- You may have heard of the terrorist group Hamas.
Some of their best known work?
The decades-long wave of suicide bombings
in Israeli buses, restaurants, and nightclubs
in the 90s and 2000s,
and more recently launching thousands of rockets
at Israeli cities, digging tunnels to infiltrate Israel
in order to commit terrorist attacks,
and serving as inspiration for countless more attacks
by individual terrorists.
But who is Hamas?
How did it begin and eventually come to rule all of Gaza,
the 25-mile-long strip to Israel's southwest
with a population of almost two million?
And how is Hamas different from its fierce rival, Fatah?
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Hamas itself is a fundamentalist Islamic resistance movement
that's recognized as a terrorist organization
by countries like the US and Canada and the European Union.
It aims to destroy Israel or the Zionist entity
and create an independent Islamic Palestinian state
in its place.
Hamas considers this region of Palestine
spanning from the Mediterranean Sea in the west
to the Jordan River in the east.
In other words, the entire state of Israel,
not just the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
So Hamas refers to any Israeli presence in the region
as an occupation.
But before we talk more about Hamas,
there's another group that we need to talk about.
See, Hamas is not the only organization
that wants an independent Palestinian state,
and they're actually a relatively recent
addition to the mix.
There's also Fatah, which was founded in 1959
and led by Yasser Arafat
for the first several decades of its existence.
It functioned as both a nationalist terrorist organization
and later a political party with an armed wing
that still sometimes engages in terrorism.
It's the dominant political party in the West Bank,
and until a decade ago, Gaza.
Now, Fatah is the largest faction of the PLO,
or the Palestine Liberation Organization,
though the line between Fatah and the PLO
is pretty blurry.
But for our purposes we'll mainly stick to discussing Fatah,
though much of what we say applies to the PLO overall.
Most Western governments considered Fatah
and its umbrella organization, the PLO,
a terrorist group up until 1991.
A few years earlier, in 1988,
the PLO had renounced violence, at least publicly,
officially recognized Israel's right to exist,
and agreed to negotiate.
The violence though didn't totally stop.
The peace talks began and the US and UN
decided not to classify the PLO, which included Fatah,
as a terrorist organization anymore.
Today, that's still one of the major differences
between Hamas and Fatah.
Fatah and the Palestinian authority in the West Bank
in general have been willing to negotiate
some kind of compromise with Israel,
whereas Hamas, not so much.
Instead, Hamas focuses on destroying Israel and its people
as part of creating an independent Islamic state
throughout the entire land.
But let's back up.
Where did Hamas come from?
And how did a terrorist organization come to rule Gaza?
Hamas was established in the late 1980s,
but the ideology that would eventually lead to Hamas
had been building for decades.
Way back in 1928, an Egyptian school teacher and imam
named Hassan al-Banna
decided to take action against what he saw
as two major ills of Arab society:
the lack of social services like charity and education,
and Western secularization due to European imperialism.
He started a Sunni Islamic organization
called the Muslim Brotherhood,
which set up desperately needed social services.
Pretty soon, the Muslim Brotherhood gained wide popularity
because of its work for the public,
and spread to other Arab countries.
The Brotherhood's main goal though was to stop the influence
of secularization in Muslim countries
and to create a society ruled
by a strict fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran
and sharia law.
So they used their network of social services
to spread that message as well as to encourage
political activism among the members.
This was all fairly peaceful, at least at first.
By the 1940s, the movement was focused
on gaining more political power,
even overthrowing the existing secular governments.
They turned to violence,
bombing buildings and assassinating Arab leaders.
But as they gained more power and influence,
some of the more secular Arab governments
started working to bring down the Muslim Brotherhood.
This was especially true in Egypt,
where the movement had started and was most popular.
In 1954, the Brotherhood tried and failed
to assassinate Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The government arrested
thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members,
which crippled the organization.
The movement became less active for about a decade.
Then, in 1970, newly-elected Egyptian president Anwar Sadat
released the imprisoned Brotherhood leaders,
who began the rebuild the movement.
This time though, their official line was
that they opposed violence
and were focused on providing social services.
But they were still committed to establishing a society
that would be ruled by a fundamentalist form of Islam.
By the 1980s, Arab countries around the world
were shifting back from secularism to religion,
some even to fundamentalism.
The Muslim Brotherhood was undergoing a major revival
and started to resurrect its plans for political takeover.
Naturally, all this affected the Palestinians also.
By the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood
had long been operating in Gaza and the West Bank,
where they helped build mosques and provide services
like loans and charities.
But in 1987, religious leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
made a move that changed the playing field forever.
He united the Muslim Brotherhood presence in Gaza
into a new movement, Hamas.
