5 - “Islam and Resistance”: The Uses of Ideology in the Foreign Policy of Hamas

Summary

To this day, the classic definition of foreign policy as the instrument by which the state tries to shape and interact with its international environment remains a widely accepted framework for international relations theory. Applied to the Palestinian landscape, this definition does not fail to raise important questions. Do the actors of the national liberation movement have the means for carrying out real foreign policy in the absence of true state institutions? If there is one, what specific practices of external action does Hamas put forward? Can the transnational component that defines Islamist ideology be reconciled with the defense of interests that are more specifically national?

This chapter enlists against the realist theories of international relations, whose analyses remain focused on states. In it, I try to show that, despite being a non-state actor operating in a territory over which it does not exercise classic sovereignty, Hamas does in fact pursue a foreign policy whenever it deals with actors located outside Palestine as well as formulate discourses and implement actions that address non-Palestinian actors. This observation remains relevant for the period following the take-over of Gaza in June 2007. Even if Hamas seems to fit all the criteria of a state entity as classically defined, it must continue to be regarded as a “non-state,” particularly because its control over the Gaza strip by no means implies any attribution of traditional sovereign resources.

The transnational ideology advocated by Hamas is not really limited to this actor alone, because there are many examples of state actors who stood for ideological positions that were transnational in one way or another. The Soviet Union, for example, comes to mind, for how it sought to advocate the Communist model even outside its borders, or yet again Syria and Iraq whose nationalisms not only addressed their own citizens but all Arabs. Nor does the religious aspect of Hamas transnationalism make it fundamentally different from these other actors, since even Russia's transnational ideological positions can be said to have been permeated by a religious dimension in the way it considered itself the protector of the Greek Orthodoxes.