Tareq Baconi

Hamas rules Gaza and the lives of the two million Palestinians who live there. Demonized in media and policy debates, various accusations and critical assumptions have been used to justify extreme military action against Hamas. The reality of Hamas is, of course, far more complex. Neither a democratic political party nor a terrorist group, Hamas is a multifaceted liberation organization, one rooted in the nationalist claims of the Palestinian people. Hamas Contained offers the first history of the group on its own terms. Drawing on interviews with organization leaders, as well as publications from the group, Tareq Baconi maps Hamas's thirty-year transition from fringe military resistance towards governance. He breaks new ground in questioning the conventional understanding of Hamas and shows how the movement's ideology ultimately threatens the Palestinian struggle and, inadvertently, its own legitimacy. Hamas's reliance on armed struggle as a means of liberation has failed in the face of a relentless occupation designed to fragment the Palestinian people. As Baconi argues, under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively been neutralized by its containment in Gaza. This dynamic has perpetuated a deadlock characterized by its brutality—and one that has made permissible the collective punishment of millions of Palestinian civilians.

The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance

Hamas Contained

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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 paci-fied, Hamas's government was only practically compliant its finger remained on the trigger.

The dehumanization of Palestinians is so thoroughly pervasive and so unquestioningly echoed by Western leaders that any effort to challenge Israel's system of dominationis 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.

Hamas's charter offered no explicit indication of the nature of its theological and political structures, neither did it signal that Hamas was looking to break from the modern trappings of a nation-state model. The charter spoke of how such an Islamic polity would allow for Christians and Jews to live in peace and harmony under Muslim rule. Despite this assertion, the rest of the charter shed light on Hamas's understanding of Israel, Judaism, and Zionism at the time it was released. The text was replete with anti-Semitic references that built on age-old stereotypes about the Jewish people, including their alleged accumulations of immense wealth, their treacherous and devious nature, and their ability to influence global media. 

Rather than joining the local leadership that was coordinating with the PLO to sustain the uprising, Hamas openly competed against it. As leaflets appeared on the streets in the West Bank and Gaza organizing acts of civil disobedience, Hamas proposed alternative strike dates. The movement's intervention was powerful, leading the PLO to accuse it of undermining unity. Given that the intifada had sprung out of Gaza, where Sheikh Yassin had cultivated the brotherhood's institutional reach deep into the local population, Hamas was able to capitalize on a strong following. The leaflets it published were different in language and feel from those officially issued by the intifada's leadership. They introduced a religious element into an uprising that was not thought of by most Palestinians in particularly religious terms. Slogans from Hamas proliferated, its graffiti attacking Jews and Christians as well as secular nationalists. 

More important was security. A core aspect of Oslo's incremental- iem was that the Palestinian Authority would be held accountable for eecurity issues that Israel might face after the redeployment off its occupation forces. The Palestinian Authority's ability to safeguard Israel's security was framed as a litmus test for Palestinian readiness to self-govern and a prerequisite for further Israeli withdrawal. Security coordination mechanisms were put in place between the Palestinian Authority's security forces and the Israeli intelligence and army. These entailed open Communication channels aimed at crushing any activity within the occupied territories that was deemed a security threat to Israel, such as resistance operations. The Oslo Accords ultimately segmented the West Bank into distinct zones, only 18 percent of which could ostensibly be administered by the Palestinian Authority with the remaining territory falling under Israeli control. In practice, this meant that Israeli forces could reenter any area within the occupied territories, even those that fell under Palestinian jurisdiction.

Netanyahu's cabinet and the PLO paid lip service to peace talks even as it became evident that the five-year deadline for reaching a final settlement, in 1999, would be missed. Aided by Israel, the Palestinian Authority sustained its crackdown on Hamas, causing severe damage to the movement. Hamas was further weakened when the United States designated it a terrorist organization in 1997, thereby limiting its activities internation- ally, while Netanyahu's government also pursued the movement's regional presence. 

Hamas's statements indicated both that its military operations during the Second Intifada were limited to the goal of liberating the occupied territories, rather than to the destruction of Israel, and that the movement was ready to end violence in return for an end to the occupation. In this way, Hamas accepted the notion of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, much as the PLO had done before it, without conceding the goal of liberating historic Palestine by recognizing Israel. Hamas saw itself postponing the full liberation of Palestine to a future battle, the responsibility for which it placed with the wider Arab and Islamic worlds." Like the PLO before it, Hamas regionalized the upris-ing, addressing the "Arab and Islamic Fronts" in all its leaflets.? Placing al-Agsa at the heart of the intifada, Hamas highlighted the Islamic world's responsibility to safeguard Jerusalem as it called for solidarity protests and the cutting of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab countries, as well as for financial, military, and diplomatic support. While both Hamas and the PLO limited their immediate goals to the liberation of the occupied territories, Hamas was clear that force was the only way liberation could be unconditional.

In a memo circulated after the report's release, Hamas elaborated that "this crisis is not between two neighboring warriors. ... In reality it is the aggression of an oppressive occupation on an unarmed population. .. The occupation itself is the highest form of terrorism, violence and aggression. " Hamas's publications condemned the implicit "equalization of power" that they inferred from demand- ng that both parties cease violence: that was akin to "comparing the victim to the executioner, the murderer to the murdered." Hamas insisted that to end violence, the occupation itself had to be dismantled. It’s own attacks were portrayed as self-defense against the inherently violent nature of the occupation. 

Israel's withdrawal plans entailed the relocation of eight thousand Israeli settlers from twenty-one settlements within Gaza and four settle- ments in the West Bank. A forty-eight-hour voluntary evacuation com- menced on August 16 to allow settlers to move out on their own accord. After this period ended, thousands of Israeli army soldiers were sent in to forcibly remove hundreds of families who refused to leave. The evacuations entailed long hours where settlers barricaded themselves and faced off with the army. After the settlers were relocated, the Israeli army destroyed all the settlements left behind, leaving synagogues intact. 

With the aim of breaking Fatah's unilateralism and deflecting worries about its Islamic nature, Hamas offered a civilizational renaissance project that was open to "all those who suffered under Zionist brutality to come in as partners in the liberation struggle." It extended its arms to Christians and reaffirmed its commitment to the role of women. In contrast to Hamas's aspirations for the domestic reconfiguration and structural reorientation of the struggle, Fatah remained committed to the notion of a strategic peace in line with past agreements, while affirming the right of resistance in self-defense, as stipulated by international law.

Hamas Contained quotes

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