Participants: Helena Cobban, Rami G. Khouri, Jeroen Gunning

Helena Cobban(0:09 - 1:39)

Hi there, everybody. If you've seen some of our webinars before, I am still Helena Cobban, and I am still the president of Just World Educational. A big welcome to everybody who is with us for this third session of our much-needed webinar series on understanding Hamas and why that matters.

My co-host here on this project is Rami G. Khoury, a valued board member at Just World Ed. Rami is a Palestinian Christian from Nazareth and a distinguished writer, author, and analyst who's been writing about the Palestine question since, I believe, 1968.

He currently writes analytical pieces for the Arab Center Washington and serves as a distinguished public policy fellow at the Ehsan Faris Institute at the American University of Beirut. And our guest expert today is Jeroen Gunning, an accomplished teacher, researcher, and thinker who's on the faculty of King's College London. Back in 2010, Jeroen published a terrific book about Hamas, and he was one of the co-founders of the entire academic field of critical terrorism studies.

It's good to have you with us, Rami and Jeroen.

Jeroen Gunning (1:42 - 1:45)

It's very good to be with you. Thank you. Thank you.

Rami Khouri (1:46 - 1:47)

Happy to be here.

Helena Cobban(1:47 - 4:31)

You can learn more about Jeroen's book and his extensive list of other publications if you follow the links that our behind the scenes associate here, Mr. Mustafa Mohammed, has put into the chat box. I do urge you not to rush off immediately and try to follow all the links we'll be putting into the chat box, but to save it near the end of the webinar so you can peruse it more deeply at your leisure later.

Before we dive into today's conversation, I just want to remind you that the multimedia records of all the five webinars in this series are being posted in a very speedy manner onto the online learning hub that we're creating for the project.

And big thanks to Mustafa for his help in doing this. We have several ideas we're mulling over for making the learning hub optimally useful for the learning public. One of these ideas might be to make a written digest of the most important things we learned during the webinars from our experts, or to make a 30-minute video montage of the key insights that get shared during the webinars, or perhaps to make a series of fairly simple informational toolkit flyers, easy to download, print out, and share on topics like a brief history of Hamas, or ten ways Hamas is different from ISIS, or the history of Hamas-PLO relations, or whatever, with those flyers containing links back to the more complex resources that we will have on the learning hub.

That's just to give you a general idea of the broader context for today's webinar, which will be one very valuable part of the broader project. And when you leave today's webinar, we'll be asking for your ideas on how to make the online learning hub optimally useful, and also asking if you might perhaps contribute either some intellectual labor or some financial support, or both, to help us bring these ideas to fruition. So now, without further ado, let's bring in Rami and Jeroen and get to the conversation.

Over to you, Rami.

[Rami Khouri] (4:32 - 5:51)

Thank you, Helena, and thank you to all who have joined us, wherever you are around the world, and especially thanks to Jeroen for being our special guest today. We started this series not aiming to either advocate for or to attack Hamas, but simply to understand better what it represents and to understand why that matters. As you know, the situation in Gaza and Israel has resonated all over the world now. It's quite extraordinary, and it may impact the presidential election in the U.S. and other things. So this is a pretty big sticker item for the moment. And we need to understand who these people are on all sides.

The Israeli government is equally complex, as are the American leaders. So, Jeroen, my first question to you is, why does it matter that we should understand Hamas? And what is the main point that you might make? There are many points we'll discuss, but the key thing to understand about Hamas, in your view, based on your studies, is what exactly? And then we'll get into the issue of critical terrorism studies, a field that you helped co-establish and how that relates to Hamas.

[Jeroen Gunning] (5:52 - 9:57)

Thank you Rami, and thank you for this invitation to talk about understanding Hamas. I think just starting with this question of why does it matter that we understand Hamas, I would say  that it matters because deliberate mis- and disinformation has been used to justify Israel's genocidal war on Gaza and its stated goal of eradicating Hamas at all costs. So, if you just buy that uncritically, you're supporting the whole narrative that supports this extraordinary assault on Gaza and Gaza lives.

Also, I think it matters why this disinformation sticks so easily. People in the global north or in the west generally know very little about Hamas, or indeed details of what it's like to live under occupation for 57 years, which is only six months less than I am old, and under an international blockade for 17 years. For example, claims like the one that the Qassam fighters, the military wing of Hamas, had beheaded 40 babies were central to Israel's strategy of depicting Hamas, and by extension Gazans who had voted for Hamas, as subhuman and therefore not worthy of human rights.

But I think the fact that these claims were accepted so readily and uncritically in Western media also showed that orientalist and Islamophobic prejudices, as well as anti-Arab racism, are still very much alive and present. And so I think that's one of the reasons why this matters. I mean, it matters, for example, whether the Qassam fighters intended to kill civilians, including children, it matters whether Hamas is willing to make compromises and stick to those once the fighting stops.

It also matters whether Hamas has grassroots support and would participate in elections. All these things matter both for assessing what happened and looking to the future. And I would say also that understanding Hamas matters because if you understand its relation with Palestinian society and other political factions, if you understand the history of ethnic cleansing, of dispossession, occupation, blockade, wars, etc., you know that eradicating Hamas would require a full genocide because the majority of Palestinians would support Hamas actions in spite of Israel's genocidal response. And we can get back to that later.

Now, the Israeli government may not care about this at this stage, at least it doesn't seem to. And in fact, some factions appear to welcome the genocide as they appear to aim to erase the Palestinian population and claim the land for Israel. But for the international community, this should matter, even more so if the International Court of Justice rules that Israel's actions amount not just to plausible genocide, but to actual genocide.

So I think that's just in short, many ways in which it matters. Just two more things. I think it's also important to understand what has happened on the Israeli side.

For example, it is important that Israeli armed forces killed a significant number of their own citizens on 7 October, as numerous reports and eyewitness accounts have argued, because that changes the narrative of what happened on 7 October. It matters whether or not Israel is taking every precaution to minimize civilian death in Gaza. And I would say at the moment, the number of civilians reported killed and the types of ammunition used in very dense neighborhoods suggest strongly that Israel does not.

