On October 7th 2023, under Hamas’ leadership, Palestinian resistance fighters from numerous brigades and organizations conducted the heroic Al-Aqsa Flood Operation that shook the zionist colonial entity to its core. Since then, the zionists have waged a genocidal campaign of annihilation against the Palestinian people in Gaza, slaughtering over 34,000 people, the majority of whom were women and children. The Western media has been working overtime to produce atrocity propaganda justifying the ongoing massacre, framing it as a legitimate war between the zionist entity and Hamas. Accordingly, the West has exploited every political angle to vilify and slander Hamas and its leaders, and, by extension, Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation movement. They need us to believe that Hamas are monsters in order to validate their own monstrous and horrific actions, and render the Palestinian cause unworthy of support.
It is vital to see this vitriol for the nonsense that it is, but dispelling myths and propaganda on a subject is only the first step — lies must be displaced by facts rather than emptiness. In the interest of seeking “truth from facts” about Hamas, we sought resources that interviewed Hamas leaders, Hamas members, and Palestinians not affiliated with Hamas. A stark contrast from much of the material casually available or presented algorithmically in the West, Hamas: From Resistance to Regime by Paola Caridi, Decolonizing Palestine by Somdeep Sen, and Gaza under Hamas by Bjorn Brenner all treat both Hamas as an organization and the Palestinian struggle as a whole with the respect these subjects deserve.
Hamas: From Resistance to Regime is a general history of Hamas, covering its foundation in 1987 until the book’s 2012 publication. It’s worth noting that the text was originally titled “Hamas: From Resistance to Government.” We can speculate as to why this change was made. The text addresses the zionist lie that Hamas is not a democratic organization and that its leadership is somehow disconnected from the Palestinian people. Caridi illustrates that Hamas functions according to the principle of freedom in criticism, unity in action, and that its commitment to democratic principles is so rigorous that it has even been a detriment to the organization. For instance, Caridi explains how contents of the 1988 Hamas charter, the Mithaq, were brandished by the zionists as proof of the organization’s commitment to antisemitism, as well as the proof that Hamas were Islamic ideologues who could not be negotiated with and needed to be destroyed. Rather than discard or even revise the charter immediately, which would have been politically expedient, Hamas strictly followed its democratic principles: they didn’t create a new charter until all four of their member constituencies — Gaza, the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners, and Palestinians living abroad — had been extensively consulted.
Another of the zionist’s frequently-made false claims is that the leadership of Hamas lives abroad, siphoning aid money meant for Gaza, and living lavishly while the masses are left in abject poverty. Caridi’s text explores the pragmatic origin of Hamas’ dispersed leadership, demonstrating that the practice emerged as the organization’s survival mechanism against continuous assassinations and arrests by the zionists. As proven by the January 3rd, 2024 martyrdom of Saleh al-Arouri by a zionist strike in Beirut, the cowardly zionists have no qualms about killing Hamas members, even on foreign soil and in flagrant transgression of international law. The practice of dispersal prevents the organization’s leadership from being annihilated in any single zionist attack.
Similarly, the importance of prisoners’ political lives to Hamas, to the extent prisoners have their own constituency within the organization, also emerged from necessity. Caridi notes that, since over 700,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned by the zionist entity at some point since 1967, “the experience of jail, therefore, is so widespread, so common, and so constant in the history of Palestinian society that particularly as far as political party militants are concerned, it is never considered a hiatus from active political life.”
Politically, Hamas adheres to the principle of freedom in criticism, unity in action. Decisions and actions undertaken by the organization are subject to debate and critique by its membership, but once a collective decision is made, “everyone is committed to abiding by it, irrespective of their own positions.” Although the zionists tout their project as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” members of their political system aren’t bound to democratic principles of this nature. Political gamesmanship, as it transpires in the U.S. when one or two senators dissent against their party in order to stymy legislation, is not possible within Hamas.
In addition to its analysis of Hamas’ political workings and history, Caridi’s text also examines the role of women within Hamas, and Hamas’ conflict with one of the most prominent Palestinian parties, Fatah.
For anyone seeking a text that examines the organization from a more theoretical perspective, Decolonizing Palestine by Somdeep Sen may be more enticing. Decolonizing Palestine draws upon the works of Frantz Fanon, particularly Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, to explore the challenges that Hamas faces as an anticolonial group who must govern as though they are no longer colonized. This is a unique position, as opposed to many of the familiar revolutions where the oppressors were entirely or mostly overthrown prior to the oppressed group seizing political power.
The text is primarily a reflection on what it means to be colonized and what it means to be liberated through the lens of the Palestinian struggle. The Palestinian focus is not to the exclusion of other examples; the author is Bengali, and brings their perspective on the oppression of the Bengali people into the text. In present-day India and Bangladesh, Bengali Muslims may be considered a liberated or post-colonial people, since the region achieved independence from Britain. However, vestiges of colonial control remain in the form of economic dependence, as well as in transference of the role of oppressor to India and Pakistan. Sen utilizes these comparisons to grapple with questions of how Palestine will look when the zionist occupation falls.
