Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance

By Tareq Baconi

Hamas has ruled Gaza and the lives of the two million Palestinians who live there since 2006. Hamas Contained, first published in 2018, offers a history of the group, drawing on interviews with organization leaders and their publications. Tareq Baconi maps Hamas's thirty-year transition from fringe military resistance towards governance, culminating in Israeli efforts to contain the movement to the Gaza Strip. Baconi argues that under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively been marginalized in favor of military action against Hamas, and by implication, all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This dynamic—a violent equilibrium between Hamas and Israel and the movement's containment in the Gaza Strip—lasted for sixteen years, until it was decidedly shattered by Hamas's offensive on October 7, 2023.

Now with new material that provides an analytical framework and reflection on Hamas's offensive of October 7, 2023, and Israel's ensuing war on Gaza, Hamas Contained is an even more essential guide to understanding Hamas and the brutal violence of Israel's war on Palestinians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781503605817

Book preview

Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures

HAMAS CONTAINED

A HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE

TAREQ BACONI

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Author’s Statement © 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This paperback edition with a new Author’s Statement and subtitle published in 2024.

This book was originally issued with the subtitle Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

ISBN 9781503632622

Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Baconi, Tareq, author.

Title: Hamas contained : the rise and pacification of Palestinian resistance / Tareq Baconi.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Series: Stanford studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017050720 (print) | LCCN 2017053020 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503605817 (e-book) | ISBN 9780804797412 (cloth : alk. paper) |

Subjects: LCSH: Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmīyah—History. | Palestinian Arabs—Politics and government. | Palestine—Politics and government—1948– | Gaza Strip—Politics and government. | Arab-Israeli conflict.

Classification: LCC DS119.7 (ebook) | LCC DS119.7 .B173 2018 (print) | DDC 324.25694/2083—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050720

Cover design: Matt Tanner

Cover photo: Tareq Baconi

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/16 Baskerville

To Eva

CONTENTS

Author’s Statement (2024)

Preface (2018)

1. The Rise of Islamic Palestinian Nationalism

2. Military Resistance Comes Undone

3. The Politics of Resistance

4. Strangling Hamas

5. Institutionalizing the Division

6. Regional Misfortunes

Conclusion: Containment and Pacification

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

AUTHOR’S STATEMENT (2024)

When Hamas Contained was published in 2018, it looked as if Israel’s blockade over the Gaza Strip was immovable. Shortly after the book’s release, an event transpired that signaled the possibility of a different future. The 2018–2019 Great March of Return emerged as one of the most sustained episodes of mass mobilization by Palestinian civil society. Thousands of people from throughout the strip converged at the fence area, the so-called border Israel had erected to separate Gaza from the rest of historic Palestine, to challenge the blockade. Palestinians were not only protesting crushing isolation and economic strangulation, but advocating for their right to return to homes from which they and their families had been expelled during Israel’s creation in 1948. A corrective period was underway. Palestinians were transitioning beyond the peace process grounded in the Oslo Accords, with its interminable wait for a Palestinian state, and returning to the first principles of the Palestinian struggle: the right to resist Zionist colonization, to achieve self-determination, and to seek justice for the decimation of Palestine in 1948.

Although the Great March of Return was initiated by civil society, Hamas, as the governing authority of the Gaza Strip, gave its backing and supported the sustained mobilization over many weeks. From the onset, Israel labeled the protests terror marches and employed snipers hidden behind sand dunes on Gaza’s periphery. During weeks that turned into months, peaceful protestors were killed, maimed, and injured as Israel exercised a live-fire policy, killing more than two hundred Palestinians, including forty-six children, and injuring more than thirty-six thousand.¹ Faced with a mounting death toll, international silence, and Israeli intransigence, Hamas—as part of a committee comprising the various factions in Gaza—intervened. It leveraged the marches with armed power, ultimately gaining concessions from Israel regarding the blockade. Under the cover of the protests, Hamas experimented with ways to defuse the security infrastructure around Gaza and solidified a lesson it had learned over the years of its containment: Israel responds only to force.