And then finally, I think Palestinian opinion matters. It matters what Palestinians themselves think. And I think a lot of the international debate is about what Israel or the US or the EU finds acceptable and what they intend for Palestinians.

And I think this highlights how much of colonial era attitudes still seem to resonate with political elites in the Global North. And in this narrative, Palestinians are allowed to have their own state only if the government is made up of blind technocrats that do Israel's and the US bidding. And this is a very patronizing colonial style logic, just as Hamas's violence must be understood as anti-colonial violence.

And we'll probably return to this theme of the colonial echoes later on.

[Rami Khouri] (9:57 - 10:20)

You are a co-founder with others of a field of critical terrorism studies. And you said that your work on Hamas influenced this. What is the relationship of your work on Hamas to the field of critical terrorism studies? And what does that actually mean?

[Jeroen Gunning] (10:21 - 14:10)

Critical terrorism studies was launched in the mid-2000s, really in response to 9-11 and the turn to a terrorism narrative, where we felt that the term terrorism is analytically unhelpful. It doesn't actually explain very much. And politically, it has disastrous consequences.

Just to give a few examples, and they all apply to Hamas, both in the current context and also in the context of when I was studying Hamas in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So the terrorism narrative strips violence of its historical and political context. It is portrayed as coming out of nowhere.

And it delegitimizes anyone who seeks to contextualize this violence as misguided at best or a terrorist lover at worst. And remember the Israeli ambassador's anger at the statement by UN Secretary General Guterres that Hamas' violence did not come out of nowhere. And so that completely undermined the Israeli narrative that this was just evil people doing evil things, rather than there's a context to this.

There's a reason why Hamas does this. It doesn't condone the war crimes that were committed, but you need to understand that context. And we'll get back to that.

Secondly, it means that there's no political solution. There's just a military or a surveillance policing solution. For example, in the case of Israel, it enables it to deny any political overtures by Hamas as disingenuous, because terrorists cannot change within this paradigm.

And it cuts out any possibility of resolving the conflict politically. So then you only have left a military solution, total eradication, which for a grassroots movement like Hamas, which has a lot of support, means having to commit genocide to achieve that aim. Among those practicing peace negotiations, it's well established that the term terrorism hinders the possibility of negotiations.

For example, the Philippines government refused to label the Moro Islamic Liberation Front terrorist, even though there was a huge pressure from the US to do so, because they recognized that the military solution was impossible and that it needed to negotiate. One final thing, I think terrorism reduces a very complex movement like Hamas to one dimension. It's all about violence. It's also portrayed as illegitimate and barbaric.

But as we know, also from your previous podcasts, Hamas is not just about violence, it grew out of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, which long opposed resistance and was focused on welfare and preaching, has participated in elections, etc. And also, I think what's important here is that [the focus on terrorism] elides the right to resist.

Under UN resolutions and international law, Palestinians have every right to resist occupation violently, it says in UN resolutions, to resist occupation and fight for independence by any available means. Of course, this right is limited by obligations on fighters not to harm civilians, and any intentional targeting of civilians constitutes a war crime. But the terrorism label reduces all violence to illegitimate and barbaric violence, even violence against Israeli soldiers.

And this then serves not just the purpose of dehumanizing the other side, but also to obscure the barbarism of Israel's own armed forces in response. And this is, again, a colonial legacy. The British used this term in the colonies, for example, India and Egypt, to delegitimize anti-colonial movements, and any non-state actors deploying arms.

And they also used it to legitimize their own usually similarly extreme state violence against anti-colonial movements. And therefore, I think you need to see this as part of a kind of a colonial echo that is happening here. So those are some of the insights that critical terrorism studies would bring to it.

[Helena Cobban] (14:11 - 17:01)

I think that's really helpful. Jeroen, I'm a little bit older than you. I actually grew up in England in the 1950s and 1960s, in the era of decolonization, where freedom fighters from organizations like the Mau Mau were routinely dehumanized and demonized.

I remember being really scared of the Mau Mau, from everything that people had told me. And then, suddenly, the British decide they can't hang on to Kenya. And suddenly there are people who are very close to the Mau Mau who are running the independent Kenyan government and shaking hands with the Queen.

So it is a particular phenomenon of late colonial violence, this dehumanization and deployment of the accusations of terrorism. And just one other experience that I had that I think is relevant is the degree to which when I first came here to the United States in 1982, the PLO was demonized and ostracized, and there were reasons, they did deploy violence against athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. There were reasons to be concerned about the kind of violence that the PLO groups used.

But finally, they decided that the PLO had to be involved in the negotiations and that  led to Oslo, and that made its own problems. But it is always a very politicized and specifically a colonial kind of label that is put on to people. So thanks for explaining that.

So you talked about the degree to which this labeling people as terrorists precludes or prevents negotiations and is often used specifically for that end. But as we've discussed here on the webinar series before, Hamas has been involved in several negotiations. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the record of Hamas in negotiations, both like historically throughout the history of the movement with various different parties, but also currently. We now have a situation where our administration here in the United States is apparently trying to nail down a ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas at the same time that they express complete support for Israel's campaign to destroy Hamas. Well, maybe that's more a problem of the model in US foreign policy thinking.

But tell us about the history of Hamas in negotiations.

[Jeroen Gunning] (17:02 - 22:14)

I think that's a very good question. Hamas has a long record of negotiating and coming to compromises and ceasefires. It did so, for example, in 1995, only a few years after it had been established.

It negotiated with Fatah in the lead up to the 1996 Palestinian elections, which were the first under the Oslo Accords process. And they agreed to cease operations temporarily, for example, in the latter half of 1995. It similarly negotiated a short-lived ceasefire in 2003.

And then again, in 2005, in the lead up to the second national election in 2006. And again, this was in negotiations with Fatah. And every war on Gaza since 2006, and there have been numerous ones, has ended with a negotiated ceasefire, negotiated indirectly between Hamas and Israel and followed by a period of calm.

