Why the West is wrong about Hamas
The Electronic Intifada 14 January 2025
Ismail Haniyeh, left, with Yahya Sinwar, in Gaza City, March 2017. Both are among the senior Hamas figures killed by Israel, whose decades-long strategy of assassinating leaders has failed to crush Palestinian resistance.
APA imagesAs a young, idealistic Palestinian American, raised with Western-articulated values, I once asked Ismail Abu Shanab – one of the founders of Hamas – many questions about the movement’s goals and strategy.
Abu Shanab, a US-educated engineer, was one of the most senior leaders of Hamas when I met him in 1998 in Gaza. That conversation – along with other personal encounters I have had with leaders of the movement, deepened my understanding of Hamas – and I came to view it not as a monolithic entity, but as a complex, principled movement grounded in Islamic values and committed to the Palestinian cause.
Despite these principles, Hamas is frequently misrepresented in Western discourse, where it is reduced to a caricature of violence and extremism. Equating Hamas with groups like ISIS is not only inaccurate but also deeply Islamophobic.
Hamas is a national liberation movement, comparable to Algeria’s National Liberation Front or South Africa’s African National Congress, indigenous resistance movements that freed their people from centuries of European colonial barbarism.
Its roots are deeply tied to Palestinian society, functioning as both a resistance movement and a social organization, and since 2006, as an elected government – despite a partially successful US-orchestrated coupagainst it and severe sanctions and siege imposed by Israel’s sponsors and allies, aimed at ensuring its failure.
Nelson Mandela the “terrorist”
At the time, as a fresh law graduate, I was grappling with a moral quandary: How could martyrdom operations – framed as “suicide bombings” in Euro-American discourse – be reconciled with the principles of justice and humanity?
What were the moral boundaries of resistance?
To my surprise, Abu Shanab expressed opposition to such tactics from an Islamic juridical perspective. Islamic law, he explained, prohibits the killing of noncombatants, particularly the targeting of women and children.
He emphasized that these operations were not a preferred strategy but an understandable reaction to the brutality of the occupation, the dehumanization of Palestinians, and the vast asymmetry of power between a nuclear-armed Israel and an occupied, defenseless people.
Abu Shanab’s argument was reminiscent of the one put forward by Nelson Mandela, the resistance fighter turned post-liberation president of South Africa, who is widely revered by the same Western states and leaders – including US presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden – who now condemn Hamas.
“It is always the oppressor, not the oppressed, who dictates the form of the struggle,” Mandela wrote in his biography, The Long Walk to Freedom. “If the oppressor uses violence, the oppressed have no alternative but to respond violently. In our case, it was a legitimate form of self-defense.”
“It is up to you, not us, to renounce violence,” Mandela told leaders of the apartheid regime he spent much of his life fighting.
Mandela affirmed that in the early days of the armed struggle, the ANC opted for tactics that would avoid the loss of life as much as possible – targeting the regime’s security installations and sabotaging infrastructure.
But he affirmed that “if sabotage did not produce the results we wanted, we were prepared to move on to the next stage: guerrilla warfare and terrorism.”
Israel assassinated Ismail Abu Shanab on 21 August 2003.
Resistance is a collective demand for justice
For decades, Israel has pursued a “decapitation policy,” irrationally believing it can eliminate Palestinian resistance by assassinating its leadership. From Ghassan Kanafani to Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s strategy of killing Palestinian leaders has failed to bring peace.
Instead, each assassination has brought it closer to the brink of collapse.
Abu Shanab’s death, like that of so many others, was a profound loss. Yet, it underscored a critical truth: Palestinian resistance is not centered on individual leaders but is a collective demand for justice.
This unity – spanning Marxists, secularists and Islamic movements – reflects a shared commitment to ending the occupation, regardless of ideological differences.
Memorialized in blood, this ideological diversity has coalesced around a national consensus of resistance in all its forms. It also exposes an insidious Israeli motive: Israel kills Palestinians irrespective of their ideologies or their ties to violence.
In fact, it often targets Palestinian leaders capable of unifying Palestinians and negotiating a just resolution to the conflict.
After 7 October 2023, the possibility of a negotiated settlement has effectively vanished. Palestinians from all factions – Hamas included – had previously been willing to compromise on their ancestral homeland in exchange for a viable state and freedom from a seven-decade slow-motion holocaust. That tragedy has now mutated into a full-blown war of extermination across Gaza.
I imagine Ismail Abu Shanab’s home has been wiped off the map – the same home where he humbly invited me to break bread with him over a meager meal during Ramadan.
Like Yahya Sinwar, Abu Shanab endured years in Israeli prisons, their resolve remaining unshaken. Perhaps unlike Sinwar, Abu Shanab was willing to negotiate a settlement in line with Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s hudna (truce) overtures to Israel.
