where the palestinian political project goes from here

 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/where-the-palestinian-political-project-goes-from-here

 Last weekend, Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, killing more than a thousand Israelis and taking some hundred and fifty hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, announced that his country was at war, and his cabinet called up hundreds of thousands of reservists and ordered the bombing of the Gaza Strip, where, in the past few days, as many as eleven hundred Palestinians have already been killed. To talk about the conflict, I called Tareq Baconi, the president of the board of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. He has also worked with the International Crisis Group in Ramallah, and is the author of the 2018 book “Hamas Contained.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Hamas hoped to accomplish, how Israeli government policy toward Hamas has changed over the years, and how to understand the sheer scale of the violence and cruelty we have seen in recent days.

How do you make sense of the timing of this attack?

What happened in the past weekend has really shifted the paradigm of how we understand the dynamic between Hamas and Israel, specifically, but more broadly between Israel and the Palestinians. Under the old paradigm, there were several factors that might have precipitated this attack, such as the increasing violence that the Israelis are using in the West Bank, through their settlers and through annexation; the provocation around the Temple Mount and, of course, around the Gaza Strip; and the growing restrictions that are part of Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Any of these in the past would have compelled Hamas to initiate some kind of missile launch or offensive that would demonstrate that it’s acting on behalf of the Palestinian people and looking to protect Palestinians, or change the reality in Gaza.
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The scale of the offensive and its success, from Hamas’s perspective, mean that we’re actually in a new paradigm, in which Hamas’s attacks are not restricted to renegotiating a new reality in the Gaza Strip, but, rather, are capable of fundamentally undermining Israel’s belief that it can maintain a regime of apartheid against Palestinians, interminably, with no cost to its population. And so, in that new paradigm, the reasons that Hamas would have attacked are quite clear. I think that Israel is in possibly the weakest position it’s been in in a very long time. There are major cracks within the Israeli polity and society around the nature of what this Zionist project has produced. I think the Army is at its weakest because many reservists were protesting, because this is the most fascist government in the country’s history. And so, even internationally, there’s a recognition that this actually isn’t the Jewish democratic state that everyone believed it to be, but, rather, something far more troubling.

When you say that we’ve arrived at a new paradigm, are you implying that Hamas set out, with the scale and brutality of this attack, to create a new paradigm?

I don’t think Hamas set out to create a new paradigm. But Western policymakers and, more generally, the international community have been changing their understanding of this reality. That change has been happening for a few years. It is now pretty much consensus among Palestinians and Israelis in the human-rights world, and other international members of that field, that this is a regime of apartheid. In 2021, Palestinians emerged in demonstrations and protests throughout the land of historic Palestine, in a unity intifada meant to overcome this idea that there’s a partition between, let’s say, the interior of Israel and the occupied territories. That was, in some ways, the beginning of this shift, to move away from this Oslo design of partitioning Palestinians and into really understanding the Palestinian struggle as a struggle of a single people against a single regime of oppression. But what Hamas has done now—and I’m not entirely sure that Hamas thought its offensive could be as major as it ultimately was—really shattered the idea that Israel can maintain a regime of apartheid, or, rather, that Israel can still pretend to be a Jewish and democratic state while it’s oppressing another people interminably.

But, to go back to my earlier question: It doesn’t quite make sense why, if Hamas didn’t set out specifically to change the paradigm, it undertook an attack of this magnitude.

Hamas was already operating within the paradigm of understanding Israel as a colonial apartheid state. What’s shifted is its ability to demonstrate the myth of invincibility that Israel holds on to and to really shatter the illusion that policymakers have that they can maintain this regime indefinitely, and that there will be Palestinian acquiescence to that. With this offensive, I think it’s much harder to go back to a world where we think of this as just terrorism that’s unprovoked, which is what the New York Times editorial claimed today. [The editorial said that the attack happened “without warning or any immediate provocation.”]

Since 2007, Hamas was effectively contained in the Gaza Strip. There was this idea that Israel could rely on Hamas to govern the Gaza Strip and stabilize two million Palestinians who are imprisoned there. And there was a very violent equilibrium between the two. But effectively Hamas was contained in the Gaza Strip and almost severed from the rest of Palestine. There were, historically, demographic reasons that Israel needed to do this, to remove two million Palestinians from under its control, to secure a Jewish majority while it continued to hold on to the West Bank. With this offensive, that notion of containment can now be understood for what it was: Hamas was biding its time. It always articulated that it was gathering its forces and strengthening itself to push forward the Palestinian political project, with an Islamist ideology.

You said that Israel is increasingly being seen as a colonial state that violates human rights. But it seems that the response to this has been a complete embrace of Israel to a degree that I have found a little bit surprising. The American embrace was perhaps to be expected, but there has been a full-on European embrace and green light for Israel to go and pretty much do whatever it wants in Gaza. Could the progress you’ve identified be reversed?

