When Defense Is Called Attack: How Israel Rewrote the Origin of Hamas and Hezbollah
Summary
Hamas was founded in 1987, almost
forty years after the Nakba of 1948 — which forcibly displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians and enabled Israel to seize control of 78 % of historic Palestine, including a large portion of the territory that the United Nations Partition Plan had assigned to the projected Arab state — and twenty years after the military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967. Hezbollah formally presented itself to the world in 1985, although its armed structures had already been operating since shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (Operation Peace for Galilee), an operation that far exceeded its declared objective of neutralizing PLO bases, resulted in an eighteen-year occupation (1982–2000), and facilitated atrocities such as the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Both movements arose as responses to decades-long processes of dispossession, occupation, and repression. Yet the dominant Israeli narrative — widely echoed in Western media — has systematically inverted this chronology, portraying Hamas and Hezbollah as the primary aggressors and thereby erasing the political and social dimensions of their resistance while criminalizing it as mere terrorism.
**When a group is universally labelled “terrorist,” its historical origins, social base, and the causes that gave rise to it completely disappear from the narrative. This article deliberately recovers that habitually silenced context — not to sanctify Hamas or Hezbollah, but to restore to the conflict its true chronology and complexity. The deliberate and intentional targeting of civilians constitutes a war crime and/or crime against humanity under international humanitarian law; no civilian victim — Palestinian, Lebanese, Israeli, or of any other nationality — can ever be justified or minimized.
1. Historical and Chronological Context
Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the dispossession, displacement, and marginalization of the Palestinian population have been constant.
The Nakba of 1948 caused the forced exodus of more than 700,000 Palestinians (Pappé, 2006; Morris, 2004), laying the foundations of a conflict that continues to this day. Between late November 1947 and mid-May 1948, around 300,000 Palestinians had already been displaced before the declaration of the State of Israel, as Zionist paramilitary groups such as Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi intensified attacks, massacres, and village destructions. Most fled with little notice, taking only what they could carry and expecting to return quickly, which never happened.
In 1967, the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank intensified the situation of dispossession and violence, expanding Israeli military control over the remaining Palestinian territories and populations (Gordon, 2010).
2. Hamas: From Social Network to Armed Resistance
Hamas was formed in December 1987 amid the First Intifada, a popular uprising against these conditions of occupation and repression (Gunning, 2007).
Its roots go back to the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, established in the 1940s, but which gained momentum in the Occupied Territories after 1967 as a network of charity and social services known as Mujama al-Islamiya.
Israeli authorities initially tolerated and, according to multiple sources including former military governor Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, indirectly financed Mujama as a counterweight to the secular and nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Fatah (Roy, 2011; Milton-Edwards & Farrell, 2010; Chehab, 2007; Abu-Amr, 1994).
This policy of divide-and-rule backfired spectacularly. During the Intifada — with its prolonged curfews, home demolitions, mass arrests, and use of live fire against unarmed demonstrators that left hundreds of Palestinians dead (Kimmerling & Migdal, 2003) — the Islamist movement radicalized and created its armed branch.
In 1988 Hamas published its Charter, declaring armed resistance against the occupation an Islamic duty (Hroub, 2006).
The Intifada’s immediate trigger was an incident in Jabalia in December 1987 in which an Israeli truck killed four Palestinian workers, but it expressed the accumulated frustration of two decades of military rule, land expropriations for illegal settlements, and systematic human rights violations documented by B’Tselem and Amnesty International (Gordon, 2010; Pappé, 2017).
Hamas positioned itself not only as a military force but also as a social welfare provider in the vacuum left by the corrupt Palestinian Authority and the occupying power itself (Tamimi, 2007). Its emergence was neither spontaneous nor exclusively militaristic, but rather the fusion of social, religious, and political forces in response to prolonged occupation.
3. Hezbollah: From Invasion to Resistance
Hezbollah began to take shape as a political-military organization immediately after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on 6 June 1982, although it only announced its existence publicly with the “Open Letter” manifesto of 16 February 1985 (Norton, 2007).
