For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it contributed) and bombardment, that speaks the loudest in the name of Palestinian liberation. For millions of people across the Arab world and beyond, this heroic conception of the organization carries genuine emotional weight. Palestine is occupied. Gaza has been blockaded and bombed. And Hamas, whatever its methods, has refused to surrender. In certain circles, Hamas’ stamina alone is enough to confer legitimacy, even glory. Yet how a power acts towards its enemies does not necessarily reflect how it feels about its own people. And the portrait of Hamas as the protector of Palestinians, as the defiant shield of Palestinian resistance — however powerful it may be for the purposes of propaganda — collapses the moment you look closely at what Hamas has actually done to the Palestinians whom it governs. Hamas is not a national liberation movement. It is an Islamist faction that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s, with a founding charter that called for the destruction of Israel on religious grounds and made no pretense of representing a pluralistic Palestinian nation. It won parliamentary elections in 2006 — a democratic mandate it then used not to govern, but to amass and consolidate absolute power. In 2007, it launched a bloody coup against the Palestinian Authority, throwing PA officers from rooftops, executing rivals in the streets, and killing more than 700 people in a matter of days. It has governed the people of Gaza ever since by means of fear, repression, religious enforcement, and political monopoly: suppressing and jailing critics and treating organized dissent as an act of treason, torturing Palestinians who dare to speak out. None of this is a secret. Human rights organizations — Palestinian, Arab, and international — have documented Hamas’ treatment of Gazans for nearly two decades. The evidence for Hamas’ crimes is not in dispute. But rather than attempting to respond to its critics, Hamas has engineered its own impunity — cunningly fusing its own survival with the survival of the Palestinians, with the Palestinian cause itself, so that any internal criticism reads, in the minds of supporters abroad, as a betrayal of the people rather than accountability for the faction. This legerdemain is one of the most successful propaganda operations of the modern era: a movement that represses its own population while convincing much of the world that to name that repression is to side with the enemy. It is a brilliantly executed magic trick loosed upon a gullible or biased world. Hamas calls itself a resistance movement. What it has never been is a national movement — of the sort that is accountable to the full spectrum of Palestinian society. Hamas demands total and unexamined loyalty from every Palestinian, at home and abroad, while representing the ideology of one faction alone. That is not representation. It is authoritarianism. To understand why this matters, it is necessary to clarify what a national movement has historically meant in the Palestinian context. A national movement is not organized around a single ideology or religious creed. It is meant to function as a broad political framework that accommodates internal differences — political, religious, social — while still claiming to represent a people as a whole. This inclusiveness, this representativeness, however imperfect, is the source of its legitimacy. The Palestine Liberation Organization was designed to function this way. When it emerged and consolidated power in the 1960s and 1970s, it positioned itself as a secular civic-national umbrella. Nationalists, Islamists, Marxists, liberals, Muslims, and Christians were all within it. Its concept of Palestine was larger than any one ideology. Even later, when the PA emerged out of the Oslo process, it inherited this same capacious claim — it was deeply flawed, authoritarian, and hollowed out, yes, but still it was grounded in the idea that legitimacy comes from institutions, elections, and a broad national mandate rather than religious doctrine dictated by divine decree. Hamas was the product of a completely different tradition — and an incompatible one. Hamas did not emerge from the Palestinian national movement; it emerged to displace it. Its ideological framework is not civic but ideological: the people are not citizens with competing political views but a community bound to a particular religious and moral order. Consent is not its source of authority. Doctrine is. Hamas has never pretended otherwise. It employs systematic and centrally directed violence to enforce its order on the many Palestinians who did not ask for it. Hamas has weaponized the language of patriotism — turned it into a sectarian loyalty oath administered at gunpoint. Hamas positions every act of repression as an act of protecting the Palestinian cause or maintaining security and preserving stability. Every arrested journalist is a spy. Every executed critic is a collaborator. Every family hunted down is a nest of traitors. The resistance, in Hamas’ telling, is perpetually under attack from within — and it alone possesses the authority to name the enemy, try the accused, and carry out the sentence. There is no appeal, no transparency, no accountability. Hamas’ rule in Gaza shares the essential feature of every authoritarian system: it has made the cost of speaking the truth higher than the cost of living a lie. It has cast journalists as enemies of the people. It has rebranded repression as protection and detention as security. What distinguishes Hamas from other authoritarians is that it has co-opted the moral authority of its people’s legitimate suffering. Hamas has built its system of control on top of a real occupation, a real blockade, a real dispossession. That is what makes it so difficult to challenge — and so dangerous to excuse. When Gazans took to the streets to demand electricity, clean water, and food for their families, Hamas did not listen. It did not negotiate. It branded protesters
Hamas Versus Palestine