In 2020, Israel signed normalization agreements with four Arab countries—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan—without granting any concessions to Palestinian self-determination. The question of Palestine had been effectively removed from the international agenda, and the reigning assumption was that Palestinians had been successfully pacified. A year after the signing, a consensus emerged among international and Israeli human rights organizations that Israeli violations of international law amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.² B’tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, noted that Israel was a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a formulation that challenges the assumption that Israel as a state can be separated from its military occupation.³

Palestinians have long understood their reality in these terms, and that same year, in 2021, they rose in the Unity Intifada, breaking through the colonial partitions imposed on them—by uniting Palestinian citizens of Israel, Jerusalemites, Palestinians in Gaza, and the West Bank—and asserting their identity as a single people facing different facets of the same colonial regime. Israel had been actively working to expel families from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to make room for Jewish settlers, triggering widespread popular mobilization. The protests centered on al-Aqsa Mosque as Palestinians congregated at the holy site for prayers and iftar, the meal breaking the day’s fast, during the month of Ramadan and were met with Israeli force and mass arrests. Hamas responded to protect Palestinians from Israeli aggression and to rally for al-Aqsa—a charged landmark and, for Hamas specifically, a potent symbol given its Islamist ideology. For the first time, the movement fired rockets from Gaza into Jerusalem, effectively breaking the violent equilibrium that had taken root since its containment in 2007.

In essence, Hamas was transitioning from its forced acquiescence to containment and toward a more explicit challenge to Israeli domination. Yet these shifts went unnoticed by Israel, which continued to mete out daily violence against Palestinians with full impunity. Settler violence expanded throughout the West Bank, with 507 Palestinians killed between January and October 2023, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005.⁴ Efforts to Judaize Jerusalem and areas within Israel, such as the Galilee, continued apace. The right-wing Likud-led government, with settlers occupying the highest echelons of power, pursued plans for the solidification, expansion, and entrenchment of the regime, firmly confident in its ability to maintain Palestinians behind walls and checkpoints at minimal cost to Israeli society.

Domestically, any semblance of opposition to Israeli apartheid was absent. In 2023, protests erupted among Jewish citizens of Israel pushing back against the government’s antidemocratic judicial reforms and other right-wing policies. Protestors chanted for democracy, making no mention of Israel’s occupation. Their message was clear: they were seeking to protect a democracy for Jews alone. The millions of Palestinians living under Israeli rule were to remain disenfranchised, absent from the protestors’ demands. Globally, there was no interest in holding Israel to account for its consistent violations of international law. As a powerful state with extensive military force, Israel looked secure in its surroundings. This book concludes by documenting the failure of the revolutions that swept over the region beginning in 2010, and by 2021, the normalization agreements emerged as a central element of the counter-revolution. A new militarized architecture of surveillance and oppression—an antidemocratic regional framework—was well underway in the Middle East, and Israel seemed firmly positioned at its heart.

Alongside a thirty-year overview of Hamas’s evolution as a social movement, political party, and military organization, Hamas Contained makes a central argument: Israel managed to divide and rule the Palestinians, creating two enclaves, or Bantustan-like structures, where Palestinian parties governed without enjoying any real sovereignty, operating under the unyielding structure of Israeli rule. I made a key distinction, however, between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Rule in the former was compliant; the Palestinian Authority had committed to security coordination, recognized the state of Israel, and cracked down on resistance. Under the guise of the peace process, liberation was demoted in favor of governance, turning the Palestinian Authority into a central pillar of Israeli apartheid.

Rule in the latter, by contrast, was grounded in resistance, whereby Hamas had turned the body of the Palestinian Authority, into which it had been elected in 2006 and from which it governed Gaza after its takeover in 2007, into a structure from which to challenge Israeli rule. In this book, I argue that the movement had been temporarily pacified, shackled by the weight of its governance responsibilities and the hegemonic oppression of the blockade without being ideologically compromised; it retained its commitment to liberation, and engaged with Israel primarily through force. It did so while signaling its readiness for a longer-term political settlement, with the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, without relinquishing the core drivers of the Palestinian struggle: legitimating Zionism or conceding on the right of return. Whereas the Palestinian Authority had been ideologically pacified, Hamas’s government was only practically compliant—its finger remained on the trigger.

In 2017, when this book went to press, such a distinction did not have meaningful implications. A long horizon stretched forward where it seemed possible that Palestinians in Gaza would remain blockaded indefinitely. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the violent equilibrium between Hamas and Israel would generate major escalations and become deadlier for Palestinians with every round. But there was also the conviction that Israel’s blockade would remain impenetrable, forcing Hamas to succumb to its despised containment. The movement may have shown signs that it was chafing against its confinement, and the growing population in an imprisoned enclave was a ticking time bomb, but the idea of a military exit for Hamas was far-fetched, given the perceived wisdom regarding the capabilities of Israel’s security and surveillance infrastructure.