Abu Shanab openly supported a two-state solution, telling The Jerusalem Post at one point, “The practical solution is for us to have a state alongside Israel.”
It was precisely this willingness, along with Abu Shanab’s ability to bridge the gaps between Hamas and the secular factions of Fatah and the PLO, that led Israel to assassinate him – yet again violating a ceasefire.
A fight for freedom, not a fight against Jews
Israel’s response to 7 October has demonstrated that it kills innocent Palestinians by the tens of thousands – not because resistance fighters “hide behind civilians” or because these are unintended casualties of war. Israel kills Palestinians because they dare to resist its occupation in all forms.
Embedded in the hearts and minds of Palestinian civil society – whether in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, “Israel proper,” or the diaspora – is a steadfast longing to be free of a racist ideology that feeds its superiority complex on the bodies of Palestinians, Lebanese and other Arabs, Muslims and Christians across the Middle East.
A lie often perpetuated is that Hamas seeks to wipe out the Jewish people.
In a speech before thousands of students at the Islamic University of Gaza, shortly after his return from exile to Gaza in 1997, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin stated:
“I want to proclaim loudly to the world that we are not fighting Jews because they are Jews! We are fighting them because they assaulted us, killed us, took our land, our homes, our children, our women, and scattered us. We became a people without a homeland. We want our rights. We don’t want more. We love peace, but they hate peace, because people who take away the rights of others don’t believe in peace. Why should we not fight? We have the right to defend ourselves.”
Israel had released Yassin from prison and allowed him to return to Gaza as part of a deal with Jordan to free two Mossad agents who had attempted to murder senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman.
Israel attempted to assassinate Yassin in 2003, the same year it murdered Abu Shanab. It would succeed in killing Yassin, a frail man and a quadriplegic who had used a wheelchair since childhood, the following year.
As an illegal occupier, Israel cannot claim the right to “defend itself” under international law, particularly given its referral to the International Court of Justice for alleged acts of genocide and the indictment of its leaders at the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Euro-America must confront its double standards: How can it continue to support Israel, allowing that state to commit genocide in the name of a nonexistent “right to self-defense,” while condemning the Palestinian resistance that is fighting for a just cause?
War of liberation
Since 7 October 2023, the Axis of Resistance has waged a war of liberation while largely adhering to Islamic principles that forbid – or at least minimize – the intentional harming of civilians.
In Lebanon, Hizballah has avoided civilian targets in its drone and missile attacks. Hamas and Hizballah, along with Iran, have maintained consistent moral messaging.
Like Yahya Sinwar, Abu Shanab saw resistance as a moral imperative, not a choice. Sinwar’s rhetorical question, posed in a rare interview in 2021, remains: “Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we are getting killed?”
This question resonates strongly in light of the events of 7 October 2023.
While Western media focused on unverified and outright fabricated allegations against Hamas, the reality on the ground painted a different picture.
Hamas’ operation primarily targeted military installations – a stark contrast to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas in Gaza.
International law may well condemn the tactic, but to the extent that Hamas or other Palestinians did target civilians by taking them captive amidst an intricately planned military operation, it was not with the intent to kill them but in order to return them home alive by exchanging them for the release of thousands of Palestinians long abandoned by the world, held captive in Israel’s torture prisons.
In a twisted sense of morality, by contrast, Israel kills with an intent to eliminate the Palestinians because it believes that Palestinians would do the same once they gain the upper hand.
The conditions for peace
In spite of all this, Muslims alone can offer Jews a genuine prospect of peace across the Middle East, from the Euphrates to the Nile.
The catch? This peace cannot come at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population, nor can it be under the guise of an apartheid rogue state or as an extension of Euro-American domination over Arab and Muslim lands.
Yet, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to deceive both the Israeli public and his Euro-American backers.
Netanyahu, akin to a Ponzi scheme scam artist, has relied on assassinations, exploding pagers and even bombing Syria to pacify a disoriented Israeli society.
His ongoing war neglects the fundamental questions: Where is Israel’s security? Where are the Israeli captives?
Where is the evidence for Hamas’ supposed destruction? And what of the Israeli allegations that Sinwar was hiding behind captives?
After Sinwar’s heroic last stand, rooted among his people, the Palestinians have shown that resistance persists despite the odds.
Even if a ceasefire – a distinct possibility – is reached before President Donald Trump reassumes office, and even if Hamas is significantly weakened, a more inclusive resistance will likely emerge to fill the void left by the Axis of Resistance. As history has shown, Hamas is likely to regroup and emerge stronger until full liberation is achieved.
Ashraf W. Nubani is an attorney with masters degrees in history and Islamic religious leadership. He writes on US foreign policy and the Middle East, and is the author of Bridging the Gap: Islam’s Challenge for America.
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