The invasion, launched under the pretext of neutralizing PLO threats in southern Lebanon, quickly escalated beyond its stated goals, reaching Beirut and producing an occupation that would last until 2000 (Hirst, 2010; Fisk, 2001).
Led by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the operation sought not only to destroy PLO infrastructure but also to reshape Lebanese politics in favor of Israel’s Phalangist allies — a clear violation of Lebanese sovereignty (Anziska, 2018; Schiff & Ya’ari, 1984).
The invasion caused thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilian deaths, destroyed infrastructure, and deepened sectarian fractures, radicalizing the historically marginalized Shiite community (Norton, 2007; El-Khazen, 2000).
In September 1982 came the Sabra and Shatila massacres. After the assassination of President-elect Bachir Gemayel, Israeli forces surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut, illuminated them with flares, and allowed allied Phalangist militias to enter.
Over three days the militias massacred between 800 and 3,500 civilians — mostly women, children, and the elderly (Kapeliouk, 1984; United Nations, 1983; Kahan Commission, 1983).
The Israeli army controlled the perimeter and prevented escape or external intervention. Israel’s own Kahan Commission (1983) found Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible and recommended his removal as Defense Minister, while the independent MacBride Commission documented Israeli complicity in grave breaches of international humanitarian law (MacBride et al., 1983).
These events dramatically intensified anti-Israeli sentiment among Lebanese Shiites and became a decisive catalyst for the consolidation of Hezbollah as an armed resistance movement.
4. Narrative Inversion and the Criminalization of Resistance
One of the central strategies of official Israeli discourse — and of much Western media coverage — has been the systematic inversion of the chronological and causal order of the conflict.
By presenting Hamas and Hezbollah as the original aggressors and Israel as perpetually “responding” or “defending itself,” this narrative erases the occupations, invasions, massacres, and structural violence that actually gave birth to both movements (Chomsky, 1983; Hirst, 2010).
This inversion serves a clear political purpose: it depoliticizes both organizations, reducing them to mere “terrorist groups” devoid of context, grievances, or popular base.
In reality, both Hamas and Hezbollah maintain extensive social service networks (hospitals, schools, reconstruction programs, food distribution, and micro-finance schemes that reach hundreds of thousands of people). Hamas has won elections (2006) and governed Gaza since 2007; Hezbollah has been the largest single bloc in the Lebanese parliament since 1992 and has repeatedly headed or participated in governments.
These political-military duality is not an anomaly but a historical pattern in anti-colonial and resistance movements (from the IRA to the ANC, from Viet Minh to FLN). Denying it in these two cases is a deliberate choice that strips Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite communities of political agency and legitimizes collective punishment against the populations they represent (Gunning, 2007; Norton, 2007).
5. The Political Dimension as Key to Understanding the Conflict
Failing to recognize the profoundly political nature of Hamas and Hezbollah produces analyses that are not only historically inaccurate but functionally complicit in perpetuating the conflict.
These are not “terrorist organizations” that emerged in a vacuum; they are political actors that fill governance voids created by occupation, corruption, or state collapse, and that enjoy genuine popular legitimacy in their respective societies precisely because they address basic needs that neither the occupying power nor the formal state authorities have met.
Their military wings exist because diplomatic and legal avenues for ending occupation have been systematically blocked for decades. Their social wings exist because occupation and blockade deliberately undermine any alternative provider of services.
As long as the root causes — military occupation, siege, dispossession, and denial of self-determination — remain unaddressed, these movements will continue to regenerate, regardless of how many leaders are assassinated or how much infrastructure is destroyed.
Conclusion
Hamas and Hezbollah are, in essence, resistance movements born of concrete historical processes: the ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion of 1948, the occupation of the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967, and the devastating invasion and eighteen-year occupation of Lebanon beginning in 1982.
Presenting them as the original causes rather than the consequences of the conflict is not merely a historical error; it is an ideological operation that sustains asymmetry of power and blocks any path toward justice.
Only by restoring the real chronological and causal sequence can we begin to understand the conflict — and, more importantly, begin to resolve it.
References
Abu-Amr, Z. (1994). Islamic fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza. Indiana University Press.
Alagha, J. (2011). Hizbullah’s identity construction. Amsterdam University Press.
Anziska, S. (2018). Preventing Palestine. Princeton University Press.
Chehab, Z. (2007). Inside Hamas. I.B. Tauris.
Chomsky, N. (1983). The fateful triangle. South End Press.
El-Khazen, F. (2000). The breakdown of the state in Lebanon, 1967-1976. Harvard University Press.
Fisk, R. (2001). Pity the nation. Nation Books.
Gordon, N. (2010). Israel’s occupation. University of California Press.
Gunning, J. (2007). Hamas in politics. Columbia University Press.
Hirst, D. (2010). Beware of small states. Nation Books.
Hroub, K. (2006). Hamas: A beginner’s guide. Pluto Press.
Kahan Commission. (1983). Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut.
Kapeliouk, A. (1984). Sabra & Shatila: Inquiry into a massacre. Association of Arab-American University Graduates.
Kimmerling, B., & Migdal, J. S. (2003). The Palestinian people: A history. Harvard University Press.
MacBride, S., et al. (1983). Israel in Lebanon. Ithaca Press.
Milton-Edwards, B., & Farrell, S. (2010). Hamas: The Islamic resistance movement. Polity Press.
Morris, B. (2004). The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited. Cambridge University Press.
Norton, A. R. (2007). Hezbollah: A short history. Princeton University Press.
Pappé, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.
Pappé, I. (2017). The biggest prison on earth. Oneworld Publications.
Roy, S. (2011). Hamas and civil society in Gaza. Princeton University Press.
Schiff, Z., & Ya’ari, E. (1984). Israel’s Lebanon war. Simon and Schuster.
Tamimi, A. (2007). Hamas: Unwritten chapters. Hurst & Company.
United Nations. (1983). Report of the Commission of Inquiry on the events at Sabra and Shatila.
Summary
Hamas was founded in 1987, almost
forty years after the Nakba of 1948 — which forcibly displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians and enabled Israel to seize control of 78 % of historic Palestine, including a large portion of the territory that the United Nations Partition Plan had assigned to the projected Arab state — and twenty years after the military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967. Hezbollah formally presented itself to the world in 1985, although its armed structures had already been operating since shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (Operation Peace for Galilee), an operation that far exceeded its declared objective of neutralizing PLO bases, resulted in an eighteen-year occupation (1982–2000), and facilitated atrocities such as the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Both movements arose as responses to decades-long processes of dispossession, occupation, and repression. Yet the dominant Israeli narrative — widely echoed in Western media — has systematically inverted this chronology, portraying Hamas and Hezbollah as the primary aggressors and thereby erasing the political and social dimensions of their resistance while criminalizing it as mere terrorism.
**When a group is universally labelled “terrorist,” its historical origins, social base, and the causes that gave rise to it completely disappear from the narrative. This article deliberately recovers that habitually silenced context — not to sanctify Hamas or Hezbollah, but to restore to the conflict its true chronology and complexity. The deliberate and intentional targeting of civilians constitutes a war crime and/or crime against humanity under international humanitarian law; no civilian victim — Palestinian, Lebanese, Israeli, or of any other nationality — can ever be justified or minimized.
1. Historical and Chronological Context
Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the dispossession, displacement, and marginalization of the Palestinian population have been constant.
The Nakba of 1948 caused the forced exodus of more than 700,000 Palestinians (Pappé, 2006; Morris, 2004), laying the foundations of a conflict that continues to this day. Between late November 1947 and mid-May 1948, around 300,000 Palestinians had already been displaced before the declaration of the State of Israel, as Zionist paramilitary groups such as Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi intensified attacks, massacres, and village destructions. Most fled with little notice, taking only what they could carry and expecting to return quickly, which never happened.
