Transcript of the video:

Helena Cobban

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to those of you who were with us for last week's session, and a big welcome to everyone joining us for the first time. It's good to have you all with us.

I'm Helena Cobban. I'm the president of Just World Educational, and I'm speaking with you today from Washington, D.C., sometimes known as the belly of the beast. Our city stands on the traditional lands of the Piscataways.

Today's webinar is the second in our timely, and we feel very necessary, current series on Understanding Hamas & Why That Matters. Last week, my colleague Rami G. Khoury conducted an excellent and very informative conversation with Dr. Paola Caridi of the University of Palermo. You can access all records of that conversation, the video, the audio, and the transcript at the special online Learning Hub that we've already started to build on our Just World Educational website for this project.

Our behind-the-scenes associate here, Mr. Mustapha Mohammed, will put the quick link to the Learning Hub into the chat here for you all to see. The records of today's conversation will soon be added to the Learning Hub for you to review at your leisure afterwards and to share with your friends and networks. By the way, if you have any tech questions about today's webinar, please send them via the chat to Mustapha, who will answer them for you there.

The main part of today's program will be a conversation that Rami and I conduct with today's guest expert, Dr. Khalid Hroub. It's great to have you both with us. I will provide short introductions to both of them in a moment, but first, a quick preview of how today's session will run.

After my introduction, Rami and I will engage Dr. Hroub in a conversation that will last around 35 to 40 minutes. You can submit questions to the Q&A while we talk, but I hope we can all keep centrally focused on the main conversation for as long as it runs. Mustapha and I will be reviewing all the questions that come in via the Q&A, and after the end of the main conversation, Rami, Dr. Khalid, and I will start to address some of the main themes that we have seen coming in, and that might last about 20 to 25 minutes, during which you can also post additional questions.

After that, I'll do a quick closing of today's session. I'm sure we can't get everybody's questions answered today. That's why we have three more sessions planned for this series, and we'll be posting the records of all of the sessions onto our online Learning Hub as we go along.

So, before I introduce Rami and Dr. Khalid Hroub to you more fully, I want to spring on all of you attendees the first of the two little pop quizzes I've designed for today's session. Rest assured that these quizzes are completely anonymized. Today, neither of our quizzes has any right answer, so here is quiz #1 (what differences do you see between Hamas and ISIS?).

Okay, so you can give as many answers as you want for this quiz. Do we have the answers showing up? Oh, people are reading them carefully. Well, that's good. I mean, better to read them before you answer, rather than like slapping in an answer, whatever you think. Thanks, everybody, who has been answering them for us.

So, this is interesting. None of the people who answered said that they don't see any difference. Six said, I know they're different, but I'm not quite sure in what ways, which is really significant. And then roughly 12 and 13 people identified differences regarding women and higher education and attitudes to the UN and the international state system. Then 11 identified attitudes to the elections, and 12 attitudes to using violence. I think that's great.

Well, thank you so much, everybody, for answering that one. The next quiz, I can assure you, is going to be a lot simpler. So, okay, the next quiz is... How confident do you feel explaining the differences between Hamas and ISIS to friends or colleagues? Now, this one is much easier for you guys to read through and answer, much more speedy. And so, we have 34 people answering, and seven of you feel very confident, which is great. Tell us how you do it, please.

So, thank you all for answering our quizzes. It's really helpful for us to know a little bit about our audience before we dive into the conversation. Just rest assured that all of your answers were completely anonymous. So now, I am delighted to bring in Rami G. Khoury, who is a valued board member at Just World Educational. Rami is a Palestinian Christian from Nazareth and a distinguished writer, book author, and analyst, who's a citizen of both Jordan and the United States.

He's been writing about the Palestine question since 1968. Rami, you must have been like a child when you started writing about it. Rami currently writes columns for Al Jazeera and serves as a distinguished public policy fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut.

Thanks for being with me on this project, Rami. And our guest expert today is Dr. Khaled Hroub, who is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Arab Media Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar and a former fellow of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, that is Cambridge, England, where he lectured on the history and politics of the contemporary Middle East and was the founding director of the Cambridge Arab Media Project between 2003 and 2012. He has published numerous books and articles on Palestinian, Arab, and international affairs in both English and Arabic.

His helpful little book, I have the first edition here, “Hamas, A Beginner's Guide,” came out in that edition in 2006 and the second edition in 2010. He has a book due to come out later this year on the intriguing topic of the Gaza tunnels. And he has a thoughtful essay in this book, which is titled “Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm,” which was published by All Books just last week, I think.

His contribution there is titled Nothing Fails Like Success, Hamas and the Gaza Explosion. So now let's hand over to Rami so that you can ask Khaled the first set of questions and then I'll stay on the screen and I'll be asking some questions a little later on. But really, as I said, it's great to be working with both of you.

Rami G. Khouri

Thank you, Helena, and thank you, Mustapha, behind the scenes, and especially Khaled, thank you for being with us. This is a huge issue with so many dimensions and that's why we thought to do this five-part series where we interview scholars, experts who really know a lot about Hamas because they've spent years studying it, but they also know more about the region, the wider Palestinian issue, the Middle East, the Arab world, the Islamic world, and relations with the West. And you have to really understand how those concentric circles fit into one another to fully grasp what Hamas is and what it does and why it does it.

