[Helena Cobban]

Hello, everybody. I'm Helena Cobban. I'm the president of Just World Educational. Today is, I believe, day 230 of Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza. A big welcome to all of you to today's fifth session in our webinar series, “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters.”

My co-host 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 1968.

He currently writes analytical pieces for the Arab Center Washington and serves as a public policy fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at AUB. It's great to have you co-piloting this project, Rami.

[Rami Khouri]

Thank you. Great to be with you and I'm learning as much as the audience is.

[Helena Cobban]

As I mentioned, this is the fifth webinar in this series. I hope many of you watching today may either have attended in real time or watched on YouTube the previous four webinars in the series. They featured far-ranging and deeply informative conversations with four real experts on Hamas and they've started to attract some serious attention and engagement out there on YouTube.

You can access all those videos and very soon also the recorded version of today's session via the online learning hub that we're building for this project, which you can find at bit.ly/UH-Resource-Page. Be aware that like all bit.ly links, this one is case sensitive. Our great tech person on this project, Mr. Mustapha Muhammad, has just dropped this link into the chat box for your convenience and I think I have it up here behind me today. Today, our format is going to be a little different than in our earlier conversations because today our guest expert is not just an academic expert on the Hamas movement but also someone who at various points has been pretty close to its leadership. He is Dr. Azzam Tamimi, who's the editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Hiwar Dialogue TV channel. He's a specialist on issues related to Islamic political thought, Islamic movements, and Middle Eastern or, as I would say, West Asian politics and he's a distinguished author of several well-received books on those topics.

The book on Hamas that Dr. Azzam published in 2007 came out in the UK under the title Hamas Unwritten Chapters and in the US it came out with the intriguing title of Hamas, A History from Within. Here is my very well-thumbed copy. So, Dr. Azzam Tamimi, it is our pleasure and our honor to have you with us from London on today's webinar. I know a lot of people greatly value the chance to have their questions about the Hamas movement thoughtfully and straightforwardly answered by someone with a history of close connections with it. So, welcome.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be with you and I'm really grateful you've invited me to take part in this webinar.

[Helena Cobban]

Well, it's our pleasure too. So, I know that in the last webinar I invited viewers to send in the kinds of questions that they would like to have answered by Dr. Azzam and a big thanks to all of you who did that. However, we also had great interest in doing this from members of our own board of directors at Just World Ed.

So, we decided to give priority to them and their questions and to bring some of them in to join the conversation with Dr. Azzam alongside Rami and me. I hope that those of you who sent in questions last week find that your concerns get reflected during the intensive but friendly questioning that our Just World Ed board members will be engaging in with Dr. Azzam today. But if you do not hear your questions or concerns answered, be aware that we will, as usual, welcome you putting your questions for our guest into the Q&A box, where, as usual, Mustapha and I will review them and try to get as many of them as possible answered, if we have time at the end.

And at any point, if you have any technical questions about the webinar or about this project more broadly, please direct them to Mustapha via the chat box. So, before we get to our conversation with Dr. Azzam, I just want to introduce you to our participating board members. First up is Gwendolyn Zoharah-Simmons, who's a veteran struggler for civil and political rights here in the United States and worldwide, and a professor emerita of African American religions and Islamic studies at the University of Florida, the state that she still lives in.

Zoharah is a founding member of the National Council of Elders and a board member of both the SNCC Legacy Project and the Civic Media Center. Zoharah, it is a true honor to have you with us.

[Zoharah Simmons]

Yes, the honor is all mine. I'm happy to be here today.

[Helena Cobban]

And I love to see that book up behind you, of which I have a copy, that is about your life and that of your ex-husband. It's called Stayed on Freedom. So, really wonderful.

We also have with us today our board member Rick Sterling, who over the years has done a lot of thoughtful research and writing on anti-colonial struggles and other aspects of international relations. Rick is with us from Northern California, where he is board chair of the Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center, and he also heads the Center's task force on the Americas. He's a member of Rossmore Voices for Justice in Palestine and sits on the steering committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement.

Rick, it's great to have you with us today.

[Rick Sterling]

The pleasure is all mine.

[Helena Cobban]

And just before I hand over to Rami, we do have a third board member here, Nora Barrows Friedman, a longtime leader in the Palestinian rights movement.

For many years, Nora was the senior producer and co-host of Flashpoints, an investigative news magazine out of KPFA radio in Berkeley, California. But now she's much better known for the work she's doing with Ali Abunimah and the team at Electronic Intifada, especially on the super important live stream they've been presenting about the genocide in Gaza, which goes out every Wednesday starting at noon Eastern time. Nora was also the super prescient author of a book that my company published 10 years ago, entitled In Our Power: U.S. Students Organized for Justice in Palestine. And here we are 10 years later!

Now , Rami, you and Rick can lead the first part of the conversation with Dr. Azzam.

[Rami Khouri]

 

Thank you, Helena. Thank you all for being with us on the panel and all the people in the audience who are following us. We're delighted to do this fifth episode and the last one in this series.

And we will then gather all the material which Helena will tell you about later and how we're going to make it available to everybody. So let's start with Dr. Azzam. Can I ask you first, as far as you know or understand, what do you think or how do you see the intentions of the Qassam Brigades fighters who breached the Israeli defenses and actually led the military operation in southern Israel on October 7th?

There's probably nothing that's generated more speculation around the world than that particular event. And it's important to try to understand exactly what was its aim and how should it be interpreted.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 My understanding from conversations I've had with some of the Hamas leaders is that this wasn't expected to be such a big operation. It was intended to capture a few Israeli soldiers from the battalion that is usually stationed around Gaza to provide security and protection for the settlements there in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. The issue of Palestinian prisoners, Palestinian captives, if you wish, as they are called in Arabic, Al-Asra, this is a very important issue.

