ABSTRACT
Palestinian politics is dominated by the struggle between Fatah and Hamas for hegemony of the Palestinian resistance narrative, with both parties advocating differing paths for ridding Palestinians of Israeli occupation and achieving independence. While Fatah’s strategy involves remaining an amenable partner in the Middle East Peace Process, Hamas’s strategy is still evolving. After Hamas surprisingly won the 2006 elections, Israel imposed a siege on Gaza to exorcise Hamas from Palestinian politics. With Hamas determined to remain a viable political actor it needed to re-evaluate its political strategy. This chapter analyses this strategy and how Hamas copes concomitantly with Israel’s occupation, the siege, and its competition with Fatah. The chapter investigates how Hamas has implemented concurrent domestic and diplomatic strategies to buttress its political legitimacy domestically and diplomatically. Domestically, Hamas employs “soft-Islamisation” and “soft-authoritarian” policy frameworks, while diplomatically it has made incremental ideological compromises concerning the two-state solution and recognising Israel.
