Israel has tended to fight the Hamas of its own creation rather than the Hamas known to serious scholarship, although for many years the landmark study of the movement was by two Israelis: Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela’s The Palestinian Hamas, published in 2000. Mishal and Sela described a social movement with deep roots among ‘the common people’. Intellectually it borrowed from the leading political religious thinkers in the Islamic reformist tradition: Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia and Hassan al-Turabi in Sudan. Hamas wasn’t a band of criminals but a well-organised political and social force. It divided the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into districts and subdistricts, and subdivided those into local units headed by members of the movement. It exercised ruthless pressure to enforce conservative religious norms, with the goal of a pure, and therefore strong, resistance, purged of doubters and opponents, including supporters of Fatah, the most powerful party within the PLO. Hamas’s presence at every level of society, providing welfare and medical provision as well as religious education, ensured a baseline level of support.