In effect, Hamas appeared locked in a relationship with Israel whereby it would remain simultaneously demonized and relied upon to stabilize the Gaza Strip. Emerging as it did from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, Gaza has historically presented the most extreme manifestation of Israel’s Bantustan system. The blockade—grounded in policies of demographic engineering that Israel pursues to sustain the illusion that it is a Jewish state even while it rules over more non-Jews than Jews in the territory under its control—served Israel’s aims of containment, both of Palestinians and of Hamas. Between 2007 and 2023, Israel relied primarily on Hamas to govern Gaza’s population, obfuscating its own legal responsibility as the occupying power while adopting a mowing the lawn policy to deter Hamas militarily. For Israel, this dynamic worked so well that it never developed a political strategy for Gaza, pursuing—as it did in the West Bank—measures to manage, rather than resolve, the occupation.

The shocking Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, undermined a number of these assumptions and was a turning point in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The offensive was named Operation al-Aqsa Flood in Arabic, a title that reaffirmed Hamas’s use of al-Aqsa as a Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic symbol speaking far beyond the confines of Palestine. Hamas fighters converged on Israeli territory by sea, air, and ground under the cover of rockets fired from Gaza. Many of the fighters who pushed into Israeli towns were descendants of refugees from the very lands they glided into, stepping onto those grounds for the first time since their families’ expulsion. Within hours they had besieged the towns; broken into homes; killed 695 Israeli civilians, 373 soldiers and policemen, and 71 foreigners—mostly Thai workers—and kidnapped 240 others to use for negotiating the release of thousands of imprisoned Palestinians.⁵

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Hamas’s containment was finite, lasting for sixteen years between 2007 and 2023. At its core, Hamas’s attack was an unprecedented and bloody display of anticolonial violence. It can be read only as a response to Israel’s relentless provocation of occupying another people, besieging them, and denying their freedom and right to self-determination for more than 75 years. So thoroughly was Gaza erased from the Israeli psyche that Hamas’s offensive came as if out of nowhere, dealing the most lethal blow to the Israeli military and public since 1948. Within hours, the infrastructure that had been put in place to contain Hamas, and with it to wish away the Palestinians of Gaza, was trampled before our disbelieving eyes. As Palestinian fighters and civilians burst into Israel, the collision between the myth of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state without responsibility for its non-Jewish subjects and its reality as a purveyor of violent apartheid was shocking, tragic, and ultimately irreversible.

By breaking out of its prison, Hamas revealed the strategic poverty at the heart of the assumption that Palestinians would acquiesce indefinitely to their imprisonment, that Israel could maintain—and expand—its colonial regime at no cost to Israeli society. The movement broke through a central pillar of Zionism, that Israel would be able to provide a safe haven for Jews without having to address the Palestinian question in political terms. And in so doing, it laid to waste the viability of Israel’s partitionist approach, that Palestinians can be siphoned off into Bantustans while the state that controls their territories continues to enjoy peace and security.

In that sense, October 7 ushered in a paradigmatic rupture, hurtling Palestinians and Israelis from an era that had lasted more than 75 years into a new reality, the contours of which remain unknown at the time of this writing. The rupture risks drawing the region into an all-out conflagration, encompassing Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Rather than attempt to de-escalate, the administration of President Joseph R. Biden poured fuel on a raging fire, likening Hamas’s offensive to the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a thinly disguised attempt to preemptively excuse Israel’s extreme use of force in Gaza. In speeches after the attack, Biden described Hamas as pure evil, comparing its offensive with the so-called Islamic State and using widely discredited and doctored Israeli photographs and videos to stir up orientalist and Islamophobic tropes that would allegedly justify the ferocity of Israel’s response.

Under the guise of self-defense, and armed with an American green light, Israel retaliated with the stated goal of decimating Hamas. The extent of Israel’s killing and destruction in the Gaza Strip has prompted scholars, experts, and lawyers to argue that the Israeli state is committing genocide against Palestinians. At the time of this writing, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians. The UN has called Gaza a graveyard for children, given the thousands murdered by Israeli forces, which sought to obliterate all signs of life in the strip—destroying schools, hospitals, bakeries, and universities.⁶ In response to Western complicity in Israel’s violence, in January 2024 South Africa brought charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, prompting a ruling from the court that such accusations were plausible and ordering provisional measures to be taken by Israel to minimize the killing of civilians, all of which were ignored.⁷ That same month, a California federal district court also ruled that a plausible case of genocide could be brought against the Biden administration for abetting this crime.⁸ Underpinning the mass killing is also the threat of expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza under the pretext of defeating Hamas, a tragedy that would mark the continuation of the Nakba.