We're doing this series not to either advocate for Hamas or to criticize it, but simply to clarify for people what it is, and then people can make up their own minds. So, my first question to you, Khaled, is I know from your writing and people I've met over the years that there's basically two strands, main strands, within Hamas's thinking. One is the Islamist and the other is the Palestinian nationalist, a Palestinian nationalist, not Arab nationalist, but within the Palestinian national struggle, or as an Islamist focused movement.

How do you see that balance, first of all, as having changed over time and evolved, and where do you see it now?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Yeah, first of all, Rami, thank you very much, and thanks to Helena for organizing this event and organizing the whole program of educating people about this huge issue, as you said. Now to start off about the two, let's say, strands that you have mentioned, the nationalist, Palestinian nationalist, and the Islamist within Hamas.

This is one way of seeing things, which is somehow enlightening and maybe simplifying things, though it belongs to the binary, maybe, understanding of social phenomena, political activism, and the rest of it. So, simplification is nice, maybe, for wider audiences, and it's very helpful. Yet at the same time, let me say that things are maybe more nuanced and sophisticated than this kind of binary thing.

Because if we say within Hamas, you have the nationalist and you have the Islamist component, there is maybe unconscious, maybe unintended assumption that these two components are mutually exclusive. So, either you are an Islamist or nationalist. If you are an Islamist, you cannot be a nationalist, and then vice versa.

And I think within the Palestinian scene and Palestinian nationalist movement that started from, the days of British colonialism until this very moment, we have things, I would say, more sophisticated. So, you have these components overlapping, feeding into each other. Sometimes, you know, one of these takes the lead, the other one maybe goes to the back seat, all depending on the context and given circumstances.

Still though, maybe the binary thing, Islamist and nationalist, is helpful again for short discussions. But I just wanted to say this, to say Hamas is multifaceted, if you like, organization or movement though. This means they are a political party; they are a charity organization; they are a military faction; All of these combined together.

And you cannot say, if I am a nationalist movement, then what can I do with my charity arm, the charity function? This is run according maybe to the Islamist ideals and principles and the rest of it. So, in fact, you cannot disentangle these two things from each other.

Now, Hamas would gear up the political component or the Islamist component when it comes to dealing with changing circumstances, depending on the context. If they are, let's say, running for elections, if they are joining forces with other Palestinian factions in Palestine, if they are talking to governments in the region and even beyond, in this case, you have the political aspect, the political face of Hamas, is taking the lead, the nationalist one now.

Now we talk nationalism. So, Hamas would speak in the name of the Palestinians and the Palestinian nationalist discourse and the rest of it. If Hamas appeals to, let's say, Muslim constituency, globally speaking. If they deal with, again, social networks, charities, religious maybe matters. In this case, you know, you have the religious face of Hamas, the Islamist face of Hamas would take the lead. So, I think you have these two components, but if we want to leave this discussion, the nuanced one aside and go to the simplified one and say, okay, at the end of the day, all boils down to these two components, Islamist and nationalist.

I would say we have been witnessing a steady increase of the nationalist force within Hamas at the expense of the religious, maybe, claims, religious maybe tendency within Hamas over the past two, three decades. So, this is one, one solid curve. Yet within this curve, you have ups and downs, maybe some slow paced or fast paced movement within Hamas on the nationalist curve, depending again on the circumstances.

If there is some good reception to the nationalist delivery of Hamas, Hamas would increase this nationalist aspect. If there is some kind of isolation, disengagement, you would see the religious face and aspect of Hamas maybe becoming more apparent in this time or in that time. I hope I answered this one and not kind of complicated even the question.

Helena Cobban

If I could just jump in here, I think it's really useful to note thatــــــــــ Of course, there is the big constituency of Palestinian Christians and how do they relate to Hamas, but also in the current resistance movement in Gaza, the fighters of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are actually fighting alongside fighters from the Popular Front, the Jabha ash-Shaʿbīyya, which is a very explicitly secularist, secularizing movement. So just to note that that has been a thing. And of course, PFLP was founded by George Habash, well-known Palestinian Christian, and had a lot of Palestinian Christians in the movement.

So just harking back to the difference between Hamas and ISIS, you would not see ISIS you know, allying with Christian movements.

Dr. Khaled Hroub

So, you know, I could add before, sorry Rami to interrupt, but, you know, it's very fascinating. This is why I say it's a more nuanced picture, because when you talk about a Palestinian politics or even maybe some Arab politics, this applies to Arab politics maybe in the same way, you mentioned, you know, the, let's say the Marxist Popular Front in Palestine that was founded and led by George Habash, sometimes you might meet with a Palestinian who is Marxist and yet religious. So, they would do their religious duties, but intellectually speaking, they would say, I am leftist, I am on the Marxist, maybe even Leninist tradition.

So this is why I think the binary, the very rigid binary, black and white approach, sometimes it's not really capturing the Palestinian and maybe some other realities.

Rami G. Khouri

Thank you. Let's move on. Another point. Hamas, as measured in public opinion polls or elections, which are really probably the two main ways that we can measure its place in society among Palestinians, how popular is it, how influential is it, whatever words we want to use, it obviously goes up and down. And recently there were polls done by Khalil Shaki, I think that showed that their popularity was very high after the October attack in Israel.

