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| Khaled Hroub and friend |
On 1 May 2017, Hamas released its “Document of General Principles and Policies” following years of periodic speculation that the movement was working on a new political platform. Heralded by some as a significant milestone in Hamas's political thought and practice, the document reiterates longstanding positions but also lays out some new ones. Given the timing of its release, as well as its contents and possible implications, the document could be considered Hamas's new charter: it details the organization's views on the struggle against “the Zionist project” and Israel and outlines its strategies to counter that project. This essay aims to provide a fine-grained analysis of the substance, context, and ramifications of the recently released document. The discussion starts with an overview highlighting aspects of the document that could be considered departures from Hamas's original 1988 charter, and pointing to changes in the movement's discourse, both in form and substance. A contextual analysis then probes the regional, international, and internal impetuses behind the issuance of the document. Finally, the discussion concludes with a look at the possible implications for the movement itself, as well as for the Palestinians and for Israel.On that same May 1, I reported that Hamas newspaper Felsteen explicitly said the new document did not replace the antisemitic charter, I said, "The entire purpose of the document is to present a false, moderate face to the West."
I was right. The academic, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and Arab media studies at Northwestern University in Qatar and research associate at Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, was wrong. (Hroub is also a supporter of violence.)
And there is also "Questioning the moderation dichotomy: understanding Hamas’s evolving moderation" in Democratization, Volume 29, 2022, by Martin Kear, a lecturer and unit co-ordinator in the Department of Government and International Relations, The University of Sydney:
In the moderation literature opposition movements are driven to alter their political behaviour via either inclusive or exclusive political forces. Despite each analytical pathway producing cogent analyses, the lack of any consensus complicates our ability to understand the drivers of the moderation process holistically. However, this research questions the efficacy of any dichotomy. Using the Islamist movement Hamas as its case study, I argue that concentrating solely on examining the structural causal mechanisms of moderation exhibited by inclusion and exclusion does not capture the full ambit of the moderation process. To provide a more nuanced account of the causal drivers of moderation, I argue for the need to examine a movement’s ideological agency within the moderation process. By doing so, the article demonstrates that what is driving Hamas’s moderation post-2004 is not only a combination of inclusive and exclusive political forces, but its evolving ideological reconceptualisation of resistance. Hamas’s dual-status means that its resistance legitimacy, gained from confronting Israel’s occupation militarily, is also used as a political buffer to justify making substantive ideological compromises. A key finding of this research is that while inclusion allowed Hamas to be more ideologically circumspect, exclusion forced Hamas to take more ideological risks.
While the full article hedges its bets a little, its overarching theme is that Hamas has moderated its positions - and it also uses that 2017 document as evidence, again falsely claiming that it was a replacement for the violent, antisemitic charter.
Both these academics chose to believe what Hamas wanted them to believe, and ignored all counter-evidence, which could be found easily in MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch archives (or my site, for that matter.)
Or, to be less charitable, one of them may have knowingly sought to soften Hamas' image just so an attack like October 7 could be more effective.
