The Islamic movement in Palestine is, in a sense, an extension of its counterpart that was born in Egypt in protest against the British occupation and the fragmentation of the Arab countries after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as Sheikh Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a student of Sheikh Muhammad Rashid Rida, one of the major pioneers of reform in Egypt. He also received his education at Al-Azhar in Cairo. This movement, which is considered the mother movement for many of the current resistance factions in Palestine, including Hamas, was fueled by great anger following the Jewish occupation of Palestine under the auspices of the major powers, led by Britain, France, and the United States.
But before we know how Hamas appeared on the surface of events and announced its presence with the first intifada against Israel in 1987, we must go back a little to find out the historical reasons that led to the emergence of this movement, which was linked intellectually and organizationally to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine
Researchers agree that the activity of the Muslim Brotherhood reached Palestine in August 1935, when the first two envoys from the Egyptian Brotherhood came to Palestine and then Syria, namely Abd al-Rahman al-Banna (Al-Sa’ati), brother of Hassan al-Banna, and Muhammad Asaad al-Hakim. They arrived in Jerusalem, where they met Haj Amin al-Husseini and began calling for their organization. Although there were no signs indicating the establishment of an organizational entity for the Brotherhood in that period, they participated remarkably in the Great Palestinian Revolution between the years (1936-1939). Then the door was opened wide for their magazine, “Al-Nazir,” which was severely attacking the British occupation in Palestine, which drew the attention of the people of Palestine in the West Bank, especially to this group. Therefore, we see that the years 1939-1945 were the real beginning of numbers of Palestinians joining the Muslim Brotherhood and opening their own centers and magazines (1).
In the three years between 1945-1948, the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine was increasing in strength and spread in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Qalqilya, Lod, Tulkarm, Majdal, Silwad, Hebron, Gaza, Beersheba, Nazareth, and Acre. Sheikh Hassan al-Banna mentioned in one of his letters that “the Brotherhood in Palestine has more than twenty branches in North, center and south” (2).
The activities of the Muslim Brotherhood at that stage included holding the Haifa Conference in 1946, which was attended by representatives of Lebanon and Jordan and in which they announced their goals. Such as considering the (British) government of Palestine responsible for the turbulent political situation in the country, supporting the Arab League’s decision to declare the independence of Palestine, as well as supporting Egypt’s demands for evacuation and the unity of the Nile Valley, and not recognizing Jewish immigrant bodies. In the conference they held in Haifa in October 1947, they declared their determination to defend their country by all means, and their lack of confidence in the Security Council or the United Nations, while calling for the liberation of Palestine (3).
The Muslim Brotherhood in the 1948 war
The United Nations’ announcement of the partition resolution in November 1948 was shocking to all Arabs and to the Palestinians in particular, as the Arab Supreme Council, which was headed by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and was formed to lead the 1936 revolution against the British and the Jews, announced the establishment of the “Holy Jihad Army.” Led by Abdul Qader Al-Husseini, whose outstanding role we discussed in the 1948 war He was martyred in the Battle of Qastal. Along with the Jihad Army led by Al-Husseini, the Muslim Brotherhood joined the fight with its various branches inside and outside Palestine before and after the outbreak of the 1948 war.
Until then, the Brotherhood in Palestine was still small in numbers and equipment compared to its peers in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. They formed irregular forces from the beginning of the war, and they operated in their locations in the north and center under the local Arab leadership there, which was engaged under the command of the “Holy Jihad Army” led by Abdul Qadir al-Husseini. As for the southern regions of Gaza and Beersheba, many Brotherhood members joined the Brotherhood volunteers coming from Egypt, led by Kamel Al-Sharif, who states that the Palestinian Brotherhood forces were estimated at about 800 people (4).
The battles of 1948 ultimately resulted in the victory of the Zionists, the declaration of their state, and the displacement of large numbers of the population of Palestine in the north and center to the areas of the East and West Banks, and the areas of the south, of which only the Gaza Strip remained. And in this sector he was able Egyptian Major General Ahmed Fouad Sadiq To preserve it and protect it with all our strength and energy, as we saw in a previous article, so that it would not also fall before the Zionist gangs. The Egyptian and Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, led by Kamel Al-Sharif, played a vital role in supporting the Egyptian army forces in this war, to the point that Major General Sadiq In 1950, he called on the Egyptian government to give them certificates of appreciation, provide suitable work for those who are alive, and pensions and financial support for those who died or were injured and had one of their limbs amputated in this war (5).
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Accordingly, the Gaza Strip became subject to Egyptian rule from 1948 until the tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1956, when Israel occupied this sector for four months, before the Egyptians returned to its rule again in 1957, and it remained in this state for ten years until the defeat of 1967, which occupied Israel. As a result, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan, and Sinai were affected. It is noted that the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza during the Egyptian monarchy and then the republican rule in the Nasserist era until 1955 was strongly present, before the Egyptian authorities attacked them and arrested many from 1954 and what followed after the decision to dissolve the group at the hands of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, which… The rest of them were forced to work underground, similar to what was happening with the Brotherhood in the West Bank in the same period (6).
The emergence of Hamas, led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
Because of this strong blow, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza weakened in the period between 1957-1967, and at this stage nationalist movements began to emerge and expand in Palestine, led by the Fatah movement and others. But Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank united the general vision of all Palestinians in resisting the Israeli occupier, and the Brotherhood in Gaza began to return again after years of persecution in the Nasserist era. They met in September 1967 to develop their plan and goals, which were the first foundations for the emergence of the Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas.” “Twenty years after this meeting.
From that date until his martyrdom in 2004, the name of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin became prominent in the Gaza Strip. He was famous for his sermons and advocacy activities and for being one of the most prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. Sheikh Yassin was displaced with his family from south of Ashkelon to Gaza. He lived through the years of British occupation, the Nakba, and Egyptian rule during the time of Abdel Nasser. He participated in demonstrations in support of Egypt in the face of the tripartite aggression in 1956. He came to Cairo and joined Al-Azhar University in the late 1950s and 1960s, and drank. The Brotherhood thought so that he was arrested for a while for this reason.
Sheikh Yassin had been afflicted with quadriplegia before that, and when he returned to Gaza as a teacher of the Arabic language and Islamic sciences, he became very active in advocacy, education, and raising children and adolescents. By 1973, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza established the “Islamic Complex” and then founded the “Islamic Society” in 1976. The “Islamic University,” which was established in 1978, can also be considered one of the institutions that the Brotherhood stood behind at this stage (7).
Some researchers consider that the emergence of the Hamas movement during the Palestinian Intifada in 1987 was preceded by a stage during which “political influence was built, equipment was completed, and strength was tested” within the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestine Branch, between the years 1982-1987. During this stage, the relationship between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was established, and the group began In collecting weapons and conducting training, which led to the arrest of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1984, along with a group of the movement’s leaders, and more than forty weapons were seized from them. The Israelis discovered that they had established a military apparatus called “Palestinian Mujahideen,” and another security apparatus called “Majd” (8). .
The following year, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and more than a thousand other Palestinians were released following an exchange deal between the two sides. Only two years had passed since these events until the spark of the first intifada broke out on December 9, 1987, after four Palestinian workers were martyred in a deliberate run-over accident on the day that He preceded him, so the Islamic Movement, with the Brotherhood at its heart, decided to organize massive demonstrations that started from the Jabalia Camp Mosque. In these demonstrations, many martyrs fell, such as Hatem Abu Sis and Raed Shehadeh, and for the first time, the people of the “Palestinian interior” began to take the initiative in the struggle against the occupation after many years in which the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat, led this struggle in Jordan and then Lebanon. This uprising continued for six years until the announcement of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which was not recognized by many Palestinian movements such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others (9).
The founding of Hamas coincided with the beginning of the first intifada, as the movement issued its first statement on December 14, 1987, only five days after the beginning of the uprising, and declared in its founding statement that it was a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and an extension of them. The movement quickly achieved success and wide popular spread in Palestinian circles, and this was evident, as researcher Mohsen Muhammad Saleh says, “in achieving from a third to a half of the votes in the student elections and professional unions, as in the universities of An-Najah, Gaza, Hebron, Birzeit, and Jerusalem, and the unions of engineers, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, teachers, and chambers of Trade”(10).
Meanwhile, the Hamas military apparatus, called the “Palestinian Mujahideen,” led by Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, had begun its military operations against Israel, where it was able to kidnap and kill Israeli Sergeant Avi Sasports in February 1989, and soldier Ilan Saadoun in May of the same year. . This military wing was quickly struck in the same month, following the strong campaign led by Israel against it. The following year, in May 1990, Hamas formed its current military wing called the “Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades,” which replaced the “Palestinian Mujahideen” Brigades.
Hamas’ military operations continued in subsequent years. According to a study written by Ghassan Doar, Hamas carried out 138 operations in 1993, in which the Israeli entity lost, as it declared itself, 79 dead and 220 wounded. Despite the Palestine Liberation Organization entering into a settlement with Israel, announcing the Oslo Accords between the two sides in the same year, and assuming the administration of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which led to a sharp decline in the pace of Hamas’ military actions; This did not prevent the emergence of “martyrdom operations” later, then the outbreak of the second intifada, then the independence of Hamas to rule the Gaza Strip in the last sixteen years, until the present moment when Gaza is subjected to complete genocide by Israel (11).
This is the story of the emergence of the Hamas movement from the womb of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had entered Palestine since the 1930s in the West Bank and Gaza, and participated in the 1948 war, before later contributing to the emergence of Hamas and its military wing, the “Martyr Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades,” which is considered the most prominent among them. The factions that lead the resistance against the Israeli occupation to this day.
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Sources
(1) Nuwayhid’s statement: Political leaders and institutions in Palestine 1917-1948, pp. 502, 503.
(2) Salah Shadi: Pages of History, p. 62.
(3) Bayan Nuwayhid: Previous, pp. 503, 504.
(4) Mohsen Muhammad Saleh: The Islamic Movement in Palestine 1917-1948, pp. 464-466.
(5) Four senior witnesses before the Criminal Court, Ahmed Fouad Sadiq Pasha.
(6) Khaled Nimr Abu Al-Omrain: Hamas, its roots – its origins – its political thought, pp. 97-101.
(7) Previous, pp. 175-178.
(8) Previous, p. 179.
(9) Mohsen Muhammad Saleh: The Palestinian Issue, p. 104.
(10) Mohsen Muhammad Saleh: Previous, p. 105.
(11) Ghassan Doar: An appointment with the Shin Bet, a study of the military activity of Hamas and the Al-Qassam Brigades during the year 1993 AD.
