Living next door to Hamas

The seeds of Hamas were planted in the late 1960s, when Palestinian members of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood began setting up the infrastructure for what they hoped would be an Islamist state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. The Palestinian Muslim Brothers quickly locked into intense competition with the secular Fatah, prompting an internal struggle between two camps that has been ominously decided this week in favor of the Islamist camp.

As the Hamas charter states: "Hamas is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine."

Like their Egyptian counterparts, Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood members felt that jihad against Israel and their Arab nationalist, secular foes should not be launched until they had completed 'sufficient ground work,' meaning a total Islamization of Palestinian society. Hamas then deviated from this platform during two intifadas, and has become the standard bearer of mass casualty suicide bomb attacks, murdering hundreds of Israeli civilians in the last decade.

The terrorist organization does not, however, feel that its holy war can succeed until it completes the first part of its agenda, that is, the creation of a deeply religious Islamic society. "The Movement's program is Islam," the Hamas charter explains.

This, therefore, may well be the first goal of the new Hamas-controlled Palestinian government, and sweeping, radical internal changes can be expected in Palestinian society. Islamic Sharia law will probably be strictly and lethally applied, women and men will not be allowed to interact freely, homosexuals will be tried and executed, music banned, and the Palestinian Christian minority may even find itself forced to pay the dhimma tax, levied exclusively on 'unbelievers' of Islam.

"The Movement goes back to the time of the birth of the Islamic message… the prophet is its example and Koran is its constitution," the Hamas charter warns.

Some analysts are more hopeful, believing that once Hamas faces up to the need to deliver essential services and act as a proper government, it will be forced to give up its fanatical ways. But Hamas has already been providing services to the Palestinian people for decades, and uses welfare, charity, and educational centers to propagate its message of Islamic absolutism. Nor will a desire for world acceptance cause Hamas to abandon its ideology.

Hamas and Israel

In fact, any temporary pretence for a ceasefire or moderation on the part of the incoming Hamas government will be designed only to allow itself to accomplish its first goal of Islamizing Palestinians, and so long as the organization's charter calls for Palestinians "to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine," any Hamas-led Palestinian government should be viewed as a time bomb.

As Hamas' covenant openly states, "Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes." The organization's constitution regards the murder of Jews as a central aim: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims... there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

In many Hamas publications, Jews are described as "blood suckers," "brothers of apes," "killers of the prophets," "human pigs," and "butchers."

Regional implications

It is not only Israel, however, that is in Hamas' crosshairs. The governments of Jordan and Egypt will most likely be holding a number of urgent meetings to assess the new situation and its consequences for the Islamist threat within their own borders.

Egypt has been locked in a civil war with jihadists bent on overthrowing the Egyptian government since the 1920s, and Jordan faces a serious challenge with the emerging organization of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi's Iraqi al-Qaeda, comprised of many Jordanian members. These groups view the Jordanian and Egyptian governments as secular sell outs to the hated West.

Hamas' victory will certainly not make Jordan's and Egypt's life easier.

The Shi'ite fundamentalist government of Iran, guided by a president with nuclear ambitions who seriously wishes to hasten an apocalyptic return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite twelfth Imam, may well find a willing ally in the new Hamas government, despite Shi'ite-Sunni tensions. Iran and Hamas' desire to launch war on Israel could easily overcome factional differences in the future.

Israel is accustomed to facing such threats, and will be prepared for the new strategic challenges ahead.

The presence of an Islamist government on our doorstep is, however, a new development, and one that will push prospects for a peace deal back into the unforeseeable future.

For now, the Palestinians have voted to go down the Islamist route, a path strewn with conflict and danger.