Israel says Hamas ‘is ISIS.’ But it’s not.

In the grim aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, a slogan spread. “Hamas is ISIS,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, linking the grotesque slaughter carried out by the Palestinian faction’s militants to the ravages of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria almost a decade prior. The latter — driven by an apocalyptic, millenarian creed — had embarked on a frenzy of killing, torture, grisly execution and abductions of civilians from communities of supposed apostates and enemies. The reports of what Hamas fighters did across towns and kibbutzim in southern Israel recalled the cruelty and savagery of the Islamic State’s rampage.

But scholars of the Middle East contend that such rhetoric deliberately flattens the deep forces at play. Saying there’s no distinction between Hamas and the Islamic State is “an effective tactic to paint it — and all Gazans, given many Israeli leaders’ generalizing language — as inhuman, irredeemably evil and therefore legitimate targets for savagery in reprisal,” argued Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus. She added that Hamas’s Islamist character and theological convictions were arguably less important than its self-styled vision of being the armed standard-bearer of Palestinian national liberation.

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