Like Fatah, the movement's main goal
was to establish an independent Palestinian state.
But unlike Fatah, they used religion to support their ideas
and wanted the state to be ruled
by a fundamentalist form of Islamic doctrine.
Still, according, to historian Anita Shapiro,
Hamas' activities initially focused
on providing social services and education.
They believed in the ultimate goal
of destroying Israel and its Jews,
but they didn't think it was time to do that just yet.
They talked about things like maintaining integrity,
avoiding corruption, and maintaining religious prohibitions
like alcohol consumption.
Even the Israeli government thought that sounded good,
and at first they actually supported Hamas
despite its overt antisemitism.
They thought if Hamas gained power,
Fatah might become weaker,
and overall there would be less risk of violence
towards Israel.
As we'll soon see though, they were wrong.
Now, earlier that same month, December 1987,
a grassroots Palestinian movement of demonstrations
had ignited an uprising known as the First Intifada.
It began with Palestinian protestors
throwing stones and Molotov cocktails,
but soon escalated to full-blown
terrorists coordinating attacks
using guns, grenades, and other explosives.
The First Intifada was mainly orchestrated by Fatah,
but some of the terrorists participating in the Intifada
were also members of this new group, Hamas.
And they convinced their leader, Ahmed Yassin,
that he was wrong to wait to start a holy war.
Now was the time to destroy Israel and its Jews,
not through spreading their spreading their doctrine
and recruiting members but through violence.
Despite the ongoing Intifada,
the Palestinian government, led by Fatah,
was making moves to try to negotiate with Israel.
But Hamas opposed any sort of compromise,
especially one that allowed Israel to exist,
and they strongly disapproved of Fatah's plan
to create a secular Palestinian state.
In 1988, Hamas officially codified their charter,
which stated their position clearly.
According to the charter, the "Zionist enemies"
controlled everything from the world media
to the French and Communist revolutions
to the United Nations.
They believed that Israel was only the beginning
and soon the Jews would take over the entire world.
So antisemitism and opposition to Israel's entire existence
was always a central part of Hamas' philosophy,
they just didn't act on it right away.
But by the time the First Intifada was in full swing,
they were already using terrorism to achieve their goals.
The First Intifada finally ended in 1993.
More than 1,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces
trying to push down the uprising,
and around 150 Israelis
were killed in attacks by Palestinians.
The uprising stopped when Israel and the PLO, led by Fatah,
signed a set of agreements known as the Oslo Accords.
The agreements were meant to end violence
and start a series of talks that would eventually lead
to two separate independent states,
one for the Jews and one for the Palestinians.
But that didn't mean the terrorism ended.
As you can imagine,
Hamas was not exactly on board with this idea.
Over the course of the 90s,
Hamas carried out a wave of suicide bombings in Israel,
killing over 200 Israeli citizens.
It got to the point where it was scary
for Israelis to do routine things
like take a bus or go grocery shopping,
for fear of being blown up.
In less than two decades,
Hamas had grown from a movement
that provided social services
while believing a holy war would destroy Israel
at some point in the future,
to one that was actively killing
as many Israeli civilians as they could.
For many reasons, the continued terrorism among them,
the negotiations between Israel
and the Palestinian government eventually failed.
This led to the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005,
in which Fatah not only joins Hamas
in a campaign of terror attacks
but actually led the charge.
During those years alone, there were 141 suicide attacks,
and Hamas was responsible for almost 1/2 of them.
There was a bombing practically every week.
Things like tourist attractions and malls
that were normally bustling with people
were suddenly quiet.
Even going to a popular restaurant became a serious risk.
The death toll in Israel was over seven times higher
than during the First Intifada
with more than 1,100 Israelis killed,
78% of whom were civilians.
After a particularly gruesome month
during which 130 Israelis were killed,
the Israel military retaliated at full scale
in Operation Defensive Shield.
They hoped to stop the attacks sweeping the country
by taking out terrorists
and destroying the supplies being used to make bombs.
In total, during the Second Intifada,
around 4,200 Palestinians were killed.
Now, it's unclear how many were civilians,
but mainstream estimates range from 35 to 50%.
The Second Intifada ended around 2005 for several reasons.
One may have been the death
of Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat in 2004.
But another may have been related to Israel's 2004 decision
to withdraw from Gaza by the following year.
That decision meanwhile was a major factor
in the next stage of Hamas' development.
Israel's withdrawal from Gaza created a power vacuum
in which Palestinian elections were held
and Hamas unexpectedly won.
Those elections and the violence that followed
finally ruptured the already divided Palestinian government.
Fatah retained control of the West Bank
while Hamas seized complete control over Gaza.
But we'll save that part of the story for our next episode.
Thanks for watching, see you guys next week.
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