In 1967, the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank intensified the situation of dispossession and violence, expanding Israeli military control over the remaining Palestinian territories and populations (Gordon, 2010).
2. Hamas: From Social Network to Armed Resistance
Hamas was formed in December 1987 amid the First Intifada, a popular uprising against these conditions of occupation and repression (Gunning, 2007).
Its roots go back to the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, established in the 1940s, but which gained momentum in the Occupied Territories after 1967 as a network of charity and social services known as Mujama al-Islamiya.
Israeli authorities initially tolerated and, according to multiple sources including former military governor Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, indirectly financed Mujama as a counterweight to the secular and nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Fatah (Roy, 2011; Milton-Edwards & Farrell, 2010; Chehab, 2007; Abu-Amr, 1994).
This policy of divide-and-rule backfired spectacularly. During the Intifada — with its prolonged curfews, home demolitions, mass arrests, and use of live fire against unarmed demonstrators that left hundreds of Palestinians dead (Kimmerling & Migdal, 2003) — the Islamist movement radicalized and created its armed branch.
In 1988 Hamas published its Charter, declaring armed resistance against the occupation an Islamic duty (Hroub, 2006).
The Intifada’s immediate trigger was an incident in Jabalia in December 1987 in which an Israeli truck killed four Palestinian workers, but it expressed the accumulated frustration of two decades of military rule, land expropriations for illegal settlements, and systematic human rights violations documented by B’Tselem and Amnesty International (Gordon, 2010; Pappé, 2017).
Hamas positioned itself not only as a military force but also as a social welfare provider in the vacuum left by the corrupt Palestinian Authority and the occupying power itself (Tamimi, 2007). Its emergence was neither spontaneous nor exclusively militaristic, but rather the fusion of social, religious, and political forces in response to prolonged occupation.
3. Hezbollah: From Invasion to Resistance
Hezbollah began to take shape as a political-military organization immediately after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on 6 June 1982, although it only announced its existence publicly with the “Open Letter” manifesto of 16 February 1985 (Norton, 2007).
The invasion, launched under the pretext of neutralizing PLO threats in southern Lebanon, quickly escalated beyond its stated goals, reaching Beirut and producing an occupation that would last until 2000 (Hirst, 2010; Fisk, 2001).
Led by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the operation sought not only to destroy PLO infrastructure but also to reshape Lebanese politics in favor of Israel’s Phalangist allies — a clear violation of Lebanese sovereignty (Anziska, 2018; Schiff & Ya’ari, 1984).
The invasion caused thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilian deaths, destroyed infrastructure, and deepened sectarian fractures, radicalizing the historically marginalized Shiite community (Norton, 2007; El-Khazen, 2000).
In September 1982 came the Sabra and Shatila massacres. After the assassination of President-elect Bachir Gemayel, Israeli forces surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut, illuminated them with flares, and allowed allied Phalangist militias to enter.
Over three days the militias massacred between 800 and 3,500 civilians — mostly women, children, and the elderly (Kapeliouk, 1984; United Nations, 1983; Kahan Commission, 1983).
The Israeli army controlled the perimeter and prevented escape or external intervention. Israel’s own Kahan Commission (1983) found Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible and recommended his removal as Defense Minister, while the independent MacBride Commission documented Israeli complicity in grave breaches of international humanitarian law (MacBride et al., 1983).
These events dramatically intensified anti-Israeli sentiment among Lebanese Shiites and became a decisive catalyst for the consolidation of Hezbollah as an armed resistance movement.
4. Narrative Inversion and the Criminalization of Resistance
One of the central strategies of official Israeli discourse — and of much Western media coverage — has been the systematic inversion of the chronological and causal order of the conflict.
By presenting Hamas and Hezbollah as the original aggressors and Israel as perpetually “responding” or “defending itself,” this narrative erases the occupations, invasions, massacres, and structural violence that actually gave birth to both movements (Chomsky, 1983; Hirst, 2010).
This inversion serves a clear political purpose: it depoliticizes both organizations, reducing them to mere “terrorist groups” devoid of context, grievances, or popular base.