Absolutely. In some ways, that’s very much possible, and I completely agree with you. I think the rhetoric that has emerged since this attack has partly been a continuation of the fundamental misreading of what causes violence. The important thing is to end the war and to end civilian death. Unless the political drivers of Palestinians are really contended with, this isn’t going to go away. If Hamas is decimated, the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle will continue in another guise and with another ideology. What I find frightening is that the Western powers and the Americans who are so bent on supporting Israel despite its apartheid somehow think that they can maintain this project cost-free.

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If we assume that Hamas’s actions are rational in the sense that it’s doing something with a goal in mind, that doesn’t necessarily mean its actions make strategic sense.

That’s absolutely right, and I think this is a situation that’s still in flux. No one can understand where this will lead. I do think that Hamas was surprised by how far it was able to go. Israel could decimate the Gaza Strip, and Hamas could cease to exist as the organization that we understand it to be today. Regardless, what the past seventy-two hours have shown, and I think this is in some ways irreversible, is that there’s a myth about Israel’s invincibility as an apartheid regime. And so, even if the kind of overwhelming military power that Israel can now unleash with the full support of its Western patrons completely decimates Gaza, or Palestinians more broadly, in the Palestinian political imagination this will be very profound. That’s why I believe we’re in a new reality now.

Do you think this attack was in part about the relationship between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority?

Look, there’s obviously an institutional and political divide between the P.A. and Hamas, and this goes back decades. Hamas has been a governing entity in the Gaza Strip for sixteen years now. In some ways, that has served it well. But there was always a degree of ambivalence that Hamas held on to—wanting to be less of a governing authority and more of an armed resistance movement. What we’ve seen with this offensive, and for a few years leading up to it, is a greater degree of confidence from Hamas in asserting its role as speaking on behalf of Palestinians not just in the Gaza Strip but across Palestine, and even in the diaspora and refugee communities.
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At the same time, the P.A. has been increasingly irrelevant in that project, in the sense that it’s been seen as inextricably linked with Israeli apartheid. Hamas defines itself as very actively against that, and against the notion of security coördination. Hamas is much more capable as an actor when there’s Israeli aggression against Palestinians, regardless of whether Palestinians buy into Hamas’s Islamist ideology or even its tactics. It’s the only major political and military party now that is speaking the language of defiance. And I think this offensive shows more than ever before how irrelevant the P.A. actually is in this constellation.

But, in some fundamental sense, you don’t believe that this action was about an intra-Palestinian struggle? And you don’t believe it was about sending a message to Arab states regarding peace treaties with Israel?

I do think all of those factors were in there, but I think that, fundamentally, an attack of this scale is not an attack which was planned in the past month or two, and that it was definitely an attack which, at its heart, was about pushing back against Israeli impunity.

What has been this Israeli government’s policy toward Hamas, specifically? There were reports in the Israeli press about Netanyahu expressing the belief that strengthening Hamas would weaken the Palestinian Authority, and thereby prevent a Palestinian state. How has that manifested itself on the ground in Gaza?

Israel has always had an ideology or policy or position toward the Islamic movements in Palestine, which ultimately became Hamas, which sees those movements as a counterweight to secular nationalism, if one can even call the P.A. that, given what it has become. That policy of “divide and rule” is intrinsic to dealing with Palestinians. And, in the case of Hamas specifically, when it came into office in 2006, part of Israel’s idea was to enforce a blockade, which had existed in several iterations before Hamas took power.

It quickly became clear that Hamas was actually a good partner for Israel in the sense that it was able to stabilize the Gaza Strip and it provided the perfect fig leaf for the Israelis to justify their blockade. No one could really question why Israel had such an inhumane blockade. And so Hamas became a very good interlocutor. It was a violent equilibrium. Each party accepted the position of the other.

Whenever an Israeli domestic issue needed to be deflected, or Hamas needed to deflect challenges in the Gaza Strip, there could be a configuration or some kind of escalation between them. But it would always come back to a ceasefire. And, from the Israeli perspective, in a way similar to how it deals with the rest of the Palestinians, there was no strategy. There was really just a decision to manage the occupation, to manage the status quo. And so it never really had to deal with Hamas or Hamas’s political drivers. Israel thought that it could contain Hamas in the Gaza Strip and allow it to stabilize the area, and then it was out of sight, out of mind.

Is there tension between what you just said and the other idea that you put forward, that the Palestinian Authority was seen as too closely coöperating with Israel and has been politically marginalized in part because of that? It seems like what you’re saying is that, in fact, Israel in some ways prefers Hamas and has tacit coöperation of a sort with it.

That’s an important question, and it’s one that I have really tried to engage with. Israel’s acceptance of Hamas as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip raised a lot of questions around the fact that Hamas was engaging with the state that it was refusing to recognize, and in some ways achieving a level of security coördination—the same kind of security coördination that it condemns the P.A. for doing. It is entering into negotiations with Israel, and sometimes pulling back fighters or firing rockets to insure calm. So, in some ways, the reality of Hamas as a governing authority implicated its resistance project and forced it into engagement with Israel.

