Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 80: Who is Hamas and what do they want?

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current question: Who is Hamas and what do they want? If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

What is Hamas and what does it want? That's a fantastic question. Let's get into it. Hamas is in a very sort of structural institutional sense, a social movement, a social movement, a religious movement, founded in 1987 in the Gaza Strip. It claimed to be, it saw itself as at its founding, and to this day, really, fundamentally,

as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt is an organization found in the 1920s that wanted to profoundly reform the Arabian, and Muslim world. Muslim Brotherhood theologians and thinkers who concluded that Islam had actually reached a point of terrible, terrible weakness and backwardness and that was due to Muslims abandoning their faith and their true

calling and true purpose in this world. And if they returned to the holy generations, the first Islam, the original Islam, the Islam under the Prophet Muhammad, or immediately thereafter in the first generations of Islam, the Islam that conquered, the Islam that built an empire, mass converting Islam,

If we return to their piety, we will regain our mojo. We will regain our place in history. We will regain our ability to meet modernity, this unbelievable moment of Western power, Western competence, Western science, Western economic growth. The Muslim Brotherhood is an attempt to say, Islam is the answer to everything that ails the Muslim world today. And Hamas is a branch of that. But it is a branch of that in certain contexts that make it something very different from just the 1920s Muslim Brotherhood. It believes in the redemption of Islam.

It is fundamentally about the restoration of Islam to a great conquering ethos. But Hamas, of course, is born in 1987 in Gaza under Israeli military rule. And it very much sees the question of the Palestinian cause and of Israeli rule over Palestine, the entirety of the land, as Palestinian see it, not just. West Bank in Gaza. Hamas does not support the two-state solution. It has occasionally, when pressed to the point, been willing to say that as a temporary measure, it's willing to accept an Israeli withdrawal from this place or that place, the West Bank, for example, and to cease fire because the withdrawal is underway. And in its 1988 charter, it explicitly talks about how the

problem is the world's Jews, all the Jews, not Israelis, not Zionists, the Jews of the world. It uses language and vocabulary that is profoundly and explicitly anti-Semitic. It borrows it from certain parts of the Arab world that were trafficking in basically Nazi and European anti-Semitic ideas from the Ali Rashid regime in Iraq and many other places. It is dead set against Israel's very existence and it's willing to pay any cost to end Israel's existence. And one of the reasons for that isn't just that they're, I don't know what, extremists. I've never met someone who called himself an extremist. Nobody's an extremist. If you understand the story, people live in. The story people understand themselves to be embedded in, you understand what it is

their thinking. Piety and Islamic devotion and steadfastness and a willingness to sacrifice, like those first generation of conquerors after Muhammad, will redeem Islam from centuries of weakness. And the removal of Israel, this project of Jews of the weakest people of the world, that managed to push Islam back, that is a signal to Muslims of just how weak Islam has to, become. The removal of Israel is a part and parcel of that task. And Hamas believes that the Palestinians have been tasked with that first step. Palestinians are the place where Islam's decline and retreat turn around. Chamas has been at war with the peace process as much as it has been at war with Israel itself. And it is willing to destroy everything, including Palestinian.

society itself. Hamas is a rebellion. It's a rebellion by the working classes against the upper classes. Chamas's battalions are named the Al-Kasam brigades. They are... Al-Kasam is a dean al-Kasam,

a preacher, originally from Syria, who preached in Haifa in the 1930s, mostly to the dock workers of Haifa, to the working classes of Haifa, and helped initiate the terror attacks against Jews in the 1930s that caused the British to hunt him down and kill him and

helped spark what would become the great Arab revolt of 1936 to 39. He's Adil Qasam is Hamas' hero in part for his writings, for his teachings, he very much came out of the Muslim Brotherhood school, but in part because his story represents this, one of the things he preached to those dock workers was that the upper classes, the great families, the great urban families, of Palestinian society and generally of Arab society under Ottoman times, but they call the Ayun, the eyes, the Hoypiloh, the Khalidis, the Nashashibis, the Husseinis, the families that would produce the mayors of Jerusalem and the Muftis and all of that,

