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This message comes from NPR sponsor, Capella University. Capella's programs teach skills relevant to your career, so you can apply what you learn right away. See how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu. On October 7th, just over a month ago, the organization Hamas, which is also the ruling government of Gaza, perpetrated a horrific attack just across the border in Israel.
The Israeli government says that the attack killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians. And Hamas also kidnapped hundreds more, including women and children, and took them back to Gaza as hostages. In response, Israel has bombarded and invaded Gaza, where, according to Gaza health officials, more than 11,000 people have been killed and many more displaced.
Since that day, we've heard from many of you, our listeners, with questions about Hamas. Who are they? What do they want? How did we get here? So we took a few weeks to talk to experts on all sides to answer those questions. People who know the history deeply and have even participated in it.
And look, there's no other way to say it. It is a very hard moment right now. People are angry and confused and fighting is ongoing. And for this reason, we ask that you listen with an open mind and know that we always encourage and welcome feedback and interaction. So with that said, in this episode of ThruLine, we're going to explore the origins of Hamas, the context it developed in, and how we should understand it today.
And we'll start in 1987 with the event that birthed Hamas. In December 1987, a military truck driven by an Israeli citizen collided with another vehicle in Gaza near the Jabaliya refugee camp. Four Palestinians died. Authorities explained it as an accident, but many Palestinians viewed it as an act of revenge for the killing of an Israeli man in Gaza days earlier.
But these events were just a spark that lit a flame. In the days after, frustration and anger from Palestinians poured out in an event known as the First Intifada.
or uprising. The hostility and tension are everywhere on the streets in Arab East Jerusalem, in the shouting voices of Palestinian teenagers hurling stones at cars and soldiers.
In the past month, two Palestinians were killed by Israeli sniper fire, adding to the already inflamed atmosphere. In the walkie-talkies of Israeli troops on patrol. With land, housing and potable water in short supply. In the cries of angry Palestinian women watching as their children are arrested and taken away. We want exactly what the Israeli people enjoy.
Democracy, freedom, and independence. Over 1,000 Palestinians and around 200 Israelis were killed in the 1987 Intifada. It shocked the world. But for people on the ground, it was the latest event in a cycle of attack and reprisal that dated back to the establishment of the State of Israel. Here's a very simple breakdown.
In 1947, the United Nations called for the division of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. The idea was to create a Jewish homeland where Jews could feel safe after centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in the Holocaust. And in 1948, Israel was established. But there were already hundreds of thousands of Arab Christians and Muslims living there.
Almost immediately, Israel was attacked by neighboring states, who argued that the UN division of land was not fair to the Arabs. A war ensued that Israel won. Then, two more wars were fought, one in 1967 and one in 1973.
Israel won those wars as well. The reasons for those wars and their outcomes are very complicated. We do not have the time to go into those things here. What's important to know for our story is that those wars resulted in mass exoduses of people. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab countries where they'd lived for centuries. And hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in what is now Israel.
Key to the moment we're in right now is that as a result of winning these three wars, Israel gained control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories that were recognized by the United Nations as Palestinian lands. So this meant that Israel became an occupying power over more than a million Palestinians.
Palestinians still had a burning desire to establish their own state. An organization in exile called Fatah and its leader Yasser Arafat emerged as one of the main voices fighting for this state. Fatah became the most powerful group in a coalition called the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO.
But in 1987, at the start of the first Intifada, a new Palestinian organization was born in the Gaza Strip that would change everything. The group was called Hamas.
Hamas is an acronym for the Arabic phrase for Islamic resistance movement, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah. Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah. Hamas also happens to mean zeal or passion. This is Khaled El-Gindi. He's a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. And I'm the author of the 2019 book,
called Blindspot America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump. Khalid also served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership during their negotiations with Israel in 2007. Hamas's overall vision was a Palestinian state in all of the land of historical Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Khalid says this goal to establish a Palestinian state was shared by other Palestinian liberation groups,
But Hamas was different for one major reason. They were Islamist, whereas most of the Palestinian factions emerged in the 1950s and 60s and were either leftist, like strongly Marxist, or centrist. Hamas basically put Islam at the center of its political program. In their charter, they made it clear that it was only through Islam that Palestinians could achieve liberation.
Part of Hamas's appeal was they didn't believe in diplomacy. They didn't believe in compromise. That's reflected in Hamas's charter published in 1988. It spells out their purpose and objectives. We've asked ThruLine senior producer Devin Katiyama to read from the group's founding document. There's no solution for the Palestinian question, except through jihad.
Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. Hamas.
It is an expression of Palestinian anger, desperation and frustration. This is Martin Keir. I'm a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sydney in Australia. He also wrote a book all about Hamas called Hamas in Palestine, The Contested Road to Statehood. Martin says that Hamas introduced itself as an organization dedicated to both Palestinian statehood and Islamic jihad or holy war.
The Islamic resistance movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.
While their charter in 1988 clearly lays all this out, Martin says we should not mistake it for some well-thought-out founding document. The people who wrote it were very insular. It was known as though the leadership of Hamas sat down and put this document together. Three people wrote it, and they'd never been outside of Gaza, never traveled. But Hamas, after that, rarely, if ever, mentioned its charter.
The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion and so on. The Hamas charter contains anti-Semitic language. Their plan is embodied in the protocols of the elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.
The first goal of Hamas is to destroy completely the state of Israel. This is David Hacham. He's a former colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, where he served for 30 years. During my military service, I was for almost eight years
in the Gaza Strip. I arrived to Gaza one year before the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising. David has written two books on Hamas and other Palestinian groups. He's a senior analyst of Arab affairs at Miriam Institute, which is basically an Israel-focused think tank. He says that Hamas was expressly dedicated to the destruction of Israel from its inception.
As a matter of fact, they are speaking about in the first phase about the establishment of a Palestinian Islamic State on the ruins of the State of Israel.
Ultimately, Hamas's emergence in the chaotic, bloody years of the First Intifada signaled a change in the symbolic and material direction of the Palestinian fight against occupation. It allowed Hamas to frame their narrative that this was a... We are an Islamic resistance movement.
And in the years after their launch, Hamas began carrying out the promise of its charter. I'm Ramtin Arablui. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're going to tell you the history of Hamas from multiple perspectives and try to answer a few central questions. Why did Hamas form? In what context has it evolved into the organization it is today?
And what does it represent to Palestinians, Israelis, and the rest of the world? Hi, this is Patrick Cornegay Jr. calling from Washington, D.C., and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Thanks. Part 1. Men in the Sun In 1988, Hamas was created explicitly as an Islamist organization. Now, you might be wondering what I mean by Islamist.
Well, the larger context for that term goes all the way back to the early 20th century. Back then, European powers were slowly encroaching on and sometimes outright colonizing parts of the Middle East.
This was a big change because since the medieval period, the Middle East and North Africa had been ruled by Muslim empires that were dominant politically, militarily, and economically on the international level. This was and is a point of historical pride for many in the Muslim world. I was reminded of it all the time growing up by people in my community.
But as Europe and eventually the United States rose to power, those fortunes changed. By the 20th century, several kinds of responses to that formed. There was the leftist, anti-imperialist Marxist kind that was prevalent all over the world. Think like Che Guevara.
There were also secular nationalists like Ataturk in Turkey. But there was another camp that basically said the problem in the Muslim world was that Muslims weren't Muslim enough, not religious enough. That if Muslims reconnected with Islam, then perhaps they could regain the glory of the past. This worldview created movements and organizations all over the Middle East.
And one of those organizations, based in Egypt, was called the Muslim Brotherhood. They are key in the creation of Hamas. So the Muslim Brotherhood's goal is to connect Muslims again with Islam. And once that connection is made, then the people themselves will rise up and feel a sense of collective identity, and through that collective identity be able to connect
get rid of foreign occupation. Even though it was founded in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had chapters and supporters all over the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Iraq. But while the group did engage in political violence, it was different from extremist Islamist groups that we might think of today, like Al-Qaeda or ISIS. The Muslim Brotherhood started out by focusing on social welfare programs and preaching.
The Palestinian chapter in Gaza and the West Bank provided education, food, and other kinds of social services to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And it would be one of its members that would help found Hamas, a guy named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. So he was a young Palestinian. He was a quadriplegic. He was born in 1936 near the modern city of Ashkelon.
Yassin came to Gaza as a refugee, like many other Palestinians, after the establishment of Israel. He was a product of the occupation. He had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man in Egypt. In Gaza, he focused his efforts on Palestinian statehood.
