The history of Hamas

Plus: The housewives who worked for the CIA |

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By Made by History / Produced by Olivia B. Waxman This week, the top story in the news remains Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel, and the war that has resulted from it. Israel’s determination to eradicate Hamas raises questions about the past: Where did the group come from, and what might that tell us about what comes next? Through Made by History—which has partnered with TIME History, and will work with TIME's Olivia B. Waxman to bring you this newsletter going forward—Ibrahim Al-Marashi, a historian of the Middle East, took on these questions. He chronicles how Hamas emerged and gained power in the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to Israel’s focus on the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The group’s terrorist tactics ignited a cycle of violence and retribution that has destroyed the peace process. As Al-Marashi warns, this backstory suggests that Israel must be careful in its push to eliminate Hamas, as the group's history is one of unintended consequences.

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FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1973: The October war TIME The Oct. 15, 1973, cover of TIME “Though both Egypt and Syria insisted that invading Israeli troops had started the war, the evidence clearly indicated that the fourth Arab-Israeli war in 25 years had been launched by a massive Arab invasion. Within 24 hours, Israeli troops had stemmed the Arab thrust and were delivering a brutal counterattack. News of the invasion sent Israeli civilians cleaning out their bomb shelters, filling their bathtubs with water and taping their windows for blackouts. At several synagogues, services were interrupted as the sextons stood up and called out the names of young men who were being summoned to duty; other worshipers, on hearing the news, quickly folded their prayer shawls and departed; some returned later, in uniform, to bid their families goodbye. That day, Israeli warplanes buzzed Israel's principal cities, perhaps as a signal for air force call-ups; but it was a curious occurrence, because planes had never flown over Israel during Yom Kippur before.” Read More » This week in 1981: Anwar Sadat TIME The Oct. 19, 1981, cover of TIME “The air around the assassination of Anwar Sadat was dense with fatal ironies. In martial finery, the Nobel Peace prizewinner sat admiring his nation's annual celebration of force; it was the anniversary of the 1973 day when Egypt plunged across the Suez Canal to break Israel's Bar Lev Line. Now death jumped out of his beloved army's line of march. The scene came to the world in that stricken electronic burst that has now, after much experience, become a sort of art form, a genre of the politics of terror and risk and awful surprise: television verite abruptly pouring bulletins into the global village, the images of anchormen nervously fighting for a grip on things. The mind behaved like the hand-held television cameras that reeled wildly from sky to earth and then zoomed in on that Guernica of tumbled chairs and shot bodies and blood smears.” Read More » This week in 1997: Hillary Clinton PATRICK DEMARCHELIER The Oct. 20, 1997, cover of TIME “‘There is no formula that I'm aware of for being a successful or fulfilled woman today,’ Hillary Rodham Clinton once said. ‘Perhaps it would be easier...if we could be handed a pattern and cut it out, just as our mothers and grandmothers and foremothers were. But that is not the way it is today, and I'm glad it is not.’ On Oct. 26, Hillary turns 50, which is a birthday that compels almost any woman to step back and examine whether the drape and line of her life fit the woman she once dreamed of becoming. …[T]he First Lady will lead a major White House conference on child care next week; she promises to lay out the problem's complexities with her customary intellectual rigor. ‘You have to put the issue in front of the American people and get them to look at it honestly,’ she told TIME last week in a late-night interview at her hotel suite in Panama City, Panama, where she spoke at a conference of First Ladies of the Americas. But already the ideological lines on child care are forming, bracing for confrontation.” Read More »

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