There have been hostage negotiations before, where hostages were exchanged. And since 2006, Hamas has also repeatedly sought to negotiate a national unity government with Fatah, making increasingly significant concessions, most notably in 2017. Although most of these negotiations failed for a variety of reasons, involving not just Hamas, but also Fatah's intransigence and Israeli or Egyptian interference.

But I want to give you one vignette of an interview I had with Ismail Abushanab, who was one of the top three leaders in Gaza in the 1990s. He was a prime mover behind negotiating the ceasefire in 2003, before he was assassinated by Israel that year. And when I interviewed him back then, he told me that he'd learned to negotiate with Israelis in prison.

And so it was the prison block that tried to improve the living circumstances, where he was the leader of the negotiations, and he had to negotiate with Israeli guards. But tellingly, he also said that he learned there that Israeli guards were only willing to accede to demands if they were pressured. So only when they went on strike, for example, did the guards concede anything, even if the demands concerned basic human rights.

So his lesson, and you can debate whether that's the right lesson, but it was that therefore, you need violence to put pressure on, or the threat of violence to put pressure on Israel outside prison in order to get Israel to the negotiating table. But I think the other thing to say here is that there's a huge reservoir of experience within Hamas, even though internally negotiations have often been contested, particularly with the military wing, which is typically less conciliatory, and more maximalist. But whether or not Hamas negotiates or is willing to compromise is very much influenced by the political opportunity and threat structure that prevails at the time.

So in the late 2000s, for example, Hamas leaders engaged with Swiss negotiators and toned down their rhetoric, took some of the anti-Semitic references from their website, and dropped a decision to impose the hijab, the headscarf,  in court, all through these negotiations. At that time, pragmatists in Hamas were weakened after their election win was boycotted, but they still had influence. If you fast forward, the rise of hardliners within Hamas over the last five years is in part because of the failure of these negotiations and the refusal of successive Israeli governments and Western governments to respond to Hamas's political overtures and engage it.

I think particularly the lack of response to its 2017 document of revised principles, and then to the originally non-violent Great March of Return, which originated outside Hamas, but which Hamas co-opted. So if political overtures do not lead to change, then that means that hardliners in the movement gain power. And one final point on negotiations is that what's really interesting since 7 October, is that the center of gravity within Hamas has shifted.

So after Yahya Sinwar's leadership win in Gaza in 2017, the center of gravity of leadership shifted gradually to Gaza, and certainly at the start of the war on Gaza, it was very Gaza-centric. Now, fast forward to the latest negotiations, you can see that, for example, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the political bureau based in Qatar, was flown over to Cairo in order to give his stamp of approval to the negotiations there. And what's important is that this external leadership, which resides abroad, has on the whole been more willing to accept a state on 1967 borders and come to compromises.

And it's also important that members of this external leadership have indicated that the Qassam Brigades could be disarmed if there were a permanent ceasefire, and the end of a blockade, and an actual Palestinian state. And particularly intriguing here is that this statement was made by Khalil Haya, who was part of the negotiations that ended the 2014 war on Gaza, and he's a member of the political bureau. And interesting again here, in terms of the colonial theme, is that he and others reference other colonial struggles, and particularly that anti-colonial movements usually lay down their arms and convert into political parties after they had won independence.

So there's a clear sense in which what Hamas is doing at the moment is similar to this kind of anti-colonial history.

[Helena Cobban] (22:16 - 22:54)

That's fascinating. I'm glad that you mentioned the Great March of Return, and I agree with you that the Great March of Return was initiated as a project outside of Hamas. And you said it was then co-opted by Hamas. I think it's more like Hamas sort of adopted it.

Well, maybe co-opt, adopt, it's all the same thing. But they gave support to it from the get-go; it could never have been organized with such breadth if Hamas had opposed it from the beginning.

[Jeroen Gunning] (22:54 - 23:58)

Adopted is probably a better word. I wanted to make it slightly stronger because some of the military wing abused the Great March of Return to introduce violence, which wasn't the original idea. But what's interesting is that if you look at the reports in B'Tselem, which is an Israeli human rights organization that documents deaths in the conflict, the vast majority of people killed, and over 200 were killed in just about 18 months, were unarmed.

So it was very clear that it was, in the majority still, a non-violent response, and yet it didn't lead to anything, right? So Hamas has tried wars, it has tried compromising with political overtures, then there's this march, which is a non-violent expression of anti-colonial struggle, and none of that leads to anything. And that then sets the scene for the hardliners to come back in and say we have to prepare for a dramatic, violent explosion.

[Helena Cobban] (24:00 - 24:17)

So just to nail down this issue of negotiations currently, do you see it as a possibility that there will be a negotiated ceasefire that will lead to real political gains, lead to the release of the hostages, and to real political gains for the Palestinians?

[Jeroen Gunning] (24:19 - 25:53)

I don't know. I wish it was the case. But I think it's interesting that Hamas, just before the invasion of Rafah, agreed to a version of the ceasefire, which clearly the Israelis didn't agree with, so it didn't lead to anything.

But in that version, as far as we understand it, they did agree to cease fire, to release the hostages in various stages, but all premised on a permanent ceasefire and a withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from Gaza. Unless there's a willingness to do that on the Israeli side, I'm not sure what will happen. Because at the moment, you have an Israeli government, which is the most right-wing in Israel's history, with a leader, Netanyahu, who is very much beholden to the most extreme right-wing voices in his cabinet, who are all pushing him to be more hardline, to eradicate Hamas, to erase Palestinians from Gaza altogether.

This is a particularly extreme [Israeli] government, but it also has to be said that in terms of Zionist ideology, the whole project of Zionism is to clear the land for a Jewish majority state. So I think it's too simplistic to just say this opinion is limited to Netanyahu and the government. There's more at stake here. And unless that gets critiqued more bluntly within Israel, I'm not sure what will happen.

[Rami Khouri] (25:56 - 27:13)

Let me jump in here and ask you a bit about the 7th of October attack. There are thousands of people around the world speculating why Hamas did this. And of course, none of us knows, but what you might be able to shed light on is what does the October 7 attack tell you about how Hamas operates?

