel had for years stoked this rivalry and, in fact, supported Hamas in order to undermine the Palestine Authority. This was to keep Gaza and the West Bank divided in order to create a further roadblock to the creation of a Palestinian state composed of the two areas. In 2007, open war broke out between Hamas and the Palestine Authority and Hamas seized complete control in Gaza. There were further negotiations and new elections were to take place in 2021. These elections never happened. 

Since its inception, Hamas has vacillated between different approaches:

• It called for a single Islamic state “from the river to the sea” and then implicitly accepted the “two state solution”. 
• It carried out acts of individual terrorism, including assassinations and abductions, and at other times sought negotiations.

In  other words, Hamas vacillated between simply being the administrators of Gaza and leading a fight against Zionist oppression of Palestinians. There is nothing unique about this tendency of moving from a strategy of individual terrorism (or the similar approach of guerilla warfare) and administering a capitalist state. Fatah before it took exactly this road. So have others, including the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). In the 1980s, the CPSA organized attacks on government facilities while it also opposed independent working class organizing. Since the African National Congress took power, the CPSA has been central to administering South African capitalism, including repressing the South African black working class, for example in the Marikana miners massacre.

In fact, the role Hamas attempted to play was not entirely different from the role of the “Judenrat” in the (Jewish) Warsaw Ghetto, which was ruled over by the Nazis. Zionists will scream to the rooftops about comparing that ghetto under the Nazis and Gaza under Israel, but consider this: The Nazis crammed 460,000 Jews into 1.3 square miles, en route to killing them all. In Gaza over two million people are crammed into 141 square miles. Up until now, Israel’s official policy is not to kill them all, but it is now moving in that direction. This is part of a plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza and incorporate the Strip into Israel itself. Even Israeli defenders of the genocidal war admit this.  In the case of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nazis realized that they could not administer the ghetto themselves. So they recruited a layer of Jews, the Judenrat, to do it for them. In the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first target of the fighters was the Judenrat. (We urge readers to familiarize themselves with that uprising.) In the case of Gaza, things have turned out differently.

Hamas was unable to follow down the road of simply being the administrators for Israel for two interconnected reasons: First of all, the Palestine Authority already occupied that political space. Secondly, Israeli expansionism and aggression prevented Hamas from conceding to Zionism. Had they done so, they would have ended up just as popular as was the Judenrat!

War criminal Netanyahu pounding his message home before US congress

Taking the comparison between Hitler and the Jews and Israel and Palestinians one step further also helps reveal the actual situation of Hamas. As Netanyahu has made clear: “I have sworn to destroy Hamas. Nothing will stop us…” The Washington Post explained, what that means in practice: “After more than 15 years in power in Gaza, Hamas and its supporters are deeply embedded in every sector of society — not only in the government ministries they run, but also in charities, courts, mosques, sport teams, jails, municipalities and youth groups. Hamas has overseen the economy, health care, water and electricity, trade and infrastructure. It runs the security forces in Gaza — not only the militant brigades, like Qassam, now fighting Israeli forces in the streets but also the regular police force, including traffic cops.” In other words, the only way to “destroy” Hamas is to “destroy” the entire population of Gaza.

Support for Hamas
Support for both Hamas as well as for violent actions against Israeli expansionism, while stemming directly from Israeli violence and provocations, are not one and the same. For example, in September of 2000, Ariel Sharon took the provocative step of visiting the al Aqsa mosque. According to Wikipedia, prior to that visit 52% of Palestinians supported “violent actions” to stop Israel, while afterwards 86% supported it. However, while support for Hamas increased, it was still far less than for such actions themselves. That support went from a mere 10% to 17%. 

It’s not clear exactly what support for “violence” even means. Does it mean support for abductions and individual acts of violence against individual Israelis (in other words, individual terrorism)? Or does it mean recognition that nonviolent protests are inadequate and that Palestinians must be prepared to defend themselves? If it means the latter, then Hamas’s approach is opportunist at best. From here in the United States, it’s impossible to know to what extent Palestinians in the West Bank can organize to physically defend themselves against settler terrorism. But in any case, although Hamas is an armed presence in the West Bank, there appears to be no evidence it has done anything to actually help organize West Bank Palestinian self defense.

