Staking Their Claims: Hamas, Israel, and the Land

James Tonkowich
January 8, 2009

The following originally appeared in a recent IRD Weekly e-newsletter.  If you would like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, click here and select “IRD Weekly.”

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” So wrote Imam Hassan al-Banna, one of the founders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.  Banna is quoted as a preamble to the 1988 Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] Covenant. And that covenant is critical for understanding the current conflict in Gaza.

Banna’s reference to the obliteration of others before Israel brings to mind the short-lived Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Established by crusaders who defeated the Muslims in 1099, it was permanently destroyed by Muslim armies in 1291. The nation of Israel is sitting on that same territory. The Hamas Covenant makes it clear that once an area is ruled by Muslims it is a Muslim land in perpetuity.  All other claimants must be “obliterated.”

Thus the Covenant states that in the effort to “liberate Palestine”:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement [Hamas] is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.

Robert Lewis Wilken notes in an article entitled “Christianity Face to Face with Islam” in the January 2009 First Things:

In a way that is not true of Christianity, Islam is territorial. One of Islam’s most enduring innovations was that religious law became also the law of the body politic. Shari’a is more encompassing than the Church’s canon law, and historically its authority depended on a community with territorial boundaries and political jurisdiction.

It is certainly true that Jews have a religious reason for the attachment to the land as well.  As even a casual reading of the Hebrew Bible will make clear, “the land” is a major theme. In Genesis 17, God promised Abraham:

The whole land of Canaan… I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.

The key word is “everlasting.”  This promise to Abraham is still cited in Israel’s defense.
The difference between Israel and Hamas, however, is that it has never been the state of Israel’s policy to “obliterate” other peoples or nations.  Jews, Muslims, and Christians share Israeli citizenship.  A country under siege, Israel struggles to avoid being obliterated itself.

Withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was an Israeli concession in hopes of a greater measure of peace. Israel ceded Gaza to the Palestinians. The result? Charles Krauthammer summed it up in the Washington Post.

Did the Palestinians begin building the state that is supposedly their great national aim? No. No roads, no industry, no courts, no civil society at all. The flourishing greenhouses that Israel left behind for the Palestinians were destroyed and abandoned. Instead, Gaza’s Iranian-sponsored rulers have devoted all their resources to turning it into a terror base—importing weapons, training terrorists, building tunnels with which to kidnap Israelis on the other side. And of course firing rockets unceasingly.

The grievance? It cannot be occupation, military control or settlers. They were all removed in September 2005. There’s only one grievance and Hamas is open about it: Israel’s very existence.

Hamas sees its conflict with Israel as a religious conflict over Muslim property.  The same can be said of Hezbollah, Iran, and other Islamist groups. As IRD board member Paul Marshall, of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, has written:

For radical Islamist groups, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah, Israel is not understood in terms of the ins and outs of foreign policy and peace processes, but only as an assault on Islam itself.  Questions of the extent of Israeli settlements, or where Israel’s borders might be, are irrelevant except insofar as they may weaken Israeli resolve or military power.  It is Israel’s very existence that is the problem, no matter what concessions might be made to achieve peace.  The only solution they can see is for Israel to cease to exist.

The conflict going on in Gaza today is, from Hamas’ point of view, a religious war with the purpose of eliminating Israel.  Krauthammer comments that not only does Hamas not conceal its goal, it is clear on its strategy as well.

Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world’s opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire…. Then… rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d’etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.

This understanding of Hamas’ goals and strategies is not to give Israel carte blanche in defending itself.  It is, however, foundational for understanding the conflict and a brutal fact that must be reckoned with in any serious attempt to bring peace to the long-troubled region.