Hamas Is Not ISIS
The two groups are not the same, and their differences are likely to matter as this war proceeds.
Two weeks ago, Hamas declared a “Day of Rage”—an invitation for Muslims to rise up worldwide and express their hatred of Israel and its works. “Head to the squares and streets,” one of its leaders, Khaled Meshaal, said from Qatar. Arabs should bum-rush the Israeli border, and Muslims everywhere should wage war. “You know your responsibility,” he said. The time to study jihad was over. “To all who teach and learn, this is a moment for the application.”
These words brought back waves of anti-nostalgia for anyone who watched the rise of the Islamic State almost a decade ago, like hearing an old song that you hate, or smelling a madeleine covered in mold. “Hamas is ISIS,” Israeli and American officials have said repeatedly since October 7. In 2014, the ISIS version of Meshaal’s call came from the organization’s chief terrorist, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani: “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies.” The message was very do-it-yourself: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.” Adnani’s speech kicked off a year of murder and carnage.
ISIS and Hamas differ in at least this way: When Hamas asks random strangers to go spree-killing in its name, few comply. On the Day of Rage, demonstrations filled public squares in various countries, and an Israeli diplomat was stabbed in Beijing. But the Day of Rage was mostly quiet. I spent the Rage afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, in case an uprising reached al-Aqsa Mosque. The Old City was quiet as a crypt. In fact, it was quieter than a crypt, and I know that because I spent part of it in a crypt—the Holy Sepulchre of Jesus Christ—and it was louder inside than out. I had a friendly conversation at normal volume with a Franciscan monk from Stuttgart, who remarked that the area had not been so empty since the darkest days of COVID.
I can understand why Hamas and ISIS might look the same to a casual observer. And I understand, too, why the differences might seem picayune and pedantic, when the blood on the floor ultimately drains to the same place. But they are not the same—and the differences between them are likely to matter as this war proceeds.
My colleague Yair Rosenberg ably summarized what Hamas wants: a “struggle against the Jews,” a rejection of all “so-called peaceful solutions,” and mass murder, as a means to those ends. These characteristics are all very ISIS-like. What makes Hamas unlike ISIS are its more normal characteristics: Hamas is an ally of Iran, Qatar, and Syria; it won a plurality of votes in a 2006 election and based its legitimacy on that win; and it believes there is a patch of land called “Palestine” that it, as the leader of the Palestinian people, should rule.
These facts are so distasteful to ISIS that any one of them would be sufficient to declare Hamas’s leaders infidels and call for their slaughter. ISIS wanted to send Hamas to hell, and it said so openly.
ISIS’s monomaniacal focus on theology and creed led it to demonize one group above all others: Shiite Muslims, the sect that dominates Iran, its Lebanese affiliate Hezbollah, and the ruling party of Syria. ISIS’s hatred of the Shia is limitless. The Shia, according to ISIS, elevate saints and members of the Prophet’s household to the state of demigods. Many Sunnis believe this. ISIS just has no sense of humor about it and says that all the Shia, hundreds of millions of people, need to be killed. This view does not lend itself to a close alliance with Syria, Iran, or Hezbollah.
ISIS thought that saint worship gave the saints a share in the indivisible lordship of God. Another way one can, in ISIS’s eyes, split that lordship is to participate in a democratic election. Participation suggests that popular will deserves deference, and not God’s word alone. To run for office—even to vote—would “nullify one’s Islam,” according to ISIS, and send the democrat down a path toward “the religion of democracy.” One ISIS ideologue wrote that democrats followed a “deviant methodology of Hamas and their ruling by man made laws.”
Finally, Hamas wants a Palestinian state. “We are with the consensus of the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state on the June 4 borders,” Khaled Meshaal said in 2007. Hamas has further goals, of course—a global Muslim government, someday—and it happily associates itself with Muslim Brotherhood outfits in other countries. But it confines its immediate ambitions to Palestine, and the creation of a state there, on the model of states elsewhere, with a seat at the United Nations and the Arab League, and other normal stuff.