They must have expected a huge reprisal because they've been through this several times before and had thousands of people killed, a lot of destruction by Israeli attacks. So they knew there was going to be something big coming at them. What does that tell you about the way they think and take their actions and link that to, if you could, the ongoing process, whenever there is a process of re-establishing a legitimate Palestinian-led government in Gaza and all of Palestine. Does Hamas, do you think, expect to be part of that?

Or do they feel that they've alienated a lot of people, a lot of people have suffered and a lot of people have left. Does this hurt Hamas? Do they anticipate that?

How do they think through these things?

[Jeroen Gunning] (27:15 - 27:24)

So a lot of what I'll be saying is speculative because there's so much that remains unknown or unclear or ambiguous or contested.

I think this will be a painful question for Hamas to answer in the face of this enormous suffering wrought on Gazans. There are various scenarios. Even if Hamas only planned to kidnap a large number of soldiers, as was claimed in interviews with members in the newspaper Sharq al-Awsat, they would have known that Israel's response would have been more brutal than anything before.

Because before they would have kidnapped a few soldiers, but not a large number. But also, I feel that it seems that more was at stake already from the beginning. And from what has been said in public statements about the attacks being intended to change the whole political equation, and also based on analysis of what has been reported about the extent of the attacks, the number of people involved – estimates range from 1,000 to 3,000 of Hamas, I mean, Qassam fighters – but also 14 breakout points through Gaza's fence, spanning the full length of Gaza from the very top to the very bottom. To me, that suggests that the goal must have been larger, that it was more than just a kidnapping operation. It was also about making the point that Israel was not invincible, that it was not sovereign on its own soil, that Gaza could take the fight to Israel.

Also, there was an element of spreading terror, of killing entire communities. I mean, we've heard testimonies from captured Hamas leaders that they say that they were instructed to kill anyone in sight. Of course, we don't know how much of that was genuine, what they wanted to say, and how much of that was through torture-like interrogation practices.

So we don't know, but it seems that it was more than that. And I think if you look at how Hamas leaders have talked about wanting to change the equation, to show that Israel was not invincible, that Palestinians would not be forgotten in the context of regional normalization, and talk about annexing the West Bank, and to put a Palestinian state back on the international agenda, it seems there was a more maximalist agenda. And this would require a shocking escalation of violence in order to change the regional normalization agenda, to put the Palestinian state back on the international agenda.

And even if Hamas leaders only expanded the operation once they realized how weak the Israeli defense was, they would have known in that instance that Israel's response would be extremely violent. But then I think you need to put it in context. And there are three things I would say. First, Hamas and Qassam leaders seem to have expected that the fighting would spread to multiple fronts, that there would be an uprising in the West Bank, they called repeatedly for a third intifada, that it would spread to the north with a much more full-on response from Hezbollah in Lebanon than has happened so far, that there would be more activity from Iran, from Shia militias in Iraq, from the Houthis in Yemen. And although all of them have acted, they've carried out attacks in support of Hamas and Palestinians, but these actions have been far more limited than Hamas appears to have expected.

And they [other Hamas sympathizers]have also been very much constrained by domestic considerations. So it's possible that Hamas expected the Israeli response to be more diluted than it actually was. It's also possible that Hamas expected the international community to put more pressure on Israel sooner.

And here I think the shocking nature of some of their own actions and the way Israel has succeeded in dehumanizing them in the eyes of northern governments and obscuring its own role in killing Israelis on 7 October and in helping to create conditions for the attacks, have played a role in the international community not responding more forcefully. But I think it's also an indictment of the international community that it has not upheld the much-vaunted human rights order, and particularly in sharp contrast to the way it responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And here a lot of Palestinians feel there's an element of racism going on, that Palestinian lives matter less than Ukrainian lives.

And then finally, one should try to understand Hamas's actions from an anti-colonial perspective; they've drawn parallels with other anti-colonial struggles, pointing out that millions of people have died in the course of liberation, for example in Algeria and in Vietnam. And in their mind, the end goal of national liberation and a Palestinian state is worth the sacrifices made today. Now, many will disagree with this perspective, many of those have lost family members, and yet it's striking that in a poll only last month, so seven months into the war on Gaza, 71% of Gazans polled said that Hamas's decision to attack was the correct one, and it was up from 57% a few months earlier.

And I think this goes back to the destruction of Gazan life since its occupation in 1967, and in particular how life has become unbearable in Gaza following 17 years of international blockade. If you think about 80% of people living under the poverty line, no viable economy, huge unemployment, five and a half thousand civilian deaths between 2008 and 2023, and the prospect that this horror would continue indefinitely in a region with normalized relations with Israel, so that it would just be forgotten and locked into this horror. One could understand why Gazans might support Hamas's attacks, regardless of the violence meted out by Israel.

And I think Israel's own extremity of response means that many Gazans lay the blame for genocide at Israel's feet and not at Hamas's.

[Rami Khouri] (33:06 - 34:54)

And that brings up a related question about Hamas's relationship to the Palestinian people, whether in Gaza or all over Palestine. And it's a question that is rooted in a very frequent Western tradition of saying these are brutal dictators, they look at what they did in Gaza when they ruled, they killed their opponents, they wouldn't let people speak freely, etc, etc. So their presentation as a brutal dictatorial organization is certainly anchored in some realities.

They're not Western liberal democratic systems. But the nature of their brutality or their autocratic rule, let's just call it, does that cause a problem, do you think, for them going forward? Is this going to create roadblocks between them and anybody in the West or other places talking to them saying, no, we can't talk to these people, they're very violent?

And even some people bring up the comparison with ISIS, of course, they're very different from ISIS. But how do you see that whole relationship of the nature of their exercise of power, and their place in society and their interaction with foreign powers? It's ironic, all the foreign powers that the US, for instance, in particular demonized and called terrorists, like the PLO, the Viet Cong, the Taliban and others, they ended up negotiating with them.

So what do you see in this realm for Hamas?

