What does Hamas want? – 2/2

JVL Introduction

This is the second of two interlinked posts on Tareq Baconi’s work on Hamas.

You can find the first, a review of Baconi’s 2018 book Hamas Contained, here.

This second one is an interview with Baconi published in Spectre in February this year.

Remember it is now three months old. Nonetheless its reflections on what Hamas seemed to be about then are still relevant.

Baconi believes that the movement’s long-term aspiration of joining the PLO and reforming it from within to resuscitate the Palestinian struggle from the debris of Oslo remains a key objective.

The Palestinian movement as a whole, going beyond Hamas, has two tasks:

• to work for  the emergence of a representative political body that “would enable us to assess the Palestinian struggle in its entirety, represent all its different constituencies, craft strategy, and implement it through the movement’s various fronts”; and
• “to see the Palestinian struggle as intimately connected to the regional struggle”, both against imperialist interests and against the authoritarian regimes in the region that work hand-in-hand with those interests.

The region is indeed on a knife’s edge.

This article was originally published by Spectre on Fri 9 Feb 2024. Read the original here.