By Elizaveta Naumova

On January 26, 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections. Twenty years later, Gaza is still living inside the consequences of that vote.

What was then framed in Washington and European capitals as a democratic experiment gone wrong has since been treated as an anomaly – an error to be isolated, sanctioned, and erased from political memory. The movement that won a free and internationally monitored election was declared illegitimate almost overnight, its victory rejected in practice even as democracy was praised in principle. The political choice of millions of Palestinians was not overturned by a counter-vote, but by blockade, isolation, and force.

Today, as Gaza enters yet another fragile ceasefire after more than 100 days of war, that unresolved contradiction has returned with devastating clarity. More than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed, entire neighborhoods erased, and a society pushed to the brink – all while Israel and its Western allies continue to insist that Hamas neither represents the Palestinian people nor can be allowed to govern them.

Yet this position raises a fundamental contradiction: if Hamas is not legitimate and can’t rule the enclave, why is an entire civilian population treated as if it weren’t governed by a choice people consciously made?

Beyond the militia: How Hamas became a mass political force

In February 2024, then-US President Joe Biden addressed this contradiction directly, writing that “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people” and emphasizing that “the vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas.” His words were meant to draw a line between an armed group and a civilian population facing collective devastation. But they also exposed an uncomfortable truth: for more than two decades, US policy has rested on denying Palestinians their rights to vote.

The Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas (meaning ‘enthusiasm’), is perceived as the most influential spoiler of Palestinian-Israeli peace.

Historically related to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by a majority of Western states, which have not recognized it as a legitimate political force. But, as Russian expert Grigory Lukyanov explains, the late 1980s and the 1990s became a period when many movements that had emerged under the banners of Islamic revival and Islamic fundamentalism began to face a growing question: “what comes next – what can we offer besides war?”

“Hamas had its own motivations for moving into socio-political activity: consolidating public support around itself. An important factor was that Hamas stood for a position that completely contradicted the course taken by the Palestine Liberation Organization toward ‘land for peace’, renouncing violence and agreeing to negotiations with Israel (and essentially toward the ‘two states for two peoples’ principle). However, at that moment it was supported by very few Palestinians,” says Lukyanov, a research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and deputy dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Russia’s State Academic University for the Humanities.

Hamas felt and understood the trend perfectly well, Lukyanov adds, and saw itself as the embodiment and leader of this opposing current: a force that would defend that idea and show that it was not some rogue actor or outsider, but rather capable of demonstrating its social role.

Hamas also managed to combine three elements that no other Palestinian movement managed to fuse so effectively: armed resistance, religious legitimacy, and a vast social welfare network. It ran schools, charities, clinics, and mosques, embedding itself deeply into everyday life, especially in Gaza. For many Palestinians, Hamas was not just a militia, but an alternative system of governance long before it formally entered government.

This growing legitimacy was visible in hard data. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) consistently recorded Hamas’ rising popularity throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Its surveys showed a slow but steady shift away from Fatah and toward Hamas, driven by disillusionment with corruption, nepotism, and the collapse of the Oslo peace process.

Between March and April 1997 alone, trust in Hamas rose from 8.6% to 10.3%, while trust in Fatah dropped from 45.8% to 41.3%. These were not minor fluctuations. They reflected a structural change in political loyalties. Hamas was becoming a credible political actor, not merely a protest movement.

Gradually, Hamas sponsors, including Iran and Syria, as well as other states – such as the US and the Gulf monarchies – also pushed the organization toward public politics, Lukyanov explains. “For Hamas, it was always important to try to sit on two chairs at once: not to keep all its eggs in one basket, not to rely only on states that supported a purely military solution – only on Iran and Syria,” he added.

“Iran and Syria could provide weapons, military experience, and certain technologies. But they could not achieve other goals – for example, legitimizing Hamas across the broader Muslim world – because they themselves were constrained in their resources and capabilities. They could not provide sufficient funding, and they could not provide enough freedom of maneuver for Hamas to do broad political work, including beyond Gaza and the Palestinian arena.”

By late 2005, Hamas was no longer just gaining ground. It was dominating. In December 2005, PCPSR conducted an exit poll during the fourth round of municipal elections in the cities of Nablus, Jenin, Ramallah, and al-Bireh. Hamas lists received 59% of the vote, compared to only 26% for Fatah and 15% for all other factions combined. Even more telling were voters’ intentions for the upcoming parliamentary elections: 41% said they planned to vote for Hamas versus 21% for Fatah, while 23% remained undecided.

Democracy as dogma: How Washington misread the moment

This transformation inside Hamas unfolded at the same moment Washington was gripped by a very different kind of transformation of its own.