How do you see the factors that cause individual men and women in Palestine, but also maybe in the Arab countries, what are the factors that make somebody feel, I'm supporting Hamas, I'm with Hamas, or I'm against them? Because there's many reasons why somebody would support them. And it could be just emotional, feeling good about something, or it could be a sense that they're going to protect me, or it could be a sense that they're going to push for an Arab-Israeli justice settlement. So, we’re in this very complex world of ways in which individuals relate to these political movements, but where do you see, how and where do you see Hamas standing among Palestinians and Arabs?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Yeah, well I think maybe the key word for this is resistance. The Palestinians specifically, and then the Arab audiences and Arab peoples at large, I think the main reason why they support Hamas is because of resistance, not because of religion, not because of maybe nationalism, not because of anything. Again, if it was a Marxist movement, or a Palestinian nationalist movement, or maybe even a liberal movement that is conducting resistance at the moment, I guess maybe they would enjoy the same support, more or less.

You have other kinds of factors here and there. This organization is clean-handed in their delivery, in social work, in running the business of government, this and that, but I think the core issue is resistance.

And, in my writings, I followed this line of thinking and support throughout the Palestinian history, again, starting from the days of the British colonialism. If you have any given organization or movement adhering to the idea of resistance, now they would take the lead. Since Sheikh Izzuddin al-Qassam, mid-1930s, he captured all the hearts and minds of the Palestinians back then, and then he became at the forefront in terms of prestige, maybe popularity and support, though his resistance period lasted for a couple of, three, four years only.

And then, traditional leaders like Haji Amin al-Husseini and so many others, they became in the backseat. Now, leading into 1950s, 1960s, when Fatah was organized, created and founded, with the main issue, the main slogan, the main mantra was resistance, not even an ideology. They took the lead.

All other organizations before Fatah, they became secondary. And Fatah remained at the forefront of the Palestinian national activism and leadership until Oslo, if you like, Oslo days and the signing of Oslo. Until that moment, Fatah started to decline because they put resistance on the side.

Hamas started to rise because of this, because they adhered and they hold the flag of resistance, if you like. Before Hamas was founded in 1987, their mother organization, the Muslim Brotherhood was created in Palestine even before the establishment of the State of Israel. The Brotherhood started in 1946.

Yet, they remained on the margins of the Palestinian national movement because they thought, you know, resistance is not urgent, we can delay this, we can postpone this, we can focus on religious affairs and this and that. The resistance program was not their core idea. So, they remained on the margin.

So, I think what marginalizes or centralizes any political movement within the Palestinian colonized scene is resistance. So, what makes now people in the West Bank and in Palestine and in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere support Hamas, in my humble analysis, it's this thing. The primary thing is resistance.

You have secondary reasons, definitely, yes, but all of them, they would come, again, not as significant as resistance.

Rami G. Khouri

So, in that context, Hamas has been working now since the 1980s and doing resistance, military resistance, and doing many other things as well in society. They've had experiences with Israel, where they've attacked Israel, and then Israel attacked back, and there was about seven or eight major military assaults by Israel on Gaza because of retaliating for what Hamas did when it fired rockets at Israel.

So, in this context, are Palestinian citizens in Gaza or elsewhere, but especially in Gaza, how do you see them responding to the pain that's inflicted by the Israelis when they do attack, and what they used to call mowing the lawn, where every few years they do a massive attack, kill a couple thousand people, and destroy a lot of stuff, and then lay siege to Gaza, and this happened, you know, regularly, and it caused the quality of life of people in Gaza to gradually decline steadily, and now we've got this major attack on Gaza, how do you see this impacting the citizens' tendency to blame or not to blame Hamas for the pain that they're feeling?

Or do they accept the Israeli pain, saying this is an inevitable part of resistance, nobody has ever freed themselves from occupation without going through something like this? What's your analysis on the citizen reaction?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Yeah, I think, number one, we need to wait and see any surveys, or maybe even elections, and how the people in Gaza would judge what Hamas has done, and for some people what October 7th has caused to them.

However, I think, judging from what I gather from friends and others in the Strip, there is a sense of, or let me put it this way, there is a significant segment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, yes, they do blame Hamas, in part, for the magnitude of pain and destruction that they had to suffer. Now, part of this is the size of, maybe, the unique and exceptional size of brutality, unexpected. This is a genocide at the end of the day.

So, the ordinary people, they can maybe sustain a war for two, three weeks, four weeks, as it happened before, the wars that you have mentioned, and the people in Gaza, again, they got used to this. So, you may have a war for two, three weeks, as brutal as it was, but life goes on, and you have this steadfastness, and resilience, and the spirit is very high, and all of that. Now, in this event, this is a genocide.

It has been now for seven months. So, you cannot expect from every single ordinary Palestinian, without having proper shelter, without having proper refuge, losing their families, but to cry out really very loud, and to blame all people, left, right, and center, including Hamas. So, I can understand that, and I think Hamas has to face and answer so many, maybe, tough questions, and to justify what happened for so many people in the Gaza Strip.

