Israel’s campaign against Gaza following the Hamas attack on October 7 is not just military; It is also narrative and of great intensity. Two weeks ago, for example, the head of an Israeli communications company, in contact with the foreign press, sent an eight-slide document on WhatsApp under the title “Hamas & ISIS” and the signatures of the Israeli security forces. The document contrasts 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 is rich in one of the mantras that Israel’s government, almost the entire opposition, diplomacy, military commanders and now its own population use every day: Hamas is like ISIS. In fact, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often refers to the Palestinian armed group as “Hamas-ISIS,” and his Foreign Minister Eli Cohen last week deemed it “worse” than the Islamic State (ISIS, its acronym in English).
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Experts interviewed by this newspaper and the analysis of ISIS’s cruel terror show that Hamas did use terrorist tactics on October 7th and some of the killings were brutal, their origin, nature, ideology and form of government in Gaza far removed from that of this jihadist hydra. Mustafa Ayad, director of the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, summarized the relationship between the two armed groups in a news exchange: “The Islamic State despises Hamas because of its ties to Iran and its dependence on politics; For example, he took part in elections, and that is a red line for the Islamic State. Its supporters refer to Hamas as “Jihadi Jews.”
The two groups see each other as enemies and differ in their goals: While ISIS wants to break the international order and establish a totalitarian caliphate by force – a terrorist project that included the formation of a unit in Syria for attacks abroad (Paris, Brussels). Under the name Enmi, Hamas seeks to destroy Israel through sectarian armed struggle and establish an Islamist government. Its target is geographically limited to so-called “historic Palestine” – present-day 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 parliamentary election in 2006). ) and violence against soldiers and civilians, while the Islamic Resistance Movement, whose full name is Hamas, is an acronym. “You can’t just say, ‘ISIS massacred people, Hamas did too, so they’re the same thing.’ It is very superficial,” Itzjak Weismann, a professor at the University of Haifa who analyzes Islamic movements and thought, told Haaretz newspaper.
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), also believes the comparison is “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 it is for ISIS,” emphasizes Sela. While ISIS, he adds, practices takfirism (declaring apostates and even executing other Muslims for not strictly adhering to the precepts of Islamic law), Hamas does not and respects the small Christian community in the Gaza Strip, which has been under siege since 2007 under their control.
“Even after October 7, Hamas leaders used language that cannot be equated with that of ISIS. They remain concerned about their international image, particularly in the Arab-Islamic world. The main difference is that the majority of the Muslim world opposed ISIS and a long list of Muslim theologians and academics have issued statements against it, while the majority of the Arab and Islamic world supports Hamas because they see it as a liberation movement “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
Equating the two groups has not only made Netanyahu’s cabinet one of the flagships of the Israeli offensive. US President Joe Biden said in a speech at the White House on October 10 that the Hamas attack reminded him of “the worst of ISIS.” A few days later, it was French President Emmanuel Macron who, speaking from Tel Aviv, joined Netanyahu in comparing Hamas to ISIS and suggesting using the coalition that defeated the jihadist group to fight the Palestinian militia.
Among the items found by the army after the Oct. 7 attack were documents, USB sticks and flags linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS, according to Israeli spokesmen. Nathan S. French, an expert in jihadism research and professor at the University of Miami, 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 circulating on popular jihadist websites since at least 2001 (…) They show that Hamas operatives – like other Islamist and jihadist groups – borrow, steal and adopt tactics .” and strategies of other political movements, guerrillas or similar militants.”
However, the Palestinian cause has been at the center of jihadist slogans since the times of Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. The same is also true, albeit less often, of ISIS, which emerged from the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda but is now confronted with the network that financed the Saudi terrorist. However, the presence of Palestine in jihadist propaganda is one thing and consideration for Hamas is another. Back in February 2015, a group affiliated with IS distributed a video from Syria in which it threatened to attack Hamas. “The Sharia regime [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 Naba, ISIS’s propaganda organ, criticized the Palestinian militia without mentioning its name, as noted by terror phenomenon analyst Kyle Orton. This is an excerpt: “People should recognize this jihad […] is different from what is called resistance. The difference between jihad and resistance is like the difference between truth and lies […] “Jerusalem will not be liberated from those who distinguish between Rafida and Jews!” The term Rafida refers to Shiite Muslims and in particular to Iran, an ally and fundamental supporter of Hamas. This alliance is unsustainable for IS fundamentalism.
“Both Hamas and ISIS have as their central goal the destruction of the State of Israel and the restoration of some form of Islamic government in Palestine,” 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, effectively crushed several small Salafist groups in 2009 after They agreed to a ceasefire with Israel, ending the 22-day war in which more than 1,400 Palestinians died. The jihadists accused it of betraying its credibility 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 soccer fields and his successor, Ismail Haniye, became a photographer). But above all in the personalization of an authentic armed resistance against an old Palestinian guard who are now seen as corrupt people who care less about their people than the maintenance of their official cars and the arrest of the Palestinians in the West Bank demanded by the Israeli army.
Borders before 1967
The 2006 election victory gave way to his more pragmatic side after years of suicide bombings and the loss of leaders to selective assassinations. He repeatedly rejected the demands of Ayman al Zawahiri, the later leader of Al-Qaeda and murdered by the USA in Kabul in July 2022, to open Gaza to jihadist volunteers from all over the world to fight against Israel, Sela remembers . Its then supreme political leader, Khaled Meshal – who today welcomes the October 7 attack without any nuance – publicly proposed a 10-year ceasefire in return for an end to the military occupation and was prepared to accept the same as the international one Community defended – a Palestinian state on the borders before the Six-Day War in 1967, but without officially recognizing Israel.
In 2017, Hamas released a new program: it continues to defend jihad to destroy Israel, but rejects “interference 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” and not “with Jews because they are Jews.” This year, during ceasefire negotiations, Hamas leader Yahia Sinwar, now Israel’s most wanted man for masterminding the October 7 attack, wrote a letter to Netanyahu in Hebrew (which he had learned in prison). , who asked him, “Take a calculated risk.”
That is, “it is not a nihilistic cult,” as writer Adam Shatz recalled in the London Review of Books this month. This is the question that worries Sela: why, on this October 7th, an organization was founded that “is not suicidal,” attaches great importance to “maintaining its social, religious and military infrastructure,” and “never a mercenary of another country or another organization”. a massive attack after which he knew Israel would seek his destruction?
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