Hamas according to Hamas. A reading of its Document of General Principles
Résumé
On May 1, 2017, the Islamic Resistance Movement-Hamas promulgated a “Document of General Principles and Policies”, adopted by its representative bodies after several years of debate. The reading that I propose operates a constant back and forth between the text itself and, on the one hand, a body of press releases published by the movement itself and previous declarations of its leaders, including of course the 1988 Charter and, on the other hand, the positions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). With this Document, Hamas explicitly assumes its vocation to be one of the elements of the Palestinian national liberation movement. The originality of the text lies in the absence of explicit religious references and in the multiplicity of nods to the positions held by the PLO in the 1970s. The only novelty lies in the mention of armed resistance as a strategic choice. The Document, however, is a subtle work and its silences are just as meaningful as its assertions. Thus, far from a truly secular approach, its authors appear to have simply opted to silence the religious foundations, without of course denying them, of assessments expressed most of the time in secular terms. The Document could express a kind of bet on the future when the generation of Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PLO and the Interim Palestinian Authority of Autonomy (PA), and Salim Zaanoun, speaker of the National Council Palestinian, is called to disappear sooner or later and when is periodically announced the annexation to Israel of new Palestinian lands. While the PLO and the PA prove incapable of offering a vision of the future, prisoners of the sole logic of survival in the preservation of assets which are most often financial and individual, Hamas would thus aim to restore depth to the policies it pursued in Gaza while seeking to broaden its base.