Do you think Hamas would be removed from the Gaza Strip? Do you know what Hamas is? Hamas is a big movement. Hamas has a military wing and institutions. Hamas has a government which they, of course, shelled and destroyed all the ministries. Hamas has a women’s movement, a student movement. It is part of the very fabric of Palestinian life. How are they going to remove it, excuse me? Are they going to kill all these people? And are they going to undermine Hamas in their own people’s eyes? No.” —Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian politician and scholar
When overwhelmed by the unending metacrisis in the Levant, there are some people who become my personal confidential informants and voices of wisdom: poets Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti, writers Edward Said and Ghassan Hanafani, artists Sliman Mansour and Ayman Al-Husari—and the voice of experience, Hanan Ashrawi.
The idea of Hamas can no more be killed than the idea of India. The formative idea of Hamas was Islam in the service of Palestinian freedom, and there it has remained. The word Hamas is an acronym for Harkat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya—Islamic Resistance Movement—which shows its clear Islamic inclination. But what Western observers ignore is that Hamas has not segued into Islamic fundamentalism. Israelists have been trumpeting that Hamas is in the mould of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Taliban and Saudi Wahhabism. It goes unmentioned that Hamas’s Islamism is more political than religious, “one which gives way to pragmatism over doctrine”, as David Maggs wrote in The History, Politics and Ideology of Hamas (2011).
In fact, in 2006, after its shock defeat of the Palestinian Authority in the parliamentary election, Hamas declared that while it would be “making efforts so that the sharia will be the source of legislation”, it had no intention of enforcing strict Islamic law.
And so it has been. Bars flourished in Medinat Ghazzah (Gaza City), the urban core of the Gaza Strip; women and men chose to wear Islamic clothing or so-called Mediterreanised Western clothing; there was no proscription on literary consumption; people were openly demonstrative and married for love; there was poetry-reading in the open; there was busking; graffiti as an art form was rife; there was energetic nightlife; there was un-Islamic communism; and there were women smoking in public despite an early Hamas prohibition in 2010 and a rapid walkback.
What the pro-Israel media—I hesitate to use the word ‘Zionist’ as a focused identifier because Zionism, like Islamism, is a mixed bag—has told us is that Hamas beheads infants and rapes women. The first has been conclusively discredited as a stunning canard, and the second is, weeks into a war in which Israel is trying to dredge deep for proof of sexual transgressions, without evidence.
The Israelists flourish the Hamas manifesto to show that the organisation’s credo is Israel’s end. But this manifesto was drawn up in 1988 and superseded by another in 2017 with three significant departures. First, it accepted the need for a Palestinian state distinct from Israel, thus conceding Israel’s right to exist. Second, it said that it was ranged against “the racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project but was not against Jews or Judaism. Third, it did away with the antisemitic tone of the 1988 charter. And fourth, it pointedly did not mention the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, its mothership.
The Israelist media also conflates Hamas with other more hardline but tiny Islamist groups. Way back in 2009, the so-called Jund Ansar Allah (Army of God), with allegiance to al-Qaeda, announced a separate Islamic emirate from its headquarters in Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Hamas killed this movement, thereafter refusing admittance to al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Gaza is also peppered with other groups, some with memberships as small as 100. They are irritating in Gaza’s extensive Islamic body politic but remain inutile.
In the new, unplanned world to come, some things are certain. S&P Global has downgraded Israel’s outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’. On October 23, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, an ardent proponent of a Gaza beatdown, said that the 2023-24 budget was “no longer relevant”.
Also read: Gaza gaffe pokes hole in Israel’s Iron Dome
Smotrich put the direct cost of the war at $246 million per day, but there is no accounting for the vast indirect costs yet. The war could be costing the construction sector alone—it is at a standstill—$37 million a day. Before the war, Israel’s $500-billion economy was projected to grow at 3 percent. But on October 23, the Bank of Israel trimmed growth prospects to 2.3 percent, introducing the prospect of negative growth for the first time in Israel’s history. Even in the coming fiscal, it has whittled down the projected growth from 3 percent to 2.8 percent—which means that it sees the ripple effect of the ongoing crisis as extending over several years. The central bank is also gearing up to sell $30 billion of foreign currency to shore up the shekel, which has, over nearly three weeks since the start of the conflict, dropped 5 percent, totalling a precipitous slide of 15.5 percent in 2023.
Militarily, Israel is exorbitantly throwing rocketry into Gaza, with more expenditure assured. Hamas calculates that Israel has thrown 13,000 tonnes of explosives into Gaza—nearly the equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. This fast-depleting armoury could leave Israel bare. It is now dependent on the US—which accounts for 16 percent of its arms budget—for basic munitions for the ongoing aerial blitz and the impending ground assault.
The 11-day May 2021 uprising cost Israeli businesses $368 million and Gaza $190 million. This time, it’s far worse for both sides. But while Gaza—and Hamas—might be hit, Israel will be hit far worse.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist