Podcast: Understanding Hamas: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives (with Tareq Baconi)

This is a conversation with Tareq Baconi, author of the book “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance” published in 2018. This is episode 83 of The Fire These Times.

You can support The Fire These Times on patreon.com/fromtheperiphery with a monthly or yearly donation and get a lot of perks including early access, exclusive videos, monthly hangouts, access to the book club, merch and more.

List of topics discussed:

  • How Hamas is often talked about
  • Contextualising Hamas in recent and ongoing uprisings
  • Hamas and popular protests
  • The Great Return March
  • Hamas and Israel
  • Western hypocrisy on Palestinian democracy, with a focus on the EU and the US
  • Hamas-Fatah relations
  • The horrific costs of the Israeli blockade of Gaza
  • How the Israeli state views Hamas
  • Hamas breaking out of its ‘cage’
  • Does it matter who wins at the Israeli elections?
  • The PA losing legitimacy
  • Hamas’ authoritarianism in Gaza
  • Hamas as a democratic movement
  • Difference between party and government in Gaza
  • Moving beyond the framework of partition and into colonial and apartheid frameworks

Recommendations

Where to listen

All episodes are first released on Patreon, and you can get them on your Podcast feed by copy-pasting the RSS that appears at the bottom of your page when you join (here’s how) as soon as they’re up. Patreons get episodes anywhere from weeks to days in advance.

The conversation is available on any podcast app such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS. Just type in ‘The Fire These Times’ and you can subscribe directly there.

It is also on YouTube. At the moment the YouTube page is not being updated but it will be in the near future.

Contact

Episode Credits

Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Tarabeat
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Elia Ayoub
Episode design: Elia Ayoub

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

Israel’s separation of the Gaza strip has nothing to do with Hamas. It has everything to do with the fact that there are two million Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom are refugees seeking the right of return to homes now in Israel.

Tareq Baconi: My name is Tareq Baconi; I am a Palestinian currently living in Ramallah, between Ramallah and London. My book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance came out in 2018, published by Stanford University Press. I spent a few years thinking and writing on Gaza and Hamas, and more broadly on the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Elia Ayoub: Thanks a lot for having this conversation. Throughout I’ll be referring to a really good interview that you had with +972 Mag‘s Amjad Iraqi from last month. The goal of this is to have a self-contained episode about Hamas, meaning that people listening to this don’t have to know much in order to follow our conversation.

I don’t usually like doing an episode on a specific political party, but Hamas as a part of the Palestinian story is just a reality. At the same time it’s often talked about without much nuance or understanding, especially in the West (but not just). Personally I’ve been interviewed on Palestine a number of times, and whenever I’m asked about Hamas there’s always a sense that the representation or image of Hamas precedes the question: the question isn’t really about them, it’s more about what the interviewer thinks about Hamas.

I had an episode with Francesco Saverio Leopardi entitled “The Palestinian Left and Its Decline,” focusing on the eighties up until the early 2000s and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and more recently had an episode with Dana El Kurd entitled “Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine,” which focused on the Palestinian Authority. I wanted to say this up front to emphasize that future episodes will be about exploring ways forward for Palestinian activism, but the reality now is that both Hamas and the PA, especially recently, are involved in repressing protesters and activists. Understanding these two parties is key to challenging them and moving beyond them.

The interview that you had with +972 Mag was entitled “Hamas breaks out of its Gaza cage.” I think it would be good to start from that, from the most recent events, before broadening the conversation to contextualize and understand the movement and the party. What was Hamas’s role in what’s been happening in the last few months? Why did it make those decisions, in your view? And how would you interpret those decisions in terms of whether they were different from previous policies?

TB: Thank you for having me. I want to go to something you said when you were introducing this episode: that you wanted something that is self-contained on Hamas, though your impulse is not to differentiate specific political parties and focus on them. I want to recognize this tension when it comes to the study Hamas, because it’s one that I grapple with all the time. Hamas is often portrayed as a movement that exists outside of the question of Palestine, that it’s somehow an exceptional case outside of Palestine and if we were able to wish Hamas away or address Hamas in a different way, if only Hamas were “brought to heel” in a certain way, then the question of Palestine would be resolved.

This is something that needs to be challenged head-on. Hamas is part and parcel of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and one cannot be differentiated from the other. The Palestinian struggle for liberation is a movement that is heterogeneous and diverse in every way, and Hamas is just one facet of that struggle. Trying to exceptionalize it by placing it in a self-contained podcast or to try to present it as something that is external to the Palestinian struggle is very problematic.

At the same time, I appreciate the effort to try to understand Hamas on its own terms, because it is a complex movement, and because there is a lot of effort to try to separate and exceptionalize it. There is a lot of value in this kind of podcast and in this kind of engagement with Hamas, as long as we contextualize it within the broader Palestinian struggle for liberation.

As for the events of the past two months: the Palestinian uprising against continued settler-colonialism in east Jerusalem ended up triggering a much broader Palestinian movement. Some people are calling it the “Unity Intifada.” This is a good example to showcase how Hamas is part and parcel of the broader Palestinian movement. The decision by Hamas’s leadership in May to fire rockets at Israel in order to protect Palestinians who were being and continue to be forcibly expelled from Sheikh Jarrah signaled a transformative decision for the movement in the sense that it was willing to use significant power and to dip into its military arsenal in order to come to the rescue and to protect Palestinians in Jerusalem who were suffering the brunt of Israeli occupation, and also to change the balance of power on the ground.

For the past few years, certainly since Hamas has been contained in the Gaza strip by the blockade that is imposed by Israel and co-administered by Egypt, Hamas has mostly limited the use of its firepower and military arsenal to try to lift the siege of Gaza, to lift the blockade, to force Israeli authorities to ease access, to allow for more entry of goods into and out of the Gaza strip—to generally lift a stifling blockade that is a form of collective punishment on two million Palestinians.

What we saw in May was a decision by Hamas to shift this equation: to say that it is a party that is willing to use its military power not only to negotiate restrictions and the nature of the blockade, but actually to mobilize in defense of Palestinians writ large—in this case, in Jerusalem. We can talk about the implications of what that means. It has been said that this was the first time Hamas has fired rockets into Jerusalem. That is not the case. There were rockets in the past, including in 2012, that fell from Hamas towards Jerusalem—not necessarily of the scale that we saw in May, but the difference in this moment in time is that it was a strategic decision taken by the movement to position itself as a protector of the Palestinian people writ large, and that’s a very important moment, which is why the interview was titled “Hamas Breaks out of its Gaza cage.”

EA: Thank you for starting this—I was worried about the risk of further essentializing something that is so heavily mediatized. The image of Hamas precedes any conversation about Hamas. I really appreciate what you said. One of the shortcomings in audio podcasts is that you don’t see me nodding along. I agree—it’s an open question for me, so I really appreciate what you are saying. I struggle to talk about a single party or movement for the simple reason that there are always these wider structures and wider factors—it’s a broader story. The two other episodes I did weren’t supposed to be about the PFLP or the PA respectively, it just ended up that we focused on that. Maybe that’s what we’ll do here.

Hamas seems to have made a calculation recently that nothing other than inflicting some cost on the Israeli state will garner any kind of attention, with part of the ultimate goal being to lift the siege of Gaza. This seems objectively true—nothing else seems to have worked. I remember very well the March of Return, as it was called, some years ago. The Israeli soldiers were just sniping off Palestinian civilians, and that definitely did not lead to any emergency sessions at the UN or whatever.

If it’s okay with you—this might also be problematic, feel free to challenge it as well—can you give us some overview of some of the “peaceful” tactics used by Palestinians in recent times to resist Israel? With a focus on Gaza—the West Bank is it’s own entire thing as well, but even as I say this I feel like separating Gaza and the West Bank is also problematic. Feel free to answer how you want, just to give us some idea why there was this recent development.

TB: It’s maybe best to start by talking about Hamas specifically, but then as always I want to bring it back to the broader Palestinian story. Hamas has been talking about different forms of struggle, whether it’s armed resistance or popular resistance or economic resistance, since its creation. The movement has explored and experimented with different forms of resistance to the Israeli occupation. Controversially, obviously, they used suicide bombing in the nineties and early 2000s. But the movement has not only been committed to armed resistance, and internally within the movement there are a lot of divisions around which tactics to use.

Khaled Mashal, before he departed from his position as the head of the movement, very openly and on an international platform, talked about the movement’s willingness to engage in popular resistance—to engage in forms of resistance that are not committed to the use of military force.

None of the overtures that Hamas’s leadership put out in terms of engaging with popular resistance have softened the international approach towards Hamas or allowed for the opening of diplomatic channels with the movement. They are always seen as tricks by the movement or not necessarily policies that the movement would be able to push through.

The Great March of Return which you referenced was the first real concerted effort by Hamas’s leadership to support a peaceful, politically plural, largely popular, grassroots-led movement emerging in the Gaza strip. Before the first protesters had even reached the fence that separates the Gaza strip from Israel, Israeli media was already calling this a Hamas protest and a “protest of terror,” because Hamas had to give permission for this protest to happen. There is no denying the fact that as the governing authority in Gaza, Hamas did indeed have to support this protest, and it provided much of the infrastructure for the protest, including the transfer of protesters by buses to the fence area. But that does not deny the fact that the protest was by and large a popular-led protest in every way: in terms of the congregation, the forms of mobilization, and the ambiance of the protest itself, which included dancing and songs and nationalistic mobilization.

The Israeli response from day one was to use live fire against peaceful protesters, in ways that snipered off not only civilians but medics and journalists and other targets that are protected under current international law. Of course civilians are as well, but the forms of Israeli attacks against these largely peaceful protests were so egregious that we have multiple examples of journalists and healthcare professionals being snipered off.

Now, to contextualize this to your listeners, this protest was one of the longest, most sustained forms of popular mobilization in Palestinian history, and the result of those protests was near silence on the international stage. The international criminal court put forward an investigation in order to try to see and understand whether these protests were violent or not, and whether Israeli claims to self-defense were valid or not. The investigation, which is public and can be viewed, said that Israeli responses to the protests may have amounted to war crimes, and that there was no proportionate reason that would allow Israel to use the force that it used.

That was a very key moment not just for Hamas’s leadership but also for Palestinians. Often Palestinians who talk about a rights-based struggle, or about shifting to popular mobilization in a single state, often using the example of Black Lives Matter or the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, think that if there is significant popular mobilization on the ground there would be enough popular pressure on Israel to limit its use of force against Palestinians and allow for changes in Israeli policies and Israeli violence against Palestinians. But the Great March of Return absolutely shows that not to be the case.

There was little conflict on the international stage over Israeli use of force against civilian protesters. The only shift that began to happen was when Hamas entered the fray. Here, Hamas entered the fray not in the form of rocket fire and missiles—it did eventually. But at the beginning it entered the fray through tactics that disturb Israel even if they do not cause civilian deaths or actual violence in Israel. Things like incendiary balloons and flammable kites and what they called the “nightly disturbances,” which was the use of very loud noises through loudspeakers close to the fences to keep residential areas on the other side of the fence awake at night. That’s when negotiations started happening.

The lesson out of this is clear: unless the average Israeli citizen begins to feel disturbed by Palestinian resistance, nothing will change, either in terms of Israeli readiness to engage to end this resistance or in terms of the international community’s response to the reality and the violence on the ground.

Now I want to take this moment, this snapshot that I just drew of Gaza, to Jerusalem in May. We had iftar sit-ins, we had prayer sit-ins, we had popular mobilization of Palestinians in Jerusalem against [dispossession in] Sheikh Jarrah. By the time the first rocket from the Gaza strip fell on Jerusalem, more than five hundred Palestinians had been injured by Israeli forces. But the first time the international community talks about self-defense is when that rocket fell on Israel.

The lesson is not only that Palestinians do not have a right to their self-defense, or that the international community is okay with Israeli violence against Palestinians, but also that it’s only when there is violence against Israel that channels for negotiations and mobilization in the international community for change commence. The lessons here are clear. Hamas, since then, has consistently spoken about their readiness for popular mobilization—but that’s not just a Hamas conversation. That’s also a Palestinian conversation about what tactics can be used to end the Israeli occupation.

What is the use of armed struggle, if any? I should note here that international law allows for the use of armed struggle by anti-colonial movements. Hamas’s use of armed struggle through indiscriminate violence is not in accordance with international law because it’s indiscriminate and it targets civilians. But the use of armed struggle as a tactic is one that Palestinians think about. The other of course is popular mobilization, which so far has not been as effective as armed struggle in terms of increasing pressure on Israel.

The third form may be the most well known: BDS, the Boycott Divest and Sanctions movement, which is also met with repression both by Israel and by members of the international community that are increasingly positioning this as a form of antisemitism—the lesson being that there can be no struggle that can be sufficiently disruptive of the Israeli occupation that is not seen as problematic by an international community that is focused on managing the status quo, not providing Palestinian rights.

EA: On the matter of elections—whenever I have spoken to non-Palestinians when it comes to the relationship between Hamas and Fatah, I’ve noticed that the topic of elections often comes up. Why don’t they just hold an election? As you have mentioned, Hamas won the last election in 2006, and the Palestinian government was sanctioned as a result by the international community. Fatah was brought back in an effort to isolate Hamas, and when that didn’t really work, as far as I can understand the resulting status quo was basically extended indefinitely. Now we’re seeing a different phase in recent weeks and months.

Even as of now—please correct me if I’m wrong—the EU still officially calls for elections to happen, even though they have no intention of dealing with Hamas if Hamas wins again. So what is exactly the point of such elections?

TB: This is a good question. The first thing I would say is there’s an untenable hypocrisy in the European and the American position on Palestinian elections, which is to say that they support elections, and they want Palestinians to have representative leadership, but at the same time they say there is no willingness to engage with Hamas if Hamas enters power. This basically means there can only be respect for elections if they produce the political choice that is favored by the European Union, European member states, and the US. Other than that, forms of marginalization, of boycotts and a repeat of the 2006 experience is likely to happen.

This hypocrisy rests in the so-called “quartet” conditions. There are three conditions that the international community has put forward for engagement with Hamas. The first is to recognize Israel; the second is to recognize past agreements that were signed between the PLO and Israel; and the third is to renounce violence. None of these conditions are equally applied to the state of Israel, which has not recognized the state of Palestine, has not renounced violence but uses disproportionate violence against Palestinians, and does not respect past agreements signed with the PLO.

