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.”
