Islamic Politics In Palestine

Palestinian Islamists are regularly in the headlines these days, mainly for their violent attempts to undermine the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. What motivates the Islamists? How did they become such a powerful force?

Declared a terrorist menace yet elected to government in a free election, Hamas now stands as the most important Sunni Islamist group in the Middle East. How did Hamas grow to be so powerful? Who supports it? What is its future? This essential insight into Hamas answers these questions. Milton-Edwards and Farrell have between them spent decades researching and reporting from the heartlands of the Hamas movement and gained unrivalled access to the world of Islamic resistance and radical Islam in its potent Palestinian form. Drawing on their frontline experiences of recent events, their access to secret documents from the western intelligence community and interviews with leaders, militants, and commanders of Hamas' armed battalions, they reveal the full story of Hamas and the future of political Islam in the Middle East. Milton-Edwards and Farrell show Hamas to be a broad and thus more powerful regional phenomenon than previously thought, and by doing so contend that it is now time to rethink the war and the nature of Islam and its role in the Middle East. Beverley Milton-Edwards is Professor in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queens University, Belfast. She is the author of books such as Contemporary Politics in the Middle East (2006) and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: a People's War (2009). Prize-winning journalist Stephen Farrell is Foreign Correspondent for the New York Times and was previously Middle East correspondent for The Times.

The intention of this book is to explore the relationship between an ideological idiom and the changing social movement in which it operates. The basic question is that of what roles an Islamic symbol complex played in different phases of the Palestinian nationalist movement, and what were the socio-economic factors which help to explain, and are themselves partially explained by, the appearance of these roles. Islam was ideologically ‘appropriate’ at different stages in the development of the movement, and this study examines in what way, and why. First published in 1982.

The 21st century exists in the shadow of the return of extremist Islam to the center of the world’s political stage, a process that began at the end of the previous century. While researchers have focused on the rise of Hamas, this return has in fact manifested itself in a range of independent Islamic extremist groups with their own philosophies. Jihad in Palestine provides a comprehensive study of the variety of Islamic extremist groups operating inside Israel/Palestine today, examining their philosophies and views concerning martyrdom, as well as their attitudes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These ideologies are presented in their own words, thanks to the author’s extensive translations and commentary of primary sources in Arabic, including the writings of the Islamic Jihad, al-Jama’a al-Islamiya, Hizbal-Tahrir al-Islami, Hamas and the Islamic Movement. The book studies the attitudes of these organisations towards the fundamental issues surrounding Jihad, including the concept of personal obligation, the relationship of the movement to the peace agreements and attitudes towards Jews expressed in the movement’s writings. Exploring the basic theories of sacrifice and analysing modern day Palestinian society, it promotes a greater understanding of the religious angle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Jewish Studies, Political Islam and Terrorism & Political Violence.

The ideology of Islamic fundamentalists is of central importance in the modern world, but it is often distorted or misunderstood by the international media. This insightful study provides a detailed analysis of the Palestinian Hamas movement's world-view, and shows how the theoretical framework developed by thinkers such as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyis Qutb and al-Mawdudi is applied to a specific political, social and economic context. Nusse explains the fundamentalist position on recent events, such as the Gulf War, the Madrid peace negotiations and the Hebron massacre, and helps to dissipate myths surrounding modern fundamentalist movements and their overwhelming success as opposition movements in the modern world.

In January 2006 Hamas, an organisation classified by Western governments as terrorist, was democratically elected to govern the Palestinian territories. Drawing on interviews with members of Hamas and its critics, this book offers an analysis of Hamas' understanding of its ideology and the tension between its dual commitment to God and the people.

The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has heightened since 2001, even as any perceived threat to Israel from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, or even Syria, has declined. Israel, according to Chaim Herzog, Israel's sixth President, had been "born in battle" and would be "obliged to live by the sword." Yet, the Israeli government's conquest and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza brought about a very difficult challenge, although resistance on a mass basis was only taken upyears later in the First Intifadha. Israel could not tolerate Palestinian Arabs' resistance of their authority on the legal basis of denial of self-determination,2 and eventually preferred to grant some measures of self-determination while continuing to consolidate control of the Occupied Territories, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. However, a comprehensive peace, shimmering in the distance, has eluded all. Inter-Israeli and inter-Palestinian divisions deepenedas peace danced closer before retreating. Israel's stance towards the democratically elected Palestinian government headed by HAMAS in 2006, and towards Palestinian national coherence-legal, territorial, political, and economic-has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking. The reasons for recalcitrant Israeli and HAMAS stances illustrate both continuities and changes in the dynamics of conflict since the Oslo period (roughly 1994 to the al-Aqsa Intifadha of 2000). Now, more than ever, a long-term truce and negotiations are necessary. These could lead in stages to that mirage-like peace, and a new type of security regime. The rise in popularity and strength of the HAMAS (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or Movement of the Islamic Resistance) Organization and its interaction with Israel is important to an understanding of Israel's "Arab" policies and its approach to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. The crisis brought about by the electoral success of HAMAS in 2006 also challenged Western powers' commitment to democratic change in the Middle East because Palestinians had supported the organization in the polls. Thus, the viability of a twostate solution rested on an Israeli acknowledgement of the Islamist movement, HAMAS, and on Fatah's ceding power to it. Shifts in Israel's stated national security objectives (and dissent over them) reveal HAMAS' placement at the nexus of Israel's domestic, Israeli-Palestinian, and regional objectives. Israel has treated certain enemies differently than others: Iran, Hizbullah, and Islamist Palestinians (whether HAMAS, supporters of Islamic Jihad, or the Islamic Movement inside Israel) all fall into a particular rubric in which Islamism-the most salient and enduring socio religious movement in the Middle East in the wake of Arab nationalism-is identified with terrorism and insurgency rather than with group politics and identity. The antipathy to religious fervor was somewhat ironic in light of Israel's own expanding "religious" (haredim) groups.

Jordan is unique in its political, geographic, and demographic complexion located at the heart of a turbulent Middle East. With limited natural resources at its disposal, the country is exceptionally dependent on good foreign relations and foreign aid. This situation makes a fascinating subject for a case study of the relationship between foreign and domestic politics in the Arab world a singularly under-researched and neglected subject.