But nonetheless these three conditions are placed specifically for engagement with Hamas. When Hamas won the last elections in 2006, not only was there a refusal to recognize their election victory, there was a concerted diplomatic, political, and military push by the administration of George W. Bush to strengthen Fatah internally, and politically enable Fatah to marginalize Hamas and precipitate a coup in which Hamas would be kicked out of Gaza and Fatah would take over. That is the backdrop, that is the context that resulted in Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza strip in 2007.

The civil war that we saw between Hamas and Fatah—it’s more accurate to call it a factional war—in 2007 was precipitated by a West that is refusing to deal with democratic elections we Palestinians participated in. We are still stuck in a moment where there is now a repeat of international calls for elections without the ability or willingness to engage with Hamas having good results.

That’s the surface explanation of all of this, but I want to dig in one step deeper, which is to say: I don’t necessarily condone the idea of elections as it’s currently understood. When policymakers tell you, Hamas and Fatah need to engage in elections in order to have a more representative leadership, what they are telling you is that there needs to be an end to the institutional division between Hamas and Fatah and the resumption of the PA. The PA can come back into the Gaza strip and take over control.

That’s all well and good. I think the end of that division is something that most Palestinians would aspire to. But two problems come out of that formulation. The first is that those elections are not Palestinian elections. There are Palestinian elections: elections for the Palestinians in the occupied territories—the Gaza strip and the West Bank including east Jerusalem—to elect a legitimate leadership within the governing authority. So we’re not talking about the leadership that is representing Palestinians in negotiations or that is shaping the future of the Palestinian liberation struggle. We’re talking about the leadership that is managing Palestinian affairs under occupation.

That is not the kind of leadership or the kind of elections that we need to be thinking about or engaging in when we’re talking about the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Those elections are the elections that have to happen on the level of the PLO, and those are the elections that Hamas is aspiring to get into even in this latest round of elections that were just postponed in May, just before the uprising in Jerusalem.

So we should bear in mind that when the international community is talking about elections, it’s actually talking about ending an institutional division and allowing a governing authority that is functioning under occupation to become a more effective and a more legitimate government. It’s not necessarily reflecting on elections that could allow for a more representative Palestinian leadership to emerge.

The second thing I would say is there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about the blockade of the Gaza strip and its separation from the West Bank. There’s this idea that if there can be a united Palestinian Authority, and Hamas can be somehow engaged in democratic elections, whether it wins or not, that the blockade is going to be lifted. That’s entirely untrue. The blockade was put in place before Hamas was even established as a party. In different ways and in forms, we’ve had a blockade on the Gaza strip since the occupation began in ’67. Israel’s separation of the Gaza strip has nothing to do with Hamas. It has everything to do with the fact that there are two million Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom are refugees seeking the right of return to homes now in Israel. This demographic balance means that the Gaza strip, for various reasons which we can talk about, needs to be separated geographically and also institutionally.

The idea that elections are somehow going to herald a form of unity is fantastical. It’s not rooted in any historical understanding of what the Gaza strip is and why successive Israeli governments are bent on separating it.

EA: Thanks for that. The next question is an extension of your thoughts, if you want to continue to expand. How is Israel actually dealing with Hamas? Divide and conquer is one easy go-to term, but how would you explain it to people who may not understand how old the blockade is, how old this policy of (and obsession with) separating Gaza from the West Bank has been?

TB: Hamas is a fundamental part of the Israeli effort to maintain the Gaza strip as an entity, as a piece of land that is separate from the rest of the Palestinians but that is not so entirely unmanageable that it becomes a catastrophe. I’ll elaborate on what that means.

Hamas is currently a government in the Gaza strip, and its management of the affairs of two million Palestinians in Gaza is one that successive Israeli governments (certainly the ones under Netanyahu and his long tenure in Israel) have been very actively supporting. Hamas provides Israel with a fig leaf. For the West and the international community, it allows Israel to portray the Gaza strip as a terrorist haven that is run by a terrorist organization, and therefore to justify the blockade to an international community that is willing to accept the collective punishment of two million Palestinians in favor of fighting terrorism.

So it provides that kind of external or Western-facing rhetoric while internally for Israel it allows the government or the state of Israel to outsource the management of the Gaza strip, which is essentially a large, very congested, very populated refugee camp, to a governing authority, in this case Hamas, and to external actors including Qatar and the European Union and other actors, which provide and fund all the humanitarian relief in the Gaza strip.

Essentially, Hamas allows Israel to sustain a reality of blockade and a reality of separation that might otherwise be condemned more vocally if Hamas weren’t there. This use of Hamas for Israel is one that’s been evident over the course of the past fourteen years of the blockade. We see Israel doing two things towards Hamas: first, making sure that the movement does not develop into the kind of military power that Hezbollah is, for example, by trying to maintain restrictions on the movement’s access to funds and military power, and also by deterrence—every few years the Israeli government does what they call “mowing the lawn,” which is to go in and destroy key Hamas infrastructure and assassinate Hamas personnel and leaders in order to limit the movement’s ability to gain in power.

