Between Pragmatism and Ideological Zeal: The Path of Palestinian Political Islam

Abstract

The Palestinian Islamist milieu is dominated by Hamas, which has succeeded in combining the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood with the nationalism deriving from the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. From its bastion in the Gaza Strip, which is not occupied but subject to a strict blockade, Hamas is the main rival of Fatah in terms of local power relations and maintains a complex co-existence with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). However, the party’s integration into secular political structures (the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)) has resulted in the creation of other Islamist groups as alternatives. The main parties in these groups are Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Salafist movement, which are comprised of different actors, some of them are violent. Meanwhile, the severity of the occupation and of the Israeli blockade, the scarcity of resources and territorial discontinuity all determine the relations between the various groups in the local Islamist spectrum and their aspirations. Unlike the majority of the cases studied in this book, regional developments since 2011 have had only a limited impact on the relations of power related to political Islam in Palestine.