by Austin Michael Bodetti. He is a student in the Gabelli Presidential Scholars Program at Boston College and a reporter for War Is Boring. He focuses on the relationship between Islam and conflict in Syria and Sudan.

Hamas chief Khaled Mashal waves to the crowd during a rally marking the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas, in Gaza City, 2012.
Hamas runs a police state in its territory. “The press is still heavily monitored and controlled, Fatah members are watched, and the sheer visibility of armed Hamas police and militia forces is intimidating,” wrote The New York Times. “After having confronted and disarmed significant Fatah-supporting hamullas, or clans, Hamas has a near monopoly on arms inside Gaza.” Unlike the Palestinian National Authority (PA), which must submit to Israel by controlling and limiting the paramilitaries operating in the West Bank, Hamas guides the resistance movements and terrorist organizations in Gaza toward jihad against the Jewish state. PIJ has worked with Hamas to attack Israeli territory. As PIJ has lost one of its few commanders in the West Bank, the paramilitary may come to depend more on Gaza and therefore Hamas to continue striking Israel. The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a coalition of a number of armed Palestinian groups and believed to be the third strongest faction active in the Gaza Strip, has allied themselves with Hamas after opposing the PA’s relationship with and submission to Israel. “The intifada will continue and will become the greatest strategic turning point in the history of the Palestinian struggle,” asserted a Hamas official. “Nothing will be able to stop this intifada. Not the occupying enemy and not its security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority.” Hamas has sensed its superiority over other Palestinian factions, recognizing its leadership in fighting Israel. Because paramilitaries such as PIJ and the PRC cooperate with it rather than compete with it — while the PA has abandoned resisting Israel altogether — Hamas understands that it has succeeded where other Palestinian factions have failed. Few can pose a challenge to its rulership in Gaza and over the remaining anti-Israeli terrorist organizations in Palestine.

Palestinians of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, display a Gaza Strip made M75 rocket during a parade marking the 27th anniversary of Hamas’s creation on 14 December, 2014.
PIJ has avoided the difficulties that Hamas faces in governing Gaza by focusing on jihad against Israel. “Because Islamic Jihad has not participated in elections, it is difficult to determine its popularity in that respect,” wrote Al-Monitor. “The burden of governance has cost Hamas popularity on the ground as it struggles to steer Gaza through the hardships associated with the Israeli–Egyptian siege and a series of economic and political crises.” Two years ago, PIJ launched rockets to punish the Jewish state for killing some of its fighters. Hamas, meanwhile, refrained from fighting Israel because of the potential consequences for Gaza’s infrastructure, which it would need to rebuild. “The Palestinian Islamic Jihad wants to reestablish a sovereign, Islamic Palestinian state with the geographic borders of the pre-1948 mandate Palestine,” observed the Council on Foreign Relations. “The PIJ advocates the destruction of Israel through violent means; it approaches the Arab–Israeli conflict as an ideological war, not a territorial dispute. PIJ members see violence as the only way to remove Israel from the Middle East map and reject any two-state arrangement in which Israel and Palestine coexist.” Though hard-liners compose Hamas, analysts have viewed PIJ as more extreme, refusing to concede to Israel where Hamas or other Palestinian factions might. Whereas Hamas has become mainstream, PIJ prides itself on representing Israel’s fiercest Palestinian enemy, threatening to attack however, whenever, and wherever it can.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah (L) and Fatah leader Faruq Qaddumi (R), who runs the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Tunis-based political department, attend a conference in Tehran in support of Gaza and Palestinians on March 4, 2009 (Behrouz Mehri / AFP /Getty Images).