To do this, he founded an organization in Gaza in 1973.
which was licensed to operate by the Israeli government in 1979. He came with a request from the Israeli military government in the Gaza Strip in order to bring him the green light for the establishing of Al-Mujammal Islami. This organization David's talking about, Al-Mujammal Islamiyah, or the Islamic Center, was the precursor to Hamas. It was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood,
The Israeli government approved Yassin's request for the Islamic Center because it was basically a charity organization. But according to David, it did more than that. During the 80s, Al-Mujammah Al-Islami did its utmost with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin at his head to gain, you know, public support.
to take control of local associations, to open, you know, mosques. So Sheikh Yassin and several other Gazans established Hamas out of the Islamic center. Hamas was created because
a number of Palestinians who believe in armed resistance and this Islamist ideology created the organization. This is Tariq Bakoni. He's a scholar and president of the board of Al-Shabaka, a nonprofit focused on Palestinian policy research and author of the book Hamas Contained, The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.
When Hamas was established out of that structure and it began to engage in resistance activities, like attacks on military posts and abducting Israeli soldiers, immediately Israel's approach to dealing with Hamas changed. And it stopped being one of approval. It started being an antagonistic relationship because obviously now it's a resistance party.
In retrospective, I think this was, I call it the original sin of the Israeli authorities, the Israeli security authorities, that did not understand that period of time what can be developed of this innocent organization movement, Al-Mujammar Islami.
As the first Intifada went on, many Palestinians became more and more frustrated, not only with the occupation, but with the PLO-slash-FATA as it attempted to negotiate a two-state solution with Israel.
The reality was that Fatah and some of the smaller parties were interested in joining a peace process that would result in a compromise situation of a West Bank and Gaza state. It's certainly by this stage, 1987, 20 years of occupation, what have the PLO done? When I say PLO, what has Fatah done? Nothing. Virtually.
We've been fighting for 20 years, resisting for 20 years, nothing has changed. In fact, it's actually gotten worse. We're further away from an independent state than we've ever been before. This sense of desperation and frustration among Palestinians is part of what allowed for Hamas's argument that compromise and negotiation are losing strategies, that fighting was the only way forward.
And part of Hamas's appeal at this time was that their founders and members were from Gaza. They grew up there under an occupation that, according to a 1985 UN committee report, included a stagnant economy, broken communities, depleted natural resources, and violations of fundamental human rights. Meanwhile, many of the PLO-slash-Bata leaders lived in exile and, in some cases, luxury.
The key Fatah people, most of Fatah are living in the diaspora. They're the ones living in the four-storey houses, driving around in their gold Mercedes. They're not experiencing the day-to-day privations of the occupation. Whereas Hamas...
They're a product of the occupation. You can see them walking in the streets, you can see them at the market. People may not necessarily agree with their narrative as an Islamist movement, but they get a lot of respect for the fact that they live amongst the community. The body of an Israeli border policeman kidnapped two days ago by the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement was found today in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
In 1992, Hamas carried out a plan that would set in motion a cascade of events, altering their path. They took an Israeli border policeman hostage, a man named Nassim Toledano. And he was eventually killed by the kidnappers.
Hamas did this at a time when the PLO was starting negotiations with the Israeli government on a peace deal that could potentially create a two-state solution. Prime Minister Rabin said Hamas wanted to murder both Jews and peace, but they would not succeed. OK.
I was there. I was in all the meetings.
that took place with our Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At the time, David Hacham was serving in the Israel Defense Forces and as an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And after the killing of Nisim Toledano, there was a decision taken by Yitzhak Rabin as the Israeli Prime Minister to expel 415 Hamas activists from both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
During the night, security forces woke up more than 400 of the 1,500 Palestinians who have been arrested in the past two days. The deportees were blindfolded, their hands bound with plastic handcuffs, and loaded onto buses which headed for the Lebanese border. It was a way of dismantling, disrupting Hamas, and it did for a time.
Because these were the key members of key leadership of Hamas. But it was a public relations disaster for Israel. About 400 Palestinians deported by Israel are trapped in a no man's land in southern Lebanon. The international community found out. And it was like, well, OK, how come you're deporting 415 people? To Israel's surprise, they became a kind of cause célèbre as Israel
These self-sacrificing, the exiles, they represent kind of a microcosm of what the Palestinian movement is about. And it was also seen as an especially cruel move. I mean, of course, it's a violation of international law. You can't deport people.
elements of the population. The international media starts to take more attention. What is it about Hamas? Why were these people deported? Is it a human interest story or whatever? So people start to pay more attention to Hamas, Hamas's narrative. They're interviewed.
on international media, they get their narrative out. They get their story out for the first time, really, to the outside of the Arab world. The only ones doing anything to help the Palestinian people, he says, is Hamas. Well, all of a sudden, you can talk to these people, and it's ten fingers, ten toes, two arms, two legs. They're just like me. And the other thing that happens is that Hezbollah, which is...
