Beyond those circles lies the rest of the world. The question of Palestine is, for Hamas, the fundamental determinant in shaping the relationship between those three circles and the rest of the world. The movement’s literature states that: Hamas believes that the ongoing conflict between Arabs and Muslims and Zionists in Palestine is a fateful civilisational struggle incapable of being brough to an end without eliminating its cause, namely, the Zionist settlement of Palestine.
The West is charged not only with the responsibility of having illegally created Israel but also with bringing devastation and dismemberment to the region as a whole: This enterprise of aggression [on Palestine] complements the larger Western project that seeks to strip this Arab Islamic nation of its cultural roots in order to consolidate Western Zionist hegemony over it by completing the plan of greater Israel and establishing political and economic control of it. Doing so implies maintaining the [current] state of [physical] division, backwardness, and dependency in which this Arab Islamic nation is forced to live. The conflict as described is a form of struggle between truth and falsehood, which obligates Arabs and Muslims to support the Palestinians in bearing the consequences of a holy struggle to extirpate the Zionist presence from Palestine and prevent it from spreading to other Arab and Islamic countries.
Of the circles surrounding Palestine, the first one is Arabic, the second is Islamic and the third is the rest of the world. Naturally more affinity and intimacy is felt towards the closer Arabic and Islamic circles. There is a considerable amount of dismay, criticism and attack against the indifference that the outermost circle comprising the ‘world’ has exhibited concerning the suffering of the Palestinians. The western world is typically criticized and accused not only of ‘transplanting’ Israel in Palestine – at the heart of the Arab region – by force, but also with its continuous support of the ‘usurping and aggressive Zionist state’ which has sought even to exceed the borders of the original illegal foundation.
In its very early stages, Hamas thinking was skewed by a dichotomy that bisected the world into the ‘truthfulness’ represented by Muslims and believers, and the ‘falsehood’ represented by non-Muslims and particularly westerners and Jews. This naïve perception later almost disappeared from the movement’s discourses. In tandem with Hamas’s rise in influence, the expansion of its regional and international relations and its realization of the complexity of reality and politics at ground level, Hamas has rehabilitated its ‘worldview’ and effectively abandoned the dichotomy based on believers/nonbelievers. The notion of political support for the Palestinians and their just cause has prevailed as the defining parameter by which Hamas assesses world players and where they stand.
Hamas: Ideological and Religious Themes
