What the media won't tell you about Hamas

Hamas was founded in the Gaza Strip in 1987 at the outset of the First Intifada, a period of intense Palestinian protest against Israeli occupation. Its name is an Arabic acronym for "Islamic Resistance Movement. Twenty years earlier, in 1967, Israel had occupied Gaza and the West Bank. So Hamas emerged in response to Zionist settler colonization and the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is a national, Islamist movement and has been at the forefront of armed resistance in the occupied territories. Hamas sees itself as a national liberation movement fighting Israel. It has used guerrilla tactics and violence, often against civilians. Hamas's official history claims that its roots go back to Palestinian militancy in the 1930s. Many historians, however, argue that Hamas grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s. At least in part, the creation of Hamas is also the result of Israeli intelligence maneuvers.