Mike Walker, Col USMC, ret
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Jewish state in Palestine. It goes back to 1935, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam (Qassam) and his brethren fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It became part of another chain that included the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.
Here is the story of Qassam: He tried to fight against the Italians in Libya 1912 but was prevented by Turkish authorities. He then fought with the Ottomans in WWI in his native home of Syria and after the French arrived he fought them. Defeated by the French, he fled to Haifa in 1920 and became a radical imam and ally of the Mufti of Jerusalem. By 1931, he was organizing armed resistance, the Black Hand, against the British (who governed Mandatory Palestine) and Zionists. In reaction to the discovery of a secret weapons shipment bound for the Jewish Haganah, Qassam killed a policeman on 8 November 1935. The British then began to hunt him and his group down. He was killed on 20 November and immediately became a martyr and the Black Hand was renamed the Qassamites.
The failed Arab Revolt in Palestine followed from 1936-1939. In trying to deal with the Arab Revolt, the British Royal Peel Commission (headed by Lord William Peel) was created in 1936. In 1937, it proposed for the first time a two-state partition solution.
But Peel died that year and the British abandoned partition in 1938 then let the issue rest in early 1939 by issuing a white paper proposing joint Arab-Jewish rule. The change in policy stemmed from a number of interrelated factors: Its success in crushing the uprising in 1939 combined with the looming Second World War motivated the British to calm the waters as Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies gained wide appeal in the Arab world and opened it to an alliance with Germany.
In 1937, Nazi Germany had concluded “the formation of a Jewish state … is not in Germany’s interest” because it would “create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counterweight against such possible power growth of the Jew.”[i]
And at that time German operatives in Mandatory Palestine actively used Jewish immigration to turn the Arab population away the Britain and towards Germany. They were quickly rounded up by the British as soon as the Second World War began.
Similarly, Germany’s Axis partner Italy was a clear threat. The large Italian army in Libya on Egypt’s frontier and its conquest of East Africa that concluded in May 1936, made the British even more eager to defuse potential troubles in the Middle East.
Whatever policy strengthened Britain’s position in the region and further secured the vital Suez Canal would take precedence and to shore up Arab support, Britain walked away from partition and limited Jewish immigration in 1939.
Notably, the mandates were overseen by the League of Nations and it rejected the British white paper and continued to support more immigration and the formation on a Jewish state in Palestine. Facing the exigency of a world war, the British ignored the League’s decision but partition would be a legacy policy when the League was dissolved and replaced by the new United Nations.
With the Second World War over, the British again returned to their support of partition and sought to end Mandate Palestine.
In 1947, the United Nations adopted a two-state Palestine-Israel solution for the region with Jerusalem as an open city under international administration.
The Jewish side accepted the UN’s two-state solution while the Palestinian side rejected it in its entirety. The founding fathers of Hamas in their 1988 covenant continued to reject the two-state solution. In the covenant’s opening preamble, Hamas exhorts its followers to destroy Israel:
“Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam obliterates it just as it obliterated others before it.”
That led to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War where the followers who later formed Hamas were defeated and the State of Israel was created. This extremism is further explained in the Covenant’s Article 13:
“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”
How can two states negotiate a peaceful resolution when one side has utterly rejected a two-state solution?
[i] PRO: GFM 33/799 Telegram from Von Bulow–Schewante to German embassies in London, Baghdad, Jerusalem, 11.6.37.