Some analysts have described Hamas’s move as suicidal, given Israel’s reaction, or irresponsible, given the enormous death toll it has led to among Palestinians. Whether either of these characterizations is accurate depends on an analysis of what options Hamas had. There is no doubt that the attack itself was a decisive rupture. From a perspective strictly of military strategy, Hamas certainly had the option of sustaining its equilibrium with Israel indefinitely, remaining constricted within the framework of the blockade. With the release of its 2017 revised charter, Hamas had explored options for further political engagement, formalizing many of the positions described in this book, including accepting a Palestinian state on the 1967 line. There was very little Israeli, let alone international, interest to question the blockade, even when mobilization against it took the form of popular protests, such as in the Great March of Return—and no effort at all to respond to these changes in Hamas’s position. Many Palestinians in Gaza came to describe their confinement as a slow death, and Israeli, regional, and international actors assumed that Palestinians had been defeated, unable to fundamentally overturn the structure of Israeli apartheid.

Seen in this light, it is Hamas’s acquiescence to Israeli rule that might be considered suicidal. That Hamas opted to disrupt this dominating structure suggests that it was behaving strategically and remains dedicated to the belief that it is playing a long game. The movement irreversibly shattered the false sense of security Israelis had cloaked themselves in, and their failed efforts to present Israel as invincible and impenetrable. The evident weakness and fragility of Israel’s military can be exploited in the future through a reconstituted Hamas or through another military formation equally committed to armed resistance as a means of liberation. In other words, the disruption itself has emerged as a space for alternative possibilities to surface, whereas, prior to that, there was only the calcified certainty of continued Palestinian oppression.

This is precisely what is existential for Israel, and, supported by Western allies, the state believes that the only way to survive this blow is through the decimation of Hamas, to rebuild deterrence so that nothing like Operation al-Aqsa Flood can happen again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for a total victory, insisting that Hamas will be dismantled, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that Israel will wipe Hamas off the face of this world.⁹ Israel will fail—and is already failing—in attaining this objective. As in any asymmetric struggle, the guerrilla fighters merely have to avoid losing to emerge victorious, whereas the conventional army will lose if it does not achieve its overarching goals. And the goal of decimating Hamas as a movement is as vague as it is unachievable.

Such a strategic and military reading of Hamas’s calculus is almost entirely absent from current Western analysis of the movement and its rationale in the wake of October 7. The dehumanization of Palestinians is so thoroughly pervasive and so unquestioningly echoed by Western leaders that any effort to challenge Israel’s system of domination is met with perplexed reactions and uniform condemnation. In this reading, Hamas acted irrationally, Palestinians in Gaza were disposable to the movement as veritable human shields, and the system in its whole was sustainable. These reactions cohere with a broader tendency toward Western hypocrisy and racism, which has normalized the occupation and daily killing of Palestinians, and reacted only when the violence is directed at Israeli Jews. It is a reading that removes all agency from Palestinian actors seeking to overturn a regime bent on their erasure. It is also one that fails to grapple with the violence and complex ethics of anticolonial resistance, painting all forms of mobilization by Palestinians—peaceful or otherwise—as unacceptable.

Still, Hamas’s operation and the ongoing genocide have raised significant questions for Palestinians, regarding Hamas, Gaza, and the future of their struggle. Many Palestinians, for instance, have voiced worries that Hamas’s offensive is the beginning of another existential crisis. The looming possibility of ethnic cleansing must not be underplayed, and the staggering death toll that civilians in Gaza are experiencing must give collective pause to reflect on the enormous cost that Hamas’s attack instigated, even as the main responsibility for this violence sits with Israel’s regime of apartheid. Furthermore, the wholesale destruction of Gaza has all but made this tiny sliver of land uninhabitable, so that even if the genocide stops, there is a longer-term question as to whether Palestinian life can be sustained there. With the knowledge that Hamas and other factions have gathered over the years, and the expectation that the movement’s offensive would unleash fury on Palestinians, many argue that Hamas should have been prepared for this violence and planned accordingly. Yes, the thinking goes, Hamas’s offensive was strategic in its disruption of the structure of apartheid, but to what end? Where do Palestinians go from here? Determining whether Hamas’s calculus paid off, despite this tragic loss of life, is something Palestinians will be debating for years to come.

