Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, was supposed to create an alternative religious nationalist ethos in contrast to the secular nationalism led by various Arab organizations. It failed abysmally to do so.

Hamas:  Full steam ahead to nowhere

When the “Islamic Resistance Movement” – the full name of Hamas – took over Gaza in 2007, some pundits expressed the opinion, or more accurately the hope, that once Hamas has a state and is responsible for its drinking water, gasoline, electricity, employment and food, it will have no choice but to become more moderate. These commentators predicted Hamas would soon prefer governing to continued jihad, exchange terror for running a state, develop political tools instead of war, adopting a political stance instead of armed conflict. Every one of those pundits and observers were could not have been more wrong, because no Islamic terror organization abandons terror without being seen as an organization that has abandoned Islam as well.

In actual fact, what has happened is a peculiar process that could only occur in Islamic societies. It is a self-destructing or self-immolating process that can be traced to a specific trait of Islamic organizations. This process is a function of the collective belief shared by Islamic leaders that it is a religious obligation to stick to their political principles – and that any deviation from total allegiance to those principles will result in their falling victim to skewed, subjective criticism aimed at them personally by others whose religious image is more vivid, more faith-based and therefore more trustworthy.

On the other hand, Hamas also wants to seem like a political organization, so it ran in the legislative elections in 2006, winning a majority of the seats.  Now it is getting ready for presidential elections where it hopes to conquer the seat of the PA President. Hamas’s problem is the inherent contradiction between two roles: Being a political organization that takes part in political life in  the PA  and which therefore must adopt suitable patterns of  behavior, headed by pragmatic flexibility and the ability to talk  to Israel about basic issues – and at the same time continuing to act according to the principle that forbids moving off the path dictated by Allah,  who only allows his earthly representatives  to talk to the Zionists about technical issues such as transferring food, water, gasoline, electricity, and medical services.

From the standpoint of Hamas, it is not so bad if the Gaza Muslims suffer, because that is considered  “bla’a”,  one of  the tests Allah presents to believers in order to decide whether or not they deserve a passport to Paradise when the time comes. That explains why Hamas is so ready to sacrifice hundreds and even thousands of victims in every military encounter with us, and why the Arab world media present the situation as a victory for Hamas and a defeat for Israel, convincing the world that they are telling the truth, when actually, just the opposite is the case.  The price for this delusionary “victory” is paid by the man in the Gaza street, whose family members are dead or wounded,  and who has to live with a destroyed infrastructure. The man in the street is not in the Hamas camp on this issue, because he is much more pragmatic that those who have taken over his life – and death.

The religious conceptual framework prevents Hamas from giving in to the Jews or from doing anything that might be interpreted as giving in to them, including freeing prisoners or the bodies of fallen soldiers who have fallen into Hamas hands, and even from giving out information about them. Anyone with a connection to the issue knows full well that Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul  are, to our great sorrow, not among the living, but Hamas spokesmen continue  to throw sand in the  eyes of the Palestinian Arabs, saying that they will not divulge any details about the two, not even  whether they are alive or dead, as if there could be any chance they are still alive.

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