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Over a year into the Gaza conflict, Hamas remains widely misunderstood. Due to persistent media mischaracterizations, the group is often compared to ISIS, used to justify Israel’s heavy-handed military tactics, and even portrayed as a group allegedly created and controlled by Israel.

A few weeks ago, we published the first part of this video series. In it, we explained the origins of Hamas, distinguishing fact from fiction about the group’s funding, its historical context, and how it emerged as the most popular Islamic party in Palestine.

In this video, we examine the argument that Hamas, along with a fringe Israeli right-wing faction, was responsible for derailing the so-called peace talks aimed at securing a two-state solution. As is often necessary with such questions, the discussion requires a careful look at history.

When the Declaration of Principles was signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel in September 1993, it marked the end of the First Intifada. This mass Palestinian uprising brought Hamas to prominence as a political force. Many viewed the Oslo Accords as a beacon of hope, a chance for peace in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, the path to failure had been set long before Hamas became a significant factor.

To understand why Oslo ultimately failed, we must rewind to 1974, when PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations, famously offering peace while upholding the right to armed struggle. This followed the PLO’s issuance of a ten-point plan, which many saw as paving the way for dialogue with Israel.

Israel’s response was to reject what it described as a terrorist group’s “peace offensive.” Interestingly, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had once labeled the PLO a terrorist organization, would later go on to sign the Oslo Accords with Arafat.

So, what changed?

By 1981, the Arab League had ratified the Fez Initiative, advocating a two-state solution—a proposal the PLO was prepared to consider. However, Israel’s response was not peace but war.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, forcing the PLO to flee to Tunisia and resulting in the deaths of around 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese. This conflict severely weakened the PLO, diminishing its capacity for both armed resistance and political leadership.

When the Palestinian Intifada erupted in the late 1980s, the PLO struggled to take control of the uprising, which was led locally within the occupied territories. During the Intifada, the PLO also lost the support of one of its primary financial backers, Kuwait, after aligning with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War. Meanwhile, Israel faced a public relations crisis, as images of Palestinian youths throwing stones at tanks created a David-versus-Goliath narrative that Israel found difficult to counter.

Recognizing the unsustainable economic and security burden of the occupation, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—infamously dubbed the “bone-breaker” for his harsh crackdown on non-violent protesters—ultimately agreed to a deal with the severely weakened PLO. This led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority, transferring administrative and security responsibilities for the West Bank and Gaza’s Areas A and B away from Israel. Israel retained full control over most of the territory, designated as Area C.

The arrangement was further beneficial to Israel, as the Palestinian Authority was funded by the U.S. and EU, making Israel’s occupation cost-free and allowing it to allocate military resources elsewhere.

Hamas has often been blamed for the failure of peace talks and the Israeli government’s refusal to compromise. However, the group was far from the first to use suicide bombings—Palestinian Islamic Jihad introduced this tactic in 1989, with several groups contributing to similar attacks throughout the 1990s.

The peak of these attacks occurred during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, with Hamas responsible for 39.9%. Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and especially the Marxist–Leninist socialist organization, the PFLP, accounted for the remainder. Hamas’s violence came in direct response to Israel’s own wantonly violent policies, including continued settlement expansion, apartheid and, of course, an ongoing military occupation, all of which played significant roles in derailing the peace process.

Even as armed Palestinian groups were crushed in the West Bank, especially during Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, Hamas’s resilience in Gaza compelled Israel to rethink its approach. By 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza but not before securing control over the West Bank, restructuring and repurposing the Palestinian Authority’s security forces to ensure their coordination with Israeli occupation forces.

Successive Israeli governments, including those led by Netanyahu’s Likud Party, continued expanding settlements in direct contravention of international law, all while placing the blame on Hamas for stalled progress. The narrative of a so-called Hamas-Netanyahu radical alliance, promoted by some liberal Zionists, centers less on Hamas’s actions and more on deflecting responsibility from Israel’s policies.

In the post-9/11 era, Islamic extremism became a convenient boogeyman for Israel. In 2008, Netanyahu himself stated the September 11 attacks were beneficial for Israel because it had found a new equivalent to the Soviet Union in Iran and to the PLO in Hamas, arming itself with two new public relations tools. The first was to assert that the Palestinian Authority was not a rational negotiator for peace, and the second was to frame Israel’s own “Al-Qaeda-type problem,” using the specter of Islamic terrorism as a distraction.

Borrowing from the battle-tested strategy of the post 9-11 Bush administration, today Netanyahu claims that October 7 was “Israel’s September 11.” It’s the same playbook he used to advocate—twice—for U.S. military action in Iraq. However, Al-Qaeda was a transnational terrorist organization whose founders were armed and trained with CIA assistance to counter a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. The only real commonality between Al-Qaeda and Hamas is that they share a common faith, Sunni Islam. However, each organization has distinct goals and origins: Al-Qaeda emerged as a transnational answer to U.S. wars in the Middle East, whereas Hamas was founded with a focus on Palestinian national liberation.

While Hamas and other Palestinian armed movements may have been used as Israel’s rationale for its hardline stance, it was not a primary factor in the failure of the Oslo Peace Process. The roots of that failure lie in multiple variables: Israel’s strategic decisions, its ongoing occupation, unconditional U.S. support for Israel, and the broader dynamics of Palestinian resistance. Suppose Hamas were truly the core issue in the failure of Oslo. Why would Israel continue to expand settlements, target civilians, and tighten its control over the West Bank—a region where, unlike in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority promotes non-violence and actively suppresses those who resist occupation by force?

The issue is less about ideology and more about the fact that Palestinians are engaging in armed struggle for their existence against the expansion of a settler-colonial project on their land—an approach that dates back to the Arab Revolt of 1936 and earlier. Nearly every major Palestinian political faction, whether secular-nationalist, Marxist, or Islamist, has been labeled a terrorist organization by Israel, with the mainstream branch of Fatah, which governs the Palestinian Authority, as a notable exception. Yet, before the Oslo Accords, even Fatah was cited by Israel as a barrier to peace.

Join us for Part 3 of this series examining the origins of Hamas. We’ll examine Netanyahu’s strategy in the post-Second Intifada period and analyze how Qatari financial support has influenced the dynamics of the conflict.

Original article: mintpressnews