It actually is of paramount importance for most Palestinians because you can hardly find a Palestinian family in Gaza or in the West Bank that doesn't have a member who is incarcerated by the Israelis. And this experience has shown that there is really no other way of getting the Israelis to release them, to release those prisoners, without a prisoner swap or a prisoner exchange. So this was intended, this was the primary reason.

There are other factors, of course, that contributed to this. The most obvious one is that the Gaza Strip had been under siege for 17 years and the people are really suffocating. The Israelis were keeping them on a diet which was measured to just keep them alive without enabling them to really enjoy the life they are allowed to live.

So principally, this is what I understand.

[Rami Khouri]

 And from what you know, how would you interpret the Israeli accusation that the Hamas fighters went in there deliberately aimed to commit atrocities against anybody who they found, and because, as Israel claims, they hate Jews, they hate Israel, they want to destroy the country, which is now a dominant theme in the American mainstream media, even American political leaders. So how accurate is that?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Israeli claims about what happened on the 7th of October have since been proven to be false. They have been proven even to be deliberate lies designed in order to justify what the Israelis were going to do as a revenge attack on Gaza, which we were seeing happening for the past eight months nearly. Al Jazeera produced an excellent documentary about this, quoting Israelis themselves, many experts around the world, Hamas activists and leaders, and some eyewitnesses who all testified that there was no beheading of babies, there was no rape whatsoever, and that even some of the atrocities perpetrated on that day were actually the result of two things.

First, the Israelis trying to come in and rescue some of their hostages, and they started shooting people, especially those who were coming out of the dance festival that coincided with the attack. Most of the people shot on that day actually were shot by helicopter gunships. Some of the houses in which hostages were held inside the kibbutz were actually bombarded with tank fire by the Israelis themselves.

Many of the hostages that were taken into Gaza on that day were not actually taken by Al Qassam fighters, they were taken by ordinary citizens who crossed the line after the fence came down and were in a sense jubilant that they managed to set foot on the homeland of their ancestors. Because we need to remember that the majority of the inhabitants of Gaza today are actually the descendants of people who originally lived in the land that was occupied in 1948 and turned into the state of Israel. So these people were coming home and they were just acting in a very disorderly manner.

My understanding and my knowledge of the Al Qassam brigades is that they are highly disciplined and probably some of the things attributed to them, if ever took place, were not actually perpetrated by them but probably by some others.

[Rami Khouri]

And what about the civilians, the Israeli civilians who were either killed or taken hostage to Gaza? Do we have clear knowledge, proven facts about whether or not they were targeted specifically, or did it just happen that there were so many people there that some of the people from Gaza, whether Hamas or otherwise, took some of these civilians hostage to trade for the 8,000 Palestinians who were in Israeli jails?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

My understanding is that the target was the army or people who served in the army. And of course it was very early in the morning and many of these army cadets and army recruits were in their civilian clothing. Many of them were asleep.

But yes, indeed, some of the civilians, especially the women, the children and the elderly who were taken Gaza. My understanding is that they were taken by ordinary people who crossed into those territories. Hamas, to be fair to Hamas, from day number one, asked for an international commission to investigate what happened because the Israelis were claiming all sorts of things and Hamas was pushed on in a self-defending position.

And they said, okay, send an international commission and let them investigate what happened. And we'd be willing to be taken to account if we did anything wrong. But actually, it was the Israelis who refused, and they were insistent on seizing on that event in order to crush Gaza.

[Rami Khouri]

 

Right. And the last technical point, if there is an attack like this that only targets Israeli military, is that under international law seen to be legitimate or is it still seen to be unacceptable?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

The international law itself is a very vague thing now, unfortunately. And most of the people who talk about international law in an official capacity, government representatives, etc., exempt themselves from what they call others to abide by. But anyway, it depends on where you begin the story from.

Now, if this land is Palestinian, and if the people of Gaza are the original inhabitants of that land, then even under international law, they have every right to fight back and liberate their land, the land that was taken from them by people who invaded the region from Europe for reasons that had nothing to do with Palestine, but had a lot to do with Europe itself. Until recently, the world didn't want to listen to the Palestinian point of view. From the Palestinian point of view, Israel is a military outpost for the West.

And evidently, almost every single Israeli, upon reaching the age of maturity, serves in the Israeli army, and keeps serving the Israeli army for many years to come as a reservist. So, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an expert on international law, but I can tell you, as a Palestinian, the house from which my mother was driven out in Beersheba in 1948 is my house. And I will still claim that house until my death, and my children and my grandchildren will continue to claim that house.

So, where does international law stand on this? We need to hear from the experts.

[Rami Khouri]

 Well, let me turn it over to Rick Sterling, one of our board members who joins us. Rick, take it away.

[Rick Sterling]

 Yeah, Dr. Tamimi, very glad to be here today and to learn from you. The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants against two Israeli leaders and three Hamas leaders. What do you think of that? And can the adjudication be fair?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 Well, Hamas responded to this by saying this is unfair, because this is like equating the aggressors with the victims. But I personally can understand why the prosecutor inserted the Hamas names into that request. He wanted to make it more palatable to the so-called international community, and especially to the United States of America. It still wasn't accepted by them, wasn't accepted by the Israelis. It is probably more symbolic than practical, because Hamas is already proscribed worldwide, including in many Arab countries, by the way. Its leaders don't travel. Probably Haniyah is the only one now who needs to reconsider if he is invited to Egypt.