So, this is, I guess, something that we need to acknowledge. Now, the other, let's say, a complimentary, maybe, part of the answer is, this is only limited to the Gaza Strip. When you speak to Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip, of course, they have all the sympathy, and the deepest sympathy ever with their brothers in the Gaza Strip, yet they have more, let's say, I would say, calculated and understanding position when it comes to Hamas.

And, as you said, in the most recent polls in March, six weeks ago, have pointed, you know, the support of Hamas, in the West Bank, is so high. Seventy percent of the people, they justified, they accept what happened on October 7th, and they put it in the wider context of resisting the occupation and the colonial system in Palestine. So, you have the Palestinians, depending on the geography and constituency whom you talk to, having, I guess, different and various opinions.

But, when it comes to the people in Gaza, I think the pain is beyond imagination, and the destruction and the scale of brutality have driven many people there to just go out and blame again the situation, the occupation, and even Hamas.

Rami G. Khouri

I’ll follow that up with a short question, then I'll turn it over to Helena. Given your knowledge of the modern history of Hamas in the last two or three decades, and it's gone through this several times, where destruction happens, people suffer, and then it's still there, and has to deal with it.

How do you anticipate Hamas might try, if once, and if the attack by Israel, the genocidal attack ends, do you see any signs of how Hamas might operate to regain people's trust and try to continue to be in a government leadership role, maybe with others? Do we have any sign of that?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

I think we do. Hamas has signaled, not only signaled, in fact, they said this publicly and in clear language, that they are not interested in ruling the Gaza Strip exclusively. What they wanted, as they said, is a Palestinian coalition, if you like, government, leadership, a collective Palestinian decision-making process that would take the Gaza Strip, not only the Gaza Strip, in fact, they said this should be united with the West Bank as well.

So, this has been put on the table. And I guess, even before October 7th, I could say there were some signs of fatigue within Hamas's dealing with every single detail in the Gaza Strip. This is a resistance movement that found itself since 2007 in the seat of government, maybe unlike or against their initial plans.

So, they had to deal with this strange system of, on the one hand, resisting, and on the other hand, governing the Gaza Strip in some sort of, I wouldn't say under the system of Oslo, but in one way or another, connected to it. Because this system, the Palestinian Authority that created, let's say, the basic law, that created so many rules and ministries and here and there, it somehow emanated from the Oslo system. So, there was some awkwardness, in fact, in having Hamas in power.

And this was expressed by many Hamas leaders. So, this is why I think, maybe after the events, the genocidal, I hope it will finish soon, we may have some new creative formula, according to which Hamas is there, as influential, maybe, as powerful as before, but not necessarily taking the lead. Behind the scenes, it does have its power, its influence, maybe, it's personnel in the leadership, but again, not having everything in their own in their own basket, but share the burden with others.

Rami G. Khouri

Thank you. I'll turn it over to Helena.

Helena Cobban

Yeah, well, that actually leads very nicely to our next question, which is, can you talk more about relations between, on the one hand, Hamas and its allies, and on the other, Fatah and its allies? Does the current push by Hamas to become included in the overarching national body, the PLO, does that stand a chance of success?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Well, yes, about Hamas relations with its allies, let me start at the Palestinian level. At the Palestinian level, Hamas's position and relations with all Palestinian parties, I would say, have grown stronger during this genocidal war. So, if you think of the inter-Palestinian spectrum, from right, left and centre, Hamas's relations really seem to be very strong. The only exception, however, is with Fatah, and with Fatah, we need to talk about maybe two Fatahs with S: Fatah, the official one, that is led nowadays by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and this is seen by many Palestinians as only a functionary of the Israeli occupation.

Basically, they are part of the security system, or to protect Israeli settlements and to do whatever is dictated on them by the Israeli colonial masters, and then you have the other Fatah. The other Fatah is the original nationalist Fatah that is in huge disagreement with the official Fatah. Now, these disagreements and diffractions, sometimes they appear on the surface, sometimes they are suppressed, still boiling, but I think something eventually will happen.

Now, Hamas's relations with the other Fatah, as far as I know, is almost very good, and in fact, we can read this in the insistence of Hamas to free Marwan al-Barghouti, Marwan al-Barghouti being the leader of Fatah in prison for the past 20 years, and Hamas put him on the top list of the prisoners that the movement wants to free. So, this is a Fatah leader, and he has his own constituency inside Fatah, of course, and even outside. So, I think Hamas is, again, as far as I know, makes this big difference between these two groups.

This is at the regional level, sorry, at the Palestinian level. At the regional level that I wanted to say, I guess at the very beginning, if we think of who are Hamas's allies in the region, we think of Hezbollah, we think of Iran, we think of the Houthis, basically. So, with these parties, I think at the very beginning, especially with Iran and Hezbollah, maybe in the first two or three weeks of the war, one could sense some inharmony, because as we know now, Hamas conducted the attacks of October 7th without any prior consultation.

So, it was individually planned, designed, orchestrated, and then implemented by Hamas. That seemed to have somehow annoyed Iran and Hezbollah. This is something massive, something big, and yet if we are within the same axis of resistance, we should have been notified maybe in advance or anything like that, put into the picture.

Nonetheless, that inharmony, I think, that lasted for the first three, four weeks has ended. And I can say now you have more harmony, harmonious policies, harmonious arrangements, and you can see between Hezbollah, what Hezbollah is doing in the north of Palestine, what Hamas is doing, what Iran is doing. So, there is some sort of more organization.

