The campaign launched by Israel on Gaza after the attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 is not only military; It is also narrative and of great intensity. Two weeks ago, as an example, the head of an Israeli communications company, in contact with the foreign press, sent a document with eight slides on a WhatsApp under the title “Hamas & ISIS” and the signatures of the Israeli security forces. The document confronts photos of the Palestinian militia, considered terrorist by the United States and the European Union, and the Syrian-Iraqi jihadist group. Compare their rhetoric, beheadings, massacres, rapes… It abounds in one of the mantras that, in Israel, the Government, almost the entire opposition, diplomacy, the military commanders and, now also, its own population use daily: Hamas is like ISIS. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in fact often refers to the Palestinian armed group as “Hamas-ISIS,” and his Foreign Minister, Eli Cohen, considered it “worse” last week than the Islamic State (ISIS, according to its acronym in English).
Experts consulted by this newspaper and the analysis of the savage terror of ISIS show that, although Hamas used terrorist tactics on October 7 and some of the murders were brutal, their origin, nature, ideology and form of government in the Strip are far from those of this jihadist hydra. Mustafa Ayad, director of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, based in London, summarizes, in an exchange of messages, the relationship between the two armed groups: “The Islamic State despises Hamas due to its ties to Iran, as well as its dependence on politics; He participated in elections, for example, and that for the Islamic State is a red line. Their supporters have referred to Hamas as the ‘Jihad Jews.’
The two groups consider themselves enemies and differ in their objectives: while ISIS wants to break the international order and establish a totalitarian caliphate through violence – a terror project that included the formation in Syria of a unit to attack abroad (Paris, Brussels), under the name Enmi, Hamas seeks to eliminate Israel through religiously inspired armed struggle and establish an Islamist government. Its objective is geographically delimited to the so-called “historic Palestine” – current Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – and it has resorted to both institutional means and the ballot box (it won the last Palestinian legislative elections, in 2006) and violence against soldiers and civilians, while the Islamic Resistance Movement, its full name of which Hamas is an acronym. “You can’t just say, ‘ISIS massacred people, so did Hamas, so they’re the same thing.’ “It’s very superficial,” he told the newspaper. Haaretz Itzjak Weismann, professor at the University of Haifa who analyzes Islamic movements and thought.
Also Avraham Sela, Israeli historian, professor emeritus of the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author of the essay The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence Columbia University Press), sees the comparison as “inappropriate.” “There are many differences […] Hamas is, above all, a national-religious movement or, rather, religious-national, for which religion has never been something as radical and extreme as for ISIS,” Sela points out. While ISIS, he adds, practices takfirism (declare apostates and even execute other Muslims for not strictly following the precepts of Islamic law), Hamas does not do so and respects the small Christian community in the Gaza Strip, under its control since 2007.
“Even after October 7, Hamas leaders used language that cannot be identified with that of ISIS. They remain concerned about their international image, especially in the Arab-Islamic world. The main difference is that the majority of the Muslim world was against ISIS and a long list of Muslim theologians and academics issued opinions against it, while the majority of the Arab and Islamic world supports Hamas because they see it as a liberation movement. national or religious, whether justified or not,” adds Sela, who criticizes the inclusion of any form of Islamist violence as a whole.
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Biden and Macron
The equation between the two groups has become one of the banners of the Israeli offensive, not only from Netanyahu’s Cabinet. US President Joe Biden, in a speech from the White House on October 10, said that the Hamas attack reminded him of “the worst of ISIS.” A few days later, from Tel Aviv, it was French President Emmanuel Macron who, together with Netanyahu, compared Hamas to ISIS and proposed using the coalition that defeated the jihadist group to combat the Palestinian militia.
Among the objects found by the army after the October 7 attack were documents, USBs and flags linked to Al Qaeda and ISIS, according to the presentation made by Israeli spokespersons. Expert in the study of jihadism and University of Miami professor Nathan S. French has analyzed them: “They do not reveal an ongoing jihadist conspiracy shared by Hamas, ISIS and Al Qaeda,” French notes in an email. “The documents presented to the public,” this analyst continues, “have been in circulation since at least 2001 on popular jihadist websites (…) They reveal that Hamas agents – like other Islamist and jihadist groups – borrow, steal and “They appropriate tactics and strategies from other political movements, guerrillas or similar militants.”