Another resistance movement to Israeli occupation, this time of southern Lebanon, looks after these deportees. Hezbollah is an Islamist organization based in Lebanon that was founded during the Israeli invasion of that country in the 1980s. The group is backed by Iran. Both movements see a convergence of interests in their opposition, their militant opposition to Israel.
They were totally indoctrinated ideologically by Hezbollah, by Iran. I think Hamas saw Hezbollah as someone they could learn from politically, tactically and in other ways. Hezbollah introduces Hamas to the idea of suicide terrorism, to car bombs, a more violent resistance to Israeli occupation.
It adopts the tactic of suicide bombing from Hezbollah and brings that back to Palestine when they are, when the international community essentially forces Israel to take them back in. People come back in dribs and drabs. Israel admits that over time that, okay, these 10 people were illegally deported, these five people. This was another mistake taken by Israel. I'm not speaking about the expel, I'm speaking about the coming back to the territory.
Coming up, Hamas begins to put the lessons learned in Lebanon into practice. Hi, my name is Fabio Ferrari. I'm calling from New York City. You are listening to ThruLine from NPR. We just want to take a moment to shout out our ThruLine Plus subscribers. Thank you so much for your support. If you don't already know, subscribing to ThruLine Plus means you get to listen to our show without any sponsor breaks.
And you also get access to special bonus episodes where we take you behind the scenes, introduce you to our amazing producers, and tell you about how we make the show. To get these awesome benefits and support our work here at NPR, head over to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. Part 2. 1994 When the first Intifada ended around 1993, the path to a potential two-state solution seemed more possible than ever.
Israel and the PLO culminated months of negotiations in Oslo, Norway. It was the first agreement in what would come to be known as the Oslo Accords. The agreements recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and called for the creation of the Palestinian Authority to handle some policing and municipal authority in some parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In exchange, they had to ensure the security of Israeli civilians from Palestinian attacks. Israel agreed to negotiate on the status of its settlements during the peace process. The terms of the deal would be implemented over the course of five years and promised further negotiations. Many in the world viewed the deal as a groundbreaking step towards a Palestinian state and towards peace.
PLO leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were all given the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. But many in Israel and the Palestinian territories saw it completely differently. I think there's a lot of misinformation about what the Oslo Accords actually were. They certainly weren't about peace.
The Oslo Accords were designed to transfer administrative control of Palestinians from the Israeli occupation to Palestinians. So it would be the Palestinian Authority who was in charge of the provision of basic services to Palestinians.
Making Palestinians responsible for their own administration means that if anything goes wrong, if there are starving Palestinians, if there are Palestinians who can't access health care, basic services, that's not the responsibility of the occupation. That's the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority. Even though the occupation controls everything that's going on, controls all of the money that goes in,
There was a lot of suspicion. It looked like, in some ways, a bad deal. But for the Palestinian public, there was this sense of, well, let's give it a chance. Let's see what happens with this peace process. Fatah signed it to get back in control.
of Palestinian life. The PLO had been forced out of Lebanon in 1982, they've been cast adrift, no direct contact, they're becoming irrelevant. So Arafat was desperate to get back in control. And the suspicion grew into despair as it became clear the peace deal wouldn't deliver a better life for most Palestinians. It's really when the process began to falter
when the peace dividends in economic terms never actually materialized, when closures were imposed, when Israel didn't meet its commitments to withdraw from certain areas by a certain deadline. Hamas has said that the Oslo Accords was the biggest betrayal of Palestinian nationalism ever. Hamas opposed the Oslo Accords from the beginning.
Unlike the PLO, Hamas did not believe in compromise and negotiation. They didn't think it would make a difference. And this gave Hamas an incentive to oppose the peace deal because they feared what might happen if it were to succeed. Hamas had gained enormous support and popularity in the territories and it was fast becoming the dominant resistance movement. And so for Hamas, it was like, well, okay,
What if there's a genuine peace agreement between the PLO and Israel? Where does that put us? How are we supposed to resist? How can we be a resistance movement if there's peace?