That’s the first thing that it does, but in doing so avoiding completely destroying Hamas. For Israel, there needs to be a functioning government in the Gaza strip that is taking care of administrative functions. The second thing it’s doing is similar to what it had done with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is to reach an equilibrium, to reach an acceptable equation or balance of forces between Israel and Hamas, where there is almost agreement on the relationship between the two entities. For Israel that agreement is calm for calm, which means there will be no Israeli attacks against the Gaza strip as long as there’s no rocket fire from Hamas. For Hamas the equation is always calm for lifting the blockade: there will be no rocket fire from Gaza into Israel if Israel loosens access and entry into the Gaza strip.

Those two different starting points between Hamas and Israel have been the function of the various wars and escalations between the two parties over the course of the past fourteen years. Both parties are negotiating around calm and access, around calm and restrictions on the blockade. That has been the equilibrium that has taken form and taken root in the Gaza strip over the past fourteen years.

In that equilibrium, Hamas has to be sustained as a functioning, very effective governing authority in the Gaza strip which for Israel justifies the blockade to an international community that might otherwise be skeptical. Just to reaffirm, though: the reason this blockade is needed by Israel is for demographic reasons, predominantly. We can talk about historically what that blockade and the separation of Gaza looked like pre-Hamas. But the idea that this emerged as a result of Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza strip is historically inaccurate.

But the reason May became such a turning point, as we said at the beginning, is because that equation, that equilibrium that has taken root between Hamas and Israel was fundamentally altered by Hamas by their saying, Actually, the movement’s use of force is not going to be limited to that negotiation—it’s more extensive than that. It’s now focused on a negotiation that brings in a broader Palestinian narrative.

EA: Thanks for that as well. You mention the restrictions of the blockade itself and how Hamas has always tried to alleviate some of that: a certain number of kilometers where fishermen are allowed to fish is extended a tiny bit and then restricted again—that kind of negotiation. In more detail for those who don’t know what we’re talking about, can you say what the blockade actually restricts? What gets negotiated?

TB: Israel controls Gaza’s airspace, its maritime space, and its entry and exit points. People will often refer to them as borders. They are not borders, because there is no “border” between Israel and Gaza. This is a fence that separates two million Palestinians, who are still under Israeli control, from the rest of what is known as Israel-Palestine and places them in their own coastal enclave. That’s the structure and the architecture of the blockade.

In that kind of geographic separation, Israel controls everything including the population registry and the documentation of newborns in the Gaza strip. In terms of access, it controls the entry and exit of all goods and people to and from the Gaza strip: the number of trucks that come in and out, what kinds of material those trucks are carrying. And it restricts the permits of individuals—whether they are tourists or individuals seeking healthcare, or workers in Israel—to control how many individuals are allowed in and out of the Gaza strip.

It also controls geographic access. There is a “buffer zone,” which is the area around this fence, which is an area important for agriculture in the Gaza strip and is controlled by Israeli forces, often snipers, that try to limit access to areas around the periphery of the Gaza strip on the inside of the fence, as well as what you mentioned, which is the area that Palestinian fishermen are able to go fishing in off the coastal enclave, which varies all the way from three nautical miles to twelve nautical miles.

For the past fourteen years, the escalations, the fire exchanges between Israel and Hamas, have for the most part ended in ceasefire negotiations that would entail a list of demands that include things like expanding the access of fishermen around the coastal area up to twelve nautical miles; increasing the number of permits of Palestinian workers working in Israel to exit the Gaza strip; increasing and allowing for Palestinians seeking medical treatment either in the West Bank or in Israel to leave the Gaza strip; and calling for the entry of more goods—whether for reconstruction or other goods.

Obviously there is the other entry point into the Gaza strip, which is the Rafah border with Egypt. This is an actual border, and there is often significant variation in terms of the movement of goods and people there. Often that becomes a pressure point because the Egyptian authorities work with the Israeli authorities to try to limit the entry of goods and people and to try to increase pressure on Hamas depending on the state of negotiations or the state of local politics or whatever the case might be. That’s the other pressure hold on the Gaza strip.

It’s always been a negotiation by Hamas to try to alleviate the economic and humanitarian suffering in the Gaza strip. Often just before periods of escalation, there would be significant shortages of goods in Gaza, or the economy in Gaza would take a significant hit, and the effort by Hamas to try to alleviate that sometimes takes the form of the use of rocket fire to initiate negotiations.

EA: Thanks for all of these expansive explanations. Is this all an end in itself? Is the Israeli policy of “containing Hamas” an end in itself, or is it this separation that the Israelis have been trying to impose between Gaza and the West Bank including east Jerusalem—can you explain that a bit more?

TB: The policy is to contain Hamas as a political party, an Islamist party, and a nationalist party committed to Palestinian liberation, within the Gaza strip, which means to try to limit the movement’s capacity to maneuver and to function to a very small strip of land. Institutionally, where the movement was present in the West Bank, through security coordination with the PA, that infrastructure has been dismantled. Hamas has effectively been contained.

At the same time, there is an effort by Israel to maintain Hamas as an effective governing authority in the Gaza strip that is able to administer the needs of two million people. That reality—of having both a government that is seen by Israel and by the West as a terrorist organization that might justify the blockade, while at the same time allowing Israel not to worry about humanitarian collapse in the Gaza strip because there is an administrative authority taking care of the needs of Palestinians in Gaza—allows the blockade to appear sustainable. And in many ways it is. We are in the fourteenth year of the blockade and there is no sign at all that either Israel or the international community are considering ways in which the blockade can be removed. Rather than considering those, the removal of the blockade has now become tethered to the idea of Hamas disarming—which misunderstands the blockade by placing it as something that is a reaction to Hamas rather than the demographic reality in Palestine.

That’s the overall structure. It’s both a policy of containment and a policy of managing Hamas as a governing authority in the Gaza strip, outsourcing much of the cost to international payers including the EU and Qatar.

When we stop thinking of Hamas as an exceptional movement and we zoom out of Israel-Palestine and look at it as a single state—which it is, because there is a single sovereign between the river and the sea—Hamas and the Gaza strip stop being an exception. They actually become a representative of how Israel deals with Palestinians throughout the territory. If we look at areas throughout the occupied West Bank, we have also instances of Palestinian population centers that are entirely surrounded by Israel and Israeli-controlled territory that are governed by Palestinian governing institutions, whether the PA or otherwise. Even within Israel itself we see the containment of Palestinians in heavily populated, very dense Palestinian urban centers surrounded by communities and cities that Palestinians might not be able to live in or have as much freedom living in.

Gaza is just an extreme of a broader policy of Israel that began before 1948, which is to consolidate territory for Jewish settlement and dispossess Palestinians. The outcome is the enclosure of Palestinians in smaller and smaller urban enclaves and the management of these urban enclaves by Palestinian governing authorities while the overarching control of the city rests in the hands of the Israeli state. Hamas just takes on the veneer of something that’s exceptional because of its Islamism and because of its commitment to armed struggle. But in terms of the overall structure of what we’re dealing with, the Gaza strip in my mind is just the natural end point of Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine.

EA: Given this policy of containing and isolating Hamas in Gaza, and also given that Hamas “broke out of its cage,” how did the recent protest throughout historic Palestine—between the river and the sea, modern Israel and the occupied territories—change the dynamic, in your view?

TB: It changed the dynamic not necessarily just in the sense that Hamas was able to break out of its containment in Gaza. It changed the dynamic in ways that are more fundamental than that. Hamas breaking out of its cage in the Gaza strip changed a dynamic that is specific to Hamas, the one that I just articulated, this relationship that had taken root between Hamas and Israel, this equilibrium of violence as I call it. That broke with the recent turn in May. Hamas was able to position itself, despite the absence of elections, as the movement that is most popular on the Palestinian street, as an armed movement that is willing to protect Palestinians who are facing the brunt of a very violent occupation committed to their dispossession.

So Hamas broke out of its containment in the figurative sense, in the symbolic sense, and was able to act in the military sense very clearly, and was able to position itself as this movement speaking and reacting on behalf of Palestinians. But the reason I say the shift was more fundamental than that is because what we saw was a breaking down of a psychological barrier that Palestinians have long suffered from, for decades, that we often talk about when we talk about fragmentation, that Palestinian citizens of Israel are a separate constituency than Palestinians in Jerusalem or the West Bank or Gaza. The uprising and the mobilization, the Unity Intifada—it’s still unclear where it will go. It is still unclear whether it will fundamentally change the equation on the ground. But it nonetheless had a transformative impact in the sense that psychologically it reaffirmed Palestinian people-hood as a single people. It reaffirmed the sense that no matter where they are—even in the diaspora, even as refugees, even if they have not faced the brunt of Israeli occupation forces in their day-to-day—they are a single people fighting a single regime.

So the transformation was significant in that sense, that it affirmed Palestinian people-hood, and also affirmed the notion that Palestinians, no matter where they are, are fighting the same regime. In that transformation, Hamas is only one element. It is the Islamist element, and the element that is committed to armed struggle, but that is only one element in what is emerging as a diverse, heterogeneous Palestinian movement—which of course it always has been. Now we’re seeing it manifest on the ground: Palestinians protesting against PA repression and against the Sheikh Jarrah dispossession in the West Bank, for example, coexist alongside rocket fire from Gaza, and alongside Palestinians protesting in ’48.

Hamas, then, in that vision of unity, in that singularity of the Palestinian movement that is a diverse movement, stops being exceptional. We begin to understand Hamas as part and parcel, as only one thread of a much more complex tapestry of Palestinian mobilization. All this is to say that there is a transformation that is fundamental specifically for Hamas in terms of breaking out of its cage, but the transformation on the level of Palestinians is actually much broader than that, and it’s one that is inclusive—it brings Hamas, despite many people perhaps disagreeing with its ideology or its tactics, into the Palestinian fold.

