The muslim brotherhood, Hamas and Israel

Alex Grobman, PhDuThe media has played a pivotal role in reinforcing ignorance about Israel’s enemies by repeating their antisemitic slogans without exposing how they distort the truth.  Understanding the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Israel helps provide perspective of the nature of the evil we are forced to confront.

Hamas, Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah (Islamic Resistance Movement), is the Sunni Muslim Palestinian movement that has ruled the Gaza Strip since gaining power from Fatah in January 2006. The organization is the creation of the Palestinian branch of the extremist Muslim Brothers’ Society (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin), or the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Middle East expert Yehudit Barsky.

Established in Ismailia, Egypt in1928, by Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood reflects the revival of Islam as the primary basis of individual and collective identity in the Middle East. The importance of the Brotherhood “to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas,” explains German political scientist Matthias Küntzel.

Significantly, the Moslem Brotherhood transformed the concept of jihad and martyrdom, which had practically been absent from Islamic teachings, and essentially ignored or regarded as irrelevant to the beliefs of Imams and preachers, into a fundamental religious principle.

 Al-Banna made this radical change by infusing death with a more common and acceptable significance, and by relating the idea of jihad with the chance of death occurring at any point and at any place writes Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi, a professor of international relations.  In 1937, Al-Banna wrote an article about jihad called “The Industry of Death.” In 1946, the article was reprinted and entitled “The Art of Death.” He concluded that, “To a nation that perfects the industry of death, and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come… So prepare yourself to do a great deed.”

Arab journalist Zaki Chehab claims Al Banna’s success can be seen in the recorded video messages by Hamas suicide bombers. Reem Rayashi, the first female Hamas suicide bomber, left a three-year-old son and an 18 month old baby girl behind.  The 22 old university student from an affluent Gaza family denoted a two-kilogram bomb at the Erez border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, killing two soldiers, a border policeman and a civilian security guard. Dressed in combat fatigues with the green Hamas bandana around her head and holding an automatic weapon, she declared that since she was in the eighth grade she “hoped that the shredded limbs of my body would be shrapnel, tearing the Zionists to pieces, knocking on heaven’s door with the skulls of the Zionists.”

Palestinian Media Watch reported that Tomorrow’s Pioneers, a Hamas TV children’s program, produced a broadcast in which her two young children were invited to the TV studio to watch a video re-enactment of their mother’s suicide bombing.

After Reem was chosen for the assignment, Chehab noted, hundreds of young girls complained to Miriam Farhat that Reem had been selected ahead of them.  They were envious of Reem and pleaded to be the first to follow her. Miriam understood their impatience.  On March 7, 2002, Farhat’s 19 year-old son Mohammad killed five 18 year-old boys and wounded 23 others in the beis medrash (study hall) in the Gush Katif settlement of Azmona.  She remarked how she “was his partner in jihad. It is a normal thing.” It is not as remarkable as people think.”

Chehab said he wrote about Farhat because her statement “would seem incomprehensible to most parents but I think it is important to document it as it shows the extremes which make this conflict so difficult to understand.”

Strong communal encouragement is needed to nurture the environment to support this choice asserts Ami Pedahzur, a professor of government. Hamas recruited prospective homicide bombers from members of its university chapters, schools, mosques, and social clubs and from Israeli jails.  “Comradeship” and social networks were one of the most powerful dynamics in generating radicalism and terrorism. Recruiters wanted individuals driven by ideology and not by the expectation of bettering their own financial position or that of their families.

For Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Israeli penitentiaries were “boot camps” where many of its members forged their ideology and commitment to the organizations during the years spent together with other inmates. Israeli authorities prevented these groups from establishing camps to indoctrinate and train its members in an isolated environment, so prisons were used instead.

The Al-Aqsa intifada (Arab uprising April 1993-September 2000) changed this recruitment procedure Pedahzur found.  Along with other Palestinian Arab organizations, Hamas used homicide bombers as a primary strategy precipitating the need for an ever increasing number of replacements. As competition between the groups intensified and Hamas and other Palestinian Arab leaders were injured and assassinated by the Israelis, the organization abandoned its lengthy selective and training process.  In some cases, the entire procedure now took no more than a couple of hours. The ability to mobilize limitless numbers of recruits when required, testified to their success in instilling the “culture of death” in the society.

The primary goals of Hamas are to abolish the Jewish state through jihad, establish an Islamic state and transform society to follow Sharia law.

Article 15 of the Hamas Covenant of August 1988, explains why the destruction of Israel is not negotiable; it is a religious imperative: “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.”

Ismail Haniyeh, a senior political leader of Hamas and previously one of two contested Prime Ministers of the Palestinian National Authority, was equally clear. “Let the whole world hear us—we will not cede an inch of Palestine, and we will never recognize Israel.”

Palestinian Arab Ma’an News Agency quoted Khalil Al-Hayya, a Palestinian Legislative Council member from Hamas, who was similarly adamant.   “We have not authorized, nor shall we authorize, anyone to give up on a single particle of Palestinian soil. Israel is an aggressive state which we will not ever recognize, and Palestine is an Arab Islamic property which has no room for the Jews.”

El-Awaisi explains that a fundamental tenet of Hamas is that the land of Palestine “is an Islamic trust (waqf) upon all Muslim generations till the day of Judgement, [and that] “giving up any part of Palestine is like giving up part of its religion,”

This belief is a “novel politically-oriented myth, rooted neither in Islamic legal texts nor in historical practice,” asserts Yitzhak Reiter, an Israeli professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. The objective of this fabricated political myth is to explain why Palestinian Arabs are not permitted to relinquish even an inch of land to Israel or to the Zionists. When the Oslo Accords collapsed during the second half of the 1990s, Yasser Arafat adopted the idea and often mentioned it in the Palestinian media.

In a speech at an international conference on education heard by representatives from Egypt, Tunisia and Qatar, Ismail Haniyeh was quoted as saying “Israel is a cancerous tumor that must be removed and uprooted. The hand of the resistance and the jihad fighters has begun to uproot the tumor, and will work to end the occupation of Palestine as a whole. Allah willing, we will break the occupation.” He urged teachers in Gaza to “raise a generation that will fight and liberate the Palestinians from the occupation.”

After offering his explanation about the nature of the Jewish people, Abdallah Jarbu’, Hamas deputy minister of religious endowments, proffers a solution to resolving the Jewish problem:  “[The Jews] suffer from a mental disorder, because they are thieves and aggressors. A thief or an aggressor, who took property or land, develops a psychological disorder and pangs of conscience, because he took something that wasn’t his. They want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are foreign bacteria – a microbe unparalleled in the world. It’s not me who says this. The Koran itself says that they have no parallel: ‘You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews.

May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience.  I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with them, whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people. They have no religion, no conscience, and no moral values.”

Dr. Alex Grobman is an historian with an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He is on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel (NCLCI) and on the executive board of the Religious Zionists of America. He has served as Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in LA, has written 9 books on the Shoah and Israel and co-authored two more including Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It?  He was the founding editor-in chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Annual, the first serial publication in the United States focusing on the scholarly study of the Holocaust.

Copyright Alex Grobman, 2024