At the same time, the main difference between Hamas and the P.A. is that Hamas never conceded on its ideology. It has never conceded the right of Palestinians to return, or its refusal to recognize the state of Israel, or to give up on armed struggle. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then subsumed into the P.A., did, and it conceded on the major drivers of Palestinian nationalism and the belief that it could get a state.

Israel also has different modes of engagement with each of the governing entities under its sovereignty, but also beyond its sovereignty. So its relationship with Hezbollah was actually closer to its relationship with Hamas, which is a relationship of violent exchanges that in some ways also worked in its favor, and that’s just fundamentally different from how it deals with the P.A.

How would you say it deals with the P.A.?

I don’t think there’s any confrontation. The P.A. has acquiesced to Israeli sovereignty. I think the P.A. now, its raison d’être, is security coördination. It has accepted that it is ruling a Bantustan.

I’d always heard that there was a lot of Israeli counterintelligence activity within Hamas, which I assume is still the case. Why do you think this plan did not get revealed?
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Different people within Hamas or commenting around Hamas have talked about this being a very tightly held secret within a very small group of military men and others within the organization. What I can say is that, historically, Hamas has always maintained a degree of separation between its military wing and its political bureau. The political bureau would put forward a strategy. And that strategy would then provide the direction for the military wing to carry out its tactics without actually informing the political bureau. So the political bureau gives a vague direction, and it has no information or insight about when or how a certain operation is going to take place. It strikes me that this is something that probably happened here—that there was a general sense of watching Israeli weakness and discombobulation in the past six months and the sense of giving some kind of direction for an attack, but not actually knowing when or how the attack would happen.

Many of the anti-colonial or revolutionary figures we revere—Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress come to mind—did use violence to achieve their ends. And I think there’s a naïveté today about how often groups throughout history have used violence. At the same time, when I hear Israelis say things like, “People in Palestine are animals who will be treated as such,” or when I hear the reports about dead children in Israeli towns, I sometimes have trouble thinking of this as military strategy, or some part of a coherent political struggle with clear ends in mind. It often seems like sadism. And I don’t know how we should think about these acts in the context of larger struggles, even larger struggles we support. How do you wrestle with that?

It’s a really important question and, I think, a very, very difficult one. I grapple with it every day. What you’re saying is absolutely right. There was no anti-colonial struggle or struggle for decolonization without violence. Part of the issue here is that it’s really important for us to go back to centering the primary cause in any anti-colonial struggle, which is colonial violence. It’s crucial to ground the discussion in that context because Hamas’s violence isn’t coming out of the blue. And part of the issue around, as you say, sadism, is that Palestinians have, day in, day out, been living with death and violence.

This is the first time I have been interviewed by The New Yorker, and it’s happening because Israelis were killed. What happened when Palestinians were killed in the thousands, just in the fifteen years that I’ve been covering Hamas? And so, when we really want to think about what this driver of violence is—and the pictures that have been coming out are sickening—we need to understand that colonial violence instills dehumanization both in the oppressor and in the oppressed. And it’s completely out of mind. It’s mind-boggling to me that Israeli protesters go out to protest for democracy in an apartheid regime. The only way they can hold that contradiction is if they accept that Palestinian lives are absent or expendable. And so we have to understand this violence, which, again, is heart-wrenching, in that context.

But if we want to think about Hamas and its political project, the group still doesn’t speak on behalf of all Palestinians. Palestinians are not all Islamists. The bigger issue here is that the Palestinian political project, which was the P.L.O., which was actually more in line with anti-colonial movements in the seventies and the eighties, was equally treated as a terrorist organization by the West until it was decimated both institutionally and through the assassination and imprisonment of Palestinian political leaders. This was the decimation of the political project of the anti-colonial movement. And, in the Palestinian case, it worked, or worked temporarily. But the political project right now is reconstituting itself, and so far Hamas is the loudest manifestation of that project.

What you say about the colonial situation causing this amount of violence is true in the macro sense. But people also commit violence in all sorts of circumstances: Israelis who are not victims of colonialism; Islamist groups who want to kill Jews for being Jews. Some violence may not necessarily be intimately connected to the colonial struggle, but maybe that’s always the case throughout history.

I think it’s vital for political leaders and for Palestinians to be able to see the suffering and the tragedy and the loss of human life and the violence, and to be able to still maintain the ethical value in seeing the justice of their own struggle, while also grieving over sadistic violence. We need to be able to hold both. We need to recognize that anti-colonial struggles are violent. But not all of that violence is in pursuit of a political project. As you say, violence occurs for all different sorts of reasons. We need to be able to hold that truth while also recognizing the ethical purpose of ending apartheid. And I think it’s really hard to do that when the media tries to portray this in black and white. It’s very complex, and we need to be able to hold that complexity. ♦