In late 1935, a small band of irregulars led by a Syrian-born Islamist cleric launched a guerrilla campaign against the British mandatory government that had the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in what was then predominantly Arab Palestine, as part of its purview. The campaign was swiftly suppressed by British forces, and its leader, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, was killed as were the majority of his men.
But Qassam’s readiness to take up arms and die in the service of the Palestinian cause made a deep and lasting impression on Palestinian society, and his “martyrdom” became a symbol of sacrifice that has continued to resonate throughout the past 90 years, eventually providing both inspiration and a name to Hamas’s armed wing in the late 1980s. The fact that Qassam failed was essentially irrelevant. More important was his embodiment of the spirit of dogged and selfless resistance to foreign domination despite the imbalance of power and the unlikely prospects of success. Qassam also set the Palestinian national movement down the path of “armed struggle” that was eventually adopted by Yasser Arafat’s “mainstream” Fatah movement from the late 1950s onwards but whose role has diminished since the 1993 Oslo accord with Israel.
The past 30 years have witnessed an accelerating competition between Hamas’s claim to embody national resistance to Israeli rule, and Fatah’s collapse into discord, corruption and collusion under the banner of the Palestinian Authority’s “security cooperation” with the Israeli occupation. This race culminated in Hamas’s 7 October assault that was designed as much to shock and terrorise Israel as it was to discredit Fatah/ Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and consolidate Hamas’s position as the primary inheritor and embodiment of the Palestinian national movement and its liberationist cause.
Israel’s post 7/10 resort to massive force, dropping an unprecedented total of about 30,000 bombs by mid-December 2023 (equivalent to two Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs), has so far failed to eradicate the military force established by Hamas amid the torrent of bloodshed, 25,000 Palestinian dead and the 62,000 wounded, and the mass displacement of 1.9 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza (85% of the population), easily exceeding the toll of the ethnic cleansing that accompanied Israel’s establishment in 1948.
The issue of how and when the war will end remains shrouded in the fog of Israel’s opaque intentions and the US’s increasingly desperate diplomatic manoeuvrings, hoping for a clear Israeli victory over Hamas, while fearing the worst consequences of a regional conflagration as evident from the slow spread of hostilities from Bab-el-Mandeb to Irbil. US hopes of leveraging the moment into a redesigned Middle East living in peace and harmony must not only contend with the sheer contagion of the current conflict but with the political capital needed, especially in an electoral year, to shift Israel away from its current semi-consensual refusal to countenance any substantial change in the status quo of occupation, settlement and domination.
Meanwhile, as “day after” scenarios pile up, ranging from the utopian vision of a region speeding towards peace and stability thanks to an as yet invisible “pathway to Palestinian statehood” dreamed up by US secretary of state Antony Blinken, to Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant’s fantasy of an Arab/international consortium taking over the Gaza Strip on Israel’s behalf, to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise that there will no Palestinian state and that the war will continue at least into 2025: in all these, one thing is missing: Hamas’s likely survival and its potentially growing influence both despite and because of the enormous damage inflicted on the movement itself and the people of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas’s brutal tactics in its 7 October assault have been washed out of Palestinian political consciousness by the subsequent indiscriminate and mass erasure of Palestinian civilian lives, and the US/west’s complicity in supporting, arming and allowing this onslaught to continue under the guise of Israel’s right to self-defence with no evident expiry date attached. Rather than crush Hamas, its most likely effect will be to remythologise the notion of resistance and sow the seed for future iterations that may be inspired by Hamas but have no necessary connection to its history, ideology or organisational structure.
With Israeli leaders openly talking of pursuing the war against Hamas and its leaders across national boundaries, another potentially dangerous turn could take the form of Hamas’s transformation from a national-religious movement focused on the conflict in the land of Israel/Palestine into a more global movement ready to take the war to arenas that Hamas has hitherto avoided.
With regard to re-establishing a viable political authority in the Gaza Strip and reconstituting a Palestinian representative body that is capable of taking and sustaining decisions whether relating to a future political horizon with Israel or any legitimate governance and reconstruction process, the real issue is how to incorporate Hamas and its associated “spirit of resistance” into a new Palestinian authority, rather than how to quash or excise it. Within or associated with such an authority, Hamas could be part of the solution; outside, it would remain both a spoiler and an opposite pole of attraction.
Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have made it clear that they will seek to impose a strict and indefinite Israeli-determined security regime over the Gaza Strip for the foreseeable future; in other words, to reinstitute what amounts to a long-term occupation. This, in turn, will not only keep the flame of Hamas alive and galvanise Hamas-inspired resistance but will ensure that Israel’s “right of self-defence” will only produce the very insecurity that Israel and its allies claim to be addressing. If the past 55 years of occupation have taught us anything, it is that this cannot be the path to a genuine and lasting peace. It took Israel and the US approximately 35 years to talk to what was then seen as the terrorist PLO, just as it took years for the ANC and IRA to be recognised as partners to a resolution. All those threatened or rightfully concerned about what may happen next, simply cannot afford the price of waiting that long.
• Ahmad Samih Khalidi is an author and a former Palestinian negotiator
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