I don't think we can trust the Egyptians when it comes to Hamas. Other than this, Mohamed El-Deyf and Sinwar are in Gaza. So, I think the prosecutor wanted just to make it look more acceptable to a very critical West when it comes to the Palestinians.

[Rick Sterling]

 And how do you assess the effects of the October 7 operation overall at both the humanitarian and at the political levels?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

I think the 7th of October was best described by a couple of writers on that same day when it happened, when they compared it to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. And, frankly, I didn't know much about the Tet Offensive at the time, but that motivated me to go and search and read, because I was 15 years old when the Tet Offensive happened in 1968. It was a game changer, in a sense.

This is what they wanted to tell us, because just like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam changed world perception when it came to American involvement in that part of the world and eventually led to the American withdrawal from Vietnam, the 7th of October is having a huge impact on the world's perception of the conflict. A conflict that has always been portrayed as if it were a religious conflict, or a communal conflict, or a conflict over territory, or a conflict that is the result of Arab or Islamic anti-Semitism, or something of this sort. Now, the young men and women, in particular, university students in America, as well as elsewhere in the world, are actually going back to libraries and going online, and they're googling and looking for information, and they are discovering, many of them for the first time, that this was actually something completely different from what had been portrayed all along, that this is another colonial project by the West in order to achieve something that the imperialist West sought, and that in this the Palestinians have been victims all along since the beginning.

I think that that's very important. Not only that, I think the initial solidarity with the people of Gaza because of the genocide that is being exacted upon them is slowly and gradually turning into a revolution against the current world order, a world order whose leaders in Washington, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, and elsewhere in the West have proven to these youngsters -- many of them are Jewish, by the way -- that this is a world order based on hypocrisy, on double standards, and all the talk about democracy and human rights is very exclusive and very selective, and it's making these students question the very legitimacy of such a world order which is today fighting them for merely wanting to express their opinion regarding what happens in Gaza.

[Rick Sterling]

 Yes, thank you. How do you respond to people who say Palestinians in Gaza have brought all their current suffering on themselves because they voted for Hamas, or they support Hamas?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Well, this can be said of any struggle against colonialism. Probably it was said in the case of the Vietnamese, it was said in the case of the Algerians who fought the French for 132 years until they liberated their country, it was probably said of the black majority of South Africa who struggled against apartheid. I mean, when now we go back to the 80s and remember how Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, Margaret Thatcher even vowed he'd never be allowed to set foot on British soil, and then you see the results when the people of South Africa became victorious.

The same thing applies to any conflict in which people are fighting for their freedom. I would say to these people to go back and read about the history of this conflict, find out for yourselves what has happened to the Palestinians. The Palestinians have every right to resist occupation and to resist foreign invasion.

[Rick Sterling]

Okay, thank you very much, and next we'll have questions from the women's team. Helena?

[Helena Cobban]

 Zoharah, you and I get to ask the next set of questions, and would you like to start, and then I'll come in afterwards.

[Zoharah Simmons]

Yes, thank you very much. How do you assess the prospects for a lasting ceasefire at this moment?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Well, the Palestinians want a permanent ceasefire if they can get one. It's the Israelis who are not granting it, and they seem to be confident of American and European support for them, although, of course, we hear more new voices nowadays that call for a ceasefire they didn't call for in the early months of this war. Now, I think it's highly unlikely that we will see a ceasefire so long as Netanyahu is in charge of decision-making in Israel, because this guy knows that what might be perceived as a defeat for Israel, as a failure for Israel, could mark the end of his political career. So, he's actually fighting for his own political career with his own people and with the people of Gaza. So far, I don't see a prospect for a ceasefire.

[Zoharah Simmons]

 And this next question, I know, is really for us here in the US, but we want to hear your perspective on what do you think are the prospects in this, a presidential year here in the US, for President Biden to accede to the global demand for a permanent ceasefire? Do you, from your perspective, see any hope in that arena?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

It is only possible if he succumbs to domestic pressure. I think my understanding is that pressure from within the United States of America is growing every day. But, of course, so far, Biden hasn't really shown any signs, not at all. And maybe now, with Trump raising the bar in his rhetoric regarding Gaza, and the supporters of Palestine in America and what he might do to them if he becomes president, this might even push Biden to a more pro-Israel position, rather than less. So, on the basis of what we've seen over the past eight months, I'm not really that optimistic.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Thank you, Dr. Azzam. Why should anybody trust that a ceasefire that's concluded with Hamas would be respected by Hamas?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Hamas is an Islamic movement. It is informed by Islam. And in Islam, if you signed a contract, it is your religious duty to fulfil the terms of that contract.

You cannot be the first to violate it or breach it. And I explain this in my book, even citing past examples of truces, informal truces, unofficial ones, reached with Hamas throughout the 90s. And until 2007, early 2008, it was always Israel that breached the understanding, not Hamas, not a single time.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Was that what happened last November as well? I don't actually recall, but I know that there was a very successful seven-day ceasefire. And then it fell apart.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Yes, it was the Israelis who started, yes, same thing.

[Helena Cobban]

 

So, do you think the Hamas leaders would prefer to see the UN Security Council as a whole overseeing a ceasefire to end Israel's war in Gaza? How can the US veto in the Security Council be overcome?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

It cannot be overcome. The Security Council is the most undemocratic institution in the world. It grants unchecked powers to a few members of the so-called international community, to the extent that the international community today is really just Washington and its allies, there's nobody else.