[Jeroen Gunning] (34:56 - 40:36)

I think this also links back to your earlier question, which I realized I didn't answer, about how Hamas sees its own future role in politics. But I think you're right, there are two elements, there's the Palestinian scene, and there's the international scene. If you look at opinion polls, Hamas has enjoyed remarkably steady popular support over the years.

It's gone up and down in polls, and these polls are regarded as rigorous and accurate. But it typically has been between 20 to 35% of support and very, very comparable to Fatah. But what's whether Hamas acts in a more democratic or in a more authoritarian way depends very much on the political context.

And when there was an active electoral process, elected Hamas representatives were generally more responsive to popular demands than a lot of Fatah representatives. In the lead up to the 2003 and 2005 ceasefires, Hamas leaders were seen consulting with the wider population about whether they would support the ceasefire, and they clearly cared about that. And the fact that a significant majority supported the ceasefire in opinion polls seemed to play a role in their decision.

And it's also important to remember that when faced with national elections, Hamas adapted its program through consultation with its own grassroots and the wider population. And one reason it began to accept a de facto two-state solution around 2006 was because it recognized that this was the national consensus. And it instantly compared to the 1990s, when it won most of the professional and student union elections, but boycotted the national elections because it said it was part of the Oslo process, which they disagreed with, and they didn't believe that Arafat would give them a fair show.

And at that point, they faced a small, highly politicized pool of unionized voters who were more likely to oppose a two-state solution and support violence than the general population at the time. So they didn't have any need to adjust, there was no incentive. In 2006, by contrast, it faced the general population, which was much more in favor of a two-state solution and weary of violence, and it responded to that.

And then you've got the aftermath of 2006. So this is the whole lead up to elections, and then the elections were not recognized, Fatah doesn't recognize them, the international community doesn't recognize them. Coupled to that, Fatah, encouraged by the US and other Western forces, then prepares to stage a coup against Hamas.

That has completely changed the incentive [for Hamas] to participate in elections, because it means nothing, clearly. But also, it has made them much more paranoid and much more authoritarian. And since 2007, when it violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in this kind of internecine struggle, as a kind of preemptive coup against the expected coup, it has not brooked opposition in Gaza.

And this, of course, was hugely problematic for Gazans. But I would say this is in large part a product of the breakdown of this electoral process and this internecine war between Hamas and Fatah, breeding paranoia on both sides. And so it is very much dependent on context.

And I would also add to that, in the 1990s, before they came to power, Hamas had developed a very extensive Islamic democratic framework for politics. That's one of the things I talked about in my interviews with them, which also informed their internal decision making up to a point. And a lot of the big decisions were done through consultation within the movement, and so it wasn't imposed through an authoritarian kind of top-down decision.

And this reservoir of political thought is still there, but it has been overshadowed by the blockade and the wars of the past seven years, and the rise of this more hardline leadership. And so whether Hamas will return to that reservoir depends on what political system evolves in Palestine. And I would also say two more things.

One is that Fatah itself is deeply authoritarian, but acceptable to the international community. And it was Fatah which canceled the scheduled 2021 elections because it feared losing to Hamas. And yet, the international community insists that Fatah, in some kind of reformed way, should govern.

So clearly, authoritarianism itself is not a problem [for the international community]. It is whether or not you agree with the Israeli and American agenda. And that's what leads me to my final point.

There's a very neocolonial nature to this discourse about Hamas being dictatorial. You say they're not liberal Democrats. I would counter liberal Democrats have been complicit in a lot of violence outside, right?

Look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan. And neocolonial externally-manufactured regime change in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan has worked because it was imposed from the outside by powers that wanted blind technocrats rather than national politicians with a grassroots following. So I think it's very important to put it back on the Palestinians who have to decide who should lead them.

But any chance for a more democratic turn requires the establishment of an independent state and an end to occupation. And I think, just as a footnote, I would reiterate what Khaled said last week, that Hamas has called for the release of Marwan Barghouti, who's one of the most powerful Fatah leaders, but he's been imprisoned since the early 2000s for his role in the Al-Aqsa  intifada. And Barghouti has consistently come out on top in polls for presidential elections.

And Hamas knows that releasing him would mean that it would not win the presidency. And similarly, Hamas has long indicated it doesn't want to govern on its own. At best, it wants a national unity government, or maybe leave it to others altogether.

And certainly [Hamas] also wants to become part of the PLO, but not on terms of surrender, as Fatah has typically insisted.

[Helena Cobban] (40:37 - 42:51)

I gave a talk about Hamas recently at a church, and somebody said, well, why haven't they organized any elections since 2006? There was a plan for elections in 2021 that Fatah then aborted.

So this person didn't really know much about the history. But I think it's also worth recalling both that elections get held in a context. Too many people here in the West just think let's have an election and that'll solve everything.

No, elections are always about something. The election in 2006 was about the Palestinian Legislative Council. It was about a whole lot of things, and what you were voting for. That context is important. And when you mentioned an end to the occupation, or significant lightning of the Israeli occupation on Gaza, or hopefully an end of the Israeli occupation under UN auspices, then you could have a free and fair election.

And everybody would know what it is. But the other thing about elections is that they are risky. If you've been in a complex, militant, very oppressive situation, when you have an election, you reveal who your supporters are, you reveal what your networks are, in order to fight the election.

And they took that risk in 2006, and got hammered for it, got locked up even worse than they were previously locked up. So, I think it'd be great to have elections. And I think that we've got a lot of things that need to happen, including letting Marwan Barghouti and thousands of other Palestinian prisoners out of jail for free and fair elections to be held.

But these are things that we can continue to work for.

[Rami Khouri] (42:54 - 43:20)

Can I just jump in and add one little touch to this question again, the question of self-determination. Self-determination is a great phrase, because it goes way back to the League of Nations. And it's maybe easier to use than freedom or end of occupation or whatever.

How does Hamas relate to self-determination? Do they use that phrase a lot? And what does it mean to them?

[Jeroen Gunning] (43:22 - 44:40)

They have used it in interviews with me, for example, and they always say, where are you from? And you say, I'm from the Netherlands. And you say, oh, you remember the German occupation, you want self-determination and resistance was justified.