The Palestinian cause is and has been, however, central to jihadist slogans since the times of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. It is also the same, although less frequently, for ISIS, born from the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda, but today confronted with the network that financed the Saudi terrorist. However, the presence of Palestine in jihadist propaganda is one thing and the consideration towards Hamas is another. Already in February 2015, a group related to ISIS broadcast a video from Syria in which it threatened to attack Hamas. “The regime of sharia [ley islámica] will be implemented in Gaza despite you [de Hamás]“said one of the terrorists.
In May 2021, during another Palestinian-Israeli escalation, Al Nabathe propaganda organ of ISIS, criticized the Palestinian militia, although without saying its name, as the analyst of the terrorist phenomenon Kyle Orton reported. This is an excerpt: “People should realize that jihad […] differs from what is called resistance. The difference between jihad and resistance is like the difference between truth and falsehood […] Jerusalem will not be liberated by those who make distinctions between rafida and the Jews!” The term rafida It is used to refer to Shiite Muslims and, specifically, to Iran, an ally country and fundamental support of Hamas. This alliance is intolerable for the fundamentalism of ISIS.
“Both Hamas and ISIS have as their central objective the destruction of the State of Israel and the restoration in Palestine of some form of Islamic government,” notes Nathan S. French. “However, ISIS considers Hamas to be full of apostates and the Palestinian group has openly fought against jihadist groups similar to ISIS.” Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezedin al-Qassam Brigades, actually crushed several small Salafist groups in 2009, after agreeing with Israel on a ceasefire that ended 22 days of war in which more than 1,400 Palestinians died. The jihadists accused him of betraying his credentials as a resistance movement, by making a pact with the enemy, and defended the establishment of an Islamic emirate.
Born in the late 1980s, during the First Intifada, Hamas built its popularity on the charitable element and an image of honesty, religious piety and closeness (Sheikh Ahmed Yasin built football fields and his successor, Ismail Haniye, has become photograph playing). But, above all, in the personalization of authentic armed resistance against an old Palestinian guard seen today as corrupt people who care less about their people than maintaining their official cars and arresting in the West Bank those Palestinians requested by the Israeli army.
Pre-1967 borders
The 2006 electoral victory gave way to his more pragmatic side, after years of suicide attacks and losing leaders in selective assassinations. He repeatedly rejected the requests of Aiman al Zawahiri, later the leader of Al Qaeda and assassinated in Kabul by the United States in July 2022, to open Gaza to jihadist volunteers from around the world to fight against Israel, Sela recalls. Its then maximum political leader, Khaled Meshal – who today applauds without nuance the attack of October 7 – publicly proposed a 10-year truce in exchange for the end of the military occupation and was open to accepting the same thing that the international community defends – a Palestinian state on the borders prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, although without formally recognizing Israel.
In 2017, Hamas issued a new program: it continues to defend jihad to eliminate Israel, but rejects “intervening in the internal affairs of other countries”; It eliminates the clearly anti-Semitic elements from its founding charter, and emphasizes that it is in conflict with the “Zionist project,” not “with Jews for being Jews.” That year, during the negotiation of a ceasefire, Hamas leader Yahia Sinwar, today the man most wanted by Israel as the mastermind of the October 7 attack, wrote Netanyahu a letter in Hebrew (which he learned in prison) in the one that asked him: “Take a calculated risk.”
That is, “it is not a nihilistic sect,” as the writer Adam Shatz recalled this month in London Review of Books. It is the question that worries Sela: why did an organization that “is not suicidal”, gives great importance to “maintaining its social, religious and military infrastructure” and “has never been a mercenary for another country or organization” launch that 7 October a massive attack after which he knew that Israel would seek its annihilation?
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