Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance

Most writing about Hamas in English is either denunciation or apologetics, and both save the writer the trouble of reading what the movement actually publishes. Baconi read it. The book is built on Hamas’s own publications and internal documents, on interviews with its leaders conducted while the author was the International Crisis Group’s analyst for Israel/Palestine in Ramallah, and on the human-rights record — including reports by Palestinian organisations documenting Hamas’s own abuses.

The argument is in the subtitle. Baconi traces the movement’s thirty-year passage from a fringe military-resistance faction to the governing authority of the Gaza Strip after the 2006 election and the 2007 split, and argues that through a dual process of containment and pacification Hamas was forced into becoming little more than an administrative authority in a territory sealed by land, sea and air. Israeli policy, on this reading, did not seek to destroy Hamas so much as to hold it — to keep Gaza governed by a party it could designate hostile, contained behind a blockade, and periodically bombed.

The book keeps the record in both directions, which is why it is here rather than a friendlier account. Baconi documents Hamas’s authoritarianism plainly: no election since 2006, torture in detention, extrajudicial killings of political opponents, and a security apparatus that behaves as security apparatuses do. He also records what governing achieved, including the suppression of the armed clans and lawlessness that preceded it.

Its evidence stops in 2017. Readers should hold that date in view: the events of October 2023 and after put the containment thesis under a strain the book could not anticipate, and Baconi has written about that since. What the book remains is the best-documented account of how Hamas came to be what it was on the eve of it.

About the author

Tareq Baconi is president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and was formerly senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and economics of conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah. He is book review editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and writes for the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Hamas Contained was shortlisted for the 2018 Palestine Book Awards.

Details

• Stanford University Press, 2018 — Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures; 336 pages
• ISBN 9780804797412 (cloth); 9781503605817 (paperback)

Where to find it

• In print from Stanford University Press, and orderable through any independent bookshop.
• The author’s ongoing analysis is published free by Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network.