This book, HAMAS: The Rise of Palestinian Resistance and the Attempts at Containment, is a work which offers a history of the HAMAS Movement (The Islamic Resistance Movement) across a span of thirty years. It narrates, from the Movement’s own viewpoint, its beginnings as a call for armed resistance to liberate historic Palestine, followed by its democratic rise to power and assumption of rule, and then by the attempts made to contain and suppress it in Gaza.
The book argues that HAMAS is a liberation movement of complex dimensions and advocates demands sanctioned by international law, demands that have for long characterized the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. It deals in depth with the political motivations which activate and energize the Movement’s strategies and its relations with Israel and with other Palestinian movements. The author describes how HAMAS has dealt with a merciless and unrelenting occupation that seeks to splinter Palestinian unity and further explains how the Movement’s legitimacy was stripped away in the international sphere and how its demands for Palestinian sovereignty were disabled and then contained within a specific geographical area, subject to a siege that has lasted since 2006.
The author has mapped out a chronology for HAMAS’s extraordinary history, based upon interviews with its members in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond Palestine itself, and buttressed by a deep knowledge of the Movement’s archives and publications.
The book shows that managing the struggle rather than solving it is the predominant manner in which Israel deals with the Palestinians under its occupation. The author also invites leaders of the international community, from the Middle East to the United Nations, to reexamine in depth their role in keeping this situation static and unmoving, resulting in a state of brutality where civilians pay the highest price.
The Arabic version of this work contains a new introduction which discusses the latest developments in Israel’s war on Gaza, aimed at providing a more extensive understanding of the present context. This book first appeared in English in 2018 and was published by Stanford University Press.