Book Talk: Hamas Contained (Tareq Baconi) (Part 1)

Tareq Baconi presented his book, “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance,” to a packed house at the Kevorkian Center's Richard Ettinghausen Library on Friday, February 1, 2019.
The product of more than 10 years of engagement with literature produced by Hamas and interviews with memories of the organization, Baconi’s book “offers a thirty-year history of Hamas from the perspective of the organization itself,” he said. Baconi traces the history of Hamas from 1987-2017, and intervenes to “put forward a more nuanced view of events.”
In his book, Baconi questions a perceived tension between “Hamas’s Islamism and its nationalism,” or the group being seen as an Islamist organization “at the expense of its Palestinianness.” Baconi places the organization “squarely within the Palestinian nationalist struggle.”
For Hamas, the use of violence has been “strategic” and “calculated,” argues Baconi. “Hamas was instrumental in derailing the diplomatic process in the 1990s” through the use of suicide bombings, aiming to strike a “balance of terror” and inflict pain to “force the Israel government to relinquish its hold.” This strategy failed, however, due to what Baconi calls a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how Israel would respond-by reconfiguring more overarching and resilient modes of occupation. He also places Hamas’s engagement with the Palestinian Authority in the mid-2000s not “so much an acquiescence to the PA” but as an attempt to “rebuild and resuscitate the PLO” as it existed in the 60s and 70s.
A key overarching argument of Baconi’s book is that “Hamas’s presence in the Gaza strip…is fundamental for the current reality to be sustainable” in Israel.” Through the presence of Hamas, Israel “justifies policies that predate Hamas by decades,” says Baconi. In the context of a “one-state reality,” “creeping annexation in the West Bank,” and the “institutionalization of separation” of the Gaza strip, the Israeli government walks a fine line: Hamas must remain in power but “cannot be empowered.” Hamas, he argues, needs “to be contained” but “not really defeated.
This dynamic, which he calls “the equilibrium of belligerence,” results in both sides maintaining tension but never moving towards a resolution. In the process, key Palestinian demands are “managed, never really resolved.”
This book talk was in collaboration with NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies.