When evaluating the actions of Hamas, it is essential to separate some importantly distinct issues. We argue that even though Palestinians in Gaza have very serious grievances, there are major practical and moral objections to Hamas using violence to address those grievances, including an absence of the sort political legitimacy needed to fight in the name of Gazans. There are yet further objections to the particular violent methods that Hamas uses. These reflections also show that Gazans have no reasonable means to protect themselves at this point, and as such there are very strong duties on other parties, including Israel and the U.S., to help address their grievances.

It seems that death from Israeli airstrikes is better than injury, as Israel attacks and destroys hospitals and thus deprives the injured of medical attention. Omar's story is not a religious one. It is a human story. It is wrong for some human beings to kill other human beings unlawfully. It is wrong for some human beings to illegally occupy the land of other human beings. It is wrong for the powerful to force a people to live under an apartheid regime. Omar's cries and questions: 'Where is mum? Where is grandma? Where did they go?' – should hurt all of us, whether we are Muslims or non-Muslims. Let's stand up for truth and justice irrespective of the identities of the perpetrators and victims of injustices.

Paper presented at International Conference Glocal Islamism - Institute of Civic Education, 15-17 October, Potsdam, Germany.

This article aims to explain the facts related to the conflict between the State of Israel and the Palestinians of Hamas and propose how immediate peace and lasting peace between the belligerents can be celebrated.

This article analyses the popular support for Hamas, the most important of the Palestinian Islamist movements today and charts the movement’s historical ascendancy from a fringe Gaza-based group to a mainstream Islamist movement and mouthpiece for dispossessed Palestinians. Since 2001 Hamas’s leadership has come under increasing attack from Israel, which has killed a number of the movement’s leaders and senior members, most prominently Sheikh Yasin, the movement’s founder and spiritual leader, and his successor as Hamas leader, Abd al-Aziz Rantissi. Nonetheless, Hamas’s duality as ‘worshippers’ and ‘warmongers’ has made the organisation extraordinarily popular among dispossessed Palestinians and has created a mounting political challenge to the secular nationalism of the PLO. At present two-thirds of the Palestinians live below the ‘poverty line’ and it is likely that it is in this disenfranchised segment of the population that Hamas finds its core support. About one in every six Palestinians in the Occupied Territories benefits from support from Islamic charities. Hamas, for its part, allocates almost all its revenues to its social services, but there is no evidence that Hamas or the other Islamic charities provide assistance conditional upon political support.

The electoral triumph of Hamas in the Palestinian elections of January 2006 has made it imperative for policy makers around the world to understand this group and its ideology. Is Hamas likely to soften its hostility to Israel? Is Hamas likely to receive significant support from the Muslim world? What are the odds that Hamas can be either placated or isolated? If Hamas can make a strong claim to be authentically Islamic in its ideological underpinnings, then it is more likely to receive support from portions of the Muslim world and less likely to be conciliatory vis-à-vis Israel. Unfortunately, a careful study of the ideology of Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, shows that that ideology is firmly rooted in traditional Islamic principles. Far from distorting or perverting classical Islamic law, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood can claim very plausibly that shari'a requires implacable and violent resistance to Israel, including terrorism, and denial of Israel's right to exist as a non-Muslim state located on Islamic territory. Efforts to placate or isolate Hamas are therefore unlikely to succeed.