Israel-Palestine Mega Fact Check!

As Ilan Pappe noted, the portrayal of Hamas in mainstream media "is a very one-dimensional portrait. A social and political movement has been portrayed as a purely terroristic organization”.

The reality is that Hamas is an organization with a political wing, a social services wing, and a militant wing.

The political wing heads the Hamas government apparatus.

The social services wing runs schools, hospitals, welfare systems, and so on.

The militant wing is committed to fighting, in their view, a just war against a highly oppressive Israeli regime, which has denied the Palestinians freedom, opportunity, land, and the ability to form their own state for over 75 years. Part of their strategy has included targeting Israeli civilians, which by most definitions qualifies as terrorism.

There is a common assumption that terrorists are inherently “evil” in nature and will always remain terrorists. But this is not true. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), for instance, renounced terrorism in the late 1980s. The Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, which was from the 1970s to the late-1980s a nonviolent organization, later evolved into Hamas—an organization whose policies include armed resistance. The main force that drove this evolution was the oppressive Israeli occupation.

Source: Hamas and Civil Society: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (2011) by Sara Roy, pp.77-78.

If exterior pressures can push a group to adopt armed struggle, a removal of these pressures can potentially lead the same group to lay down their arms. As the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said in 2018, “the problem is not our resistance, it is their occupation. With no occupation, we wouldn't have rockets. We wouldn't have stones, Molotov cocktails, nothing. We would all have a normal life."