Following five years of strained relations between Hamas and Tehran over the Syrian civil war, the Iranian capital recently had many visits from high-profile Hamas leaders, most notably the visit paid in late October by the newly elected deputy chief of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, who following the visit said that the two parties are on the path of fully restoring bilateral relations to the level of strength they had in the past.
Hamas had optionally withdrawn from Syria months after protests broke out in 2011 since the group's Damascus-based leadership rejected taking any supportive position on Bashar Assad's regime and called on different occasions to respond to the Syrian people's just demands. Furthermore, it implicitly criticized Iranian intervention in the country and the atrocities committed by the Assad regime in the following months and years. Not only concerning Syria, Hamas also issued a statement welcoming the Saudi-led Arab coalition's intervention in Yemen in 2015, which aimed and continues to attack the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels who overran the Yemeni capital Sanaa a year before.
Hamas voiced on different occasions that its exit from Syria and its decrying of the Houthis in Yemen targeted firstly to satisfy Arabs and Muslims who were totally indignant to what was going on in the two countries. But it was clear that the group's positions also came to draw Saudi attention, particularly the new Saudi leadership, King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who came to the throne after the death of King Abdullah. However, the Saudi reaction to Hamas's bids for rapprochement was extremely cold and any change had yet to be taken toward the Gaza-based group. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia embraced many anti-Hamas policies on the regional level, which made the group seriously think to throw in its lot with Iran again.
The first sign of this was shutting the Saudi door in front of Hamas leaders. In July 2015, a delegation of prominent Hamas leaders, headed by former leader of the group Khaled Mishaal, paid a visit to Saudi Arabia during which they met with King Salman and the crown prince of that time, Muhammad bin Nayef. The Hamas spokesman expressed the group's comfort and satisfaction with the Mishaal visit, saying that it would be a turning point for improving relations with the kingdom. Hamas's visit to Riyadh angered Tehran, as some Iranian media outlets decried the move, saying that it came upon a Saudi request to involve some Hamas fighters in the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, which Hamas totally rejected. What was disappointing for Hamas from this visit was Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir's statements two days afterward, affirming that the visit carried no official features. Jubeir went on to assert that the Hamas leaders came to Riyadh to perform the rituals of umrah, and their meeting with King Salman regarded that. Jubeir's remarks were shocking not only for Hamas, but also for observers who were betting on a shift in the tendencies of the new Saudi leadership.
After the labeling
The second and the main dynamic that prompted Hamas to quickly knock on the door of Iran was the Saudi classification of Hamas as a terrorist group. A few days after the eruption of the Gulf crisis in June 2017, Jubeir justified his country's cut of ties with Qatar with the claim that Doha was supporting terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. It was an unprecedented move for a Saudi official to label Hamas a terrorist group, since Hamas had been enjoying large popularity among the Saudi people for decades and Saudi charity foundations were among the main financial supporters for Hamas-linked social and humanitarian organizations. Additionally, late Saudi Kings Fahd and Abdullah had received the various leaders of Hamas on different occasions, terming the group an authentic Palestinian resistance group that had the full right to resist against Israeli occupation. Moreover, King Abdullah had sponsored the first talks held between Hamas and Fatah in Mecca in 2007, which culminated in signing a landmark reconciliation agreement. Labeling Hamas a terrorist organization in 2017 was totally unexpected, and the move only favored the Israeli occupation and pushed the Hamas leaders to go back to repair their relations with Iran.
A third reason behind the strained relations between Saudi Arabia and Hamas was Riyadh's rapprochement with Israel. Since U.S. President Donald Trump came to power at the beginning of 2017, there has been implied rhetoric from Saudi officials seeking to normalize relations with Israel, which reached its peak when Mohammad bin Salman became crown prince last May after toppling his cousin Muhammad bin Nayef. Bin Salman's era witnessed Saudi experts and former generals, like Anwar Eshki, appearing on Israeli channels.
The same era that Avichay Adraee, the official spokesman of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), wrote an opinion in one of the biggest Saudi newspapers at a time when Palestinians were blocked from getting byline there. Such rapprochement came as part of the Trump-backed so-called deal of the century, which, according to Israeli leaks, aimed at achieving regional peace by bringing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestinians and Israelis to one table. A regional peace process that sought to give Palestinians scattered territories in the West Bank and to send the people of the Gaza Strip to Egypt's Sinai desert in exchange of normalizing ties with Israel. Such rapprochement, which Israeli leaders had not expected in their best dreams, has been analyzed as bin Salman's striving to gain the required international legitimacy to be enthroned as the Saudi king following his father's demise.
In front of these unprecedented developments, Hamas found itself ejected from its biggest Arab and Muslim depth, Saudi Arabia, since all bids to improve relations with Riyadh's leadership ended in vain. The Saudi door was shut to Hamas leaders, then it had been labeled a terrorist group and, after that, the guardians of the holiest Muslim sites started to come close with the leaders of the terrorist state. There is an Arabic proverb: I have to ally with my brother to defeat my cousins, and then with my cousins against strangers. Unfortunately, the Saudis left their Palestinian brothers to confront strangers alone, and that is why they resorted to their Iranian cousins.
* Gaza-based journalist