The author applies Fanon’s conclusions on the colonized subject to the Palestinian struggle, arguing that liberation cannot be condensed to the singular moment when the colonizer leaves or suffers an intractable defeat. Instead, the moment the zionists are defeated will constitute the beginning of the Palestinian peoples’ emancipation. Sen emphasizes that anti-colonial and post-colonial conduct are lived and continual modes of existence, rather than singular events. Hamas, as a dynamic and multifaceted organization that operates in the interstice between government and resistance group, and between secularism and theocracy, not only represents Palestinians in the literal sense, but also demonstrates that “liberation is not just about liberation. It is as much about the colonized’s perceptions of who they were, who they are, and who they ought to be in their liberated future.”
The book’s appraisal of violence is also firmly rooted in the Fanonian tradition. Too frequently, assessments of violence are either dismissive or superficial. But Sen correctly explores the roles violence plays in forming the Palestinian identity. The zionist’s fervent need to erase the Palestinian people — both physically and metaphorically — is struggled against through both physical and symbolic acts of violence. Acts of violent resistance are given a sacred status by the colonized because they are proof that their suffering can be unmade, and actions towards unmaking that suffering are under way. Each act of resistance is emphatic proof, a declaration, that Palestine exists, that Palestinians exist. Despite their best efforts to ignore and erase the colonized, settlers can only live in fear and discomfort that boils out from the realities of their trespassing.
The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation enunciated Sen and Fanon’s theories about violence from theory into reality. The October 7th attacks unequivocally proved that Palestinians will not be erased — they will not quietly perish on their oppressor’s terms. No matter the level of surveillance, the strength of the walls around Gaza, the brutality of the prisons, or the defensive power of the Iron Dome, the resistance will ensure that settlers can only live in anxiety. Ultimately, it is not the military aspect of the Al-Aqsa Flood that was most successful, although it was a significant tactical accomplishment, but its psychological impact upon the zionists. The facades of colonial supremacy and invincibility are crumbling. Evidence is emerging that many of what the colonizer calls “atrocities” from that day were carried out by the zionists themselves, or are outright fabrications. It increasingly appears that many of the deaths on October 7th were caused either by disarrayed and panicked zionist forces or by active invocation of the noxious zionist Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the IOF to prevent the taking of prisoners through the indiscriminate murder of prisoner and captor alike, whether the prisoner is an IOF soldier or a so-called “non-combatant.” In subsequent months, the zionist military has been humiliated, has failed to achieve its objectives, tens of thousands of settlers have fled, and the entity is increasingly gripped by a burgeoning crisis between its military and political leaders. Every desperate strike by the zionists against the children, women, and men of Gaza only reinforces the justness and inevitability of the Palestinian cause to millions of people around the world. In this way, violent acts not only unmake the colonizer, but cause the colonizer to unmake themselves. The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on its own did not liberate Palestine in one dramatic punch, but marks a new development in what Sen would term Palestine’s “long liberation moment.”
Finally, Gaza Under Hamas by Bjorn Brenner is a contemporary examination of Hamas after the 2006 elections. It assesses Hamas’ response to what the author identifies as the three major problems confronting Hamas, beyond the obvious one which is the occupation of Palestine by zionists. These are: Hamas’ governmental conflicts with Fatah, its political rival which governs the West Bank, who have proven themselves to be complicit with the occupier’s agenda, Hamas’ handling of Salafi and Jihadist groups, and its general approach to social order within Gaza.
This text dismantles the common Western canards that Hamas are “Islamic supremacists,” “Arab supremacists,” or “authoritarian.” It examines in detail how serving the needs and interests of the Palestinian people has led to Hamas’ style of governance balancing between theocratic and secular, democratic and authoritarian. It showcases Hamas’ pragmatic and grassroots nature, and its responsiveness to the needs of Palestinians. This is contrasted with how the Palestinian Authority functions under Fatah’s leadership.
Brenner’s work examines Hamas’ conflicts with groups who ascribe to more fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, such as Salafi-Jihadist groups and ISIS, whose politics and compradorship are beyond the scope of this article. Drawing attention to these conflicts is important as it illustrates that Hamas are not the Islamic extremists they’re construed as in Western media. Notably, many members of the fundamentalist groups are former Hamas members who were disillusioned by the organization’s secular and democratic qualities, and its lack of radical nihilism.
Gaza Under Hamas also investigates the pragmatic balance that the organization must maintain between its own survival, the need for social harmony in Palestinian society, and respect for individual rights within Palestinian society. Brenner concludes that Hamas prioritizes communal security over notions of justice or individual rights as they’re commonly understood in the West. He describes how Hamas’ governance is a unique combination of Islamic customary codes (urf) and Islamic religious law (sharia). While the organization is democratic, they may act beyond democratic norms in order to resist the zionists and preserve Palestinian society.Overall, Gaza Under Hamas by Bjorn Brenner, Decolonizing Gaza by Somdeep Sen, and Hamas: From Resistance to Regime by Paola Caridi strive to paint a comprehensive portrait of a complex organization. The various analytical and theoretical perspectives utilized by the three authors are a welcome refrain from the reductive and bombastic drivel that permeates Western discourse on this subject. As the zionists come under increasing social, political, and military pressure from the resistance, so too will their efforts to slander Hamas and the Palestinian people intensify. In this context, texts like these, which humanize the resistance of the colonized and aspire towards an objective understanding of Hamas, become increasingly essential.