So long as these permanent member states have the right to veto any resolution, we cannot get anywhere, we cannot get justice through the United Nations. The entire General Assembly doesn't matter, because the General Assembly can decide whatever it wants, and that would mean nothing.

[Helena Cobban]

 

So, Dr. Azzam, I have a little follow-up here, actually, because I did grow up in England, as you know. And when I was a child, there was the 1956 Suez Crisis, that was an attempt by the British, the French and the Israelis to overthrow President Jamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. And the Americans at that time were opposed to that.

So Britain and France had a veto at that time in the Security Council. The United States was able to nullify that veto through economic pressure. Do you see that as being a prospect anytime soon in the current international order?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

Not soon, but we can dream of a moment in the future when the United States of America is led by a sane and fair administration. They'll probably stand by that which is just rather than by that which is unjust. But in the current circumstances, I don't see that happening.

[Helena Cobban]

Thank you. I'm going to hand over now to you, Nora, if you could take the lead.

[Nora Barrows-Friedman]

All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Azzam. There has been public disagreement between the governments of the United States and of Israel over what should happen on the so-called day after when there's a ceasefire.

Do you consider these arguments serious or are they just for show? I mean, obviously Israel and the US would have to win the war first and it doesn't look like that's happening.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

No, I believe any disagreements between Washington and Tel Aviv are real. I wouldn't say serious, but I would say they are real. And that is simply because there are people in Washington who disagree with the current administration in Israel on the way things are done out of fear for the future of Israel, actually, not out of sympathy for the Palestinians.

They're worried about what Netanyahu might do to Israel and to the Zionist project. I personally believe that even European countries, the three European countries who recently decided to recognize Palestine as a state, also emanate from the same fear. They're doing this against Netanyahu and not in favor of the Palestinians, because I can tell you as a Palestinian, it makes no difference to my cause whether they recognize Palestine as a state or not.

Practically, it means really nothing. For us, the issue is not having a state or having a state. For us, the issue of being free from occupation, from the foreign invasion that we have been suffering.

I want my mother's house back and I will never ever recognize the legitimacy of the occupation of any part of Palestine, whether that was occupied in 1948 or 1967. But you see, in Washington, as well as in other European capitals, there are people who are truly worried about the rise of the so-called religious Zionism. It's a fanatical form of Zionism, probably never anticipated by the founding fathers of Zionism, who were secular and atheist and were condemned by the religious communities of Europe and America at the time.

So there is this concern, and it is a concern for Israel.

[Nora Barrows-Friedman]

 

Related to that, Washington seems to want to cobble together a coalition of Arab states who would, along with the Fatah, Palestinian Authority forces in some form, help the US and Israel to administer Gaza after the ceasefire. It's a truly astonishing plan. And again, they would have to win the war first. Do you see this as feasible? And if not, why not?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

You know, we have a proverb in Arabic that says, he who tries what has already been tried is insane. There's something wrong with their mental capacity. I mean, we've been through this so many times since 1948, not just since 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed.

Unless the root of the problem is addressed, there will always be a new generation of resistance fighters. See, my grandfather fought against the British. My father fought against the Zionists. The people of my generation and the generation of my children are now resisting the current Zionist regime. This will continue. And now they've burned Gaza almost completely. They've destroyed its entire infrastructure. They tried to smuggle in some of the Palestinian Authority elements. It didn't work.

It doesn't work because the people of Gaza know who the enemy is. The enemy is not Hamas. The enemy is Israeli occupation and those who support that occupation.

[Nora Barrows-Friedman]

 

And the PA is really the subcontractor of that occupation.

[Helena Cobban]

If I could just jump in here, I found something truly amazing from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. And if you look over here in the Gaza Strip, between December and March, the support, the opinion poll support for Hamas actually increased. I was so surprised.

Mustapha has actually just dropped that link into the chat. So if anybody wants to follow that through. I want to do more with this little chart and actually the whole of that PCPSR report is really fascinating, but it's rather long.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Well, if I may add to this, you see in the West, there were decision makers and mainstream media. And I'm really glad that the mainstream media is no longer the source of information. Now with the end of the monopoly on information and education because of all the alternative means and tools, the world is much more enlightened.

But generally, decision makers and journalists in the mainstream media, as it is called, portray the conflict as if it were between a fringe group called Hamas and the Israelis. You go and speak to any Palestinian child anywhere in the world, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the diaspora. Palestinians know what happened to them.

They know what happened to their grandparents. They know the whole story. So it's not a Hamas issue.

Even if they destroy Hamas, even if Hamas is gone, there will be something else sometime very soon in the future.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Let's go on to the next set of our questions. And Rami, could I have you and Rick once again take the lead.

[Rami Khouri]

There have been many discussions over the years, generally spearheaded by members of different Palestinian movements who are in Israeli prisons, to unify the whole Palestinian political world, Fatah and Hamas and PFLP and many smaller groups, so that there's a united single national leadership, which there was about 15 years ago, or so, and the Israelis refused to negotiate with them. So the Israelis always say, we can't negotiate, the Palestinians are divided.

Well, when they were united under Arafat, with Hamas saying we'll go along with anything that is negotiated that the Palestinians agree on, we will support it. But when you have a unified Palestinian national movement, the Israelis refused to deal with it. So how do you see today the feasibility of once again, down the road, trying to recreate a single credible, legitimate national Palestinian political leadership?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

Yes, you're right. There have been efforts along this way. And I'm sure there will always be efforts to bring the Palestinians together and unify them. But the real problem is to be united on what? This is the issue. This is not a piece of cake that people want to fairly share.

