Why I support the UK taking a more nuanced position on Hamas
Hamas members attend the funeral of Al-Qassam Brigades fighters who were killed by the Israeli army in recent months, in Al-Hajj Musa Mosque in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 31 January 2025
Avi Shlaim writes in Middle East Eye on 30 May 2025:
The reputation of Hamas sank to its lowest point after its attack on 7 October 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis and foreigners were killed and 251 taken hostage.
In Israel, this attack provoked a tsunami of anger, strident calls for revenge, demands for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and a national consensus in support of the total eradication of Hamas. The result has been the longest, deadliest and most ruinous war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Hamas is a social movement and political organisation with a military wing, al-Qassam Brigades. The military wing was proscribed by the British government as a terrorist organisation in March 2001, and in November 2021, former Home Secretary Priti Patel added the political organisation to the list of proscribed groups.
This decision marked an abrupt reversal of the government’s previous policy, which made a clear distinction between Hamas’s political and military wings.
Patel, a staunch supporter of Israel, argued, unconvincingly in my opinion, that the distinction between the two wings was no longer tenable. For its part, Israel has always denied that there is any difference between the two wings.
In August 2017, as secretary of state for international development, Patel went on a trip to Israel accompanied by Lord Polak, honorary president of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and a major fund-raiser for the Tory party. She had previously served as an officer for CFI’s parliamentary group between 2011 and 2014. While pretending to be on a private holiday, Patel held 12 secret meetings with high-ranking Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Upon her return, she asked her officials to explore the possibility of diverting some of the foreign aid budget to enable the Israeli army to carry out humanitarian work in the occupied Golan Heights. She was subsequently forced to resign for concealing the nature and purpose of her trip to Israel.
Baseless argument
In 2019, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson rehabilitated Patel by appointing her as home secretary. Johnson shared her Manichean view of the Middle East struggle, in which Israel represents the forces of light and Palestinians the forces of darkness.
The change of policy towards Hamas was announced not by the foreign secretary, but by the home secretary. Patel said that designating the whole of Hamas as a terrorist organisation should be seen through a domestic prism: it would help to protect Jews in this country.
This argument is baseless. Hamas does not carry out operations outside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, it has no presence in Britain, and it poses no threat to British Jews in this country.
Hamas’s 2017 “Document of General Principles and Policies” (unlike the 1988 Hamas Charter) explicitly distinguishes between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a political project. It affirms that Hamas’s conflict with Israel is due to occupation, not religion, and states that it would accept the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders without recognising Israel.