Hamas was not the only faction on either side against a peace deal. In Israel, far-right Jewish settlers also opposed the Oslo Accords. Here's why. Since 1967, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews have created settlements on internationally recognized occupied Palestinian territories.
These settlements come in the form of villages, towns, and full-blown suburbs. Many of these settlements are sanctioned by the Israeli government and protected by police and military. They have become so extensive that they've essentially carved the West Bank into a collection of small territories separated by Jewish settlements. This was and is a major source of tension in the conflict on both sides.
And when the Oslo Accords were being negotiated, some of those Israeli settlers feared their settlements could be dismantled as part of an agreement. So in 1994, one of those settlers did something that would change the course of the conflict. There is the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Hebron is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It's about 17 miles southwest of Jerusalem. Which is sacred to both Jews and Muslims.
There'd be events, religious events, significant events for both Jews and Palestinians. And on one of those days where it was a Palestinian or Muslim holy day, there was an American Jewish settler
Barak Goldstein. He walked into the mosque during dawn prayers while there were, you know, the mosques were full. It was Ramadan, so there was quite a large number of worshippers. And he gunned down 29 people in the middle of the mosque.
Baruch Goldstein was celebrated by a small minority in Israel. And for Hamas, this event also had a radical impact. That was a turning point for Hamas. They switched to attacking civilians. So after 1994 is when we see, you know, when they attack a bus, for example, or a cafe, something along those lines, and they blow up large numbers of civilians.
A bomb exploded today on a crowded downtown bus in Tel Aviv. It was one of the worst terrorist attacks in Israel's history, and it was the third strike against Israeli targets in less than two weeks. On October 19, 1994, a member of Hamas named Saleh Abdel Rahim Al-Sawi boarded a bus on a very busy street in Tel Aviv. He carried with him massive explosives.
He rode the bus to a busy area with cafes and pedestrians. At 9:00 a.m., he detonated the explosive. The massive blast lifted the bus off the ground and ripped it apart, eviscerating passengers. Twenty-one Israeli citizens and one Dutch citizen were killed.
An anonymous caller to Israel Radio claimed responsibility for today's bombing in the name of Hamas, the Islamic militant group. The attack shocked Israelis. The Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, promised a tough response. We cannot fight these barbarians with silk gloves, he said. All measures are foreseeable.
Hamas uses that moment to really change the scale and the type of its resistance and to begin carrying out operations against Israeli civilians as a way of instilling a form of deterrence against Israeli occupying forces, basically saying, if you kill Palestinian civilians, your civilians will also die. And it's very shocking for Palestinians. There's a lot of debate within Hamas about
about the utility of these. If we do this, there's no coming back from this. The bus bombing in October of 1994 was one of Hamas's first attacks on civilians. It would not be their last. That year, there were six suicide bombings in the span of several months and even more attacks in cafes, shopping malls and events.
At the time, David Hacham was serving in the Israel Defense Forces. He challenges the idea that the Hebron massacre was the main reason for Hamas's move towards attacking civilians.
Instead, he says, Hamas carried out these attacks to derail the Oslo peace process because ultimately they opposed the two-state solution, not because they didn't want a Palestinian state, but because they refused to recognize Israel's right to exist. The main reason behind these activities was in order to spoil and to harm the Oslo process between Israel and the PLO.
This was the main reason
Hamas was able to capitalize on that despairing of the peace process. Of course, Hamas also contributed to that despairing by its campaign of attacking civilians and almost always, of course, triggered an Israeli harsh response, mass arrests, harsh treatment, internal closures, preventing movement and access that really decimated the Palestinian economy. And it was part of the
part of the way Hamas could disrupt any progress. Coming up, another bloodier intifada and Hamas finds its way to power. Hi from Knoxville, Tennessee. This is Mary and you are listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part three, the day after.
After the end of the First Intifada and the signing of the Oslo Accords, extreme factions on both sides seemed to keep inflaming tensions and undermining the peace process. In 1995, an Israeli right-wing extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. By 1997, Hamas had carried out more than a dozen attacks against Israeli civilians, killing hundreds.
Meanwhile, Israel continued to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip, being accused by many, including Amnesty International, of repression. Also, illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian territories continued to expand. And by 2000, it all boiled over in the Second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising.