So, depending on this, I would say that Hamas's relations with these main allies and the Houthis, I forgot to mention about the Houthis and the Houthis from Yemen as well. So, you can see some sort of, I could say, the relations with these parties have grown stronger as time passed on.

Helena Cobban

Actually, that raises another really interesting point, another point of contrast with ISIS. You cannot imagine ISIS getting into a coalition with any Shiite organization at all, because one of their main, I mean, really, all the minorities in Syria and Iraq that were not Sunni Muslim were the targets of ISIS, whereas Hamas has always been, well, not always, but it's always had respectful relations with Shiite movements. And sometimes, as now, it's had a close alliance with them. So, I think that's another important difference.

Dr. Khaled Hroub

You know, Helena, let me add to this, in fact, because this is, I think it doesn't feature in Hamas's calculation, you know, the sectarian identification or even the ideological identification of the parties that the movement would ally itself with. Because I take you back to Oslo days, there was an alliance called the Ten Factions Alliance, and that alliance within the Palestinian scene, so, these ten factions, all of them Palestinians against Oslo Accords, all of them from the Palestinian Communist Party to the Popular Front, the Marxist Party, so, you have most of them, in fact, except Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, all of them were on the leftist leaning politics.

So, Hamas did not care about whether I am allying myself with you, you are secular, or you are Marxist, or a communist. The main thing was, you know, the political position, whether it was with or against resistance, with Oslo or against Oslo.

Helena Cobban

I think that's a really important point. So, thanks for putting that in. I just want to follow up, actually, on this question of Fatah and Hamas relations. So, we've seen there were delegations from the two movements, went to Moscow in February and were in Beijing last month. Was it last month? I think so, at the end of April. And obviously, each of those two very distant foreign governments was trying to do what they could to reconcile the differences and to reunify the PLO. Do you see some outside intervention like this being successful in reunifying the PLO?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Well, in theory, it should work. Because if you have heavyweights, heavyweight countries like Russia, China, interfering in this and trying to help, one would imagine, yeah, why not, you know, the Palestinians with their different groups and movements, they would listen, they would come up with some sort of compromises. Yet, unfortunately, I think the bottleneck is in Ramallah, with Mahmoud Abbas himself, even personally, and his clique.

So, he himself doesn't believe in not only unifying the Palestinian national movement, or he is not even willing, he is not even doing anything to unify Fatah itself, Fatah, his own movement. He is not willing to reform the PLO without Hamas, put Hamas and the Islamic Jihad on the side. The PLO is frozen, is marginalized, is not doing anything.

Where is the PLO? The PLO is the legitimate and the official representative of the Palestinians. Supposedly, this is the institution that can even cancel the entire system of Oslo. This is over and above the Palestinian Authority.

Now, it has become marginalized, downsized to maybe a footnote in the Palestinian Authority. We have something called the Palestinian National Council. The Palestinian National Council, this is the Palestinian Parliament, if you like. Where is the Palestinian Parliament? Who is putting Mahmoud Abbas and this authority accountable?

So, I think, unfortunately, we have copied, the Palestinian Authority has copied, you know, the authoritarian system that does exist in here and there, in the Arab world or even beyond. And you have unwillingness in that corner not to do anything. All the Palestinian factions, again, without even including Hamas, they are demanding changes, demanding elections, demanding any sort of legitimacy.

Helena Cobban

Demanding an end to the occupation, for goodness sake.

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Exactly. Because this is the main issue. And yet, there is total kind of rejection to all these demands. So, I think, unfortunately, all these events, all these attempts to bring Hamas and Fatah together and other factions, they ended up in total failure because of this. Because we have that blockage.

Helena Cobban

Yeah, I've studied and interviewed Mahmoud Abbas over many, many years and we could discuss his particular position. I'm actually going to cede the next two questions and throw it back to Rami to ask questions. What was it? Seven through nine.

Rami G. Khouri

So, Khaled, you and others have studied and written about the political wing and the military wing of Hamas, which have always existed along with the social services and other wings. What is it that you understand from your studies and your research about the tradition of Hamas starting out to say it was only going to attack Israeli military sites and they will only carry out attacks in Israel or Palestine, greater Palestine, whatever, historic Palestine?

That changed over the years and Hamas started attacking civilians and so did Fatah and others with suicide bombers or whatever. And I think you've written that Hamas actually tried several times to reach a deal with the Israelis that we don't attack, we only attack military targets, an understanding in between them and you say the Israelis always refuse.

Clarify for us Hamas's attitude to attacking civilian targets or not attacking civilian targets and its attempts to try to reach an understanding with Israel on this for the benefit of all civilians.

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Well, let's go back to mid-1990s. Maybe most of the audience would remember the wave of suicide attacks that was led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine and even followed by Fatah and other organizations.

All that started as a response to the killing of civilian Palestinians by Israeli settlers that Israel did nothing to the perpetrators except building shrines for them, especially the one in the Abrahamic Mosque, Almasjid al-Ibrahimi in Hebrew. Now, exactly after that crime, Hamas replied or retaliated by two or three attacks and then in 1994, they issued a statement saying we are more than ready to neutralize the civilians from both sides and we are more than happy for you Israel to target us as a military organization and then we do the same. We just direct our operations to a military target and then in that case, all civilians are basically spared on both sides.