EA: Is there any possibility at all of these recent developments or changes also affecting the politics of the occupiers?

TB: You mean domestic Israeli politics? There will always be variations in terms of the makeup of the government, how rightwing versus leftwing it is. This latest government—commentators are very interested in it because it includes Islamists, it includes Meretz (the leftwing party), and it includes far-right parties. Of course there will always be variations. And the Israeli electorate might choose more moderate governments as tensions continue within the Israeli domestic theater around what to do with Palestinians.

But fundamentally and structurally, no Israeli government is going to significantly challenge the current reality in Israel-Palestine until Palestinian mobilization makes occupation untenable. Until there is a fundamental shift in the balance of forces on the ground—for that to happen there needs to be a shift on the international stage in terms of allowing Israel to continue to operate with impunity—that forces a reckoning by the Israeli government, I personally think it’s a waste of time to think about the makings of the Israeli government. I don’t want to overstate that, because there are always openings that of course can be leveraged in order to shift public opinion within Israel. But the point I’m trying to make is that fundamentally the Israeli state now is committed to maintaining apartheid, constitutionally. It is committed to Jewish preferential citizenship over Palestinians—some have citizenship, most are military subjects or refugees.

The Israeli government and its electoral politics are fundamentally a part of this regime of domination. Regardless of whether there are changes in the internal makings of it, it will be tinkering around this monolithic structure in some ways, until that structure begins to shift because of external and internal pressure by Palestinians and by members of the international community. It’s very hard to see electoral politics changing fundamentally.

EA: That’s fair enough. The occupation is never part of any debates between Israeli politicians on the national stage.

Just a few days ago, Nizar Banat was murdered, and there’s ongoing repression of journalists and activists and others in the West Bank by the PA. Given that there is more of a grassroots reception of Hamas on the streets, and given this sharp contrast with how the PA is acting towards Palestinians, and being seen as collaborators or essentially the enforcers of the Israeli occupation on the West Bank—and this is ongoing as of the time of recording—how is this likely to develop, if at all, in terms of how people view the PA?

TB: The PA has lost legitimacy among the Palestinian public. It has been losing legitimacy consistently for years. This current moment in time, which has shown a significant mobilization by Palestinians in the West Bank against PA’s security coordination and its repressive use of force against Palestinians, culminating in the murder of Nizar Binat, is something that is just the climax, in some ways, of increasing resentment and increasing frustration against the PA and what the PA is: a fundamental part of the Israeli occupation.

Just as we were talking about Hamas being a governing authority that Israel depends on to administer affairs in Gaza, the PA is a crucial cog in the Israeli occupation. It is how Palestinian affairs in the West Bank are managed, and security coordination is fundamental to the sustainability of the occupation—unlike Hamas, which remains ideologically committed to armed struggle and to fighting for liberation. The PA has acquiesced to its role as a subcontractor to the occupation. Security coordination is reviled by Palestinians.

What we see at the moment is really the manifestation of that repulsion, and the very clear, undeniable reality that the PA is, like Israel, committed to maintaining the status quo rather than moving the Palestinian cause further. Now, it’s not actually the PA’s job to move the Palestinian cause further. That’s the PLO’s job. But under Mahmoud Abbas the PLO has been subsumed into the PA, and the PA itself has become more authoritarian, more draconian in its policies, and an entity that—despite putting forward the performances of statehood—is really quite content to remain committed to the notion of statehood without actually seeking liberation.

The question of whether this is a turning point—is the PA likely to disintegrate or collapse or deal with this repression? It remains unclear. The PA is quite sustainable for various reasons, including the fact that it employs hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And the PA is officially an entity that Israel and the international community are very committed to upkeeping. Because rather than an interest in allowing Palestinians to capture their rights, there is a willingness to sustain the status quo. There is a lot of capacity for the PA to survive this current mobilization against it.

At the same time, I don’t see any prospect for the PA to revitalize its image among Palestinians. Its image has been getting tarnished for years, but this moment is quite drastic. The one other thing I would say here is that this represents also a moment of catastrophe for Fatah. Fatah has been divided increasingly between the people who support the PA—the Fatah that has been part and parcel of the PA—and the Fatah that is more committed to the revolutionary roots of the movement. Those divisions are likely to get more exacerbated as there is more resentment by Fatah leaders for being implicated in what the PA has become. We are more likely to see increasing tensions within Fatah itself.

EA: You and others have talked about resuscitating the PLO. But before asking about that, have there been discussions within Hamas leadership or rank-and-file about Hamas’s authoritarianism within the Gaza strip? I’m not talking about its attitude towards the Israeli state, I’m talking about how journalists are able to do their jobs, and that kind of “domestic policy.”