So they build on your own background. But certainly in that sense, I think that there's a real thinking around. And this is also linked, I think, to what Hezbollah has been saying in Lebanon.

It's a very similar discourse that you get on sovereignty. They often talk about sovereignty, but also self-determination through resistance. It's not sovereignty, because the UN or the international community grants you sovereignty. It is that you win sovereignty through resistance. And so that is very much baked into this.

I would very much recommend you read Somdeep Sen's book, Decolonizing Palestine, because there he looks at this kind of tension between Hamas's anti-colonial side, as a resistance movement, and a post-colonial government in very restricted circumstances, but that where they have to police the border with Israel and maintain calm. And there are these two things that are very much in tension with each other. The anti-colonial element is very much about sovereignty and self-determination of the Palestinian people.

[Helena Cobban] (44:43 - 46:45)

That was a great question, Rami. Thanks. So I want to actually pick up on when you were talking about anti-colonial violence a little earlier, you were talking about the Algerians, for example, who routinely now talk about their one million martyrs, but it was worth it.

And just to note that a couple of years ago, Just World Books actually published a book called Inside the Battle of Algiers, which is the memoir by the woman, the Algerian woman who put the bomb in the Milk Bar [in Algiers], to inflict on the French settlers, the French civilian settlers in downtown Algiers, as she says in the memoir, something like the kind of pain that the French had been inflicting on the Algerians for 130 years by then.

So it's not just Palestinians who make these choices, and she did it, Zohra Drif, at the instruction of her FLN commander, who had tried various other things in the Casbah. So it was part of a deliberate, but much broader campaign. And the other thing that Zohra Drif was doing during that period was she was organizing the Algerian women in nonviolent civil resistance networks.

So it's not like an either-or situation, either you use violence or you do grassroots organizing. Sometimes movements of national liberation choose to use violence in a targeted way. That brings me to the question of women, which is one that I really want to explore more with you, because you said you had some very interesting experiences with the women grassroots networks of Hamas in the 1990s.

[Jeroen Gunning] (46:47 - 53:31)

I interviewed a number of women that were associated with Hamas affiliated charities, with the Muslim Sisters, which was the female counterpart to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also student leaders of the women's Islamic bloc, which is the Hamas student wing at Islamic University. And one of the things I was interested in at the time was how Hamas treated women. And this was in part a very Western obsession.

Islamists are always interrogated on attitudes towards women. But it was also a very live debate within Palestinian society in the 1990s, with stories about Hamas forcing women to wear the hijab. And overall, there was a conservative turn in society where more women were beginning to wear the hijab than historically had been the case, at least wearing the hijab for religious reasons, rather than for historical social reasons.

And also Hamas was being accused of imposing a very conservative patriarchal system. Now, one thing that struck me was that all the Islamist women I talked to, and including those who were Islamist, but not Hamas – for example, Islamic Jihad, or other sort of independent Islamist groups, they said that Hamas had enabled them to go to universities that enabled them to get jobs. They were mostly from socially conservative families, mostly from refugee camps in Gaza, 70%, over 70% of the population in Gaza, of course, are descended from refugees from historic Palestine, and now Israel.

And those families would not have allowed their daughters to go to university if it did not have a strict segregation between genders, or a strict Islamist ethos. Many of them also received grants from Hamas and support to become professionals. So they saw Hamas as emancipatory and going against Gaza's socially conservative culture, though within the Islamic framework.

And it's interesting also that both Islamist and leftist women activists confirmed that Hamas was opposed to early marriage, and to all the killings. And they said both of these were un-Islamic practices, they were kind of Arab cultural practices that had emerged and were not Islamic, and therefore should not be sustained. And also interesting in that context, this was after my research, but in 2006, during the elections, the population group with the second highest percentage of Hamas voters at 47% were housewives, according to an exit poll.

I want to reiterate something that Khaled said last week, that it's not useful to think of this in a binary way. Because on the one hand, Hamas is deeply patriarchal. Leaders regularly reiterated to me that the role of women was primarily to raise the new generation.

And only after that has been taken care of, then women work or occupy public offices. And many of the leaders I spoke with said that the head of an Islamic state, if that ever came about, could not be a woman. They mentioned biological reasons, which I tried to kind of challenge them on, but they wouldn't be budged.

And because they believe that God had ordained men to lead it, that somehow there was more reason in men, although I don't quite know where they get that idea from. But they had no problem with women being elected to parliament, or heading ministries. And indeed, when they were elected, a number of Hamas MPs, and later also ministers in Gaza were women.

And there were also, and this was really interesting, a few voices who contradicted this narrative and said this within Hamas circles that a woman could lead an Islamic state. And one of these was Yusra Hamdan, who was the highest ranking woman in a political offshoot of Hamas, Hezbollah. And she explained to me that Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, that are usually invoked to underpin the belief that women should not lead, and this is never shall a people prosper, who make a woman their ruler, that this referred to a particular Persian ruler and was not intended as a general indictment of women as heads of state.

And when I offered this interpretation to a group of rank and file Hamas members, the leader first said he didn't believe this, this is not true, what does she know? But then the others ran at him and said, are you a doctor? Like the doctora Yusra? Did you study Islamic law? No? Now then you have no ground for your objection. So if doctora Yusra said this, it must be true. And it shows clearly that here education was regarded as a superior basis of authority, and not someone's gender.

When I interviewed the leaders of the women's Islamic bloc, these were also students, so they said that they pitied other women activists as in their view, that the other women were not given autonomy by their male counterparts. And this included, according to them, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP. And so they insisted that they had autonomy from the male leadership and were left to their own devices.

And this was also something that the heads of women's charities told me, that they could do things without Hamas oversight. Critics of Hamas disputed this and said that the women's Islamic bloc was, as they put it, run by the boys. And also what's interesting is that Islamist female student leaders themselves subscribed to the view, for example, that a woman could not be head of state, and accepted that men had the right to marry four women, even though they hated the idea. We've had a long discussion on this. So you can see this is not binary, right? It's not an easy binary.

