By Taghreed Saadeh
Over the past two years, the Palestinian people have endured one of the harshest periods in their modern history following the events of October 7. Although Hamas’s media portrayed that day as “the greatest achievement” in the history of the Palestinian cause, reality and history tell a different story.
Palestinian history is full of sophisticated operations inside the Green Line – where is Israel and infiltration missions documented over decades of struggle, many of which far exceed what happened on that day.
Even the use of gliders was not a Hamas invention. In 1987, four fighters from the Popular Front, General Command carried out a hanglider attack on an Israeli military base. Ignoring this history, and presenting Hamas’s action as exceptional or unprecedented, distorts the legacy of the Palestinian organizations that led the armed struggle at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood refused even to join public demonstrations.
With the rise of media influence and its tendency to inflate certain roles, a movement with no substantial historical record in armed struggle suddenly appeared as the “leader of resistance,” without any critical reading of Palestinian history, a history that passed through multiple phases, achieved gains, and avoided failures through organized national action led by the factions of the PLO.
Even the Oslo Accords, produced tangible achievements, though they ultimately fell short of fulfilling the Palestinian people’s broad aspirations for full rights and sovereignty.
Hamas’s shifting launguages, at times speaking of a state on the 1967 borders, at others endorsing popular resistance, and eventually monopolizing armed struggle when it suits its interests, reveals a pursuit of dominating Palestinian decision-making rather than liberating Palestine. Its obstruction of the Oslo process, coupled with its insistence that the agreement was useless, exposes a deliberate political contradiction.
The Arab Spring made the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood’s project even clearer. The coordination between the movement and Egypt’s former president Mohamed Morsi illustrated the direction Hamas intended to take in Palestine. The idea of “a Palestinian state in Sinai” was not a fabrication but part of a transnational vision embraced by the global Brotherhood. If Morsi had remained in power, we might have witnessed the early formation of a regional Brotherhood project in which Palestine served their ideological agenda rather than the national liberation movement. Even Hamas’s alliances with resistance factions in Lebanon remained fragile and driven by political convenience.
As Palestinians, we resist for Palestine, for our land, dignity, and rights, not for a transnational Brotherhood project. Therefore, it is our right to say we support the struggle for liberation, but we are not with Hamas.
It is time for wise voices to separate the concept of resistance from the political movement of Hamas. The movement arrived late, disrupted the course of the Palestinian cause, deepened the division it initiated in 2007, and kept Gaza isolated from the West Bank for 19 years with the support of regional powers seeking to advance the Brotherhood’s agenda, only for some Hamas leaders today to speak against the “separation of Gaza and the West Bank!!!!”
Every Palestinian has the right to support resistance and to stand firmly with Palestine without being aligned with Hamas.
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