This is why the West is wrong about equating Hamas and Daesh

In the last few days, the US and Israeli leadership have on several occasions mentioned that there’s no difference between Hamas and Daesh, the internationally recognised terrorist group.

US President Joe Biden last week said that Washington can not let “terrorists like Hamas” win. This framing of Hamas, which is a Palestinian resistance group, was also echoed by the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who at a press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hardliner prime minister, called Hamas “enemy of civilisation” in Tel Aviv.

The US, European Union and the UK have prohibited Hamas as a banned outfit. However, analysts say the Palestinian group primarily aims to wage an armed struggle against the illegal Israeli occupation. It does not harbour extremist aspirations as terror groups like Daesh.

Here’s a list of reasons why Hamas and Daesh can not be clubbed together.

Completely different ideologies

“Makes no sense at all,” says Heiko Wimmen, the project director of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon at the International Crisis Group, referring to the Israeli and American insistence on drawing comparisons between Hamas and Daesh.

“Their ideology is very different. Hamas is a national liberation movement” with a religious template, says Wimmen. “They have long since abandoned the transnational ideology of their parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood,” Wimmen tells TRT World.

In 2017, Hamas discontinued ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-origin movement, which had branches in several Muslim countries.

While Hamas has indigenous roots with a clear focus on Palestinian liberation, Daesh made “a show of erasing national borders”, says Wimmen.

Daesh is a multinational group while Hamas is completely a Palestinian-led resistance organisation like the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), which has also launched an armed struggle against Israel in the 1960s.

In 1989, Hamas launched its armed struggle against Israel, a colonial settler state, to create an independent Palestinian state, an idea that even the international community supports as part of a two-state solution.

On the other hand, Daesh unleashed horror in Iraq and Syria, both Arab countries, and carried out attacks in other Muslim states, in the name of establishing a self-proclaimed caliphate.

Unlike Daesh, which instigated Muslims to revolt against their governments, Hamas does not aim to create discontent among the Jews in Israel. Instead, Hamas wants stateless Palestinians to join its fight against the Israeli occupation. “Hamas has no record of international terrorism of the sort that Daesh pointedly encouraged around 2015,” says Ibrahim Moiz, a political analyst who has closely observed armed movements.

“The definition of terrorism is the unlawful use of violence to terrorise a population into turning against their government and facilitating regime change. Daesh and Israel fit this definition, but not Hamas,” says Sami Hamdi, a Middle Eastern political analyst and head of the International Interest, a political risk group.

“Israel under international law is an occupying power, which means it is in an offensive posture and therefore cannot invoke self-defence against the Palestinians in Gaza that it is blockading. In the absence of a legal self-defence, Israel is therefore in violation of international law in its use of violence against the Palestinians,” he tells TRT World.

“When you add the fact that the violence is designed to terrorise the population into toppling Hamas (which governs Gaza), then it can be argued that Israel falls under the definition of terrorism before Hamas does.”

Separate political discourse

Distinctions between Hamas and Daesh are not limited to their ideological differences, according to Wimmen. There are also serious political differences, he says..

“Hamas participated in elections and won. They did not come to power by the force of arms. Daesh does not even recognise the principle of political representation, leave alone elections,” says the Beirut-based political analyst.

The last Palestinian elections happened in 2006, ending with a Hamas’s victory against the PLO in Palestine.

Like the Al Qassam Brigades, which is the military wing of Hamas, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades is the military arm of Fatah, the leading group in the PLO, and it has actively fought against Israel for decades.

Despite Hamas’s undisputed election victory, the PLO under the West-backed Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas refused to acknowledge the Palestinian group’s win.

This led to a factional infighting between Hamas and Fatah. Eventually, Hamas claimed Gaza while Fatah started ruling the West Bank territory of Palestine in 2007.

Daesh refuses to be part of any political process.

In this sense, Hamas might be best compared to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which fought a decades-long armed struggle against the British government, says Wimmen.

“If you want to use a comparison to help people in the West understand what Hamas is all about, the most appropriate one is the IRA,” he says.

Another thing that sets Hamas and Daesh apart is the strength of their public image and support among local populations

“​​The identification and equivocation of Hamas with Daesh is not only absurd, but relies on a wilful suspension of memory that effectively erases thirty or so years of Hamas' existence among Palestinians, while incidentally trivialising the very real nihilistic brutality of Daesh,” Moiz, the political analyst tells TRT World.

Wimmen says there are also other differences between Hamas and Daesh. “Hamas emerged from the society it rules over and has social roots. It strives to win legitimacy rather than impose submission. Daesh was a foreign force that imposed itself on society by brutal force. It made violence into a spectacle to rule through intimidation,” says Wimmen.

“For Daesh, violence is/was at the core of its ability to rule.”