Just World Ed’s book Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters has only been available via major online and real-world retailers since October 8. But in partnership with our publishers, OR Books, and other valued friends/colleagues we have already been able to present three great events for it– in New York City, Washington DC, and Marin County, California… And we now have FIVE other events scheduled around the Bay Area/ Northern California between this evening and next Monday (October 15.)
You can find the calendar for these upcoming events here, or here. These will be presented in Oakland (this evening), Saratoga and Santa Cruz (Saturday, 10/12), downtown SF (10/13), and last but not least Sacramento (10/14, which aptly enough is also Indigenous People’s Day.)
A big shoutout to all the orgs that are enthusiastically co-sponsoring these events! Clearly, our book is landing at a very auspicious time in the altogether horrendous history of Israel’s ongoing– and diplomacy-destroying– genocides and aggressions.
The Understanding Hamas book is the latest product of the broader project of the same name that Just World Educational launched back in May, when our president, Helena Cobban, and valued board member Rami G. Khouri presented a series of five webinars in which they explored the history, development, and goals of the movement with five world-class experts.
Our book presents lightly edited transcripts of those conversations along with several appendices that provide some vital documentation on Hamas’s history, including the older and revised versions of its Charter, an authoritative report on its success in the 2006 parliamentary elections, and results of Spring 2024 opinion polling conducted among Palestinian residents of both Gaza and the West Bank.
It is our hope that this book can serve as an introduction to the history of Hamas that is both engaging and very well-documented, and that is easily accessible to social-justice activists and other readers who may have a broad range of previous knowledge about the history of the movement.
You can see a video of the initial launch event, held at OR Books’s NYC headquarters, here. (Just skip the first 29m 30s of that video, which is all about the setup.) That event was introduced by OR Books publisher Colin Robinson and featured Rami Khouri and Helena Cobban in conversation with the veteran Methodist social-justice leader David Wildman.
The next evening, Helena Cobban presented the book in a lively conversation at Busboys & Poets in Washington DC that was moderated by the powerful Israeli-American social-justice activist Miko Peled (and introduced by Busboys owner Andy Shallal.) You can see a video of that event here.
We should note, meantime, that there has already been some Zionist pushback to the book’s release. On September 23– which was the first day of #BannedBooksWeek here in the United States!– a group of ardently pro-Israeli locals organized a protest outside the Diesel Books store in Brentwood/West LA, where the store had presented our book face-up on a sales table alongside the Kamala Harris memoir. (We wrote about that earlier, here.) These eager book-banners also voiced serious threats against the bookstore and its employees, which forced the owner to close the bookstore for three business days.
In order to protect their employees and allow the safe re-opening of the store, its owners then decided to remove our book from their offerings altogether.
On September 27, Allison Lee, the Los Angeles managing director of the influential writers/free speech organization PEN America issued a powerful statement of support for the freedom of the bookstore owner to stock, display, and sell whatever title they might choose. The statement said:
Booksellers have the freedom to determine what books they sell, and should be able to make that determination without fear or intimidation. There are many books in many communities that cause offense to some — including this one. But the precedent of withdrawing a book from store shelves because of a protest over its content is deeply troubling. There are many constituencies in our society right now who claim the right to dictate what stories can be told and whose ideas are shared. Acceding to such demands from any corner risks eroding the common spaces that are meant to serve readers from all backgrounds.
It is also disturbing that Diesel was forced to close its doors… One can raise alarm bells over a bookstore’s decision to stock a book without demanding that it be withdrawn for all, and without empowering all those who wish to police speech on the basis of viewpoint. Bookstores are one of a dwindling number of venues in our polarized society where one can encounter a wide variety of ideas and opinions. And especially during Banned Books Week, that role should be cherished, respected, and defended.
It should be noted that that coterie of discourse-suppression fanatics had almost certainly not read our book at all before they mounted their harsh protest. Early copies were only just then beginning to be distributed to bookstores, given that the official Publication Date was not until October 8. In the book, Khouri anbd Cobba are at pains to explain that their intention is not to support Hamas, or to oppose it; but rather, to provide a fund of solidly documented and objective information about the movement that can help readers to make up their own minds about it.
… Later that week, the news about that book-banning even made the Hollywood Reporter! (Probably a first-time mention for OR Books, as it was for us, too.)