This is an idea. You either agree with the idea or you disagree with it. What is the idea here?

The idea is that Palestine is occupied by invaders. And that we Palestinians have every right to struggle to regain our homeland. Now, if you have a section of the Palestinians who decide, it's impossible, we cannot liberate our country, we cannot regain our homeland. So we might as well just accept whatever they're willing to give to us. This is what Oslo was about. That's a real divide.

It's impossible. You cannot agree on something like this. We were approaching some sort of agreement on unification, when it became clear to Yasser Arafat that his Oslo path was mistaken.

And this is when, especially when he returned from Camp David in 2000, and felt that Clinton and Ehud Barak were forcing something down his throat that he could never accept. And there was a unity of vision. And this is what matters. We need to have unity of vision. It's not about how many seats you have in parliament, or how many seats you have on the PLO, or a council. No, it's about what is our vision of Palestine. This is the main disagreement.

[Rami Khouri]

 

And if Hamas and the other Palestinian movements do recreate a single national movement, and it lays out a plan, which it has done before, for dealing with Israel, even negotiating with it, and even accepting to live next to it, in a Palestinian state if certain issues are dealt with, do you think that Hamas, do you understand Hamas would be willing to live with the state of Israel and its 67 borders, let's say, in a long-term permanent peace arrangement? Because there's a huge amount of discussion about this.

And one of the main issues that is presented against Hamas and the Palestinians here in the West is that they just want to destroy Israel. Whereas the PLO before, and Fatah, and Hamas even recently, has repeatedly said, look, we're willing to negotiate and coexist. So can you clarify for us your understanding of Hamas's position on coexistence in two adjacent states?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

Well, since Hamas took part in the elections in 2006, it developed a new position, which was really unthinkable before. And that is what one may describe as a de facto recognition, not a de jure recognition of the status quo. Status quo means that, yes, Israel exists, it exists on our homeland, we don't accept that, but we are willing to live with it if a Palestinian state is allowed to be next to it.

And this was finalized in the 2017 document, which was really Khaled Mishal's last project as head of the political bureau. Yet, this is not the issue. People want always the Palestinians to tell them what they think of Israel. They never go to Israel and ask Israel what they think of the Palestinians of Palestine. And all Israelis were interested in, even during the time of “peaceniks” like Rabin, was to turn the PLO into a collaborative agency to help Israel live in peace and security. That's all really.

But Palestinian hopes, Palestinian aspirations, Palestinian dreams, they don't exist. Now, if you ask me personally, I think it is highly unlikely that we will ever reach that situation in which there are two states, one called Palestine and one called Israel. And that is not because of the Palestinians.

It's because of the Zionists, because of the way the Zionist project itself is developing. Now, you have people in charge in Israel who believe they have a license from God to burn Gaza, not once, not twice, three times, four times if necessary. And they believe they're doing something fantastic, something good.

They don't believe Palestinians have the right to exist anywhere, although at least a segment of the Palestinians have agreed to recognize Israel's right to exist. There has been no real reciprocation. From 1993 up to 1998, there was supposed to be a Palestinian state.

And instead of that, all Palestine is lost. Almost the entire West Bank now is taken by settlers, and the numbers are increasing, and the settlements are increasing, and the confiscation of lands is increasing. Our people in Al-Khalil [Hebron], in my hometown, our people in the rest of the West Bank, so many of them have their houses demolished for the most trivial of reasons, of justifications. See, that's the problem. The problem is not with the Palestinians. The problem is with the other side. And I think it's time the world works on the other side.

[Rami Khouri]

 

Okay, we'll turn it over to Rick Sterling to finish this segment.

[Rick Sterling]

 

Dr. Tamimi, as you well know, the accusation is always made that Hamas just wants to kill Jews. Could you comment on that and contrast it with your understanding of what the real enemy of Hamas is and the Zionist ideology?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

There was a time when Hamas came up with a charter in 1988 that gave that impression. It gave the impression that this fight is over religion, or that the Jews are the problem, etc. And actually, that was a big mistake, and I criticized that charter in my book in a whole chapter. I think it's the worst thing that ever happened to Hamas. And the reason it happened, actually, is that the majority of the leaders of Hamas at the time were in prison, and this was one man who was in charge. He decided to write a charter and publish it.

Yet, if you ask the leaders of Hamas and the members of Hamas, there is a clarity of vision regarding this issue. This is not a war between the Muslims and the Jews. This is not a religious war.

Jews lived in this part of the world, across the Middle East, for centuries, with the Christians, with the Muslims. Actually, you find that the most ancient communities, Jewish communities and Christian communities in the world live in that part of the world, because there was a formula for peaceful coexistence. The problem started with Zionism, and I think Hamas leaders understand this now.

They probably don't express it well. They probably don't have the opportunity to even express it, because how many Hamas leaders get interviewed by the mainstream media every day? There was a newspaper recently in Switzerland who was very interested in interviewing Khaled Mishal, and the journalists who were enthusiastic about the idea had to fight with the management to convince them that this was going to be a good interview.

So, Hamas people don't get a chance to even talk to the world community about what they truly believe. You get easily just labeled. Even people like myself, and I'm not a member of Hamas. I've never held a position in Hamas, but because I wrote a book on Hamas, because I tried to explain Hamas to the world, most Western mainstream media won't interview me, won't host me. Imagine, those eight months, someone like me should have been on every single channel, but none of them, and the reason is that they are afraid of giving room or giving space for people who have a different narrative. Now, the narrative that is accepted today officially by Hamas is that this is a fight with Zionism and not with the Jews, and Hamas leaders receive Jewish delegations from the Naturi Karta, who are Orthodox, receive the Jewish delegations from the secular communities as well.

