Terror and Shariah: The Future of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood

When Nathan Brown began exploring the future of Islamist political parties in 2005, Hamas was about to make history.

In a sharp break from the past, there was a sense at that time that if Arab states held open elections, “an Islamist party was going to win. It was the wave of the future.”

Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the Brotherhood itself are currently taking two divergent paths–Hamas is now a ruling party and the champion of anti-Israel terrorism, and the Brotherhood is receding from electoral participation to a newly entrenched devotion to shariah law.

Brown and Amr Hamzawy, senior associates at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, spoke on the Brotherhood and Hamas Sept. 29. They are the co-authors of the book Between Religion and Politics, which takes a broader survey of Islamist participation in electoral politics.

Hamas officially became its own entity in 1987, and the two organizations began moving in opposite directions. While in Egypt the Brotherhood has “no legal existence,” Brown said, “Hamas is a governing party.” The Muslim Brotherhood has claimed to forswear violence, yet Hamas has an armed wing. (Many would argue Hamas is an armed wing.) The Brotherhood applies a historical outlook to its pronouncements and activities–the very antithesis of Hamas’s impulsivity.

While the Brotherhood focuses most of its energy at home, Hamas is at the center of global diplomacy. And as Hamas continues to practice pragmatic politics, both Brown and Hamzawy demonstrated that, frustrated with their lack of impact in the Egyptian parliament, the Muslim Brotherhood has begun making a mad dash away from electoral pragmatism and toward a more concrete fidelity to shariah law.

In 1991, Hamas faced a dilemma: now that peace talks were underway, should they participate? The anti-negotiation forces within the movement won that argument. In the late 1990s, Hamas decided it could participate in local municipal elections–the best way to prevent such elections from actually taking place.

The Intifada of 2000–a campaign of terror and murder waged by the Palestinians against Israeli civilians in the wake of Yasser Arafat’s premeditated rejection of the Camp David offer to create a Palestinian state–gave Hamas an opening. In their opinion, it was time to enter Palestinian parliamentary politics because it was clear Arafat’s Fatah party had failed.

“We do this because we are the future of Palestinian politics,” as Brown characterized the movement’s newfound perspective on electoral politics, adding: “And then they won.”

That presented Hamas with a new identity crisis: How could it govern, reform Palestinian politics, and “resist” Israel at the same time? The answer was, it had to choose one to emphasize. Here, however, Brown says Hamas chose to emphasize governance and downplay resistance.

I asked Brown if he was defining resistance down, since until the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead in December 2008/January 2009 children in Israel’s embattled south had to dodge rockets on their way to school, and Hamas has never ceased attempting to kidnap Israelis or murder Israelis living in Judea and Samaria. What explains the rockets if Hamas wanted to deemphasize resistance?

“They wanted a ceasefire–on their own terms,” Brown answered, adding they got the ceasefire, but not quite on their terms. And what explains the violence in Judea and Samaria? Hamas, according to Brown, doesn’t want to be “marginalized.”

And that point shows just how important Israel’s right to self-defense is, and how important global counterterrorism efforts are to protecting the West against Islamic terrorism.

Hamas is patient–waiting fifteen years to take part in elections until the stage was set for victory. And Hamas has no qualms about waging long-term war against innocent men, women and children to better their hand in negotiations. The one bulwark remains the West’s resolve. Israel’s response may have been decried as “disproportionate” by the U.N. and Western Europe, but as Brown admitted, it was the one thing that brought a measure of peace to the area and forced Hamas to swallow a deal on someone else’s terms.

And the better Israel protects its citizens, the more “marginalized” Hamas becomes. Effective counterterrorism is the answer to almost every question on this issue. So as the Muslim Brotherhood embraces shariah and its spawn Hamas seeks to mask terrorism in the guise of representative governance, let’s hope the Obama administration changes its focus on the peace process away from pressuring Israel.

The president should let Israel set the terms, and take notes.