Israel responded by heavy attacks against all civilians in Gaza and since then, every now and then, every maybe two or three years, Hamas would do the same, would issue a communique saying we are offering this to neutralize civilians without any response from the side of the Israeli government. Now, this has led to this cycle of killing civilians on the Palestinian side, tenfold of what was happening and has been happening on the Israeli side and I wrote somewhere in my research that the ratio of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel compared to the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas and all the Palestinian factions ranges between 1:15-20, depending. So, for any Israeli civilian killed, you have 15 Palestinian civilians killed and yet the whole talk, the media, the buzz, everything is about the Palestinians killing Israeli civilians because they don't have the same media, they don't have the same influence for many reasons.

So, this is to be noted, in fact, and borne in mind. Now, when it comes, another thing, when you mentioned the military wing of Hamas, from day one, they said our strategy is not to do any military operation except in the historic land of Palestine. So, this is the battlefield.

Wehave learned from the lesson of other Palestinian factions in 1960s, 1970s, when they conducted some military operations in Europe here and there to attract attention and there was some rationale behind those operations but we think the balance sheet is on the loss side. So, we are not going to do that and since then until now we are talking about what 37 years of Hamas's political life, they did not do anything outside historic Palestine.

Helena Cobban

And actually, just if I could interject, that is another distinction between Hamas and ISIS. Sorry, I keep going on about this but, you know, I mean, ISIS and Al-Qaeda are best known for their kind of global purview and their global set of operations.

Rami G. Khouri

So, in the context of this explanation and the legacy, how do you see the October 7 attack? You wrote in one of your recent articles that, “Hamas rolled the dice.” Was this, in your view, a desperate move that they just thought they'd do something and see what happens or was it very calculated, they knew they were going to get hit very hard by the Israelis? How do you assess it?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Well, I think in my analysis and based on what I have gathered from statements and interviews with Hamas leaders, I think what was planned is a small-scale operation aiming to kidnap a group of soldiers, not civilians, and then take them back to Gaza Strip in a very swift operation and then do a prisoner's swap.

Now, once the operation was highly successful, the success of the operation, I think, surprised the in-field leaders. So, they expanded the operation. So, that was an ad hoc decision to expand beyond what was originally planned.

The ease that they have witnessed and found in penetrating all these military bases and settlements and the rest of it tempted these guys to make maybe their military signature. This is massive. This is to defeat the regional superpower in the region by hundreds of fighters and then to push them back 30, 40 kilometers. In their military calculation, that was unmissable.

We are not going to miss this, to miss this victory. Now, I think that was beyond what was calculated, and hence, I think, the unpreparedness, if you like, to what came from Israel later on.

What I wrote in this piece that you referred to is sometimes, you know, the cost of success becomes very high. And I followed some sort of pattern, and I mentioned, I think, three main occasions within Hamas's history, where they surprised themselves, as they did with others, with their own success. And they couldn't handle that success, because the regional context, not even a single country in the region would accept Hamas doing this and getting away with it.

And the three occasions that I mentioned, the first one was 2006, the victory in the Palestinian elections. In 2006, they didn't plan to win the elections. Ironically speaking, that maybe against the logic of running for any elections. You run for elections to win them.

Hamas ran for those elections to protect itself from the so-called back then war on terror, and Hamas was one of those put on that list. So, they thought, you know, to preempt this, any move against them, they would be shielded by becoming part of the system, part of the political system, the parliamentarian system, the component of the system that was elected by the people, not part of the government, not part of the Palestinian authority. So anyway, they won the elections, and then that was too big of a victory.

They couldn't handle it, and we know the rest of the story, of course, you know, Israel, America, Egypt, and then the Europeans as well, concerted effort to fail Hamas's government and place in power. The second occasion, when they controlled the entire Gaza Strip militarily in 2007, a year after that, and again, that wasn't the planned. The plan was to punish, I think, the preventive security apparatus that was making, trying again to bring chaos and to destabilize the Gaza Strip and to prove and expose Hamas as a failed body in government.

So, when they tried to punish that and then silence them, they found it was the whole security apparatuses in the whole Gaza Strip were very weak and basically untrained and unprepared, and then they just fled, you know, and then suddenly, maybe a couple of days, they found themselves controlling the whole area. That was another success, military success, yet it came with very high cost, as we all knew the consequences, the successive wars on Gaza. The third episode of these successes that I pointed out is October 7^th. It was a military success by all measures, and yet it was too big to be handled or maybe to swallow.

Helena Cobban

Yeah, I kind of, I call these things catastrophic successes, you know, definitely the elections in 2006, and what happened in 2007. I think it's really helpful that you have put those together in that category. I think what they did achieve, obviously, on October 7th, was they shattered Israel's whole strategic concept.

And, you know, that is not just the fall of several local military commands, but that was like the whole strategic concept. And we're still seeing the fallout from there, and we don't know how it's going to end. But I have been, you know, really, I've noted the degree to which the Hamas military has been very resilient. I mean, the Israelis keep talking about like, oh, we've destroyed 18 battalions, as though the Hamas military fights in battalions, you know, like the US in Central Europe. No. But, you know, I watch, for example, every week on Electronic Intifada on their livestream, the military analysis that John Elmer produces.

