Thread by @_ZachFoster

The untold history of Hamas, a 🧵

Here’s the history u already know:

1. Hamas’s 1988 charter calls for Israel’s destruction
2. Hamas has committed dozens of terror attacks, killing many Israeli civilians
3. Hamas murdered thousand+ innocent Israeli civilians in past 8 days.

Here’s the history you don’t know:

In 1948, Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas, was uprooted & ethnically cleansed from his home at age 12.

In 1973, he founded an Islamic charity in Gaza focused on education, social services, preaching, youth sports, cultural activities & social services for the poor & orphans.

In the 1980s, Israel pursued a "divide & rule" policy. To weaken the PLO, it supported & funded the Islamic charity.

Yitzhak Segev (x-military governor in Gaza) & Avner Cohen (x-religious affairs official) have admitted Hamas was “a creature” or “a creation” of Israel. Source:

Then, in 1987, an Israeli truck driver struck & killed 4 Palestinians near a checkpoint in Gaza. Palestinians revolted in a series of daily strikes, protests, riots, boycotts of Israeli rule, & infamously, stone-throwing children.

It was known as the First Intifada:

During the 1st yr of the uprising, Israel killed 142 Palestinians in Gaza, while not a single Israeli had been killed in Gaza.

Despite this grotesque violence, Hamas continued to pursue non-violent resistance through spring 1989.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History (2014), 206.

During the course of the uprising:

Israel jailed 175K Palestinians; 30K pal. children needed medical care after being beaten, 10K had broken bones; 1/5th of the injured were under 5; 23K subject to “harsh interrogation”; Israel killed 1,200 Pals, Pals killed ~160 Israelis.

Meanwhile, Hamas put out peace feelers w/Israel. In 1988, a Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, proposed a peaceful resolution.

He submitted his proposal to Yitzhak Rabin, the then Israeli minister of defense, in a meeting on June 1, 1988. The proposed solution was as follows:

In 1988, Sheikh Yasin himself similarly expressed interest in negotiating w/ Israel.

Israel had to "acknowledge the Palestinian people’s right to self- determination & right of return to their land":

source: Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza, p.76

But Israel was never prepared to accept any Palestinian refugees even though it expelled them.

That's b/c non-Jews living in Israel are deemed an inherent danger to Israel.

This is b/c Israel wants to be a Jewish ethno-state. It wants to preserve Jewish domination & control.

For Israel, it was beyond the pale to allow non-Jewish refugees to return to their homes in Israel after '48.

If Israel were to let in the Palestinians it ethnically cleansed, how could it preserve a state in which Jews make all the decisions?

Israel chose ethnocracy over peace

Alas, Israel's grotesque use of violence in the first intifada had a radicalizing effect on Hamas.

1.5years into the First Intifada, Hamas killed 2 Israeli soldiers (although still no civilians). Israel embraced disproportionality. It tried to eradicate Hamas in 1989. it failed

On 8 October 1990, Israeli police violently suppressed a demonstration in Jerusalem, killing 22 people.

Hamas was enraged. On 14 December, 1990, Hamas committed an attack on civilians: 2 Hamas militants from Gaza stabbed 3 Israeli workmen to death in Jaffa.

Still, it not was until after Feb. 1994, when Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler, massacred 29 praying Muslims in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in the West Bank during the month of Ramadan, that Hamas got radicalized & fully embraced attacks on civilians.

Thereafter, Hamas carried out dozens of attacks, including 12 suicide bombings.

By 2000, Hamas had killed 185 Israelis & left over 1,200 wounded.

Then came the 2nd intifada. Top Israeli security echelons decided to “fan the flames” during the uprising’s first weeks. Amos Malka, Israel's military general, stated during the Intifada’s 1st month, when the uprising was still mostly nonviolent, Israel killed 14 Palestinian...

children. These cases were barely reported in the Israeli media, which dealt almost exclusively w/ Jewish victims, of which there were as yet only a few. Israel’s excessive use of deadly force against demonstrators enraged Palestinians. Then came Hamas's worst violence to date:

From September 28, 2000 thru February 8, 2005:

Hamas & other militant groups carried out 138 suicide attacks & killed 1,038 Israelis

As always, Israel embraced it's guiding principle of disproportionality, killing 3,189 Palestinians over the same time period.

In 2006, Hamas won free and fair Palestinian legislative elections in the occupied Palestinian territories. By this time, there were many indications Hamas sought to moderate:

“We Hamas are for peace & want to put an end to bloodshed…peaceful means will do if the world is willing to engage in a constructive and fair process in which we & the Israelis are treated as equals” (Ismail Haniyeh, The Guardian 31 March 2006)

“We agree to a [Palestinian] state on pre-67 borders, w Jerusalem as its capital w genuine sovereignty w/out settlements but w/out recognizing Israel…. we have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10yrs ” (Khaled Meshaal, April, 2008)

Then, in 2012, Hamas's #2 military commander Jabari had been conducting indirect talks with Israel via Hamas' deputy foreign minister, Ghazi Hamad, all with the approval of Israel’s then Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Jabari was expected to sign the peace treaty w/Israel.

But Israel sought to squash the peace deal, preferring war to peace to strengthen its “deterrence capacity.”

Israel assassinated Jabari just hrs after he received a draft of the peace deal.

Israel signaled to Hamas: communications w/ it will be conducted through military force.

History did not begin on Oct 7th, 2023, despite what most media outlets would have you believe.

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