What is also worth debating is whether Hamas’s leaders had anticipated that the operation would unfold the way it did. It is arguably the case that the movement had planned a targeted attack against military bases around the Gaza Strip, with the intention of gathering intelligence, disrupting the blockade, and securing combatants as hostages. There is little doubt that such an operation, focused primarily on military targets, would have also elicited a ferocious Israeli response, as the state remained committed to deterrence. However, Operation al-Aqsa Flood far exceeded these narrow objectives, and the ensuing massacre of civilians in Israel has galvanized Israeli and international opinion in ways that Hamas may not have entirely predicted. The scale of the attack, its implications on the Palestinian people, and the level of surprise by Hamas’s political leaders and allies also raise questions as to whether the military wing operated out of bounds. As I argue in this book, Hamas’s military wing often acts autonomously, under the overall strategic direction set by the movement’s leadership but kept at arm’s length to protect the clandestine nature of the wing and the safety of the political leaders. This attack was planned and executed by the military wing in Gaza under the leadership of Yahya Sinwar to such a degree of secrecy that it took most of Hamas’s political leaders by surprise. It raises real questions as to how Hamas as an organization has evolved—and will continue to evolve—from here, given that such a transformative operation was carried out primarily by the military wing, with the political bureau being forced to play catch-up.

Apart from the strict military objectives, Hamas had other factors underpinning its calculus in planning this operation, most notably its ambivalence toward governance. Hamas was shackled by its role as a governing authority in Gaza. When the party ran for elections in 2006, it harbored great reservations about taking on a governing role or even participating in the Palestinian Authority. Hamas leaders articulated that rather than accepting the limitations of governance under occupation, as Fatah had done through the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the movement was intent on using its election victory to revolutionize the political establishment. Hamas spoke about the need to build a society of resistance, an economy of resistance, an ideology of resistance, through those very structures—and to use this as a stepping stone into the PLO, from where it could lead alongside other political factions on setting a vision for the liberation of Palestine and for representing Palestinians in their entirety, beyond those in the occupied territories.

With no real hopes for statehood, Hamas understood that a focus on governance and administration meant beautifying a Bantustan within Israel’s apartheid system, and having few prospects for sovereignty. That is indeed the model in the West Bank, and it would have taken on a more extreme character in the Gaza Strip. The lengthy period of containment suggested that the movement may have become entrapped in its own electoral success and shackled by its governance responsibilities—in other words, pacified. October 7 has clearly shown that the movement had been using this time precisely to revolutionize its base, as had always been its intention. It is counterfactual to consider what alternative path might have been generated had Hamas’s political overtures following its 2017 charter been considered seriously, or what might have happened had Israel’s blockade remained impenetrable or had the operation faltered. The resounding failure of Israeli intelligence and the skilled asymmetric tactics that the movement’s fighters employed suggest that its breakthrough operation exceeded all expectations.

It is not inevitable that Hamas’s strategic shift and its successful disruption of Israeli apartheid will lead to Palestinian liberation. Hamas’s violent challenge to the status quo might well provide Israel with an opportunity to carry out another Nakba, dealing Palestinians a devastating blow. It is now up to Palestinians primarily, as well as other regional and international actors, to use this moment of disequilibrium to pursue a more just future in Palestine/Israel. What is certain is that there is no return to what existed before. Yet this is precisely what Israeli, US, and other Western leaders and diplomats are preparing for. Even before Israel’s genocidal violence has subsided, the discussion has turned to the day after.

All indications point to a US-Israeli decision to try to replicate in the Gaza Strip the—in their view—successful model of Palestinian collaborationist rule that exists in the West Bank. Rather than engaging in an inclusive political process, accounting for Hamas and other factions, and allowing Palestinians to choose their own representative leaders, Israel and the United States are replaying an age-old approach of choosing compliant leaders who can do the bidding of external powers. This is being pursued under the banner of supposedly unifying the Palestinian territories, after destroying Hamas, with both parties conveniently erasing their own complicity in facilitating this disunity until now. The goal for both is not reunification but the pursuit of acquiescent rule: the creation of a governing structure in which a pliant leadership administers civil needs under an overarching configuration of Israeli domination.

