How is Hamas different from Yasser Arafats Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)?
The PLO is an umbrella organization that has been overwhelmingly secular since its inception. Today it remains dominated by the secular nationalists of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization. Before Oslo, the PLO’s affiliate organizations, which included smaller leftist groups such as the PFLP and DFLP, operated from exile in the Arab world. The PLO’s various factions maintained small guerrilla wings that periodically carried out terror attacks against Israeli targets, and also operated illegal underground structures in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas emerged as a direct rival to the secular in PLO in the West Bank and Gaza in 1987. Whereas the Israeli military authorities had banned PLO organizations from operating openly there, it consciously allowed Hamas whose activities did not at that time include armed actions to flourish as an alternative to Arafat, who remained Israel’s primary enemy at the time. But Hamas’s active role in the first intifada led to Israel banning the organization in
