In May 2024, Just World Ed is presenting a five-part series of public conversations, co-hosted by our board member Rami G. Khouri and president, Helena Cobban, on the topic of “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters”. In these conversations, we are bringing in a variety of experts on different aspects of the history and development of this movement, whose full name is “The Islamic Resistance Movement”, and which plays a significant role within the broader movement for Palestinian national liberation.
Please note: We are building the multimedia archive of this project into an Online Learning Hub / Resource Center of lasting value, adding to it the recordings of each of the sessions as they become available, while working to further enrich and organize this archive. It is still a work in progress! But you can already view it here— or, by scanning this QR code.
For many years now, Hamas has been the subject of harsh, and often very dishonest attacks from Israeli leaders and their supporters in the West. Those attacks (and the level of their dishonesty) were multiplied a hundredfold after October 7, the day on which Hamas and its allies in the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement undertook a broad breakout from the “Gaza concentration camp” in which the Israeli military had kept 2.3 million Palestinians enclosed and besieged since 2007.
In response to the breakout of October 7, the Israeli government immediately launched a ferocious attack on the entire civilizational infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, in an extreme, punitive campaign that the ICJ has deemed plausibly constitutes a genocide. That campaign continues. Indeed, Israeli leaders have vowed that they will continue waging it until they have “destroyed” Hamas– an outcome that nearly all those who have studied the organization in any depth have judged to be quite unattainable. There is thus an urgent humanitarian as well as a political need for the global community to find a way to include this movement and its resistance allies in the diplomacy that’s needed to resolve the long-festering Palestine Question, rather then continuing to exclude and annihilate them.
Meantime, publics in the West that have been subjected to barrages of anti-Hamas propaganda remain woefully uninformed about the movement’s roots, extent, history, and political development. In our project, we aim to work toward rectifying that situation by producing well-informed, evidence-based materials that look at all the many aspects of the organization’s record.
We will do this by presenting a series of weekly public conversations in which Rami Khouri and Helena Cobban explore different aspects of Hamas’s history with some of the best international experts on the subject. We are also, as noted above, building the multimedia records of these conversations into an Online Learning Hub on our website, in which we’ll also present a wealth of other background information on the history and record of the organization– similar to the Online Learning Hubs we have already built on other topics, including the war in Ukraine.
The third of our guest experts (May 16) will be Dr. Jeroen Gunning, a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Conflict Studies at King’s College, London. Dr. Gunning is also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. He obtained his PhD from the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Durham University, and was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. Before coming to King’s College London, he was Founding Director of the Durham Global Security Institute at Durham University. He’s one of the founders of the field of critical terrorism studies and has taught and advised both policy-makers and civil society organizations.
In 2010, he published a book titled, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence. In 2008, he had issued a strong plea, “Hamas: Talk to Them.” You can learn about the broad array of articles and books he has published on different aspects of the work of radical non-state actors in various parts of West Asia, at his page on the KCL website.
(The schedule of the guest experts for the last two webinars in this series will be announced shortly.)
The second of our guest experts (May 9) was Dr. Khaled Hroub, a Professor in residence with the faculty of liberal arts at Northwestern University in Qatar, whose focus is Middle Eastern studies and politics with particular interest on Islam and politics, Arab-Israeli conflict and Arab media studies. He was previously was a research associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, where he was the founder and director of Cambridge Arab Media Project (CAMP) until 2012.
Dr. Hroub’s many works include Hamas, A Beginner’s Guide, 2nd edn, 2010, and a chapter, “Nothing Fails Like Success: Hamas and the Gaza Explosion” in the recently published book Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm (OR Books, 2024.)
Our first guest expert was Dr. Paola Caridi, a historian and journalist who is a Lecturer at the University of Palermo, Italy.
Dr. Caridi is a founding member and the president of the News Agency “Lettera22”, and was their correspondent in Cairo, 2001-2003, and their correspondent in Jerusalem, 2003-2012.
The second of her three published books was Hamas: From Resistance to Government, which first appeared in Italian in 2009, and then in English in 2012. (An updated version was released last October 10.)
Dr. Caridi is a Knight of the Order of the Italian Solidarity’s Star, which is chaired by the President of the Italian Republic.