And if people here don't see that, they should look at a couple of the episodes. You know, the Hamas fighters are well organized, they have deep stockpiles of various forms of munitions that they have produced themselves within the Gaza Strip over the course of maybe 10 or 12 years. And they have a lot more resilience than I and I think most other people thought that they would have.

I mean, it's kind of, my friend, Ambassador Chas Freeman after October 7th, said October 7th looks like the Tet Offensive, you know, where the North Vietnamese were stunningly successful for a while, they shattered the French concept of like their strategy in Indochina. Then it was very, very catastrophic for the North Vietnamese, but it did lead to the collapse over time of Western power in Indochina. So, I mean, I think that was a very astute observation.

And we're in the middle of it. And it's very, very hard to watch this, just as it was hard to watch what was happening to Vietnam's, North Vietnam's civilians and South Vietnam's civilians during those years of the 70s. But that was resolved only when the US government agreed, realized it needed to talk to the opposition.

So, I mean, I guess that's a big part of why we're doing this project here. Sorry for that long excursus.

Rami G. Khouri

Coming out of this situation, and everybody in the world is discussing in some kind of a vacuum, what's going to happen next, the day after, who's going to govern Gaza, what are the links between Gaza and the rest of Palestine, all of this is speculation now. But we did have a leader of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya, make a statement the other day that Hamas would be prepared to live next to Israel in a two-state configuration.

He didn't say they'd recognize Israel, but he said that they would exist peacefully with Israel, and that would, if that happened, there would be no need for the military wing of Hamas anymore. How do you interpret that kind of statement? And it's not new, they've said things like this quite a few times before.

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Yeah, let me add a couple of modifications. I think what was mentioned by Khalil al-Hayya and other Hamas leaders, is to say we accept a Palestinian state within 1967 borders. And they say this formula is different than the so-called two-state solution.

They say, yeah, we accept a Palestinian state. And why we are doing this is because this is a Palestinian consensus. And this is one way to bring in all Palestinians to one political platform.

If the original idea of Hamas from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River face disagreement, and the PLO, Fatah, they do have their commitments here and there. Okay, we agree on the principle of a Palestinian state within these borders without recognizing Israel, and they keep insisting on this. And they say this is totally different than saying we agree on a two-state solution.

There is a state as if we are not talking about that one. So, this is one thing. The other thing is, this has already been mentioned, in fact, in the 2017 document that Hamas issued in a way to replace the old charter.

I called it, you know, the new charter of Hamas in 2017. And in that charter, because we spoke about nationalist Hamas, that was, I would say, the embodiment of Hamas' nationalist discourse, where you see the Palestinianism of Hamas, taking in a fully-fledged maybe manifestation, defining the territoriality of Palestine on a nation-state basis, defining the Palestinian, almost kind of even borrowing the definition of the Palestinian from the PLO literature. And in that document, they said clearly that we agree on the principle of a Palestinian state, 1967 borders, because this is what most of the Palestinians agree on.

And then nobody would blame us as if we are aimless or we don't have any agreement with all other Palestinians. So, I think, and Khaled Mashal, the leader of Hamas, at one point, he said military action and military armed struggle is not an end in itself. We, Hamas, we are not born to fight forever.

We have aims, we have ends, liberation, self-determination, emancipation, these things. If these things are achieved, and then of course, there is no need for armed struggle.

Rami G. Khouri

And also when Hamas people say this, they also say a state with the refugees returning to their homes and Arab East Jerusalem as our capital. And these are things the Israelis refuse. But this is the package that the international community basically thinks it has to be resolved, but probably negotiated at some point.

We're almost out of time, I think. Let me ask you one last question, Khaled, and then I'll turn it back over to Helena. The Palestinian struggle has been on since really the 1920s, forcefully since 48, and the Hamas version or component of it since the 1980s, now you've had two or three generations of young people who've grown up with Hamas.

Some of them part of it, some of them just citizens who see what it does. Do you see anything going on with younger Palestinians in Gaza or outside of Gaza? Hamas, people in Hamas who are, when I say younger, I mean, people say under the age of 35 or so, and as they develop, is there any sign from the younger generations of what we might expect Hamas to do in the future? Will it evolve in any way? What do you see? Or would some people just give up and leave?

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Well, I am not sure how to answer this one, but my observations, a couple of them, one is that because of the successive wars and even assassinations against Hamas that Israel has been conducting over the years, this has produced all the time new young leaders.

So, Hamas is almost, and the Islamic Jihad as well, this applies to them, you could say Hamas and the Islamic Jihad are the youngest Palestinian factions when we compare them to others because of this, because Israel is after them all the time, and then they need to prepare all the time people on the reserve just to step in once the main ones are assassinated. So, the idea of, let's say, eliminating Hamas as a footnote is very, for me, it's very absurd, very silly one, because this is not an alien group coming to Palestine from another planet.

This is produced from within, from within the people. So, if you can, the guy from this family, his brother or his cousin or whoever, who will take up the arm and then continue. So, this is the generational harmony.

I can see, I can describe it as maybe the most coherent in Hamas or most coherent in Hamas when it's compared to any other, to Fatah, for example. In Fatah, you have this gap, massive gap between the young generation that you see at the universities and the generation of Mahmoud Abbas and his group and others. It's massive.