They have no problem, we have no problem with the Jews. To the contrary, today, I'm calling for an alliance between those who support justice in Palestine, irrespective of their religion, whether they are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, Sikh, whatever, any religion.

On the basis of our humanity, if we believe in justice, Palestine is a just cause as was the fight against apartheid, as was the fight against American imperialism in Vietnam, as was the fight against French colonialism in Algeria.

[Rick Sterling]

 

Thank you very much. South Africa has played a very important role by going to the International Court of Justice and charging Israel with genocide. Can you comment on the comparisons between Israel and Zionism and apartheid in South Africa, and how apartheid was overcome in South Africa and what you hope for Palestine?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

Well, if you really read about Zionism as an ideology, Zionism is a racist ideology because they believe that if you happen to be Jewish, then you have a God-given right to come to this land and live in it or on it at the expense of its natives. And this is exactly what apartheid was in South Africa. Apartheid discriminated against people because of the color of their skin. Zionism discriminates against others because of religious affiliation. And look at the sort of laws that exist in Israel. A law for the Jews, a law for the non-Jews.

So the similarity is almost identical in terms of ideology, and I think that's why the people of South Africa understand the plight of the Palestinians more than anybody else because they went through that. And we can arrive actually at a permanent solution in Palestine similar to the one reached in South Africa. When they went to Nelson Mandela in his Robbin Island cell and said to him, come on Nelson, we need to put an end to this mayhem and to this violence, etc.

He said, very easy, no more apartheid and we can live in peace. And we in Palestine say the same thing, no more Zionism and we can live in peace. We're not going to send any Jew anywhere in the world, they can remain. We don't have a problem with them as Jews, but we have a problem with them as people who believe that they have God-given rights to discriminate against us. That's the problem.

[Rick Sterling]

 

Thank you very much. I think we're going back to the women's team.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Well, I just actually want to come in with a comment on that last point about Zionism, the nature of Zionism, just a little personal vignette. I grew up in England, as I mentioned, and then I married somebody in Lebanon and that didn't work out, but we had two wonderful children. And then I came to this country, and I met Bill Quandt and I married him, so he's American. And this was, let's say, mid-1980s. And we agreed about so many things and one thing that we disagreed about, and we couldn't really sort this out, was the UN resolution that Zionism is racism. And I said, well, of course Zionism is racism. And he said, no, it's not racism. And we just agreed not to go into this for a couple of years. And then it turned out that actually Americans have a very distinctive understanding of the concept of racism that is not shared by English people.

For Americans, the concept of racism is always linked to skin color because of the particular history of America. And so, you know, when the Security Council passed the UN General Assembly and the Security Council passed the resolution that Zionism is racism, one of the first things the Zionists did was to import into Israel a lot of Ethiopian Jews. And then they could say, look, how can Zionism be racism? We've got these like brown and blackish colored Israelis. And for Americans, many Americans, that really worked. So that's just like a little side note that there is this kind of transatlantic misunderstanding over what does the concept of racism mean.

And I'm sorry at this point to have to send it to you, Zoharah, because you know about racism better than anybody here. But if you could take over, that would be great.

 

[Zoharah Simmons]

I'm happy to. I'm just going to also interject a little vignette. My first trip to the occupied territories and to Gaza in 1994 as a part of an international religious delegation, the minute that I began moving around I knew immediately what was going on, because as an elder growing up in the Jim Crow South all of my life, born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, I had experienced the U.S. form of apartheid. And I knew what's going on here. It's clear. Even though some Palestinians look very much like some people who are Jewish, it didn't matter. It was still apartheid. And I knew that in 1994.

But moving to our next question, my whole area of so-called expertise academically has been on Sharia law. And I lived in Jordan for two years, working with the women there, trying to understand the impact of Sharia law on women, and had the great pleasure of working with Ellen Khoury during those two years, as her organization was focused on this. So my question, my first question has to do with, does Hamas support Sharia law as it relates to women's rights? You know, the demonization of Hamas in the West often focuses on Hamas being an Islamist group, and that if they were in control, women would have no rights of any kind, etc. So can you just address that, please?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Well, this is a very vast topic.

[Zoharah Simmons]

I know.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

You have to define what Sharia means, explain what it is, and what sort of rights or not. It's really a big issue. But Hamas, in its present format, is actually a national liberation movement.

You don't see in their literature or in their discussions or in their rhetoric, any talk about these issues, because these are to be left to society itself. I mean, talk about Palestinian society, or any Arab society, it's a majority Muslim society, and the Muslims have every right to decide what sort of law they want to be governed by. It's as simple as that.

They believe in democracy, they accept democracy, they believe that there is no real contradictions between Islamic values and universal human rights. Now, when it comes to applying this, and when it comes to practicalities, it remains to be seen how people are going to apply this, because you use the term Sharia law, for instance. Actually, Sharia is one thing and law is another, although you're combining both.

Sharia is a set of guidelines, broad guidelines, whereas laws are the product of jurisprudence, and this can vary, can develop, people can have disagreements, and circumstances can impact on what sort of laws, when and where, etc. But there is nothing in Hamas experience or in Hamas literature that shows it wants to impose anything on anybody. Actually, the reason Hamas is ruling in Gaza is because this was imposed on it.

