“Israel will exist until Islam destroys it”

2023-10-09 12:37:51

Once again, the Middle East has dawned red. This weekend, Hamas moved in an unprecedented attack against Israel. The figures speak for themselves: more than 2,500 missiles launched against civilian targets, as many surgical blows by their militias and hundreds of deaths. Everything seems to indicate that the winds of war are arriving again in the region. Nothing new, unfortunately, since the terrorist group was forged in 1987 in the heat of the First Intifada and cried out, in its Founding Charter, for the annihilation of its neighbors: “Israel will exist until Islam destroys it.”

Controversial origin

Each author goes back to a different date when referring to the most remote origin of Hamas – an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islam (‘Islamic Resistance Movement’)–. In ‘Historical antecedents of armed Islamism in Palestine’, the journalist specialized in the Middle East Gonzalo Caretti Oria maintains that the organization draws directly from the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most widespread Islamist political movements in the world since it was born back in 1928. In any case, what is crystal clear is that it was cooked in the heat of that ‘political Islam’ that called for the recovery of historical Palestine.

Although the most direct germ must be sought in 1987. As the historian Juan Pedro Cavero explains in several of his works – the main one, ‘The Jewish People in History’ – on December 7 of that same year four Palestinians died in a traffic accident in Gaza caused by an Israeli military vehicle. The possibility that it was a premeditated murder, together with the tension that was felt in the territory due to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, led in the short term to the outbreak of some riots and, shortly after, to the declaration of the First Intifada against the Jewish country.

During that first Intifada – a term that can be translated as ‘get rid of’ or ‘shake off’ – Hamas was born. The person most responsible for the birth was the almost blind cleric Ahmed Yassin, in a wheelchair since an accident left him quadriplegic at the age of twelve. And, from its first statement, the organization opted for the threat: «The intifada of our people rejects the occupation and its pressures. […] Islam is the solution and the alternative. Our people know the path of sacrifice and martyrdom. Understand that violence generates nothing but violence, that death brings nothing but death.

Yassin was an old acquaintance for Israel before establishing himself as the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region. In the sixties, seventies and eighties he had become known as an Islamic activist and had opted to gain the trust of society with textbook populist movements; some such as orchestrating a network of charitable organizations or founding schools in the West Bank of Jordan and Gaza. That, always linked to religion, as Xavier Batalla explains well in ‘The world is an idea’: “Between 1967 and 1987, mosques tripled in Gaza, going from two hundred to six hundred.” He did this with the approval of Israel.

Blood and kamikazes

Hamas’s true intentions became clear shortly afterwards. Soon, they declared that the PLO – the Palestine Liberation Organization – which they had described as their “political sister”, was too moderate to lead relations with Israel. “They shared the objective of liberating Palestine, but, unlike them, who sought to establish a secular state through negotiations with Israel, Hamas rejected all ties and negotiations, and sought the implementation of an Islamic State,” explains José de Jesús López Almejo in ‘Hamas: between terrorist tactics and political means?’ The example is that, during its first years of existence, Israel used Hamas to act as a counterweight to Yasir Arafat’s group, Fatah, the majority faction within the PLO.

Since then, its armed militias (the Qassam Brigades) have caused the most civilian and military casualties in the Jewish country through conventional attacks and the use of kamikazes. The examples are counted in dozens. In 1989, Yasin was convicted by an Israeli court of ordering members of his organization to kidnap and kill two Jewish soldiers. On April 16, 1993 – after other murders such as that of civilian Doron Shoshan in the Kfar Darom settlement of Gaza – Hamas launched a suicide attack next to a cafe in the Jewish colony of Mehola. He was the first of many who carried out this method during that decade, against both military and civilian targets.

The West – the United States, Canada, Japan, the European Union and even neighboring Egypt – considers Hamas a “terrorist organization” that continues to refuse to accept the demands of the UN. Mainly, the recognition of Israel’s right to exist, the renunciation of terrorist violence and acceptance of the 1993 Oslo Accords for which the then Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, and the Israeli prime minister, Isaac Rabin, received the Nobel Prize in peace. While for its followers, as well as for some allied Arab countries – Russia and Turkey – it is nothing more than a legitimate resistance movement that took over from the Palestine Liberation Organization. In any case, it was in 2006 when they took Gaza after the parliamentary elections in the region.

Call to Jihad

Hamas made public its Founding Charter, also called the Hamas Pact, on August 18, 1988. In total, there were 36 articles, about 9,000 words, in which it called for erasing its enemy from the maps. He already said it in the preamble: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam destroys it, just as it has erased others before.” And the same thing happened throughout the pages, such as in article 13: «The so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences contradict the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement […]. These conferences are nothing more than a means to appoint infidels as arbiters in the lands of Islam. “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem other than Jihad.”

The Founding Charter included other points such as:

–Article 22: «The Jews strove to amass great and substantial material wealth, which they dedicated to the realization of their dream. With their money they took control of the world’s media, news agencies, the press, publishing companies, radio stations and others. With their money they fueled revolutions in different parts of the world to achieve their goals. “They were behind the French Revolution, the communist revolution and most of the revolutions we have known about.”

–Article 28: «Jews seek to undermine societies, destroy values, corrupt consciences, deteriorate character and annihilate Islam. “They are behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its forms to facilitate its control and expansion.”

–Article 32: «Zionist plans have no end and, after Palestine, they will want expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. After assimilating the area in which they have planted their hands, they will think about continuing to expand, and so on.