the great families. They had betrayed the Palestinian cause. They had failed the Islamic cause of preventing Zionism from ever gaining a foothold in the land, of pushing out the Jews. their great failure and betrayal, the ordinary people, armed with nothing but faith, have to step in and redeem what has been lost. That story from the 1930s is Hamas' vision of itself in the 1980s. And so Hamas' leaders, today they're corrupt billionaires living in Doha and someone else's dime, but they begin as poverty-stricken kids of the street. They rise up through

talent. Hamas was more a meritocracy in the early days than anything Fatah has ever been, than anything the Palestinian authority that would be built under Oslo, under Arafat, under Fatah, could ever be. And so it is a working-class meritocratic rebellion against a failed elite that had disastrously collapsed their cause and this story of that sense of class war within Palestinian society. Makes it very hard for Fatah and Hamas to come together into any kind of Palestinian unity, explains quite a bit of the divide, and has been a central feature of Palestinian society for a century and a half of its encounter with Zionism, with the incoming Jews, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and today they're thinking about the Israelis is mediated through this own

internal class divide. So what is Hamas? For the last 12 to 15 years in Gaza, Hamas ruled Gaza for 17 years until October 7. And for most of those years, Hamas spent much of Gaza's economy on the construction of a vast tunnel network that we don't think about enough. We don't think about what it represents in the group's vision of itself in the world. 500, 600 kilometers of tunnels under a 40 kilometer territory with thousands of mineshafts, air conditioning systems, electricity. These tunnels go 200 feet down in some places, 200 feet deep. It's an extraordinary achievement. It's by far the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built, and it weigh out classes any other tunnel system ever built for war. When you build that,

when you bend the entire economy of your population and your polity to that task, to that construction, it's fair to ask what it's for. It's not bunkers, because it didn't need to build that tunnel system just to get away from Israeli airstrikes. A system of unconnected bunkers would have done the job. Those tunnels travel between cities and between neighborhoods. Those tunnels can be lived in for years. Those tunnels have warehousing abilities for food for tens of thousands of fighters. And more to the point, in two years of war, no Palestinian child was allowed to step foot into a single one of these tunnels, which are basically the most comprehensive bomb shelter system ever built. In other words,

Hamas built a system in the expectation of this war, this specific war that Gaza has just gone through. And after building that system, then Hamas carried out a massacre of Israelis designed to draw in that Israeli invasion. None of what I said now exonerates Israel of anything. You can hate Israel all you want. If you don't like Israel, you don't like the war, that's fine. Goodness knows, I'm never going to ask you to like a war. But Hamas intended for this war to look like this. Because Hamas viewed the destruction of Gaza as its strategy.

The knock-on cost to the Israelis would be the most serious cost that Hamas had the ability to impose on the Israelis. And so it was worth it. Because the destruction of Israel isn't about saving Palestinians. It's about a much bigger vision. or the redemption of history. So when you say what is Hamas, the answer is it's many things all at once.

Hamas is a grand ideological vision. Hamas is a group, a brutal tyranny that murders its opponents within Palestinian society. Like the Muslim brothers, it runs charity networks, it runs schools,

it has a curriculum to teach the kids, the proper Islam that will turn them into the great Mujahideen, the great holy warriors of the future. And it is a working-class rebellion against failed elites. And it is a genocidal terror organization that is modeled by the same thinkers on the same kinds of intellectual movements that built al-Qaeda, a bearer of a story of the meaning of Palestinian history that a lot of Palestinians find very powerful and moving.

You are not merely the displaced weakest people in Islam that is pushed back by something as pathetic as Jews. You are the turnaround from centuries of weakness. All of that, all at once in this very complicated thing called Chamas.