TB: Absolutely. Like the PA, Hamas is also an authoritarian governing body. They are incapable of allowing for political plurality to emerge in the Gaza strip; for example, for Fatah to mobilize in the Gaza strip is quite difficult. It’s not impossible, and we’ve instances of Fatah mobilizing in the Gaza strip, but it’s quite difficult. There are restrictions on freedom of speech, there are human rights abuses in terms of detaining Palestinians who protest Hamas rule. There are examples of extra-judicial killings within Hamas’s prisons. The movement should in no way be let off the hook in terms of its authoritarianism as the governing authority in the Gaza strip.

This has all been documented by local human rights organizations, including Al Mezan and others, as well as international organizations like Amnesty and HRW. So both the West Bank and the Gaza strip now are administered and governed by authorities under an Israeli occupation that themselves have become quite authoritarian and brutal.

The way that Hamas leaders talk about this is often to say two things. The first is that they are an Islamist movement—they are a movement that is committed to socializing Islamic values in society, and that often comes with some degree of policing around social behavior and norms. They judge social behavior ideologically and say this is how one can nurture a virtuous Islamic society. The second is blaming the occupation, saying there needs to be an “iron fist,” from the top down, to manage the kind of resistance that is coming out of the Gaza strip (I am using the word resistance in the expansive sense, not just military resistance but also economic and social resistance) to allow for Palestinian sumud and to nurture the idea of Gaza becoming the forefront of the resistance against the occupation. By doing that, obviously, they are deflecting from their own authoritarianism and shifting the gaze back onto the occupation.

There have been protests within Gaza against Hamas’s rule which have been met with force as well.

EA: The last question was going to be about resuscitating the PLO, but is there something about Hamas and the context in which we’ve been discussing it that you want to expand upon more or that I could have asked a bit differently?

TB: When we’re thinking about Hamas, it’s important for people to separate the movement from the government. The two exist. Hamas is a movement that is existing in the Palestinian territories but also in Turkey, in Qatar, in Egypt. That’s not to say that it is a transnational movement—it is in the sense that its leadership is everywhere, and its membership is everywhere, but wherever it is as a movement it is committed to the idea of liberation in Palestine itself. In that sense it is a very nationalist movement.

But that movement coexists alongside the government, which is the bureaucracy that exists in the Gaza strip and that administers Gaza. When we’re thinking of Hamas it’s important to hold both of these in our minds, because in talking about authoritarianism now, we’re talking about the government in the Gaza strip. That’s not necessarily talking about the movement. The ideology is shared, and while the movement sets strategy, the government implements it, so that’s not to let the movement off the hook, but just to understand that there are different power plays and dynamics in terms of the movement itself.

The reason I’m bringing up the idea of the movement is, while we’re talking about democracy and elections it’s important to note that Hamas is a very democratic movement. Unlike other movements—certainly unlike Fatah—it has seen a significant change in terms of its leadership, in terms of the power shifts between different constituencies within the movement. The shura council is very active in terms of setting the movement’s strategy. In that sense the movement is quite a democratic movement.

EA: To end on a different note, I know you’ve been involved in a number of initiatives on the topic of resuscitating the PLO. Dana El Kurd also mentioned this in our conversation. What does that look like for you? How would you explain it?

TB: The thing to note is to separate the question of Palestinian representation from the PLO. The thing to note is that Palestinians need a representative party and representative leadership that speaks to the Palestinian people. As we just talked about, there is a sense of people-hood that is now re-emerging. It’s always been there but it’s now at the surface. And there needs to be a Palestinian party that is able to speak to and on behalf of Palestinians no matter where they are.

That body historically was the PLO, but at this moment in time Palestinians have a strategic question they need to answer. Should the PLO be reformed in order to take the current, institutionally defunct, unrepresentative body that we are now left with after years of Oslo and Mahmoud Abbas’s rule—is that reformable? Should that be resuscitated? Or is it time to move into a post-PLO reality and think of other ways representation and legitimacy can be nurtured?

That question is a strategic one, and is very difficult to answer. Because it’s not just an institutional issue. The PLO holds the diplomatic and legal character for Palestinians on the international stage, including at the UN. Letting go of the PLO lets go of a lot of the victories that Palestinians have accumulated over their past. Those victories might no longer be relevant, in the sense that many of the UN resolutions talk about the two-state solution an partition, and we might have already moved into a reality where the notion of partition is no longer possible and we need to think of other paradigms in which to understand Israel-Palestine: most importantly, a framework of decolonization and the apartheid framework.

All of those have implications in terms of the legal character of whatever Palestinian representative there might be on the international stage. The PLO for me is a secondary issue. The more important issue to think about how best to create institutions that are able to speak to and on behalf of Palestinians globally, and from there to think about what kind of institution can achieve that goal.

EA: Thank you for your time and for chatting with me.

TB: Thank you for having me.

Elia J. Ayoub

,

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Fire These Times

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading