How Israeli Violence Radicalized Hamas

On Dec. 9, 1987, an Israel Defense Forces truck driver struck and killed four Palestinians near the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. During protests that ensued the following day, Israeli soldiers fired aimlessly into a crowd of Palestinians, killing 17 year-old Hatem Abu Sisi and wounding 16 others.

The result was a spontaneous, leaderless uprising. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories descended to the streets in daily protests, boycotts and strikes in what would become known as the Intifada—or “the Uprising.” During its first year, the Israeli military killed 142 Palestinians in Gaza without suffering a single casualty. By 1991, Israel had killed 706 Palestinian civilians, while Palestinians had killed 9 Israeli civilians. The Occupied Territories had transformed into a Palestinian slaughterhouse.

The uprising came on the heels of 20 years of military occupation, after Israel annexed East Jerusalem and occupied the West Bank and Gaza following the June 1967 war. During this time, Israeli forces killed on average 32 Palestinians every year, demolished more than 1,000 Palestinian homes, and confiscated hundreds of thousands of hectares of land. It denied Palestinians the right to have a say in the government that controlled their lives or the permit regime that suffocated their economy. It denied Palestinians the right to organize protests, publish newspapers, wave Palestinian flags, or paint artwork made of red, green, black, and white. Palestinians were constantly made to feel humiliated in their workplaces and made to feel unsafe at military checkpoints. And so they revolted.

When the First Intifada broke out, Hamas, an acronym that means the Islamic Resistance Movement, was not called Hamas. It was still known as the Islamic Collective, or al-Mujamma’ al-Islami, founded in 1973. Initially, the Collective was established as a mosque, along with a medical clinic, youth sports club, nursing school, Islamic festival hall, zakat committee, center for women’s activities and for training young girls. By the 1980s, the Islamic charity organization operated a network of mosques, medical centers, health clinics, food banks, soup kitchens, summer camps and schools across the West Bank and Gaza. It dedicated its efforts to helping the Palestinian poor and preaching Islamic piety.

But when Palestinians in the Occupied Territories established a Unified National Leadership (al-Qiyada al Muwhhada) after the outbreak of the Uprising to mobilize grassroots support, the Islamic Collective felt pressure to participate in the most significant challenge to Israel’s occupation to date. And so the group was remade and named Hamas with a new foundational charter, published in August 1988, that adopted new forms of Jihad, including armed struggle. And so after 300 Palestinians had already been killed since the start of the Intifada, Hamas carried out its first operation against an Israeli military target, killing two Israeli soldiers, in February 1989. 

A few months later, on May 2, 1989, when asked about its violent embrace, Hamas founder Ahmed Yasin said, “what is the other alternative available to those who cannot regain their rights by peaceful and non-violent means?” Yasin argued that the Palestinian people preferred peaceful resistance to violence to achieve its goals, but he explained that the Israeli military only understood the language of force.

Yasin was arrested shortly thereafter and sentenced to life in prison for the operation. Then, on June 6 1989, Israeli prison authorities forced Yasin to listen to prison guards beat and torture his son, Abdul Hamid, in Gaza’s Central Prison. Their goal was to extract a confession from Yasin for having established Hamas’s military wing and for having ordered the killing of the two Israeli soldiers. The Israeli military managed to extract a confession from Yasin under duress. They also managed to push the movement even further down the road to violence. 

The next turning point in Hamas’s evolution came in October 1990, when the right-wing Israeli organization, Temple Mount Faithful, announced it would lay the cornerstone for a Third Jewish Temple in Jerusalem at the holiest Muslim site in Palestine, the al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinians organized a protest against the threat during which the Israeli military police killed 17 unarmed demonstrators. Two months later on Dec. 14, 1990, Hamas stabbed three workmen to death in Jaffa. They claimed it was a direct response to Israel’s grotesque violence. 

For the next few years, Hamas fighters directed most of their attacks against Israeli military targets, including a May 1992 attack on a high-ranking Israeli police officer in Gaza, a July 1992 attack on Israeli soldiers in the Old City of Jerusalem, and an October 1992 against a military camp next to the Mosque of Abraham in Hebron, among others. 

Then, on  Feb. 25, 1994, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, the Brooklyn-born Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. He threw a hand grenade at worshippers kneeling for Ramadan prayers and then squeezed on the trigger of an automatic Galil rifle, killing 29 worshippers before he was overtaken and beaten to death at the scene. 

The massacre was the trigger that ignited a reign of terror of the kind Israelis had never seen before. Six weeks later, Hamas committed its first planned suicide bombing attack. Raed Zakarneh drove a bomb to a bus stop at Afula and detonated it, killing eight Israelis and injuring 44.

This was only the beginning. From 1994 to 2005, Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants used their own bodies as bombs, killing more than 1,000 Israeli civilians in hundreds of attacks, and wounding thousands more.

In the late 1990s, Nasra Hassan, who worked as a humanitarian relief officer in Gaza, interviewed hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. When asked if they had any qualms about killing innocent civilians, they would immediately respond, “The Israelis kill our children and our women. This is war, and innocent people get hurt.” In other words, it was not a time immemorial hatred of Jews, or a time immemorial hatred of the Jewish state, or a time immemorial belief in violent Jihad, that radicalized Palestinian militants. Instead, it was Israeli violence, especially against unarmed Palestinian civilians, that pushed Hamas militants to commit so many gruesome attacks against innocent civilians after 1994.

All of this leaves one horrified at the thought of what will likely result from Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza over the past two months, which has left at least 18,600 people dead, some 70% of them women and children. “Our children, in 10-15 years, will make nuclear bombs in their house, and will wipe out Israel,” said Ali Ahmed Qudeh, a resident of Khuza'a, near Khan Yunis, as he pointed to a Palestinian boy who saw his father and his uncle die before his very eyes in November 2023. “He saw his stolen house, he’s living in a tent…how can we remove hatred from the hearts of these children?” 

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Israel’s long-standing policy of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence has had a radicalizing effect on Palestinian militant groups. One shudders to think how many more Palestinians have been radicalized in the past two-months, and how many more will pick up arms in the months, years, and decades to come as a result.