Palestinian Resistance Groups

Summary

As with the Liberation Theology Movement in South and Central America, all resistance groups are not pacifistic or non-violent. The Islamic resistance group most widely recognized is Haqamat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (Hamas), begun in the 1930s as an outgrowth of the Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt (the first modern Arab Islamist movement). Hamas and the Society have remained linked, yet separate. In the 1980s, the Israeli government supported Hamas in order to divide the Palestinian Movement and hence weaken the PLO. Late in the 1980s, in the first years of the first Intifada, Hamas, according to Karen Armstrong,

…fought both the Israeli occupation and the Palestine nationalistic movement. They were fighting the secularists for the Muslim soul of Palestine…. It was a violent movement that, yet again was born of oppression. HAMAS terrorism escalated after the killing of seventeen Palestinian worshipers on the Haram al-Sharif on October 8, 1990. Impelled by a fear of annihilation, HAMAS also attacked Palestinians whom they judged to be collaborators with Israel… HAMAS saw the Arab-Israeli conflict in religious terms…(they) believed the Palestinian tragedy had come about because the people had neglected their religion; Palestinians would only shake off Israeli rule when they returned to Islam. HAMAS believed that the success of Israel was due to Jewish faith, and that Israel was dedicated to the destruction of Islam. They claimed, therefore, to be fighting a war of self-defense

(Armstrong 2001: 352).