In reality, both Hamas and Hezbollah maintain extensive social service networks (hospitals, schools, reconstruction programs, food distribution, and micro-finance schemes that reach hundreds of thousands of people). Hamas has won elections (2006) and governed Gaza since 2007; Hezbollah has been the largest single bloc in the Lebanese parliament since 1992 and has repeatedly headed or participated in governments.
These political-military duality is not an anomaly but a historical pattern in anti-colonial and resistance movements (from the IRA to the ANC, from Viet Minh to FLN). Denying it in these two cases is a deliberate choice that strips Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite communities of political agency and legitimizes collective punishment against the populations they represent (Gunning, 2007; Norton, 2007).
5. The Political Dimension as Key to Understanding the Conflict
Failing to recognize the profoundly political nature of Hamas and Hezbollah produces analyses that are not only historically inaccurate but functionally complicit in perpetuating the conflict.
These are not “terrorist organizations” that emerged in a vacuum; they are political actors that fill governance voids created by occupation, corruption, or state collapse, and that enjoy genuine popular legitimacy in their respective societies precisely because they address basic needs that neither the occupying power nor the formal state authorities have met.
Their military wings exist because diplomatic and legal avenues for ending occupation have been systematically blocked for decades. Their social wings exist because occupation and blockade deliberately undermine any alternative provider of services.
As long as the root causes — military occupation, siege, dispossession, and denial of self-determination — remain unaddressed, these movements will continue to regenerate, regardless of how many leaders are assassinated or how much infrastructure is destroyed.
Conclusion
Hamas and Hezbollah are, in essence, resistance movements born of concrete historical processes: the ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion of 1948, the occupation of the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967, and the devastating invasion and eighteen-year occupation of Lebanon beginning in 1982.
Presenting them as the original causes rather than the consequences of the conflict is not merely a historical error; it is an ideological operation that sustains asymmetry of power and blocks any path toward justice.
Only by restoring the real chronological and causal sequence can we begin to understand the conflict — and, more importantly, begin to resolve it.
References
Abu-Amr, Z. (1994). Islamic fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza. Indiana University Press.
Alagha, J. (2011). Hizbullah’s identity construction. Amsterdam University Press.
Anziska, S. (2018). Preventing Palestine. Princeton University Press.
Chehab, Z. (2007). Inside Hamas. I.B. Tauris.
Chomsky, N. (1983). The fateful triangle. South End Press.
El-Khazen, F. (2000). The breakdown of the state in Lebanon, 1967-1976. Harvard University Press.
Fisk, R. (2001). Pity the nation. Nation Books.
Gordon, N. (2010). Israel’s occupation. University of California Press.
Gunning, J. (2007). Hamas in politics. Columbia University Press.
Hirst, D. (2010). Beware of small states. Nation Books.
Hroub, K. (2006). Hamas: A beginner’s guide. Pluto Press.
Kahan Commission. (1983). Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut.
Kapeliouk, A. (1984). Sabra & Shatila: Inquiry into a massacre. Association of Arab-American University Graduates.
Kimmerling, B., & Migdal, J. S. (2003). The Palestinian people: A history. Harvard University Press.
MacBride, S., et al. (1983). Israel in Lebanon. Ithaca Press.
Milton-Edwards, B., & Farrell, S. (2010). Hamas: The Islamic resistance movement. Polity Press.
Morris, B. (2004). The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited. Cambridge University Press.
Norton, A. R. (2007). Hezbollah: A short history. Princeton University Press.
Pappé, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.
Pappé, I. (2017). The biggest prison on earth. Oneworld Publications.
Roy, S. (2011). Hamas and civil society in Gaza. Princeton University Press.
Schiff, Z., & Ya’ari, E. (1984). Israel’s Lebanon war. Simon and Schuster.
Tamimi, A. (2007). Hamas: Unwritten chapters. Hurst & Company.
United Nations. (1983). Report of the Commission of Inquiry on the events at Sabra and Shatila.
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