To ISIS, this concept fails on two counts. First, ISIS made clear that the era of these states had passed. The only Islamic replacement was a caliphate, which should ever enlarge, with no fixed borders. And it should recognize no peers or other authority, such as the UN, or the king of Jordan. Hamas does not deny the Qatari emir’s right to rule (and if it did, the emir would rapidly evict the group’s leaders from their roost in Doha).
Second, ISIS considers Hamas a nationalist movement. To call Hamas nationalist is jarring to the ear, if you are used to contrasting it with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’s straightforwardly nationalist Palestinian rival. But to ISIS, the two Palestinian factions are equally nationalist and equally damned. Hamas’s charter “assures all the nationalist trends operating in the Palestinian arena for the liberation of Palestine, that it is there for their support and assistance.”
The ISIS objection to Hamas on these grounds is deep: Merely acknowledging that there is something called the Palestinian people, and they might live in a Palestinian state owned by Palestinians, rather than by Muslims in general, is enough for ISIS to condemn Hamas’s followers as nationalists and infidels. The first leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, promised that his soldiers’ boots “will trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy, and uncover its deviant nature.”
Cole Bunzel of the Hoover Institution, an authority on jihadist factions, wrote last year that ISIS’s leaders have treated the Palestine issue as a distraction from the theological and apocalyptic issues they consider primary. Muslims, one ISIS article claimed, had treated the liberation of Palestine as an “idol,” and failed to notice that “the apostate Hamas movement” was a bunch of polytheists. The researcher Tore Refslund Hamming summarized ISIS’s initial reaction to Hamas’s attack, and it remains in line with these views. It scolds Hamas for its alliances with apostates and Shia. It takes exception to Hamas’s respect for borders, insisting that attacks should be global.
One almost wishes Hamas were ISIS. Hamas is pragmatic in a way that ISIS never could be. ISIS, by hereticizing all its neighbors, imposed limits on its ability to form alliances and negotiate. Hamas, by contrast, works with whatever states it finds useful—chiefly Qatar and Iran. Money speaks sweetly to its leaders, and it much more closely resembles a conventional state in the alliances it forms.
Hamas can activate loyalties that ISIS could not. ISIS spent enormous effort educating its followers about the evils of democracy and nationalism—even when those followers were eager to bring their nationalist buddies on board. First, they had to be indoctrinated. For Hamas, nationalist fervor is a useful tool, and it will not hesitate to win over, say, nonreligious Palestinians by downplaying its own extremism and playing up the nationalism that is now slightly more en vogue in the Arab world. If you wave a Palestinian flag and say you love Palestine, Hamas wants you on its team. ISIS wants you dead.
Hamas also has a limit that ISIS did not. ISIS, in encouraging extreme intolerance of Shia and others, lost potential allies. But it could also exploit certain allegiances that existed broadly across the Islamic world. Many, many Sunni Muslims had some awareness of the theological tradition from which ISIS drew. All ISIS had to do was refer to it, and suggest that its natural conclusion was to pick up a rock or swerve one’s truck into a crowd. ISIS meant to appeal universally to Sunnis, and Hamas doesn’t have the same universal appeal—which is why Khaled Meshaal can call for an uprising, and the Muslim world rises up very modestly, like a cake without yeast.
Israeli officials have equated ISIS with Hamas partly for propaganda purposes, to attach their enemy’s name to that of the least likable of all groups to infest the planet in recent years. But in calmer moments, they will admit that the comparison is not exact. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesperson, said at a press conference on Monday that the IDF uses the equation between Hamas and ISIS because of “the elements of media, cruelty, and manuscripts”—the last of these, I think, is a reference to the tendency of each group to opine verbosely about its own greatness. I think ISIS actually dominates Hamas in that last department.
But in use of cruelty, and eagerness to document their crimes, the groups are indeed twins. Just don’t overdo the comparison—and be glad, mostly, that it isn’t perfect.