So, you don't have this renewal process within Fatah because it's blocked and it's frozen. There is no mechanism, there is no periodical elections and the rest of it. So, this is one thing.

The other thing that is maybe more telling, I am not sure if it's very much related to the question though, is Hamas has proven to stay unified over, what now, 37 years and I did some research that makes me confident to argue that this is the only movement in the historic Palestine between the Mediterranean and Jordan River that stayed united, intact, without any division, without any splinter, for 37 years. Not a single Palestinian movement or a single Israeli party or organization survived that long period of time without being divided or facing any splinters. The only party was the Mapai party between 1930, as I remember, and 1965.

That was 35 years. Now, Hamas beats them. In Fatah, the Popular Front, any other organization has suffered different divisions and splinters here and there.

So, this tells you about, you know, the organic and maybe culture, the discipline within the movement. So, there is something within this movement that makes it coherent and unified. So, it is not overnight, you know, after this war or any war, this movement, they would disappear.

They might change their, I don't know, the multifaceted nature of them. They would push one of the aspects to the forefront, delay others, but the eventuality, let's say, of what we are seeing nowadays is, whatever it takes, it will have Hamas as part of the Palestinian political scene.

Rami G. Khouri

On that point, I have to turn you all back over to Helena. Thank you, Khaled.

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Thank you, Rami.

Helena Cobban

I really want to thank you, Khaled, and just as a footnote to what you were saying about the nature of Hamas's internal organization and leadership, I would just note that as a journalist and researcher, I have really seen a difference between the kind of cultural norms within Fatah, where, you know, it's after the killing, especially by the Israelis of Abu Jihad in 1988, and by the Iraqis and Abu Nadal, the killing of Abu Iyad in January 1991, it was all Arafat, you know, so long as he was alive and everybody else was acting like courtiers to him.

Sometimes they would laugh behind his back, but it was not like a consultative leadership, whereas every time I have interviewed Hamas leaders, which I haven't done for some years now, but, you know, there would be a group of them, it would be very collegial, they would defer to each other, it was not anything like going to interview or being with Yasser Arafat from that point of view. It's just, you know, so that kind of underlines what you're saying about, you know, the Israelis might assassinate this one or that one, or they might assassinate 10 of them, of the leaders, which they have done in the past.

But the movement carries on because of those internal collegiality norms. So yeah, thank you for underlining that for us all. And at a broader level, thank you so much for bringing it up.

Dr. Khaled Hroub

Helena, can I answer the question or try to answer the question? What's the difference between Hamas and ISIS? Because I think maybe some additional point could be noted here. That is, when we talk about Hamas, this is a nation-based organization. This is a liberation movement with the clear-cut target, Palestine. So, you have the nationalist dimension, the territoriality of the nationalist struggle is well defined. That's it. It's Palestine.

When you talk about ISIS or Al-Qaeda, there is no nation based. So, these are groups that would do whatever they do anywhere globally, without defining themselves to a given territory. Even when they had the Islamic state, they call it the Islamic state, not Syria, Iraq or anything.

So, that was very vaguely defined. And they hoped it will expand more and more. So, the nationalist element that Hamas is very much connected to this, connected to this territorial space, is, I think, for me, the defining difference.

This is a big difference between the two organizations. That organization goes anywhere, and they can go to any place they might find themselves in, and then they would do jihad, they would do whatever they do, but without even being interested in having a territorial space well defined in national terms.

Helena Cobban

That is so valuable. Thank you so much. Of course, I should have asked you and Rami for your views on the differences between Hamas and ISIS from the get go, but I just threw that in. It's been on my mind a lot. And I thought it'd be good for the attendees to start thinking in this way. But thank you so much for putting that in. And while we're on the topic of the difference between Hamas and ISIS, I would also note the attitudes to women.

I mean, for me, that's very important, but we can discuss that because we have three more sessions, which is great. But for today, thank you so much, Dr. Khaled Hroub, for coming and bringing your decades-long expertise in studying this movement, which you've done in a very, I want to say, a very objective way, because I believe you're not a member of the movement. I believe in the past, you've described yourself as a secular person.

But you are somebody who's capable of looking at a situation and giving us the analysis. So, thank you so much for sharing that with us. And obviously, thank you, Rami, for being my co-conspirator and whatever on this whole project. The project is really important and timely. For people who have been attending, thank you for sticking with us so long. As you exit the webinar session, you'll be taken to an evaluation form.

And again, we really value this and it helps us with our planning. So, I think this one should be faster for you to fill out than the one last time. Next week, we are going to have as a guest expert, Dr. Joeren Gunning.

I don't even know how to pronounce his name, which is an embarrassment. But he is a professor of Middle East studies at King's College London and has affiliations with several other institutions in both the UK and Denmark. He's worked a lot on Hamas and its regional context and the Hamas relationship between the military and political wings inside it.

So, I think his participation will definitely enrich us yet further. Then I want to remind people watching this that we offer all our programs free of charge to the learning public. But that means we need to cover our costs through donations.

So, all donations are very, very appreciated and accepted with deep thanks. Thank you for being with us this week. Hope to see you next week, same time, same place for our next episode.