The first Palestinian uprising
began in December 1987 while I
was working for CBN television
news in Jerusalem. Violence erupted in
the Gaza Strip and quickly spread to
Arab portions of Jerusalem, Judea, and
Samaria.
The intense rioting and
Israeli army reaction instantly became
the main feature of our nightly newscasts,
as was the case around the globe.
The little town of Bethlehem scaled
back traditional Christmas celebrations
that year as the conflict rapidly reached
it. Thousands of Christians visiting for
the holiday season, along with many
Jewish people who had come to celebrate
Hanukkah, found their schedules
radically altered as tour guides, family,
and friends scrambled to keep them out
of harm’s way. Jerusalem’s historic,
walled Old City became off limits to
most visitors as Arab shops closed to
observe a prolonged general strike
ordered by Yasser Arafat.
Yet it was not Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) that was
leading the escalating revolt, but a relatively
new group called the Islamic
Resistance Movement whose acronym in Arabic is Hamas. In that ancient Semitic
language, hamas means “enthusiastic
zeal”; but in Hebrew it is one of several
words denoting animated violence, particularly
the pillaging of vanquished foes.
Hamas was actually just a new version
of one of the oldest regional Islamic-fundamentalist
political groups, the Cairobased
Muslim Brotherhood Movement.
Though banned in Egypt for decades, it
still managed to operate clandestinely.
Hamas was merely its Palestinian branch.
Two prominent Muslim clerics living
in the Gaza Strip, Sheik Ahmed Yassin
and Muhammad Taha, were behind the
1987 Hamas creation. They took full
credit for the escalating uprising against
Israeli army rule in both the Gaza Strip
and Jordan’s former West Bank, saying
that only an Islamic-based Palestinian
movement could succeed in ousting
“Zionist forces from occupied Arab-
Muslim land, with Allah’s blessing.”
The aging Arafat outwardly welcomed
the new player on the Palestinian
political stage. However, he worried
privately that the extremist movement
would grow in street popularity and end
up resisting not only Israeli rule but his
own political authority as well, which
was largely based on his widely accepted
claim to be the “father of the
Palestinian nation.” Indeed, that is exactly
what took place.
Charting Its Course
In August 1988, Hamas emulated
the PLO by publishing a lengthy
“founding charter.” The document
echoed the anti-Jewish ravings of
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf but in a
Muslim fundamentalist framework.
The charter called on all Palestinians to
be ready to become shahids, or martyrs,
for the cause of destroying Israel and
replacing it with an Arab state based solely
on the Qur’an’s civil and religious laws.
Here are a few other highlights
from the Hamas charter:
• Article Six makes clear that the
group’s ultimate goal is nothing less
than to destroy Israel and replace it
with an Arab-Muslim fundamentalist
state. It boasts that Hamas is “working
to unfurl the banner of Allah over
every centimeter of Palestine.”
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•Article Seven quotes one of the most
well-known anti-Jewish, genocidal, prophetic
verses from the Islamic Hadith, or
oral tradition, that carries nearly the
same weight in the Muslim faith as the
Qur’an: “The day will come when
Muslims will fight the Jews and kill
them, to the degree that the Jew will hide
behind the rocks and trees, which will
cry out to the Muslim and tell him,
‘Servant of Allah, a Jew is hiding behind
me. Come and kill him!’”
•Article Eleven forbids any Palestinian
peace negotiations or treaties with
Israel: “Palestine is Islamic land
assigned to the Muslims until the end
of time. It may not be renounced or conceded,
whether in whole or in part.”
•Article Thirteen amplifies this, stating
there is “no solution to the Palestinian
problem except through jihad.”
•Articles Fourteen through Nineteen
insist that Muslim educators and parents
are duty-bound to instruct the
Palestinian masses, especially children,
in the ways of jihad.
• Article Twenty-Two is the one that
most closely echoes Hitler in grossly
exaggerating and demonizing international
Jewish power, wealth, and influence.
It claims, “The enemy has amassed
astounding and influential wealth, which
has been exploited to . . . gain control of
the world media, news agencies, the
press, broadcasting stations, etc.” It ludicrously
goes on to claim that nefarious
Jews were “behind the French and
Communist Revolutions” and have set
up “clandestine organizations to destroy
society and serve the interests of
Zionism.” Such groups are said to
include “the Freemasons, the Rotary and
the Lion’s Club.”
As hate-filled and ridiculous as it
was, the Hamas charter did not seriously
bother most Israeli officials, who
were convinced the new movement
would be fairly harmless. Indeed,
many officials and Middle East commentators
pointed to the Sunni
Muslim group’s growing network of
health clinics and schools as a sign that
Hamas was actually quite benign.
On the other hand, I felt that Hamas
would probably become powerful and
dangerous and might eventually rival,
or even surpass, the PLO’s hegemony on
the Palestinian street.
My view, spelled out in my first book,
Holy War for the Promised Land, was definitely
not the main one around in those
days. It was partially based on the 1979
Shiite Iranian revolution that brought
Ayatollah Khomeini’s anti-Israel and
anti-Western diatribes and Islamic-fundamentalist
teachings to the world stage,
creating major waves around the Middle
East—and not only in Shiite circles.
But more than that, I surmised the
sad fact that Hamas had accurately
quoted several of the harshly anti-
Jewish teachings found in the Qur’an
and the Hadith, which would give the
group a leg up in the end. It was Egypt’s
assassinated President Anwar Sadat
who had seemingly violated those
sacred Islamic principles by making
peace with “the Zionist entity.” If Arafat
did the same (as he later did, at least on
paper), he would become easy fodder
for the Hamas propaganda machine, I
believed. And so it was.
Overturning Arafat
Hamas had little trouble overturning
Arafat’s 1993 signature on the Americanbacked
Oslo peace accords that had
been secretly negotiated with Israeli
officials in Norway. All it took was a
series of hideous terror attacks on Israeli
public buses and other civilian targets,
which began in April 1994. By the time
Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s
prime minister in May 1996, the treaty
was effectively dead despite Israel’s
transfer of most of the Gaza Strip and
several Palestinian cities in Judea and
Samaria to Arafat’s control.
The peace process’s final death knell
came in January 2006 when Hamas triumphed
in the Palestinian elections—
ironically held in accordance with the
very Oslo accords the terrorist group
totally rejected!
To add vast insult to severe injury,
Hamas then responded to Israel’s 2005
Gaza Strip pullout by staging a violent
coup in June 2007 against PLO-aligned
Palestinian Authority security forces
stationed in the small coastal zone.
What will come next is anybody’s
guess. But one thing seems certain: The
radical Hamas movement—now completely
aligned with and supported by
Shiite Iran, the Lebanese Hezbollah
movement, Syria, and Osama Bin
Laden’s al-Qaida and similar Sunni-
Muslim Arab groups—will not soon
disappear. This means that Israel will
continue to have no choice but to fight
the violent pillagers who work day and
night to wipe out the world’s only
Jewish state.
 Formerly with CBS Radio News, David Dolan is a Christian author and journalist who has lived in Israel for almost 30 years. You can hear David on our Eye on the Middle East news spots. He may be reached through his Web site, www.ddolan.com.
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