If you read only one piece about the hudna (Arabic for “strategic truce”) to which Hamas has agreed, let it be this excellent, illuminating article by Robert Spencer that demonstrates beyond any doubt why the hudna isn’t worth the paper on which it’s written: Can Hamas Be Trusted?

Hamas holds a vastly different vision of the nature of the conflict and its resolution from that of the PA. Yasir Arafat, although he himself has called for jihad on many occasions and is notorious for saying one thing to the West and something very different to the Muslim world, still keeps a cross on his desk (as well as a paperweight replica of the Dome of the Rock) and is careful, especially when speaking on the international stage, to call (as he did at the UN in 1974) for “one democratic state where Christian, Jew, and Muslim live in justice, equality, fraternity and progress.” This kind of statement, however contravened in practice, demonstrates the PLO’s ideological provenance in enlightenment thinking that abhors religious divisions and envisions a secular state. This, of course, is just what numerous American analysts of the Middle East want to see established for the Israelis and Palestinians.

Hamas was founded in 1988 in direct opposition to such ideas. The Hamas charter confronts this problem directly, describing the idea of a secular state as a Western colonial imposition upon the Muslim world: “Under the influence of the circumstances which surrounded the founding of the PLO, and the ideological confusion which prevails in the Arab world as a result of the ideological invasion which has swept the Arab world since the rout of the Crusades, and which has been reinforced by Orientalism and the Christian Mission, the PLO has adopted the idea of a Secular State.”

Such a state, in Hamas’s view, must be rejected: “Secular thought is diametrically opposed to religious thought… . Therefore, in spite of our appreciation for the PLO and its possible transformation in the future, and despite the fact that we do not denigrate its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we cannot substitute it for the Islamic nature of Palestine by adopting secular thought. For the Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion, and anyone who neglects his religion is bound to lose.”

In line with all this, and in contrast to Yasir Arafat’s frequent public overtures to Christian Arabs (which are not necessarily matched by his less-publicized behavior), Hamas is an exclusively Muslim movement. “As the Movement adopts Islam as its way of life, its time dimension extends back as far as the birth of the Islamic Message and of the Righteous Ancestor. Its ultimate goal is Islam, the Prophet its model, the Quran its Constitution.”

Nor is its mission restricted to Israel only. Of its Islamic mission, the Hamas charter says: “Its spatial dimension extends wherever on earth there are Muslims, who adopt Islam as their way of life; thus, it penetrates to the deepest reaches of the land and to the highest spheres of Heavens… . By virtue of the distribution of Muslims, who pursue the cause of the Hamas, all over the globe, and strive for its victory, for the reinforcement of its positions and for the encouragement of its Jihad, the Movement is a universal one.”