When George W. Bush began his second term in January 2005, he was convinced that exporting democracy had become the central mission of American foreign policy. In his view, democracy was not something that had to be built patiently through institutions, stability, and political culture. It was humanity’s “natural state.” Remove repression, hold elections, and freedom would follow almost automatically.

In the Palestinian territories, Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah had won the 2005 presidential election after the death of Yasser Arafat, reaffirming their formal commitment to negotiations and to a two-state solution. For Bush, this seemed like proof that history was moving in the right direction. The fact that Fatah had a long record of armed struggle and attacks against Israel, including against civilian targets, was treated as secondary to its new role as a negotiating partner.

Then Israel withdrew from Gaza after nearly four decades of occupation. Not only were Israeli troops pulled out, but around 8,000 settlers were removed, military bases dismantled, and the entire structure of direct control abruptly collapsed.

For Bush, this moment looked like an opportunity. If dictatorship and occupation had been removed, democracy, he believed, would naturally take their place.

What made this moment explosive was that Hamas, which had boycotted earlier votes as a matter of principle, now chose to participate. The same movement that had once rejected electoral politics as legitimizing Oslo suddenly stepped inside the very institutions it had condemned. The transformation Hamas was undergoing internally collided with Bush’s belief that elections themselves were the cure for political conflict.

Not everyone shared that confidence. Dennis Ross, a US negotiator on Israel-Palestine, warned that allowing armed movements to compete in elections without first disarming was a recipe for disaster. Militias, he argued, should not be allowed to fight the system and run it at the same time. Even Fatah, terrified of losing, quietly explored ways to block the vote. Israel, too, was deeply uneasy.

The paradox was striking: Hamas and President Bush were pushing for elections; Fatah and Israel were trying to delay or prevent them.

“One line of thinking [inside the Bush administration] was that drawing Hamas into public politics should weaken it – above all by pushing away the most radical elements, or by creating some internal chaos within Hamas,” Lukyanov explains.

“The logic was this: bringing Hamas into the public arena means, among other things, forcing it to divert resources that could have gone to war toward acting as a public actor, including in social and economic spheres, maintaining and expanding its electoral base,” Lukyanov adds.

The US policy also operated through a kind of dichotomy: on the one hand, there were always people in the administration who didn’t believe in Hamas from the start; on the other, the real policy sometimes became a not-entirely rational compromise between these opposing camps.

This was the moment where two evolving logics collided. Hamas was slowly shifting from rejection toward political engagement, however, not changing its stance on Israel (rejecting to recognize it), and the Palestinians didn’t really want a two-state solution: they felt abandoned and wronged by Israel and its military campaign. Washington was shifting from realism toward democratic idealism. Neither side fully understood what would happen when those paths crossed.

Social power before political power

At the same time, the organization was becoming the mirror image of everything Fatah was no longer perceived to be. Where Fatah symbolized compromise without results, Hamas represented resistance with discipline. Where Fatah embodied corruption, Hamas cultivated an image of moral austerity. Where the Palestinian Authority (PA) failed to deliver services, Hamas filled the gaps with charities, clinics, schools, and welfare networks.

The contrast mattered deeply in Gaza – more isolated, poor, and more densely populated than the West Bank. Israeli closures strangled its economy, and the PA’s institutions there were weaker. Hamas’ social infrastructure was strongest precisely where the state-like institutions were weakest. It became the practical authority long before becoming the formal one.

The municipal elections of 2004-2005 were the decisive warning signal. Hamas performed far better than expected, especially in Gaza and in major West Bank cities. By December 2005, exit polls showed Hamas winning 59% of votes in major municipalities, compared to only 26% for Fatah. Even voters who were not fully committed to Hamas increasingly saw it as the only force capable of breaking Fatah’s monopoly.

By that point, the Palestinian political order had already shifted. Fatah was no longer seen as the default governing party. It had lost credibility, internal cohesion, and its ability to offer a compelling political future. Hamas did not simply gain support; it filled a vacuum created by Fatah’s collapse in public trust.

This momentum carried Hamas further into formal politics when it made the internationally supported decision to contest the 2006 legislative elections. Ahead of the vote, the movement released an electoral platform that still framed “armed resistance” as a legitimate means of ending the Israeli occupation, but otherwise marked a significant departure from its earlier rhetoric.

Anti-Semitic language was absent, explicit calls for Israel’s destruction were dropped, and the program emphasized democratic governance, separation of powers, civil liberties, and social rights. It also called for a minimum wage and the creation of “labor unions and occupational societies.”

The result shocked most outside observers, and even many within Hamas itself. Its “Change and Reform” electoral list won 76 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Hamas’ victory reflected a combination of factors: its rejection of the failed Oslo process, its conservative moral image, its vast network of social charities, and widespread frustration with Fatah’s corruption and stagnation.

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Via https://www.rt.com/news/631511-how-west-rejected-hamas-democratic-victory/