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.

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.

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.