To facilitate the installation of an authority chosen by Israel and the United States requires nothing less than razing Gaza and killing or displacing its inhabitants—the genocide now unfolding. The effectiveness of this policy will depend on answering a number of questions, primarily how Hamas will survive and evolve and, relatedly, what form its presence in Gaza will take, if any. And here, I can only raise questions rather than provide answers, given the fluidity of the situation at hand.

In terms of Hamas itself, there is no doubt that the movement’s military infrastructure will have been dealt a blow by the time the genocide ends, although not one as severe as the Israeli establishment and Western powers claim. The movement has prevailed on the battlefield without succumbing to any of the military goals that Israel has sought. After more than six months of relentless bombardment, the only release of Israeli captives occurred almost exclusively through diplomatic negotiations. The vast tunnel infrastructure that Hamas built, which will be studied for decades to come as an innovative site of asymmetric anticolonial struggle, has withstood the ferocious assault and offered protection to most of Hamas’s fighting arsenal. The movement might yet be expelled from Gaza; its fighters might yet be hunted down and killed; its leaders might yet be pursued abroad; the military wing might yet disintegrate and regroup as a decentralized network of cells operating throughout the Gaza Strip, and therefore under a different form of organizational structure in relation to the political bureau; Hamas might yet reemerge in the West Bank, where it enjoys popularity and has a vast network of support.

It is impossible to predict the exact outcome, but what is clear is that Hamas’s political ideology—its commitment to and belief in armed struggle against colonial violence—will persist. In Hamas Contained, I argue that Palestinian resistance is cyclical. Parties emerge that defy Israeli colonization, and through excessive military force and diplomatic marginalization, they are compelled to acquiesce and retreat. This book charts how Hamas emerged in 1987 from the embers of the PLO’s concessions, holding on to the same principles the PLO had articulated before its rise, couched in an Islamist ideology instead of a secular nationalist framing. It is too early to tell how Hamas will emerge from this moment, but the cyclical argument of the book holds. There is a continuum of Palestinian political demands that stretch back to 1948 and well before Israel’s establishment. Whether Hamas survives in its current incarnation is a red herring: Palestinian resistance against Israeli apartheid, armed and otherwise, will persist as long as apartheid persists, and as long as Palestinians are not annihilated as a people.

The form of this defiance is contingent on how Israel will deal with the Gaza Strip itself, and how successful it will be at exterminating and/or expelling the Palestinians there. Early signs indicate that Israel is experimenting with ways to reinstate some version of the Village Leagues, whereby Israel’s occupying forces engage with local leaders who can administer the population—the model often invoked by right-wing leaders seeking to do away with the Palestinian Authority. This model might be pursued either as a longer-term structure, whereby Israel’s military reoccupies and resettles the Gaza Strip, carving it up into distinct silos (much like the Oslo Accords’ Areas A, B, and C in the West Bank), or as a shorter-term configuration, until the administration of the Palestinian Authority can be brought back into Gaza, where it will be expected to govern as it does in the West Bank. Such an entity will have even less legitimacy than it does today, which is hard to imagine. Yet it is this model, that of reunifying the West Bank and Gaza under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, without challenging Israel’s domination, that the international community touts under the banner of the two-state solution. It is a framework that allows for Palestinian autonomy short of sovereignty and is nothing more than the repackaging of apartheid in a more palatable guise.¹⁰ This way, the Palestinian Authority would finish Israel’s job by acting against what remains of Hamas’s infrastructure under the pretense of security coordination.

However these efforts pan out, it is clear that Hamas will no longer exist as a governing authority and will revert to its role as being primarily a military wing, albeit one that is weakened, operating outside the internationally recognized institutions of Palestinian liberation. From its perspective, the movement is seeking to leverage the rupture it instigated on October 7 to reinvigorate the Palestinian struggle for liberation—to build political unity among the various factions, whether in the body of a reunified Palestinian Authority that breaks from the tenets of the Oslo Accords or in the framework of the PLO, and to revive that structure in a more inclusive and representative manner. Since October 7, Hamas has articulated its political demands, calling for its readiness to accept the formation of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and for holding Israel accountable. These calls have been disregarded, as Western powers extend a cloak of protection to Israel to pursue its goal of destroying Hamas and the Gaza Strip, enabling it to continue dealing with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination through military, rather than political, means.

Hamas’s military operation might not have been accompanied by sufficient strategic planning to meet the immensity of this moment, and its political aims might ultimately fall short. Yet to place the future of Palestinian liberation solely on the movement’s shoulders is also shortsighted. It is true that Hamas is the only major Palestinian organization that is militarily active, but it is one faction of a much broader and more diverse ecosystem of Palestinian organizations, factions, and institutions that are mobilizing around this moment to challenge Israel’s apartheid and to push back against a return to October 6, which is the clear aim of Israel and members of the international community. Two lessons can be garnered from October 7: that Israel’s apartheid is not invincible, and that however the day after is packaged, it will fail unless Palestinians secure their inalienable right to self-determination as a people. Israeli political leaders and their subcontractor parties in the Palestinian Authority are yet to heed this lesson. But grassroots organizers, Hamas’s allies, and other political and military formations have. Whatever emerges from this moment, and however Hamas’s next chapter will be written, it is clear that the movement has successfully shattered the delusion that Israeli apartheid can persist at no cost.

The vast destruction of the Gaza Strip and the horrifying loss of civilian life are a painful blow to Palestinians, reminiscent of the Nakba of 1948. Yet, simultaneously, Palestine is back on the top of the global agenda—with growing recognition that it must be addressed, even if the events of October 7 have polarized debate around this subject. Moreover, Palestine is now being discussed not through the deadening policy language of state-building and partition, but rather through its first principles, as the facade of the peace process has given way to an understanding of the reality of Israeli apartheid and its rejection of life in Palestine. While it is Hamas that ushered in this new phase and broke from the ossified reality that existed in the preceding decades, it is up to Palestinians writ large to shape the future trajectory of their struggle.

There is one final point that must be stated with certainty. The fate of Palestine is not only about Palestine, but about the global order and the struggle for a just world in which this topic is contested at an institutional level. The duplicity of Western powers in leveraging global institutions like the UN to further their own hegemonic projects is no longer deniable, particularly when the Western reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are compared with the reactions to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Countries like South Africa have taken note, challenging Western hegemony at the International Court of Justice, by bringing the case of this genocide to international forums. This is but one example of how the Global South is pushing for an end to American unipolarity and Western hegemony, which have historically enabled and supported the Zionist colonization of Palestine, and mobilizing for a more just, equitable, and decolonial world order. The unprecedented global mobilization against Israel’s genocide affirms that Gaza is a pivot. Drawing on the words of the Francophone Martinique poet, author, and politician Aimé Césaire, it is through Gaza that the colonial boomerang is ricocheting back to the metropole.

Notes

1. Two Years On: People Injured and Traumatized During the ‘Great March of Return’ Are Still Struggling, United Nations, April 6, 2020, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/two-years-on-people-injured-and-traumatized-during-the-great-march-of-return-are-still-struggling/#:~:text=As%20a%20result%2C%20214%20Palestinians, were%20hit%20by%20live%20ammunition.

2. A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, Human Rights Watch, April 27, 2021.

3. A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid, B’tselem, January 12, 2021.

4. Shocking Spike in Use of Unlawful Lethal Force by Israeli Forces Against Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, Amnesty International, February 5, 2024.

5. Israel Social Security Data Reveals True Picture of Oct 7 Deaths, France 24, December 15, 2023, https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths.

6. Michelle Nichols, UN Chief Says Gaza Becoming a ‘Graveyard for Children,’ Reuters, November 6, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-chief-says-gaza-becoming-graveyard-children-2023-11-06/.

7. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), press releases for ongoing case, https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192.

8. Center for Constitutional Rights, Biden Gaza Genocide Case: In Expedited Appeal, Palestinians Argue Court Has Constitutional Duty to Review Claims, March 8, 2024, https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/biden-gaza-genocide-case-expedited-appeal-palestinians-argue-court.

9. Carrie Keller-Lynn, Gallant Vows to ‘Wipe Hamas from Earth,’ after ‘the Worst Terror Attack’ in History, Times of Israel, October 12, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/gallant-vows-to-wipe-hamas-from-earth-after-the-worst-terror-attack-in-history.

10. Tareq Baconi, The Two State Solution Is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy, New York Times, April 1, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/opinion/two-state-solution-israel-palestine.html.

PREFACE (2018)

While finishing this book, I attended a performance of Les Blancs (The Whites) in London’s National Theatre. This was the last play written by Lorraine Hansberry, the celebrated African American writer and playwright known for her work on identity and race relations in the United States. Les Blancs is her only play set in Africa. It recounts the story of an African man who travels from Europe, where he lives with his child and white wife, back to his unnamed birthplace to attend his father’s funeral. The anticolonial struggle his father had started there has gained ground, and the nation is on the brink of revolution. Hansberry’s protagonist, imbued with European values and the sheen of London civility, is a firm believer in nonviolent protest. He is also a proud and confident man, bristling at the condescension of colonial masters.

Dueling emotions wash over our protagonist as he tries to straddle two worlds and reconcile his dedication to nonviolence with the urgent struggle on the ground. Political discussions in the powerhouse of colonial Europe appear futile and out of touch. Peaceful protest feels wholly inadequate as the protagonist’s countrymen and women are slaughtered around him by colonial rifles. Dissonant themes collide, from the incivility and barbarity of armed struggle to the ignorance of the native in refusing European modernity. Questions of identity, violence, race, and nationalism test deeply held convictions, values, and beliefs. Over the course of a few hours, painstakingly crafted worldviews unravel in slow and excruciating ways. Minutes before the curtain falls, the protagonist reaches for his knife, slaughtering his first victim. It is his brother, a priest who had joined a European mission to convert fellow Africans to the Christian faith. With this final act of brutal fratricide, the illusion of peaceful decolonization appears to have been shattered.

Hansberry’s eloquent and sophisticated play was unflinching in its depiction of the complex moral ambiguity inherent in the adoption of arms for the pursuit of freedom. I was mesmerized. My companions thought it simplistic and unoriginal. There was nothing innovative, in their view, about contending with the brutality of liberation struggles. A twenty-first-century London audience, it seemed, could grapple with the role of violence in the face of colonial rule. This was understood as a natural and desperate fight for dignity. It was reductionist to conflate anticolonial violence with native barbarism.

Sitting in the darkness of the theater, I thought of Palestine. Lacking the clarity of historical hindsight, the Palestinian struggle for self-determination seems frozen in time, in many ways an interminable anticolonial struggle unfolding in a postcolonial world. It is a world that has confronted the carnage of decolonization. But the battle is still raging in Palestine, with ever-present urgency. The simplistic binaries that frame conversations of Palestinian armed struggle evoke the condescension expressed by colonial overlords toward the resistance of indigenous peoples. Palestinians have a culture of hate, commentators blast on American TV screens. They are a people who celebrate death. These familiar accusations, quick to roll off tongues, are both highly effective at framing public discourse and insulting as racist epithets. On the other end of the spectrum, I recalled conversations with Europeans and Palestinians who critiqued my reference to Palestinian armed struggle as violence. They saw this framing as a form of condemnation, casting armed struggle in a negative light. Support of the rifle, they argued, was not only comprehensible and dignified, but necessary. It was the only way to secure Palestinian rights against a murderous and unrelenting occupation.

As the play ended, I reflected on the history of violence in the Palestinian struggle, the advances it secured and the tragedy it sowed. I considered the fratricide of the play’s finale and compared it to the state of the Palestinian territories today, where leaders have turned their guns inward on their people. I thought of Hamas, the movement currently most representative of the notion of armed resistance against Israel. The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright.¹ This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming.

I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side. For close to a decade, I have attempted to peel back all the layers that have given rise to the present dynamic of vilifying and isolating Hamas, and with it, of making acceptable the demonization and suffering of millions of Palestinians within the Gaza Strip. The product is this book, which seeks to explore Hamas’s world order and present the voice of a marginalized group that remains central to the Palestinian national movement. This book works to advance our knowledge of Hamas by elucidating the manner in which the movement evolved over the course of its three decades in existence, from 1987 onward. Understanding Hamas is key to ending the denial of Palestinians their rights after nearly a century of struggle for self-determination.

It is also a prerequisite to halting the cycles of violence that are intermittently unleashed on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Nearly one year before that evening at the National Theatre, I was talking to a young boy in Gaza. The conversation was during the Islamic month of Ramadan in 2015, and everyone was sluggish from the June heat. I asked him about the school year he had just finished and whether he was happy to be on holiday. He shrugged. Sixth grade was fine, he said, a bit odd. He was in Grade A and he used to look forward to playing football against Grade B. That past year, though, the school administration had merged several grades together. The classes were crowded and the football games less enjoyable. I wondered aloud to the boy why the school administration had done that. Annoyed that I was not engaging with the issue at hand, that of football politics, he answered in an exasperated