It's not something that it even chose. Remember when there was a national unity government early on after the elections in 2006, and then the Americans intervened and sent Dayton with his plan, and they tried to exact a coup d'etat, and that resulted in an internal fighting between Fatah and Hamas, and ended up with the West Bank under Fatah and Gaza under Hamas. This is not a normal situation, and the people of Gaza themselves -- I went to Gaza about four or five times between 2010 and 2013, before the coup in Egypt in 2013 -- and people really chose how they wanted to live, but you're talking about a mostly Muslim people. They believe in Islam. It's not that these are people who have Muslim names, but they don't identify with Islam. They identify with Islam, with varying levels of understanding, levels of observance, levels of commitment, it is true, but when it comes to the basics, generally people don't disagree.

[Zoharah Simmons]

Just to follow up a little bit -- and I know that you co-edited a book on Arab secularism -- because of the demonization of Hamas in the West, people will say the reason that the women in Gaza wear the abaya and the hijab is because they're forced to by Hamas. This is what many believe, and so this is used to turn Westerners against Hamas, so that's why I was asking you your thoughts.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Of course, I understand, but of course, it's not true that they are imposing any costume on anybody. It's not true at all, and there's a Christian community also in Gaza. They're suffering as much as the Muslims are suffering.

Of course, on the issue of secularism, as the book I co-edited shows, secularism actually is a European thing for good reasons, because Europe had a very bad experience with religion. The church in Europe played a very negative role when it came to education, to science, to free thinking, etc. That's not the Islamic experience.

Of course, we have our bad experiences, but generally Islam as a religion doesn't have a church, doesn't have an authority that claims to be divine or ordained by the divine, and also Islam encourages learning, encourages research, encourages traveling across the earth and searching for signs, etc. And probably Christianity in its origins was like that, but I'm talking about a church from medieval times onwards that became corrupt and associated with despotism. And this is what inspired the idea of the separation between religion and state, the idea of secularism.

Now, secularism came to the region, to the Middle East, not through natural development, because we felt we need to do this in order to progress. Actually, it came to us during the time of colonialism. The colonialists brought it to us.

They were stepping on our heads. They were choking us and telling us, your way of life is not acceptable. You have to take our own way of life. That's part of imperialism.

[Zoharah Simmons]

So the next question, what do you say to people who accuse Hamas of having already shown very dictatorial tendencies during the time it has been “ruling” over Gaza? You know, many in the West say that Hamas has harshly suppressed political opponents, that it has acted harshly against gay and lesbian people, and has tried to enforce tight restrictions on women. And of course, they are accused of not allowing any elections since 2006.

So what do you say to these accusations?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

Actually, they've been wanting the elections all along. To the contrary, Hamas enjoys the elections because they win the elections, whether students or trade unions or whatever. They have no problem with the elections.

I mean, people can say whatever they want. But in reality, if you go to Gaza, if you had the opportunity, I mean, in the past, now, of course, nobody can go to Gaza. But if you had the opportunity to go to Gaza in the past, you could see on the ground that much of what is said in the West is not really accurate.

And of course, Hamas has its own opponents. And it's part of the competition and part of this conflict between Fatah and Hamas and how you can tarnish the image of your opponents in order to win the support of those you are talking to. There's so much injustice in what is being said about Hamas.

Now, when it comes to homosexuals, gays and lesbians, Hamas doesn't even talk about this. It's not in their rhetoric. It's not in their discourse because it's not an issue.

It's an issue for the West. It's not an issue for us. These things are generally unacceptable in our societies.

And the West cannot tell us what to accept or what not to accept. It's up to our people. And by the way, this applies to Christians and Muslims alike and probably all the Jews that lived in the Middle East until Israel was created.

 

[Helena Cobban]

So we've run over our time, and it's been amazingly rich. I want to know, actually, at this point, if any of my four colleagues here has one last question that he or she wants to ask Dr. Azzam. And there are a couple of really interesting ones from the Q&A, but I think I owe it to my colleagues.

Nora?

[Nora Barrows-Friedman]

 

It strikes me that in the way that Hamas is viewed and demonized in the West, people use this so-called women's rights or queer rights as a cudgel to deflect any sort of support for a national liberation struggle, as though the West is a pioneer of women's rights and gay rights.

It's completely absurd. But what can you say about the way that especially the resistance is viewed? I mean, we lionized the resistance of the partisans and the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. We lionized for a long time the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Which was a military struggle.

[Nora Barrows-Friedman]

 

Which had an armed wing.

[Helena Cobban]

 

And that was what Mandela was imprisoned for.

[Nora Barrows-Friedman]

 

Exactly. That's right. And now we collectively in the West, people are very understanding and even celebrate that struggle. Well, maybe not celebrate, but understand the role that armed resistance played in that national liberation struggle. I know, and I know many of my colleagues know, that in the decades to come, people will look back on the liberation struggle of Palestine, and especially the armed resistance, and understand that for what it is now. How do you think the armed resistance will be remembered, will be commemorated?

Do you think that there's ever a way that the West will see Palestinian armed resistance as a major tool of the liberation struggle that is going to be won?

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

Oh, definitely. I mean, what do people think of the Viet Cong today?

 

[Nora Barrows-Friedman]

Yes.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

What do they think of the armed wing of the ANC in South Africa? What did they think of the Algerian resistance movement? Or the French resistance against the Nazis? At the time, those in power, if they are corrupt, they would resist recognizing things for what they are. They just want to tarnish them, draw a different image of them.

I once gave a speech in a rally in Trafalgar Square in the center of London, and I said, I have a dream, maybe after Martin Luther King, I have a dream that just as Nelson Mandela was received in this country as a hero, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin will one day be received in London as a hero. Because it's the same resistance, it's the same principle, it's fighting for justice. We are not the aggressors.

