What is Hamas and what does it want?

That's a fantastic question.

Let's get into it.

Hamas is in a very sort of structural institutional sense.

A social movement, a social movement, a religious movement, founded in 1987 in the Gaza Strip.

It claimed to be, it saw itself as at its founding,

and to this day, really, fundamentally, as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt is an organization found in the 1920s that wanted to profoundly

reform the Arab and Muslim world. Muslim Brotherhood theologians and thinkers who concluded that Islam had actually reached

a point of terrible, terrible weakness and backwardness, and that was due to Muslims abandoning

their faith and their true calling and true purpose in this world.

And if they returned to the holy generations, the first Islam, the original Islam, the Islam

under the Prophet Muhammad, or immediately thereafter in the first generations of Islam, the Islam that conquered, the Islam that built an empire, mass converting Islam, if we return to their piety, we will regain our mojo, we will regain our place in history. We will regain our ability to meet modernity, this unbelievable moment of Western power, Western competence, Western science, Western economic growth.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an attempt to say, Islam is the answer to everything that ails the Muslim world today.

And Hamas is a branch of that.

But it is a branch of that in certain contexts that make it something very different from just the 1920s Muslim Brotherhood.

It believes in the redemption of Islam.

It is fundamentally about the

restoration of Islam to a great conquering ethos. But Hamas, of course, is born in 1987,

in a Gaza under Israeli military rule. And it very much sees the question of the Palestinian cause

and of Israeli rule over Palestine, the entirety of the

land, as Palestinians see it, not just West Bank in Gaza. Hamas does not support the two-state

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