Hamas in the First Intifada
is a Sunni Islamist Palestinian nationalist organization, founded during the First Intifada in 1987. While Hamas played a minor role in the Intifada, it successfully used the Intifada to grow and position itself as an alternative to the secular, left-wing Palestinian Liberation Organisation following the end of the Intifada and the start of the Oslo Accords peace process.
Background
On 9 December 1987, an Israeli truck driver collided with and killed four Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp. The incident sparked the largest wave of Palestinian unrest since the Israeli occupation began in 1967: the First Intifada. During the early stages, the Intifada was largely characterised by a non-violent campaign led by a decentralised, grassroots leadership, with actions including labour strikes, tax strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, boycotts of Israeli institutions, demonstrations, the establishment of underground classrooms and cooperatives, raisings of the banned Palestinian flag, and civil disobedience. The Israeli government responded to the breakout of the Intifada with a harsh crackdown, however, and the Intifada grew more violent during its last stages, including Palestinian internal political violence against rumoured collaborators. By the end of the Intifada, over a thousand Palestinians had been killed and over a hundred thousand injured by Israeli forces, with around two hundred Israelis having been killed by Palestinians. The First Intifada would come to an end with several high-profile peace negotiations, including the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the 1993 Oslo Accords.History
Prelude
In the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip began to re-emerge as an influential faction in Palestinian politics. Led by Ahmed Yassin and his charity, Mujama al-Islamiya, the Brotherhood rejected the secular nationalist politics and armed struggle of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, preferring to focus on the creation of an Islamist society in Gaza that would be able to confront Israel in a holy war. By 1987, the Brotherhood had built a significant network in Gaza, including doubling the number of mosques, offering welfare and social services in refugee camps, and taking control of the Islamic University of Gaza. The Brotherhood also promoted Islamist conservative norms, including encouraging women to veil, pressuring restaurants to stop selling alcohol, and vandalizing offices of left-wing organizations, including the Palestine Red Crescent Society. During this period, the Brotherhood's network received funding and assistance from the Israeli government as a means to undermine the PLO and divide the Palestinian nationalist movement.Through the 1980s, due to pressure from the founding of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the success of the Iranian Revolution in establishing an Islamist state, and growing frustration among its youth members over their inaction against Israel, Yassin's network began to re-organize itself into a paramilitary group capable of more directly participating in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Formation
In the days following the breakout of the First Intifada in early December 1987, Yassin and the other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood network in Gaza met to debate how the network should respond to the uprising. Those leaders included Abdul Fatah Dukhan, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, and Salah Shehade. On 14 December 1987, they released a leaflet announcing the formation of a new movement: Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, the Islamic Resistance Movement, abbreviated as Hamas, the Arabic word for zeal. According to Jean-Pierre Filiu of Sciences Po, the outbreak of the Intifada was "as much a surprise to the Muslim Brotherhood as to the PLO. The Islamist leadership was tempted to keep a low profile, and it was ultimately Shaykh Yasin who imposed on his divided followers his decision to participate in the uprising against Israel."According to Palestinian academic Khaled Hroub, the factors that led to the founding of Hamas with the breakout of the First Intifada included: internal debates within the Muslim Brotherhood over its stance towards the Israeli occupation, with parts of the organisation calling for the priority to be confronting Israel and other parts calling for the priority to be Islamising Palestinian society; the growing resentment against the occupation and poverty among the population of the Gaza Strip; as well as rivalry with the fast-growing and more militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad. According to American researcher Sara Roy, it was "clear that Palestinians could not be easily persuaded of the Islamic vision or its gradual, reformist approach. As the occupation turned twenty years old, the ability to win hearts and minds depended less on the establishment of an Islamic state and far more on ending Israel’s occupation through armed struggle. It was this understanding and quest for authenticity and the need to secure a popular base of support that contributed to a dramatic strategic shift within the Islamic movement."
In August 1988, Hamas formulated its founding charter, containing 36 short articles. The charter portrayed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a war between Muslims and Jews, and contained a significant amount of genocidal and antisemitic language, including references to the forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In its charter, Hamas claimed that "the land of Palestine is an Islamic trust left to the generations of Moslems until the day of resurrection" and that "the solution to the Palestinian problem will only take place by holy war," rejecting all peace initiatives. The charter also claimed that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it" and that "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them."
Agitation
Following the launch of its charter, Hamas positioned itself as an alternative to the PLO-affiliated Unified National Leadership of the Uprising and began agitating to take control over the direction of the Intifada from the UNLU, calling its own demonstrations and strike days. At first, the organisation's success was limited, particularly as it framed its calls to action in heavily religious terms, divided its focus between confronting the Israeli occupation and confronting the nationalist movements in Palestine, and still carried stigma over the Israeli government's support for its growth. As the Intifada continued, however, with a harsh Israeli crackdown and the appearance of divisions between the PLO central leadership in exile in Tunisia and the UNLU, Hamas was able to sustain its position and increase its membership. In a September 1988 article, Ian Black of British newspaper The Guardian wrote that Hamas represented "an increasingly powerful opposition to those who seek to translate the sacrifices of the uprising into concrete political gains," opposing any concessions to Israel, and that "as the PLO has faced the challenge of matching months of sustained unrest with politically imaginative ideas, Hamas has become firmer in its views."In mid-November 1988, the PLO's Palestinian National Council was convened in Algiers, Algeria, to draft and issue the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, establishing the State of Palestine as a government-in-exile and calling for peace negotiations based on the 1967 United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. The declaration was met with scepticism by the Israeli government, who also ordered a lockdown on the Palestinian Territories over the duration of the PNC conference, and received a positive, but muted response among Palestinians. Hamas would be one of the most prominent groups to speak out against the declaration, on the basis that it accepted the 1947 Partition of Palestine, describing it as a surrender. Later that month, as the first anniversary of the breakout of the Intifada approached and frustrations were growing among the Palestinian population over the continuing harsh Israeli crackdown, when the UNLU called for the date of the annual day of protests against the partition to be changed as a result of the declaration, Hamas called for protests to be held on the usual date in defiance of the UNLU. The call was largely followed and received support from the PLO hardliners, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The Israeli government's support for the Muslim Brotherhood's network in Gaza continued during the first stages of the Intifada, even as the network re-organised itself into Hamas. According to Gil Sedan and Hugh Orgel of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, during the first year and a half of the First Intifada, "the official attitude toward Hamas and its leadership has been more or less tolerant. Senior figures in the defence establishment have stated privately that two considerations supported the policy of encouraging Hamas' influence among the Palestinians. One was the notion that granting a firm public standing to the Islamic elements, even religious and political extremists, would offset the influence of violent groups, such as the Islamic Jihad. The other consideration was to strengthen the hand of PLO opponents within the Palestinian population." While the Israeli government refused to negotiate with the PLO, senior Israeli officials continued to hold meeting with senior Mujama al-Islamiya officials after it re-organised itself into Hamas, and while the Israel Broadcasting Authority refused to give air-time to nationalist Palestinian figures, it did air an interview with Yassin in September 1988. John Kifner of The New York Times wrote in September 1988 that "Israeli authorities have taken no direct action against Hamas despite repeated crackdowns and roundups" on UNLU and PLO factions, additionally quoting an anonymous Western diplomat as saying that "It certainly is remarkable with all these arrests, that someone like Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who just goes on saying the most awful things about Jews, isn't touched."