Hamas’s political program
In 1989, Hamas issued its first manifesto, The Covenant of the Islamic Revolutionary Movement. It is little different from the statements of the Taliban, ISIS or al Qaeda. “The [Islamic Resistance] Movement’s programme is Islam. From it, it draws its ideas, ways of thinking and understanding of the universe, life and man…. The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [a heritage bequeathed by Allah]….” 

As do all religious fundamentalist movements, Hamas is a misogynist movement that sees women’s role as being in the home. “She [the woman] is a mother or a sister, plays the most important role in looking after the family, rearing the children and imbuing them with moral values and thoughts derived from Islam.” Although there is nothing in this manifesto specifically about LGBTQ+ people, this support for what amounts to “family values” inevitably coincides with homophobia. These “values” are part of global authoritarian regimes around the world, such as Modi in India, and Putin in Russia, and also the extreme right wing government of Israel led by Netanyahu!

Article 12 of this declaration states “Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed…” This is the view of nationalism taken up by the Islamic State as well as fascists like Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin. It posits that a nation is not the present national borders but whatever territory its “ancient peoples” traditionally occupied. This is the view of “traditionalism, to which Steve Bannon also adheres. (Readers can familiarize themselves with this important political philosophy in this article: Aleksandr Dugin: Alchemist of “Traditionalism”, mysticism and fascism .)

Hamas is also opposed to class struggle and to socialism (or in its words “communism”). “The Islamic Resistance Movement… encourages… [different movements] as long as they do not give their allegiance to the Communist East (meaning socialism) or the Crusading West.” Their call for a united Islamic society means opposition to class struggle. And make no mistake, they don’t just deal with political opponents by propaganda. In 2014, Amnesty International reported that Hamas had dealt with political opponents by abductions, torture and summary executions.

Hamas’s opposition to any sort of class struggle is connected with its links to various reactionary capitalist states in the region. First and foremost is probably the Iranian theocracy. In addition, Hamas also reportedly receives funding through Qatar and Turkey. In the past, Hamas even was connected with the fascistic Assad regime. They had to break that link, however, after Assad started to attack Palestinian refugees living in Syria. In any case, Hamas’s statement makes clear that it supports and expects support from the reactionary regimes in the region.

In 2017, in an attempt to make itself more acceptable to moderate forces, Hamas issued an updated declaration. There was really little difference except that some of the rhetoric was toned down a little bit. 

Protesters run to cover from teargas fired by Israeli troops near fence of Gaza Strip border with Israel on Saturday. The day marked the first anniversary of the Gaza border protests.

2018 “Right of Return” Protests
By 2018 Israel’s land, sea and air blockade had devastated Gaza.

 A report from Amnesty International explained that Gaza suffered from 44% unemployment, mass poverty, a totally inadequate health system, etc. Thousands of Gazans organized marches towards the border fence to demand the right to return to the villages from which Palestinians had originally been illegally driven in the 1948 war, and to protest the inhumane living conditions. 

There were a few scattered violent acts on the part of protesters, but overall the marchers were peaceful according to Amnesty International. Israel responded with massive violence, killing 59 protesters and wounding hundreds more. Many of the wounded were hurt so severely that they had to have a limb amputated.

For eleven years Israel carried out economic violence against Gaza through its blockade. Then, when a mass protest was organized, it used physical violence to crush that protest.

2023
Five years later (2023) nothing had improved in Gaza. In the West Bank, Israel continued its slow-moving ethnic cleansing by continuing its settlement building. Aided by the US-initiated Abrams Accords, the Arab states were moving towards normalizing this situation. The Saudi regime was negotiating with Israel to normalize relations, leaving the Palestinians in the dust. (This, by the way, should shatter any illusions in the role of the Arab states, illusions that Hamas encourages.) If Hamas was to maintain any sort of reputation as the representatives of the Palestinian cause, it had to do something. As we have shown, Hamas has never had the strategy of mobilizing the Palestinian masses to fight on their own behalf. It has always had the strategy of abduction and individual terrorism. By 2023 the alternative approach of mass mobilization was somewhat closed off in Gaza by Israel’s violent response to the 2018 Right of Return march.

