Hamas's resistance to the Oslo agreement

Abstract

This thesis seeks to identify the various reasons behind Hamas’s resistance to the Oslo Agreement. In the existing literature on the subject there are three main factors used to explain the opposition; religious factors, political factors and what I chose to call tactical factors. With these as a starting point I do analyses of primary and secondary sources and this way I identify what the arguments and tactics Hamas used to resist the agreement were, before I finally do an assessment of which one of these that constituted the most important reason to object. In identifying the reasons I discuss how the agreement affected the goal of achieving a free Palestinian state, how it affected Hamas’s desire of an Islamic state and how it affected the movement’s strategy to reach these objectives, something which is structured according to the three factors from above, respectively political, religious and tactical reasons of opposition. I find that the political reasons of opposition were the most important. These were reasons shared with large segment of the Palestinian society and not particular to Hamas. They concerned the agreement’s failure to address what the Palestinians regarded as vital issues and basic claims, such as the claim for an independent Palestinian state, the question of the refugees and of the occupation as well as economic issues. The movement also objected on a tactical basis: as the agreement put an end to the Palestinian intifada and threatened to stop the movement’s use of jihad as a strategy to fight Israel, it was believed that the agreement also removed Hamas’s reason to exist. The religious reasons of opposition concerns that the agreement deals with the partition of what Hamas sees as an indivisible, holy territorial unit, Palestine, and by giving part of the land to Israel it thus impedes the restoration of the land to Islamic rule, which is Hamas’s final goal.