And it also doesn't fit neatly into a Western perspective, which has these things in very kind of binary sort of blocks. And also on the leftist side, I would say it's not binary. I heard from multiple sources that leftists also imposed the hijab at certain junctures during the intifada, in terms of respect for the dead and other things.

But also that women's rights were regularly subjugated to national rights by the leftists. And yet, it was leftist women who led a public debate in the 1990s in Gaza about reforming the law to increase the rights of women. And these women also held discussion sessions with Hamas-affiliated women, including Yusra Hamdan, whom I mentioned earlier.

And they would discuss the works of Arab feminists like Fatima Mernissi, who said that the hijab was actually a contextual historical thing, which shouldn't be taken as a general rule. And so they had these discussions about this. Some Hamas leaders approved of this and actually also went and talked to them.

Others decried these leftist activists as Western stooges, as trying to undermine Islam and had a very kind of misogynistic take on them. So this is not an easy kind of story to tell, because there's lots of complex threads in there. But it's certainly not one or the other.

[Helena Cobban] (53:32 - 57:01)

That is so interesting. By the way, I want to just tell everybody attending here that we do have a couple of good questions in the Q&A box. And if you have a question, do pop it in the box soon, because we're going to be sorting through the questions and delivering them fairly soon.

Just also to follow up with Jeroen about the women. It's quite a broad thing in the Palestinian national movement, in my experience, to definitely support having large families, because you have to replace all those who have been lost. And that obviously puts a lot of burden on women. And this is true of people in the secular part of the nationalist movement, as well as the religious part. I spent a couple of days with the Hamas women in Gaza, not nearly as long as you, but I went with the Hamas women for a couple of days shortly after the election. And I got the chance to interview two of the newly elected Hamas women MPs, one of whom was Jamila Shanti, who very much impressed m. I think she was the widow of Abdelaziz Rantissi. And I loved her because she bustled into the office,, with papers falling out of her briefcase. She was in charge of all kinds of things. And she was a quintessential working woman, and very much in command of her environment.

(Jamila Shanti was killed by the Israelis, I think back in November, maybe late October. And probably a targeted killing, as far as I can gather.)

One of the other things I did was to go with some Hamas women into one of their kindergartens. And I was literally blown away by the level of the pedagogy, because I had this idea that Muslim pedagogy for young children is all rote learning. And they were doing interactive games and dances and little computer games and PE sessions. And it just looked like really good pedagogy for four and five year olds. And I was impressed. You have to get these kinds of experiences. And even more the kind rich, broad experiences that you had to get big pictures of these movements.

So moving along, we still have a couple of great questions here.

First, how reliable are the various polls we read about that purport to survey the Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank? And how are those polls conducted? I have no idea how polls are conducted in Gaza in the current circumstances. So tell us more.

[Jeroen Gunning] (57:04 - 58:36)

I don't know how they're doing at the moment either, because the whole structure has broken down. And how would you navigate it? What I do know is that the center that is run by Khalil Shikaki in the West Bank, the PSR, is regarded internationally as very, very rigorous and reliable.

And so over the years, it has been shown to reflect public opinion – to the extent that we know what public opinion is – fairly well. What's interesting is that they didn't predict the win of Hamas in 2006, just as opinion polls didn't predict Trump's win or Brexit's win in the UK. So in that sense, I think they're in very good company that is very hard to better, because the margins are so small.

But actually, what Hamas won was not that far off from what they predicted. And one of the interesting things there, I won't go into too much detail, is that Hamas was very strategic in placing candidates in districts. For example, they would work out how many votes they had.

And then if they had five possible seats, they would only put in three candidates, if they thought that would concentrate the vote enough to beat Fatah. But Fatah put in lots of candidates.

[Helena Cobban] (58:36 - 58:41)

Seven or eight. Yeah Fatah's election, the way they fought it, was chaotic.

[Jeroen Gunning] (58:42 - 59:53)

So if you actually look at the difference in Hamas and Fatah in terms of the national vote, it's not that much. And so you can understand why this opinion poll didn't get it right, because it is a very small margin.

But because Hamas played that very well, they got a landslide election, because they concentrated their vote on a few candidates. But that's just to say that there's a history of polling being very reliable. What I don't know is how this has played out in Gaza at the moment.

And I can imagine the earlier polls were still easy because you had sort of the southern part of Gaza, which was still operating. But particularly now with so much of Gaza destroyed, and so many people displaced, my guess is that they would do the same thing, but they kind of get a random sample from different areas. But you would have  to rethink how you get that sample going. Because you don't quite know where the people are, you would probably get the UN and others to tell you how many roughly there are in a particular refugee camp, and then work from that basis.

[Helena Cobban] (59:53 - 1:00:12)

Yes, difficult. So a linked question here from Kenneth Brown, who asks, how widespread is Hamas in the West Bank? And how intense is their secrecy there in the West Bank, in the face of Israeli oppression?

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:00:14 - 1:01:33)

So Hamas has been suppressed in the West Bank since 2007, both by Israel and by Fatah. In that sense, it is a much weaker organization in the West Bank. What's interesting, though, is that that support for Hamas since 7 October in the West Bank has just gone up.

I think it was the December 2023 poll that showed that Hamas had tripled [its support] within those two, three months. This was also, I think, part of the logic behind the Hamas attack, that they felt that the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah wasn't actually governing Palestine and in the interest of Palestinians, that it had become a security force for the Israelis to keep the calm and a lot of Palestinians on the ground felt the same. And particularly when the Palestinian Authority started to clamp down on pro-Gaza protests in the West Bank, then, of course, it just undermined its legitimacy even further.

So you've seen a huge drop in support for Fatah in the West Bank and a huge increase in support for Hamas. But Hamas doesn't have the kind of infrastructure to build on that effectively, because it would have to rebuild itself. And Fatah would not allow that, at least under the present circumstances.

[Helena Cobban] (1:01:35 - 1:01:51)

So we have a question from Kathryn Habib, who's asking, how does Hamas relate to Muslim religious leaders and what influence does that Muslim leadership have on Hamas?

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:01:53 - 1:03:40)

They respect them. They will go to international conferences. But I think they're very much their own party.

