Jerusalem, 10:30 AM

I mentioned in my monthly news update published on Monday that a Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections would create a political earthquake with far reaching aftershocks.  This morning, that earthquake has apparently struck, with Palestinian election officials telling media outlets that the radical Islamic movement has captured a clear majority of seats in the 132 seat Palestinian legislature.  The official results will only be released early this evening.  If Hamas has indeed triumphed, the militant group will form the next government that will not only rule the entire Israeli-evacuated Gaza Strip, but the town of Bethlehem just south of Jerusalem, the city of Ramallah due north if Israel’s capital, and significant territory a few kilometers east of Israel’s main urban metropolis situated along the Mediterranean coast, including Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion airport.  In other words, one of Israel’s worst nightmares is coming true. 

I was the first Western journalist to write extensively about Hamas in a book—HOLY WAR FOR THE PROMISED LAND—published in January 1991 by Thomas Nelson.  I began working on it just a few months after the group (whose name is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement”) was formed in mid-1988. I devoted five full pages to the new Muslim group (which is actually an outgrowth of the older, Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood movement), quoting extensively from their 1988 founding charter, which spells out in graphic detail the Hamas intention to destroy Israel and replace it with a Palestinian Islamic regime. 

When the fourth, updated edition of HOLY WAR was published by Broadman and Holman in 2003, I changed very little in the section about Hamas that begins on page 142 under the subtitle “An Islamic Covenant.”  After all, the five pages (and many other references in subsequent chapters) that I devoted to the extremist Islamic group in my first edition had proved to be a bit prescient, given that Hamas suicide terrorists had effectively destroyed the Oslo peace accords in the meantime with a series of horrendous attacks that began in April 1994. 

Some of my Jerusalem-based media colleagues—a few of whose names are far more well known than mine—criticized my initial book for supposedly “wasting space” on a small militant group that would “never play any significant role” in the ongoing Arab-Israeli tussle.  I argued that, since the group was basing its platform on deeply entrenched Islamic fundamentalist religious teachings and traditions, it was likely to grow in strength and influence as the Islamic revolution that began a decade before in Iran continued to flourish.  Unfortunately, the apparent Palestinian election outcome 15 years later seems to have confirmed that contention. 

I also maintained in my book that Hamas would never significantly alter its central charter goals, given that they were based on a literal reading of the Koran.  Although some local Hamas politicians have recently spoken with relative moderation in relation to their charter’s call for Israel’s complete annihilation, most Israeli experts and officials do not accept this as reflecting a real sea change in the movement’s radical positions.  Therefore, the already fractured Israeli-Palestinian “land for peace” process will now be recognized by most Israelis as being beyond resurrection.  This is despite the fact that all understand the impressive Hamas victory was at least partially a well-deserved Palestinian voter rebuke of the ruling PLO Fatah movement, which faithfully reflected its former leader, Yasser Arafat, in being riddled with violence and corruption.      

How will the radical, nuclear bomb-seeking Shiite Islamic regime in Iran react to the reported Hamas triumph?  What about Tehran’s main Arab ally Syria?  What can we now expect from Hizbullah, the Iranian-Syrian proxy militia force stationed on Israel’s northern border that has given much material and media support to Hamas in recent years?  No one can say for sure, but it seems obvious that the Middle East and the entire world are in for more riveting days ahead!