Governing Gaza was not on Hamas’s to-do list when the radical movement emerged from the cauldron of the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s. Its original covenant aimed not for mundane achievements but rather the destruction of the Jewish state.
“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights, and fate toyed with,” says Article Thirteen of the charter released on Aug. 18, 1988.
Thirty-seven years later — and 77 years after the establishment of the state of Israel — we might render a verdict on Palestinian armed resistance, on the many wars fought by the Arab states before Camp David, the guerrilla campaigns of the PLO, and the acts of Islamist terrorism that were all meant in one way or the other to reverse the outcomes of 1948 and 1967 (or to spoil the Oslo Peace Process). More recently, there was the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2025, exactly two years ago, which opened the gates of hell on Gaza. If violent resistance was meant to liberate the Palestinian people from the unbearable conditions of life under Israeli occupation, we can say it catastrophically failed.
The project of political Islam, once determined to succeed where Nasserite Pan-Arabism or the PLO’s secular nationalism failed, is all but dead across the Greater Middle East. The ayatollahs cling to power in Iran. Hezbollah has been weakened in Lebanon as its government seeks to disarm it. Most everywhere else, as the political scientist Nathan Brown discusses in today’s podcast episode, the project is dead. Ideas cannot be killed, but movements come and go. There was a time before Hamas, and we might now be looking at a future without it — at least when it comes to who governs Gaza. What’s left of Hamas’ military wing today must now decide whether to disarm and come under the detested Palestinian Authority or some other structure.
Political Islam emerged about half a century ago, at the time when the Palestinian movement was experiencing “an internal crisis,” according to the historian and journalist Paola Caridi (Hamas: From Resistance to Government, p. 55). Before the First Intifada, the Muslim Brotherhood, which gave birth to Hamas, had confined its work to shaping “the good Palestinian Muslim.” Charity, literacy, religious education, and social services — these activities were discreetly supported by Israel as a way of weakening the PLO. But, as Caridi says, the devastating rout of Arafat’s battalions in Lebanon in 1982 and the emergence of Palestinian Islamic Jihad the same year “played an important role in convincing at least a part of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood to go beyond the religious and cultural dimension and to push for direct confrontation with the Israelis.”
The forces driving the emergence of political Islam, says Caridi, went “well beyond the confines of the West Bank and Gaza.” Indeed, the winds of change were blowing across the Greater Middle East — in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, too. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars (2004), the journalist and historian Steve Coll points to the 1970s when “Islamic parties… had begun to assert themselves across the Muslim world as the corrupt, failing reigns of leftist Arab nationalists led youthful populations to seek a new cleansing politics… This was especially true on university campuses, where radical Islamic student wings competed for influence from Cairo to Amman to Kuala Lumpur” (p. 26). The Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran in 1979, says Coll, inspired ordinary Muslims everywhere, even if his “Shiite creed was anathema to many conservative Sunni Islamists.”
Is this era over? In today’s podcast episode, Nathan Brown, an expert on Hamas at George Washington University, says younger Palestinians — the Palestinian population is overwhelmingly young — are done with the old politics, whether Islamist, secular, or whatever. They yearn for new leaders who can redefine and reenergize Palestinian national aspirations at some point. Today, however, Gaza is flattened and its people are traumatized. Israel is trying to destroy the Palestinian nation with the unconditional support of the United States. “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us,” says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he blesses the West Bank’s de facto annexation. Thus, as Brown concedes, imagining what the next Palestinian politics might look like, and whether it will embrace armed resistance in any form, is guesswork.
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