It’s official: The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) announced on May 1 that it recognizes Israel's 1967 borders. This is no trivial matter. The unyielding Hamas charter issued nine months after the movement was founded in 1988 left no room for such a compromise. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and other members of the founding team clearly delineated the borders of the Islamic Palestinian state they aspired to establish: from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, including all of Israel and the West Bank. The charter presented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash between Islam and Jewish heretics. It ruled out any future leeway by designating the land on which Israel was founded as “waqf,” Arabic for “sacred endowment.” It warned that whoever gives it up would be considered a heathen and traitor to the Islamic religion.

Article 11 of the Hamas Covenant declares, “The land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that.”

Over the years, the movement’s leaders, including Yassin, came to realize that there was a great distance between the founding document and reality on the ground. Although mass rallies in the Gaza Strip ruled by Hamas still echoed with calls for the annihilation of the State of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic one in its place, the leaders knew in their hearts that neither goal was feasible. Israel is a fait accompli, a strong and developed state, and calls for its destruction are an aspiration that cannot come to fruition. Over the years, top Hamas leaders have occasionally tried using back channels to pass along to the “Zionist enemy” messages in direct contravention of the charter.

In his book “Man in the Shadows,” former Mossad head Efraim Halevy wrote that even Yassin wanted to find a loophole in the uncompromising charter that he himself wrote. Halevy recounted that after the failed Israeli attempt on Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshaal’s life in 1997 in Jordan, King Hussein asked Halevy why Israel was rejecting a proposal by Yassin — then a prisoner in an Israeli jail — for a long-term cease-fire. Halevy hadn’t known anything about the proposal until that moment because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not informed the country’s top defense officials.