Comment: Hamas and peace in West Asia. (1996, 20 Marks)
Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement) was founded in Gaza in December 1987, at the outbreak of the first intifada, by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its 1988 Charter rejected Israel’s existence and any negotiated settlement. In 1996 the question was whether it could wreck the Oslo process. In 2026 it is whether Gaza can be stabilised by disarming Hamas without a political horizon for its constituency.
Ideology and organisation
- Islamist nationalism: Hamas fuses Palestinian national liberation with a religious claim to the whole of historic Palestine, unlike the PLO’s secular nationalism.
- Three arms: a social-welfare and preaching network (da’wa) that built a mass base, a political bureau, and the armed Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
- Evolution: its 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies accepted a state on the 1967 lines as a national-consensus formula, still without recognising Israel. Khaled Hroub (Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, 2000) had already traced this pragmatism, but it is not acceptance of a two-State peace.
Hamas as spoiler: the 1996 context
- Stephen John Stedman (“Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes”, 1997) defines spoilers as parties that see a peace process as a threat to their power and use violence to undermine it. Total spoilers pursue non-negotiable goals.
- Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F. Walter (“Sabotaging the Peace”, 2002) explain the logic: extremist violence persuades the other side that the moderates cannot be trusted, or cannot control their own radicals.
- Suicide bombings followed the Hebron mosque massacre (February 1994). The bus bombings of February–March 1996, after Israel killed the bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, helped elect Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1996. Spoiling ran both ways: an Israeli extremist had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995.
From spoiler to governing actor
- Hamas won the 2006 legislative election (74 of 132 seats). It rejected the Quartet’s conditions (recognise Israel, renounce violence, accept prior agreements), seized Gaza in 2007 and lived under blockade through four wars between 2008 and 2021.
- Israel’s containment, managing Hamas rather than defeating it, collapsed on 7 October 2023. Israel’s war aimed to destroy the movement, killing its leaders Ismail Haniyeh (Tehran, July 2024) and Yahya Sinwar (Gaza, October 2024).
- Under the US-brokered ceasefire of October 2025 and UNSC Resolution 2803, Hamas is excluded from governing Gaza. In July 2026 it and other factions agreed a staged handover of weapons to a Palestinian national committee, linked to Israeli withdrawal. The deal stalled in August: the Board of Peace now demands complete disarmament before Israel pulls back beyond the Yellow Line, and its $2.4 billion reconstruction plan (September 2026) depends on it.
Can peace come with or without Hamas?
- The exclusion view (Israel, the US): no settlement while an armed movement rejects the other party’s existence, so disarmament first. India, which called 7 October terrorism, backed the US plan at Sharm el-Sheikh (October 2025).
- The inclusion view: an idea with social roots cannot be bombed away; the PLO was treated as terrorist before Oslo, and Sinn Féin–IRA shows armed movements can enter politics. The Beijing Declaration on Palestinian unity (July 2024) follows this logic.
- The structural view: Hamas thrives on the failure of diplomacy: settlement growth, blockade and a divided Palestinian leadership keep producing its constituency.
Conclusion
Hamas is both a cause and a symptom of the absence of peace in West Asia: it has spoiled peace processes, and it gains ground whenever they fail. Durable peace needs both neutralising its armed capacity and absorbing its constituency politically, through Palestinian elections and a credible path to statehood. Disarmament without a political horizon would only change the name of the next spoiler.