Gaza on fire.
While it cannot be defended, any violence perpetrated by Hamas pales in comparison to Israeli genocide.

In other words, the situation imposed by Israel (with U.S. support) forced the hand of Hamas, which has always had the strategy of individual terrorism. Israel says that Hamas killed 1200 Israelis on Oct. 7. Others claim that many of those killed were actually “collateral damage”, people who were killed by the Israeli counterattack. At this point it’s impossible to know, and it doesn’t really matter that much. 

The method of terrorism, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, cannot advance the cause of an oppressed people. That has been historically proven over and over again. It simply helps to unite the oppressors and gives them the excuse to be even more violent. 

Furthermore, the indiscriminate killing of civilians almost always goes hand in hand with repression of one’s own population, as Hamas has done. While socialists must be clear that it is Israel and their main sponsor, the United States, that created the conditions that led to the Oct. 7 attack, and while Israel is guilty of far greater crimes, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack itself cannot be supported.

As for Hamas itself, as we have shown, it is a reactionary nationalist movement, not all that different from the Taliban, the Islamic State or al Qaeda. This form of reactionary nationalism is not historically unique. In fact, that is exactly what Zionism itself was originally – a reactionary response to the repression of the Jews. 

Just because a nation or group of people is repressed does not necessarily mean that a movement against that repression can be supported. If it did, then this would lead to an absurd and completely reactionary position regarding even the Nazis, whose rise was partly due to their opposition to the oppressive conditions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. There could not be a more reactionary conclusion than that.

In all those cases, the reason such an approach was taken is that a working class and socialist approach seemed closed off. For a further explanation, see, for example, this slide show on the origins of Zionism or this pamphlet The rise of Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel.

Conclusion
Neither individual terrorism nor its mirror image opposite – administering on behalf of the oppressor (for example the Judenrat or the Palestine Authority) – offers any way forward. Even on the level of October 7, these tactics are a mere pinprick to the oppressors. Nor will Israeli state terrorism be overcome simply by mass armed struggle. Who would organize and lead such a struggle? Groups like Hamas will never be able to. Nor will the reactionary Arab states have the willingness or the capacity. Israelis would fight to the bitter end, up to and including the use of atomic bombs. Even if the Arab states or groups like Hamas could or would overcome Israel militarily, the regimes they would impose on Palestine would hardly be any better than what exists there now.

The working class socialist alternative
There is an alternative. That alternative can be glimpsed by the repeated Intifadas – mobilizations of the Palestinian masses themselves. Whether that mobilization would also involve armed self defense against settler violence, for example, is something that the Palestinian people themselves would have to decide on a tactical basis. How such self defense can be organized is also for them to decide. The outlines of an alternative can be seen even more clearly in the 2011 Arab Spring. 

The Arab Spring in Syria.
This was a popular revolution against repression and neoliberalism.

Just as the State of Israel depends on support from the United States and on tolerance from the reactionary Arab states, so the crisis of the Palestinian people can only be resolved as part of a struggle throughout South West Asia – North Africa (SWANA). Oaklandsocialist outlined that alternative in our slideshow/article Palestine, the Arab Spring and the Iranian Revolution. The way forward is a renewed mass uprising similar to the Arab Spring, but with a more clear class basis. If such an uprising explicitly took up the class issues and explicitly rejected all forms of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, it would not only inspire a new movement inside Palestine, it would also tend to split Israeli society and tend to partly draw Israeli workers and youth away from the Israeli capitalist class and away from Zionism (which advocates the unity of the Jewish capitalists and Jewish workers). Having been thoroughly inoculated against theocracy and religious fundamentalism, the Iranian workers, women and youth could play a key political role.

The utter division between Palestinian and Jewish workers has a 100 year history. Fundamental to that history is the traitorous role of “labor Zionism” as Oaklandsocialist outlined in this part of our history of Zionism. It will not be easy but it must be overcome at least partially. That will not be accomplished by weakness nor by compromise with Zionist racism and oppression. On the contrary, as they say “weakness breeds aggression”. But overcome it must, and it can be at least partially accomplished through a mass struggle based on international working class solidarity and for working class democracy and socialism.