Hamas is and always has been a terrorist organization

The Islamist organization Hamas is and always has been a terrorist organization that has made its goals a priority over the freeing the Palestinians. But, they are no better or worse than Netanyahu

By Ray Hanania

FREE/Hamas Israel Palestine Terrorism/Thursday April 24, 2025

What extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done to Palestinians, Arab Christians, and Muslims over the past two decades has been a despicable and immoral assault on both Democracy and freedom that has fueled in the Middle East and the world terrorism, violence, and an extremism of the worst kind.

Netanyahu’s unrestrained violence upon Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip in the wake of the October 7, 2023, terrorism has been excessive, unjustified, and unlawful acts that have gone far beyond even the most horrific boundaries of war crimes and genocide.

I understand how people are angry with Netanyahu’s indiscriminate killing of civilians, including the elderly, women, and children — especially the children. Netanyahu’s actions and Israeli government extremism have pushed Israeli soldiers to commit some of the worst atrocities and acts of inhumanity that ironically overshadow the worst cruelty of the Nazis.

And yet, despite all of that inhumane brutality, the death and the destruction, all of that Israeli violence in no way justifies a foundation that allows anyone to look at Hamas as anything other than a vicious terrorist organization itself.

Hamas was founded on a platform of religious-driven hatred against not only Jews and Christians, but also against moderate Muslims, too. It is violence for the sake of violence.

Hamas has used the suffering of the Palestinians in a historically long-term failed drive to achieve total authoritarian control, bastardizing the fundamental principles of the Islamic religion, which is founded on peace, justice, and respect for Christianity and Judaism.

They rose into violent prominence during the first Palestinian Intifada which began on Dec. 9, 1987, not in an effort to protect Palestinians from Israeli government violence and abuse, but as a political movement to counter fears that the secular Palestinian leader, PLO ChairmanYasir Arafat, was planning to use the Intifada as a foundation to negotiate a peace accord with Israel.

Hamas violence was crafted not to achieve Palestinian independence, but solely to prevent peace.

The pursit of peace is exactly what Arafat sought initially through two intellectual and distinguished emissaries and PLO advisers, Northwestern Political Science Professor Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and renowned Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. Abu-Lughod and Said set the foundation for contacts that eventually led to the peace accords signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Sept. 13, 1993, at the White House, hosted by President Bill Clinton.

In response to the peace negotiations, Hamas launched a wave of suicide bombings in late 1993 before the Arafat-Rabin accords were signed. They committed abhorrent attacks against Israeli civilians including on April 6, 1994, at a bus stop in Afula, killing 8 civilians and reserve soldiers and wounding 40 others, mostly civilains.

The Hamas suicide bombings were not intended as revenge for Israel’s wave of killings and brutality — yes, Israel’s government engaged in terrorism, too, but in a formal way using armed soldiers, armaments, and weaponry supplied by the United States, fueling Palestinian anger, which Hamas exploited.

The Hamas suicide bombings were intended to provoke Israelis into rejecting the Arafat-Rabin peace process that might have brought about a peace based on land sharing and mutual though grudging respect by both sides.

The Hamas suicide bombing campaign of 1993 through 2000 consisted of about 4 to 5 terrorist acts each year. The goal was to divide Israeli society over the peace process, and fuel that division. Hamas hoped to provoke a violent conflict between the two sides and thereby end the peace process. Hamas wasn’t about achieving Palestinian freedom. Hamas was for stopping and preventing peace.

In November 1995, Hamas achieved its goal when a political disciple of Benjamin Netanyahu and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a murderous terrorist himself, assassinated Rabin and threw the peace process into a spiralling unrecoverable nosedive. Neither Netanyahu nor Sharon supported the peace process or the principle of sharing the land. They tookover government and escalated the violence against Palestinians just as Hamas escalated the violence against Israelis.

The suicide bombings continued sporadically each year until 2001, when Sharon took power. At that time, Hamas unleashed a massive suicide bombing campaign, committing more than 22 suicide attacks in 2001, and 56 suicide attacks in 2002.

Why did suicide bombings accelerate in those years? Hamas saw that Israeli society was being pushed away from the peace process under Sharon and his extremist political bloc. Hamas leaders wanted to put a nail in the coffin of peace, something that Netanyahu and Sharon shared and eventually helped to do, too.

Suffering under Israeli brutality, many Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, gravitated towards Hamas, an organization that was originally established as a societal movement in the 1970s under the title of the “Village Leagues” or the “Islamic Association” in the Gaza Strip with the direct help of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a mentor of Netanyahu and Sharon.

(Click here to read my detailed footnoted research paper on the topic “How Sharon and the Likud Bloc mid-Wifed the birth of Hamas.)

Shamir, a pre-Israel state terrorist and founder of the Stern Gang worked with another terrorist Prime Minister, Menachem Begin of the Irgun, feared that the PLO under Arafat would in fact moderate itself and pursue a peace with Israel, as it did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Shamir was aware of the talks taking placebetween Israeli and Palestinian emissaries like Abu-Lughod and Said to end the conflict.

At every moment that it seemed Palestinians and Israelis might achieve or reinforce peace, Hamas brainwashed young Palestinian boys and girls to strap-on suicide vests loaded with explosives to kill in the bloodiest manner possible, Israeli civilians.

Israelis condemned the suicide bombings. But instead of preventing the suicide bombings, Israelis did everything they could to fuel the atmosphere of anger and growing suffering of the Palestinians, which Hamas used to justify continuing the suicide bombing campaign.

Neither Hamas nor Netanyahu nor his political ilk from the far rightwing Likud Political party, nor its many variations and political offshoots, wanted any kind of peace that was based on compromise. They both, Hamas and Netanyahu’s political allies, wanted peace based on the destruction of their foes.

The factor that empowered Israel and undermined the Palestinians was the biased Western News Media, which inflamed reporting on suicide bombings by Hamas while suppressing the emotional trauma of Israel’s terrorist violence against Palestinian civilians. Israel was engaged in a longstanding and ongoing campaign of land theft to build illegal armed Jewish-only settlements, and to reinforce Israel’s growing Apartheid government policies.

Hamas is a terrorist organization that has been exploited and fueled by Israeli extremism and violence. Both share the same objective of preventing peace.

But Israel has always better understood the principles of “First Impression” and storytelling, the foundations of strong communications. Perception is reality in the Western World, and understanding how to manipulate perception to create your reality of truth from lies has been Israel’s masterful talent.

The only road to success for Palestinians is not to drive themselves with the belief that they can defeat the Israelis. Palestinians must break from Hamas and prevent emotion and anger from driving their decisions and actions.

At its fundamental core, violence is an expression of anger. You cannot win anything driven by a foundation of anger, especially when that anger becomes hate. Success comes from self-respect and the belief in fairness and justice, things that are the precise opposite of Hamas’ purpose of being.

Recognizing that Hamas represents the road to failure, a path of a terrorist organization, does not diminish the prosecutable evils of the Israeli Governments nor the terrorist acts of Shamir, Begin, Sharon, or Netanyahu.

They are all criminals and terrorists, too.

But if Palestinians move forward only believing that they are the evil without building your own moral foundation, Palestinians will be nothing more than a reflection of their hate, their violence, and they will become their own failure.