We did not go to Europe and invade Europe. Europe came to us and invaded us. My mother was thrown out of her house just like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

Every single one of them has the right to fight back, and their children and their grandchildren. And no matter what Biden says, no matter what anybody in the world says, we will continue to believe in this right, and we will continue to resist, and we will continue to fight until Palestine is free from the river to the sea.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Well, that's a hard thing to follow up. But if Rick or Zohar or Rami has a last question.

[Rami Khouri]

Can I just make one quick question, Dr. Azzam? At some point, hopefully, there will be a political negotiation to resolve the underlying conflict, which you rightly explain as aggression and the displacement of Palestinians. And we have documents at home of land ownership in the area of the University of Tel Aviv, which are in the name of my wife's family.

We have these documents. That land wasn't sold, it wasn't rented, it was just taken. So these issues have to be negotiated. If there miraculously is a serious international negotiation between Israel and Palestine and others, like say the Madrid conference or something, but a credible and serious one, would Hamas be involved? And what would they require as guarantees to be sure that this is a credible process and not an unserious one, like say the Oslo process was?

 

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

Of course, they would be eager to participate, definitely, if it is serious and if it is sincere. I'll tell you how we can know whether it is serious and sincere or not. If the Zionists come tomorrow to us and say, just like the white minority in South Africa said to the black majority, Palestinians, we are sorry for what we did to you. It was wrong. We invaded you, we occupied your land, we dispossessed you. But now we want to start a new page, a new chapter. We want to live together. Would you agree? I'd say, of course, we agree.

Let's sit down and talk. But they need to recognize the principle. So long as the Zionists don't recognize that the Palestinians have been their victims, you cannot negotiate anything. What is there to negotiate?

[Rami Khouri]

 

Thank you.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Thank you very much. I think really the time has caught up with us.

This has been an amazingly rich conversation and maybe we have more of our questions and people online were sending in a lot of very thoughtful questions as well, so maybe we will have a repeat engagement sometime in the future, because I think we could all continue to learn a huge amount from Dr. Azzam. And really, Dr. Azzam, I want to thank you for putting yourself out there. We told you that we would be asking you some tough questions and I think we all learned a huge amount. So thank you very, very much indeed for coming.

[Dr. Azzam Tamimi]

 

Well, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity. Thank you.

[Helena Cobban]

And now I want to thank all our guest board members. I call you guests because you're not Rami or me, but you are board members from Just World Ed who came on and deeply enriched our conversation. Thank you, Zoharah Simmons. Thank you, Rick Sterling. Thank you, Nora Barrows-Friedman. It's been just a pleasure to have you on.

And of course, my very deep thanks to Rami Khouri, who's been my co-pilot on this whole series so far, and to Mustapha Mohammed for his invaluable support behind the scenes. Rami, how has it been for you?

[Rami Khouri]

Well, it's been really instructive. I mean, I've lived with this issue my whole life. I was born in 1948, and I've known Hamas and Hezbollah people and others throughout my journalistic career.

So I know a lot about these groups, but I've learned some new things, of course, from Dr. Azzam and from every one of our scholar guests whom we had. What this shows is really the critical need for more credible, verifiable knowledge to be shared widely. And this is what the Israeli government and the American government broadly and the mainstream political and media in the US don't want to happen.

They do not want to open the question up for discussion as we're doing. What did the Zionists do wrong? What did the Arabs do wrong, the Palestinians, whatever?

They want to just reinforce the status quo by demonizing us. And they've done this with every strong Arab leader in the last 50 years, from Abdel Nasser to Saddam Hussein to Hafez al-Assad to the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat. Any time a Palestinian Arab leader gets a little bit strong, gets some popular support, they demonize him and eventually he's gone.

So what we do is really critical. Sharing knowledge is absolutely critical. And I think that with the Just World Ed, Helena, you've done a really good job in forging this path forward.

I think our challenge together is to expand it and reach more people, which we'll work on.

[Helena Cobban]

 

Well, thanks. Yeah, Rami and Zoharah only came onto the board in March or April, and it's been just a pleasure to have you guys' energy here and take Just World Educational forward to new heights. Just in terms of what Rami was saying about the new learning, I think having somebody on, as we did a couple of weeks ago, who talks about critical terrorism studies, that we really need to take on the whole discourse of terrorism: that was really helpful. But everything in this series has been just a pleasure for me to work on.

Before all our viewers depart, I want to remind you that though this is the last webinar in the current series, our broader project on understanding Hamas and why that matters will certainly be continuing.

We will, of course, get all the multimedia records of today's conversation posted onto our online learning hub within the next 30 hours. And as I have mentioned before, we will also be continuing to work with all the fantastic array of materials that we've been building up on our learning hub to organize it better, to produce digests, fact sheets, and short reports in different formats that can make our materials more accessible. And as I mentioned earlier, we may also bring back Dr. Azzam or some of our other guests for follow up conversations at various points in the future.

People who are attending this webinar as attendees, please do fill out the evaluation form as you leave, because this time it's more important than ever that we hear from you how you would like us to take this project forward.

Just my reminder that all of our programs are offered free of charge to the learning public, but of course, we have huge expenses to bear, and we need to rely on donations to cover our costs. So if you could dig deep into your pocket, go to the donate button on our website, and just shower us with what we need, that would be great.  Thank you all for being with us on this journey. Thank you to Rami, to Mustapha, to Rick, to Zoharah, to Nora, and to Dr. Azzam Tamimi. Let's take this forward.

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