Source: TheLastAmericanVagabond.com
As debate rages on about the current war between armed Palestinian factions and Israel, a prominent argument claims Israel is now facing “blowback” for its policy of aiding Hamas, the party that governs the Gaza Strip. So, did Israel create, fund, or promote Hamas?
To understand the political party/armed group known as Hamas, we first have to understand the basics. Hamas is an acronym for “Harakat Al-Muqawamah Al-Islamiyyah,” or the “Islamic Resistance Movement” in English. While every Palestinian mainstream political party/armed group other than the mainstream branch of Fatah is considered to be a terrorist organization in the West, such classifications are useless when attempting to understand these parties, groups, and movements. For example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a Marxist-Leninist party that was founded by a Palestinian Christian, George Habash, and is placed under the same terrorist classification as Hamas in the US, UK, and EU.
Hamas was officially founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising) by figures such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. In 1988, they issued their first founding document, which Western politicians and media often refer to as the “Hamas charter.” The statement strikes a radical posture against Jews specifically and cites Israelis’ oppressive behavior against civilians. It also includes religious history and quotes from Islamic texts to explain the movement’s foundations. Since then, Hamas has moved away from the original charter and amended it multiple times, most recently in 2017. The 2017 document affirms that Hamas would, in theory, agree to a two-state solution and rejects anti-Semitism explicitly—a far cry from their 1988 charter. It states:
“Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.”
This is important context for any analysis of Hamas. Such analysis is usually predicated on the idea that the Hamas movement is inherently terrorist and has a charter that speaks of killing all Jews. Although the movement does take a radical position on various issues, the mainstream interpretation of the group as a bunch of raving-mad Jew-haters who seek to commit genocide is grossly incorrect and intellectually lazy….