Unlike the first intifada, the second intifada was very bloody from the get-go. Even though Palestinian resistance began similar to how the first intifada began, which is through popular mobilization, this was met with enormous use of force by the Israeli occupying forces. And so the Palestinian intifada militarized very quickly. Hamas's violent escalation inspired other Palestinian groups to do the same.
Soon, Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were all conducting attacks inside Israel on civilians.
Eventually, Israel responded with a massive invasion of the West Bank. They destroyed infrastructure and devastated the population, killing thousands of civilians. This was happening in a post-9-11 world where the Israelis successfully, to an American public and administration, argued that they were fighting their own al-Qaeda, that they were fighting their own war on terror, which justified its heavy-handedness.
During this time, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas, was assassinated by missile shot from an Israeli attack helicopter. Many other members of Hamas' leadership relocated to neighboring countries. They were losing fighters. And by 2005, their suicide attacks in Israel had considerably slowed down.
That same year, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a man widely seen as a hardliner and supporter of Israeli settlements, pulled all of Israel's military forces and settlements out of the Gaza Strip, a move that surprised everyone. This was a huge step and was quite controversial inside Israel. This is Khaled al-Gindi again. The calculation that Sharon had made was the settlement project in Gaza was a losing bet. You had...
6,000-7,000 Israeli settlers living among 1.5 million Palestinians. Demographically, it was a losing prospect. So let's cut our losses in Gaza. David Hacham says that this move was a huge mistake for Israel. Ramtin, it was only one-sided decision taken by Israel with no Palestinian, I would say, partner.
This was, I would say, a great, great, a big, big mistake taken by the Israeli government. And as a matter of fact, it led later on to the taking control of Hamas in the Gaza Strip area and to the situation that we are witnessing nowadays. Some critics claim that Sharon did this in order to freeze the peace process.
In that same year, 2005, Hamas also made a controversial move. They decided to begin participating in elections against Fatah, the ruling organization in the PLO. There is a strong argument that any participation in these elections legitimizes these Israeli constructions from the Oslo Accords. And we had just become complicit in the administration of the occupation.
But other people say, well, no, this is our chance to get our narrative out there to the international community.
I think they see an avenue for power through the official channels that exist. And they campaign really well. Fatah does not campaign well. They're very fractured. They do better than anyone expected, probably better than even they expected. And I think they were hoping to be the kind of significant minority and be the opposition bloc. But they ended up with a majority of the seats in the parliament, which allowed them to
to form a government entirely on their own. The U.S. had actually pushed the Palestinian Authority to hold the elections. And the day after, President George W. Bush congratulated the Palestinian people on a free and fair election. But as for the results of that election...
Israel and the United States says absolutely not. Condoleezza Rice, she was the Secretary of State at that time, in her memoir says that she accepts that Hamas has won the election, but she cannot accept their program. Hamas can change or fail is essentially the Bush administration's strategy towards Hamas. The U.S. had designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1997.
So they put a set of demands on them after they won the election. If they met the conditions, then the government of Palestine would continue to receive foreign aid from the United States and its European allies. Renounce violence, recognize Israel, accept all previous agreements. Rice says in her memoir, they knew that Hamas would reject them. And that's exactly what happened. Hamas did not meet the U.S.'s demands.
So the US, EU and Israel essentially boycotted the new Hamas-controlled government. Immediately, Israel imposed an economic and political siege on Gazan. They stopped all the work permits from Gazans into Israel. That creates this dilemma. There is very dire economic consequences and there's a crisis internally because Palestinians are looking for a way out.
of the situation. This put immense pressure on the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, to cancel the results of the elections. This would mean they'd have to forcibly remove Hamas from power in order to keep the West Bank and Gaza Strip from completely falling apart under the weight of the boycott. Obviously, Hamas did not like this idea because they'd won the elections fair and square.
This crisis caused rising tension between Hamas and Fatah. And by 2007, they were on the verge of a civil war. That's when Saudi Arabia, as one of the most powerful countries in the Arab world, stepped in to mediate. They called together the two sides in Mecca, where they convinced Hamas to do what was for them the unthinkable. They come out with the Mecca Agreement, which is a unity government between Fatah and Hamas. And in that Mecca Agreement,
Hamas says that it will respect the previous agreements signed by the PLO.
The move showed that Hamas was willing to compromise on its hardline beliefs to some extent. We don't like that Israel's there, but we can't ignore it. But they stopped short of explicitly recognizing the state of Israel. So Israel and the U.S. did not accept the solution that came out of the Meccan negotiations. Now, Israel cannot accept a unity government. The United States refused, the Bush administration refuses any palace to recognize any Palestinian government with Hamas in it.
