Hamas

Reviews / Votes

'Azzam Tamimi ... a London-based Islamist intellectual ... provides a detailed and sympathetic account of the movement's remarkable rise to power. Others may challenge some of the arguments in Hamas: Unwritten Chapters,but there is no denying its authority, based as it is on extended interviews with central Hamas figures in exile, including its Damascus-based political leader Khaled Meshal. This is a counter-narrative, an explicit riposte to nationalist and leftist narratives of modern Palestinian history. It shies away, for example, from the conventional view that Israel tolerated the emergence of the Palestinian Islamists, seeing them as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Nor does it accept, as most accounts do, that Hamas was created as an improvised response to the outbreak of the first intifada by a movement scared that the other factions would leave it in the shade. According to Tamimi, Sheikh Yassin and the other Hamas founding fathers had carefully planned the creation of an armed wing-even if the start of violent protest in Gaza hastened its birth.Tamimi devotes much space to what many people would regard as Hamas's Achilles heel: its commitment to use violence to liberate the whole of Palestine, not just Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem (the position of Fatah and the PLO). He dismisses controversy over the uncompromising and archaic language of the Hamas charter, which he regards as a document that has in effect been superseded. Yet he endorses the movement's position that the most it will accept is a long-term hudnah,or truce, with Israel - not formal recognition of it. And he resists the commonly held view that Hamas is split between a more moderate "inside" leadership and a more radical "outside" one (currently led from Damascus by Meshal).Tamimi is silent about the support Hamas receives from Syria and, even more controversially, from Iran, but has a lot to say about its ambivalent relationship with Jordan. Here Tamimi, himself a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, comes into his own. His account is scarcely neutral, but it portrays in fascinating detail how the Jordanian kingdom first tried to accommodate Hamas and use it as leverage over Arafat's PLO, and then, in 1999, declared it a threat to the country's security and expelled its top leaders (including Meshal), who were forced eventually to settle in Syria.' -New Statesman, 3 May 2007'In this trenchant history spanning from the first days of the 1987 intifada to the sweeping democratic victory of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the Palestinian elections of January 2006, London-based scholar Tamimi argues that seeing Hamas as merely another face of Al Qaeda obscures more than it elucidates ... A key resource in English for any serious assessment of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.'-Publishers Weekly (starred review)'Tamimi's book is the most authoritative account yet published of the origins, rise and impact of Hamas.' -Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief, Al-Quds Al-Arabi'This is an important book, and I encourage both Israelis and diaspora Jews to read it.' -Gabrielle Rifkind, Specialist in Conflict Resolution and Human Security.'Unwritten Chapters is an excellent history and analysis of Hamas ... the story is dramatic, and Tamimi tells it well. The book is deeply researched, which allows the reader to trace the many interviews Tamimi has done with all the key players in Hamas, who clearly gave them their trust. It gives access for a non-Arabic reader to a wealth of fascinating detail not available in English before. In these pages, the organisation comes to life.' -Victoria Brittain, Palestine News