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Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance: by

Tareq Baconi, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2018, 368 pp., USD 30
(hardcover), ISBN: 97808047974...

Article  in  Politics Religion & Ideology · April 2020

DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2020.1755071

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 Politics, Religion & Ideology

ISSN: 2156-7689 (Print) 2156-7697 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftmp21

Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of

Palestinian Resistance
by Tareq Baconi, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2018, 368 pp., USD
30 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780804797412

Tristan Dunning

To cite this article: Tristan Dunning (2020): Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of
Palestinian Resistance, Politics, Religion & Ideology, DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2020.1755071

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POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

BOOK REVIEW

Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, by Tareq

Baconi, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2018, 368 pp., USD 30 (hardcover),
ISBN: 9780804797412

Tareq Baconi’s Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance is an
extremely thorough volume, predominantly entailing a narrative history of the Islamic Resist-
ance Movement in Palestine, Hamas. While acknowledging that there is no single Hamas per
se, the book attempts to present ‘Hamas’s counternarrative on its own terms.’1 As such, Baconi
meticulously documents Hamas’s changing oral, visual and written discourses between 1987
and 2017, tracing its evolution from a revolutionary armed movement to governance. The
volume, moreover, attempts to contextualise the evolution of Hamas by placing the movement
within the broader struggle for Palestinian self-determination.
To do so, the author engages in a systematic discourse analysis of Hamas publications and
outputs during this period, notably Filastin al-Muslima (Muslim Palestine), the information
from which constitutes the backbone of the study due to its uninterrupted print run, and
Hamas’s local publication in Gaza, al-Resalah (The Letter or Message). The evidence, inter
alia, also draws upon numerous other sources including samples from Gazan publication
al-Assafir (The Ambassador), bayanat (leaflets) circulated by Hamas and other factions,
Hamas online platforms, and local, regional and international news organisations featuring
interviews and statements by the movement and its affiliates.2 The work also contributes to
the pool of primary data available through the author’s interviews with various stakeholders
throughout the region and beyond. Finally, the author attempts to frame the analysis of
Hamas’s statements by reference to the contemporaneous broader reality, while drawing on
secondary literature and alternative media to attempt to cut through any rhetorical excesses
employed by the movement. In doing so, the author attempts to compare Hamas’s rhetoric
with its temporal practices.
Given the author’s desire to humanise Palestinian suffering and articulate an alternative
narrative about Hamas and the Palestinian struggle in its own words, however, the core chap-
ters of the book can sometimes come across a bit uncritical (something which, undoubtedly, I
have been accused of too at times). This is, nonetheless, understandable and refreshing in light
of the ‘terrorist’, ‘fundamentalist’, and Orientalist pejoratives often levelled at the movement—
especially from hostile governments and press—with the deliberate intention of misinforma-
tion, marginalisation and depoliticisation of the conflict as merely a security and humanitarian
issue, rather than one of Palestinian self-determination. As Baconi demonstrates, Hamas is,
ironically, both marginalised on a political, economic and military level, but also central to
conflict and any resolution thereof.
In a similar vein, as a narrative history—and refreshingly so, to be honest—the volume does
not offer much which is conceptually ground-breaking. It does, however, provide extensive
primary data and further support for the assertions of previous works about the movement.
To this end, the volume again demonstrates that Hamas is a contemporary manifestation of
Palestinian nationalism, the core tenets of which remain the same: resistance, self-determi-
nation and liberation from foreign rule. Indeed, perhaps somewhat ironically, Hamas initially
1
Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford, Stanford University Press,
2018), p. xx.
2
Ibid., p. xxi-xxii.
2 BOOK REVIEW