So Hamas fears that there will be a coup and they'll be overthrown. So they strike first in Gaza. And so there was a there was fighting between Mahmoud Abbas loyal forces and Hamas. A civil war broke out between Hamas and Fatah. It was bloody.
Hamas channeled its military power and viciousness against fellow Palestinians. Hamas threw and kicked out, removed the government of unity and took control, total control of the Gaza Strip. It was in June 2007. When Hamas took control, Israel responded by executing a blockade of the Gaza Strip.
This means that they control how much food, water and electricity the people of Gaza have access to. What Israel began doing was to limit the entry and exit of people and goods, which meant that if you were living in Gaza, you will not be able to leave the Gaza Strip unless you get a permit. And those permits are almost impossible to get.
The entry of food into the Gaza Strip is restricted, and there was a policy at the early years of the blockade by Israeli governments to count the number of calories that would go into the Gaza Strip to make sure that the population there isn't starved, but to maintain them just above what is a humanitarian catastrophe.
The fuel that's needed for electricity generation is restricted and rationed, so essentially to strangle Gaza so it doesn't survive, but it also doesn't collapse. So it's maintained in that state. The blockade is a form of collective punishment. What Tariq means by collective punishment is that the blockade punishes all Gazans, about half of whom are children, for the actions of Hamas.
During the last 16 years of the blockade, Gaza has become one of the most densely populated places on Earth and is one of the poorest, with an unemployment rate of nearly 50%. Meanwhile, Israel has become per capita one of the richest countries on the planet, with a population that enjoys a quality of life on par with most countries in Europe.
Yet it's also true that Hamas, during the last 16 years of the blockade, has expanded tunnels underneath the ground in Gaza to sneak in food and supplies from Egypt, store weapons, and to attack Israel. One of Hamas' biggest financial and military supporters during this time has been Iran.
Iran is trying to capitalize on pan-Muslim sentiment with regard to Jerusalem and the holy places. They see the Arab states as having essentially surrendered to Israel and that they are the true champions of Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause. And so it's part of how Iran projects its power and legitimacy in the broader Arab and Muslim world.
U.S. officials have said there is not much direct evidence that Iran actually helped plan Hamas's attack on October 7th. But there is no denying that they have given Hamas weapons and money over the last 16 years. And they weren't the only ones sending money to Gaza. Israeli news reports and analysts say that Qatar has provided over a billion dollars.
And this is what David Hacham claims is the problem. Hamas has been more focused on fighting than on the needs of the Palestinian people. I'll tell you frankly, here we have to put the blame on Hamas government in Gaza. They were taking a lot of money coming, but Hamas used it in order to develop its military capabilities against Israel. Hamas is in control of Gaza.
And Hamas doesn't take any step in order to improve the situation of living, the standard of living of the Palestinians. They are doing the opposite. They are concentrating on fighting against Israel. Over the last 16 years, Israel and Hamas have fought multiple wars.
but there's also evidence that they've cooperated. In fact, according to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019 told a private meeting with fellow members of his political party that his government had allowed funds from Qatar to reach Gaza because it was part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate and to ostensibly prevent the formation of a Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, the suffering of the Ghazan population under the blockade and Hamas has only increased. There have been no elections in that time. Hamas has ruled with an iron fist, not allowing for dissent. Many of their leaders live in exile and in luxury, like the PLO leadership did before them.
But ultimately, Tarek Barconi says that this story isn't really just about Hamas. That in the end, Hamas is a symptom of a larger problem. The issue isn't Hamas. The issue is always the Palestinian political demands. The Palestinian demands for return. The Palestinian demands for self-determination. This is what's troubling Israeli authorities.
The Palestinian liberation project, like any liberation project, is diverse and multifaceted. Hamas is one faction in that. Let's say in an ideal world from the Israeli perspective, Hamas is removed from the equation. There will be an organization committed to armed resistance for the liberation of Palestine emerging the day after. For more coverage and for differing views and analysis of the conflict, go to npr.org slash Mideast Updates.
That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me and... Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell.
Music for this episode was composed by me and my band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. Thank you to Rand Abdel-Fattah, Johannes Dergi, Larry Kaplow, Aya Batrawi, Tony Kavin, and Anya Grunman. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.
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