The birth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 heralded the emergence of political Islam and modeled the Islamist movements of the future. Subsequent Islamist movements surfaced as diverse responses to the problems of authoritarianism, foreign intervention, and failed Arab nationalist movements in the post-war environment. Hamas and Hezbollah illustrate the diversity of political Islam in the modern Middle East; for each Islamist movement has different origins and goals than the next, developed within particular geographies and sociopolitical contexts, and the relationship between each movement proves that Islamism is not uniform but rather an umbrella term that encompasses a vast spectrum of competing ideologies. Yet Hamas and Hezbollah, developed according to a shared pattern, that is, that they all envisioned a world free of foreign resistance in which the family, community, and state are organized and mobilized consistently with Islamic principles. While Hezbollah is Shiite and Hamas is Sunni, those sectarian differences do not eclipse their mutual nationalist, Islamic, and anti-Israeli aspirations. Both groups have a military wing that has committed acts of terrorism, and both participate significantly in local politics. It is therefore easy but problematic to lump all Islamist movements together as a monolithic threat to Israel and ultimately to the West. For despite the similarities in Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s understandings of resistance, there are differences in how these organizations interpret and apply this concept. These differences are linked less to their respective Shia or Sunni Islamist political ideologies than to the contexts the two groups operate in and the strategic interests and alliances they pursue.
The 1967 Six Day War marked a point of departure for initial Palestinian resistance through the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The new land won by Israel after their victory was occupied by Palestinian refugees. Palestinian resistance was able to strengthen its rhetoric as the “movement could claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians in occupied territories for the first time.” Prior to 1967, Palestinian refugees lived in neighboring Arab states among people who had their own, different agendas and were not motivated to actively support a Palestinian resistance movement. This changed when Israel unethically controlled these lands. The emerging success of the PLO showed the Palestinians coalescing around a common goal that emerged and strengthened after years of frustrated oppression. The newly created PLO represented Palestinian rights within the occupied regions and was quickly controlled by Fatah, an organization that used military tactics to fight for liberation. The PLO had success as it “not only kept the Palestinian issue alive” but it also “brought it [to] center stage.” By 1974, Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, was able to bring the often-neglected issue of a Palestinian nation to the UN and argue for a two-state solution, just five years after Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel, stated “there were no such thing as Palestinians”. Even though a Palestinian state has not as of date materialized, the PLO “played the same role for Palestinian nationalism that the Balfour Declaration played for Zionism,” legitimizing the Palestinian need for recognition and sovereignty in the region. They were able to at least question the legitimacy of Israel to a further extent than ever before because of increased organization. Palestinians had their strongest and most successful rally against the external force of Israel and they made progress towards attaining statehood. And yet, by 1979, “their [the Palestinians] hopes of deliverance [independence] by other Arab states were dashed when Egypt concluded a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, and their hopes for liberation at the hands of the PLO collapsed after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.”
Inspired by the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic activists established Hamas in late 1987, coinciding with the first Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Over the years, Hamas succeeded in positioning itself as an alternative to the corrupt, inefficient, and largely discredited leadership of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. On December 8, 1987, simmering resistance was brought to a boil with the killing of Palestinian workers at the hands of Israeli soldiers. The funerals that were held the next day were overshadowed by mass demonstrations in which demonstrators were once again killed by Israeli forces. This mirrored the repeated cycle of humiliation and repression that existed years before the killings of December 1987–resist, die, mourn, repeat. Resistance to this cycle became known as the Intifada, Arabic for uprising. Hamas emerged as an underground movement in Gaza to give direction and teeth to the Intifada. Hamas operated in juxtaposition to the failing domestic operations of the PLO, and so, too, the ideologies of each were juxtaposed: “They also captured the increasingly bitter struggle between the secular nationalist forces of the PLO and the rising Islamist movement for control of the Palestinian national movement within the Occupied Territories.” The origin of Hamas is also inextricably linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose leader, Shaykh Ahmad Yassin, took action on the night troubles broke out, convening “the leaders of the Brotherhood to coordinate action” and transform the Muslim Brotherhood into the Hamas resistance movement. The Hamas movement would draw continued inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood’s influential Islamic reformers; for example, the importance of organized resistance based on Islam rather than secular ideals was transmitted by Sayyid Qutb in his radical essay Milestones on “both the bankruptcy of Western materialism and the authoritarianism of secular Arab nationalism. The social and political systems that defined the modern age were man-made and had failed for that very reason….” A general disdain for the pitfalls of secular resistance meant that Islam would therefore entrench itself as the organization’s central organizational tenet.
Hezbollah’s founding preceded Hamas in 1985 in a parallel faith-based response to a similar struggle against Israeli occupation in Southern Lebanon. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel only exacerbated the economic and political marginalization of Lebanese Shia Muslims harkening back to post-independence struggles against Christian minorities. Hezbollah’s members were united in their unswerving Islamic faith and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for God’s call to action, “The Israeli invasion brought the Islamic movement to Lebanon…the Lebanon conflict provided external enemies for the Islamist movement to fight…[and] the emergence of a new Shiite Islamist movement…a militia called itself the Party of God, or Hezbollah.” The fellow Shiite state of Iran served as a model for Hezbollah structurally, for “the 1978–79 revolution in Iran served as an inspiration to action, a proof of what can be accomplished when the faithful gather under the banner of Islam.” Under the auspices of Iranian and Syrian aid, Hezbollah developed around a central objective “to create an Islamic state in Lebanon.” However, whereas Hamas defined its goals positively, that is, to establish an Islamic Palestinian state, Hezbollah can be accurately characterized as negative resistance aimed at the expulsion of Israel.
Yet despite the similarities in Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s understandings of resistance, their regional alliances and strategic interests diverge. Ultimately, the rise of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (the aforementioned parent organization of Hamas) pushed Hamas to sever its relations with Syria and cons
equently deviate from Hezbollah. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is Hamas’s ideological predecessor, and Hamas believed it would strongly benefit politically and economically from the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent to power in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Hamas hoped that a close alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood would increase its international legitimacy and end Gaza’s economic and political isolation. Hamas anticipated that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood would be able to replace its former allies: Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. Furthermore, Hezbollah has been more effective at achieving its expressed goals; after the group’s guerrilla war forced Israel to end its eighteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon, in May of 2000, Hezbollah was acknowledged throughout the Arab world for compelling Israel to relinquish land without a peace agreement, a feat no Arab army had accomplished.