rearticulated the founding goals of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation within an Islamic
framework as the PLO increasingly gravitated towards compromise with Israel in the 1980s. As
Baconi points out, ‘Israel does not have a Hamas problem; it has a Palestinian problem.’3
Below we turn to the key takeaways of the volume. The sheer detail of information con-
tained within the volume and the space constraints attendant on this review, however, only
allow me to scratch the surface vis-à-vis the complexity of Hamas’s evolving discourses
detailed inside.
Since assuming sole control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has, the book argues, been
pacified—at least, temporarily—via a combination of isolation embodied by the blockade of
Gaza, periodic withering violence unleashed by Israel, and the responsibilities of governance.
Hamstrung by the often-contradictory demands of armed resistance and government, the
book argues that Hamas has effectively been reduced to an administrative entity akin to the
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, albeit espousing an unbowed and unbroken resistance
discourse of defiance. This, in turn, allows Hamas concomitantly to defend is resistance legacy
and police other factions in Gaza to maintain calm with Israel, while providing the movement
space for military escalation if need be.4 Unlike the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli
settlements continue to expand unfettered, the Gaza Strip, however, is (at least, rhetorically)
conceptualised as ‘liberated’ land. While routinely described as a giant open-air prison due
to its military, diplomatic, economic and physical isolation since Hamas’s takeover in 2007,
Gaza became the first territory ‘under absolute Palestinian control’, thereby doing away
with the quotidian experiences of ‘Imposed curfews, home demolitions and midnight raids
by Israel’s occupying forces, or by Palestinian security following Israeli orders’, which still
occur in the West Bank.5 This has, however, come at a terrible cost to the Gazan population,
which has suffered from repeated massive military assaults at the hands of Israeli armed forces.
Paradoxically perhaps, while acting as the enforcer of calm in Gaza, moreover, Hamas has
created an environment conducive to resistance in all of its forms.6 Nonetheless, the crippling
blockade of Gaza, periodic military conflict, and the ever-present humanitarian crisis these
engender have required Hamas to compromise its resistance agenda in the name of govern-
mental responsibility. As a result, not only has Hamas demonstrated its capacity to engage
in ceasefires, but also the movement’s ability to compromise, to the extent that it was ready
to surrender administrative control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority prior to the 2014
war in order to alleviate the enclave’s suffering (albeit still remaining in effective security
control). Ironically, the devastation wrought by the war in 2014 offered Hamas a lifeline as
it led to the partial easing of the blockade.
Conversely, it is Israel, Baconi argues, that has no strategy to deal with Hamas and which
has a long-history of side-stepping core political drivers of the conflict in favour of short-term
military strategies. Indicatively, the Netanyahu government has imposed Catch-22 conditions
on negotiations insofar as it refuses to work with any Palestinian government with ties to
Hamas, while simultaneously deriding any Palestinian government excluding Hamas as unre-
presentative.7 Reading Baconi’s detailed chronology, moreover, one is reminded of the see-
mingly innumerable (and largely forgotten) armed conflicts, failed attempts at Palestinian-
Israeli diplomacy, and intra-Palestinian reconciliation deals, undermined and stymied by
Israeli intransigence and a lack of meaningful international pressure on the occupying power.
3
Ibid., p. 227.
4
Ibid., p. 235.
5
Ibid., p. 136.
6
See Ibid., p. 105 & p.190.
7
Ibid., p. 222–3.
 POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY 3

In brief, Baconi’s volume is a thorough, in-depth and extremely detailed account of the
evolution of Hamas, albeit the ongoing Return Marches and Hamas’s repeated, rapid and
expansive resort to rocket fire throughout 2018–19 to obtain (temporary) concessions, may
indicate that the extent of the movement’s alleged pacification may be overstated. Nonetheless,
the systematic evaluation of such a wide range of sources comprises the volume’s primary
value, especially for non-Arabic speakers unable to access Hamas publications, providing
extensive insight into the views of the movement itself, in contrast to the deeply limiting
and dehumanising ‘terrorist’, ‘fundamentalist’, and Orientalist labels often ascribed to the
movement. As such, the volume will be an invaluable reference work for years to come.

Tristan Dunning
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia
tristan.dunning@uq.edu.au
© 2020 Tristan Dunning
https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2020.1755071

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