I remember in the 1990s, when I was talking, for example, to Ismail Abushanab, who I talked about earlier, because he was one of the most frank, most accessible of the Hamas leaders who would talk about his logic and his thinking. And he said if I, Abushanab, come up with a policy, it's just me, Abushanab, and people have to take my word for it.

If I can find a religious leader who supports what I say, if I see, for example, Qardawi in Qatar, Muslim Brothers, then they would take the words from the thinker to support what they already had decided they wanted to do. So, for example, when they started suicide operations or what they call martyrdom operations or self-martyrdom operations, they didn't have a fatwa or a religious edict to justify that. But they felt from a military perspective that this was the next step to take, which they had learned from Hezbollah when they were exiled to Lebanon for a number of months by Israel.

But then they found somebody like Qardawii afterwards, who gave it a fatwa that justified it. So, in that sense, I think Hamas is very much its own party and then finds the right religious ruling to go with it.

[Helena Cobban] (1:03:40 - 1:03:44)

So, then they kind of go shopping for the right Sheikh who will give them what they want.

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:03:44 - 1:03:45)

Yes.

[Helena Cobban] (1:03:46 - 1:03:59)

But that's very different, actually, from the situation, for example, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the religious leaders are tightly in control of just about everything at the leadership level. Is that right?

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:04:00 - 1:05:29)

Yes. And when I talked with Hamas leaders about Iran, they were very scathing about it because they said in our Islamic state, we wouldn't have this kind of council of religious leaders who would dictate everything. They wanted to have religious leaders in the parliament, but who were elected.

And it was very interesting, they made a distinction between religious authority and elected authority. And they said Islamic law, the source of the revealed laws in the Koran and et cetera, are not legal until they've been legislated upon by the elected assembly. Before that, there were religious laws, but they're not politically legal.

And so in that sense, they're a very political organization. I mean, religion has come to play a larger part since the 1990s. And it's very interesting that Yassine very self-consciously sent cohort after cohort of Hamas members to Saudi Arabia to get the proper credentials to become imams and religious leaders.

And then they would come home and run the al-Waqf ministry, the religious endowments and so forth. So he built a whole cadre of formally trained religious leaders. Whereas when Hamas started out or before that – the Muslim Brotherhood restarted in the 1970s – they were mostly lay preachers.

They were engineers, they were teachers, they were doctors, and then they would preach in the mosque, but they were not religious leaders. And so that relationship between politics and religion in Hamas is a very interesting one.

[Helena Cobban] (1:05:29 - 1:05:32)

So he sent them to Saudi Arabia, he didn't send them to Qatar?

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:05:34 - 1:05:36)

Most of them went to Saudi Arabia.

[Helena Cobban] (1:05:36 - 1:05:42)

Yes, my impression is that in Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood is very influential.

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:05:43 - 1:06:01)

Yeah, so this was, of course, an early period, when Saudi Arabia turned against the Muslim Brotherhood, then it would have gone somewhere else. But the foundation was laid in the late 80s, early 90s, for this new leadership. And then when Yassine was assassinated– he had this kind of this role.

[Helena Cobban] (1:06:02 - 1:06:06)

Remind me, he was assassinated in 2001? 2004?

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:06:08 - 1:07:28)

A year after Abu Shanab and only a few weeks before. But he wasn't a religiously trained leader, but he had this enormous charisma of religious authority. And so that meant that we're thinking about this as a prophetic mode of authority –  in a bourgeois sense.

But what's interesting is that that's an extraordinary type of authority, which is not institutionalized. And you can't pass it on to somebody because it's very much personal. So you can see that he [Yassine] was preparing the ground for when he was killed or died, that there would be this institutionalized class that could take over.

But they never achieved the same kind of dominance, of course, as Yassine because they were not the founder. They didn't have this charisma. But some of those clerics did become members of the political bureau and did gain more positions than they had before.

But still, as far as I understand the research around this, going now into the 2010s, religious authority is still sublimated to political authority. So it's always the political reasoning winning out over the religious on the whole. There may be exceptions in extreme cases, but that seems to be generally true.

[Helena Cobban] (1:07:29 - 1:08:21)

I'm really glad to have had that answer.

I'm afraid we're actually getting close to the time to bring this to a close.  So we do have other questions and we'll try to get back to the other questions maybe next time, or we can do it offline at some point.

But I just really want to take this chance to thank you very much, Jeroen, for the depth of your experience and your analytical skills. And I love your critical terrorism approach to all of this. It fits very well with the kind of anti-colonial commitments that we have here at Just World Educational. So thank you for bringing that so richly to our webinar today.

[Rami Khouri] (1:08:22 - 1:09:05)

Keep in mind that we're going to take all the knowledge that comes out of these five seminars and somehow distill it. We're not sure exactly how, in video and in text, and make it widely available because this is such a huge issue around the world, which is discussed with such little factual knowledge. In most cases, there are a very few people around the world who talk about Hamas the way that you and others do who have actually spent time with them and studied them and understand them without joining them.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us and we will share it with the world.

[Helena Cobban] (1:09:06 - 1:10:33)

Yes. And thank you, Rami, for being a super co-host and co-pilot on this project, where we sort of put the plane into the air and we're designing the plane as we fly it. But it's been flying pretty well, I want to say.

And Jeroen and our earlier guests have both really contributed. I want to tell you a few things just before I sign off. First is when people leave the webinar, you should be sent to an evaluation form and we really appreciate your evaluations because that helps us design the whole project and the whole program going forward.

Next week, we're going to have our guest expert will be Mouin Rabbani, a Dutch Palestinian. I don't know what's with the Dutch in this project, but here we are. He is a non-resident fellow with the Doha-based Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. So we'll look forward to another great webinar on that occasion.

I just want to remind everybody that Just World Educational offers our programs free of charge to the learning public. But of course, we have expenses and we need to rely on your generosity to cover our costs. Thank you, everybody, for being with us today.

Hope to see you same time, same place next week. Bye-bye then.

[Jeroen Gunning] (1:10:33 - 1:10:35)

Thank you. Bye-bye.