Accounts of the Struggle

Seventy-six years ago, Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the war that established the state of Israel—a campaign of ethnic cleansing that came to be called the Nakba (catastrophe). Reviewing two memoirs of families haunted by that traumatic history in our October 3, 2024, issue, Tareq Baconi argues that in another sense the Nakba never ended. Palestinians, he writes, “have long argued that the Nakba is not a finite event but an ongoing process of violent dispossession,” visible both in “moments of spectacular violence”—above all Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza—and “in the relentless grind of colonization, in our mundane everyday routines, and in the ghosts that haunt our domestic lives.”

Baconi is the president of the board of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and the author of Hamas Contained (2018), a study of the militant group’s political evolution and the historical conditions that shaped it. Since 2018 he has written for the Review on many of the past decade’s most consequential episodes in Palestinian politics, from the Great March of Return to the designation of Israel as an apartheid state by leading human rights groups and the “unity intifada” that erupted in 2021 around the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. “We come to see ourselves,” he writes in his most recent piece, “as part of a multigenerational struggle for a homeland, a struggle that stretches beyond any of our lifetimes but still shapes our own search for belonging, our most intimate sense of self.”

We e-mailed this week about the Western media’s treatment of Palestinian politics, the relationship between history and memoir, and South Africa’s lessons for decolonization.  

Max Nelson: When and how did you decide to start writing publicly about Palestinian politics?

Tareq Baconi: My first publication on Palestine was in 2011 or thereabouts, on Hamas and Fatah’s efforts to form a unity government. I was finishing my doctoral studies, which were focused on Hamas’s evolution from a primarily military force into a governing body in Gaza. I was increasingly chafing at the misrepresentation of Palestinian politics in Western media. The level of demonization, dehumanization, and reduction was only becoming more apparent to me the better informed I grew. Whenever the Palestinian factions tried to arrive at an agreement that would undo the rupture between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—a rupture fomented by the US and Israel—commentators claimed that Palestinians were bringing terrorism into their governments. The only way forward, the argument went, was to defeat Hamas and ensure that any emerging Palestinian government would remain opposed to resistance and committed to security coordination with Israel—a recipe for maintaining apartheid and exacerbating Palestinian divisions.

I was also starting to understand how these false narratives were intimately connected with the destructive policies that followed from various Western governments. Treating Hamas not as a political actor but as an apolitical, bloodthirsty movement committed to the annihilation of Jews had become a way to justify any form of collective punishment—a debilitating blockade on the two million Palestinians in Gaza, for instance, or the disproportionate military assaults Israel meted out on the Strip between 2008 and 2009. I felt an impulse to intervene. This came from a place of helplessness, knowing with humility that this kind of narrative contestation is bigger than any one person or writer.

Your first piece for the Review, six years ago, was on the Great March of Return protests and the Israeli army’s brutal response. Looking back, how do you think about the longer significance of those protests, and the arguments you made about them then?

That juncture was formative, I think, in shaping Hamas’s approach to October 7, what it calls the al-Aqsa Flood. The Great March of Return was one of the broadest and most sustained mobilizations in Palestinian history. Tens of thousands of people peacefully protested for a right—our right of return—that is internationally sanctioned under UN Resolution 194. There could not have been a clearer demonstration of popular mobilization for a just, lawful cause.

Israel responded by using live ammunition against protesters, killing more than two hundred Palestinians, including journalists and medics, and causing more than 36,000 life-threatening injuries. And there was nothing from Western powers—barely any words of condemnation and certainly no policies to push for accountability or to end Israeli violence. (In retrospect this anticipated their unwillingness to stop Israel’s genocide today.) It was clearer than ever before that when Palestinians are told to avoid armed resistance, what they’re actually being told is to avoid resistance of any kind, to succumb and accept their lot as colonized subjects.

Hamas ultimately used the protests as leverage to launch more militarized forms of resistance, such as flaming kites and, later, missile attacks, which compelled Israel to make various concessions to the movement and ease the restrictions on the blockade of Gaza. That experience reaffirmed what Hamas, and Palestinians across the board, had long suspected: that Israel primarily responds to force and that the Western powers consider Palestinians dispensable.

In your latest essay you use the memoirs under review to follow Aziz Shehadeh and Sabri Jiyris through a half-century of Palestinian history, including some pitched debates within the Palestinian national movement itself. The piece ends where your book picks up—with the Oslo era and the further fracturing of the Palestinian political leadership between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. What lessons, if any, do you think that earlier era’s internal political debates might have for the present?

This question is at the heart of Palestinian politics today. I do not think we have sufficiently reckoned, on a political level, with how thoroughly the Palestinian consciousness of anticolonial revolution and liberation, dominant in the mid-twentieth century, has given way to defeat, corruption, and apathy among the leadership. Practically everyone understands that the Oslo Accords, and more generally the notion of partition in pursuit of the two-state model, have been designed to sustain Israeli apartheid and ensure Palestinian pacification. Over the past decade, culminating with October 7, we’ve been emerging from the interminable “peace process” discourse, which bought Israel time to pursue its settlement and annexation against the backdrop of endless talks.

The work for Palestinians today is to explore how we can reclaim our revolutionary legacy and extend it into the twenty-first century. We must be in intimate conversation with our parents’ and grandparents’ generations and with the political debates that shaped their thinking. Their lessons can inform our own conclusions about what decolonization in Palestine looks like today and how to advance our struggle for freedom, justice, and self-determination in the shadow of this Nakba.

In your new piece, for the first time, you’re reviewing memoirs, which means approaching some of your longer-standing political questions from the perspective of family history and intimate life—and as it happens you just finished a memoir yourself. How have you been thinking recently about the relationship between memoir and scholarly historical work?

I’ve always been an avid reader of memoirs. They lend a powerful intimacy to larger-scale political and social questions—particularly in the Palestinian tradition. Since many of our archives have been stolen, destroyed, and contested, oral history—the transmission of accounts of the struggle down family lines—has been central to sustaining our cause and insisting on our rights. For me, memoir is crucial to understanding how political questions settle into our bodies and shape our lives.

When I started writing my own memoir, I was wracked with self-doubt: I thought there was nothing interesting or particular about my life that merited documenting. And yet I felt an urge to write, and in the course of that work I realized that I was actually interrogating the world I grew up in by exploring the forces that shaped my consciousness: questions of queerness, masculinity, Palestine, intergenerational resistance, violence, and displacement. The memoir became less about me and more about these broader political and social tensions. When I started writing this book seven years ago, I thought I was writing a love letter to a childhood friend to whom I hadn’t spoken in more than two decades. Only upon finishing did I realize that I had written a far more political book than I initially imagined.

You’re currently in Cape Town, continuing a dialogue you’ve been maintaining for years with anti-apartheid activists about their own experience of decolonization. Could you say a bit about what your work there involves, and what lessons you think the South African experience might have for Palestine?

I’ve been spending a significant amount of time in South Africa for the past few years. Right now I’m a research fellow at the University of the Western Cape, which is home to the Mayibuye archives and a site of significant importance in the intellectual development of the Black Consciousness Movement. Until my first lengthy visit in 2019, my engagement with the concepts of settler colonialism and apartheid had been largely academic, and I wanted to understand how South Africa was able, in practice, to challenge white rule and transition to democracy.

The point was never to imitate the South African experience in Palestine: I do not think Palestinian liberation will or could follow the same path. It was to understand how a movement develops the capabilities for a successful liberation struggle against an occupying regime with more power and resources than it has itself. How does it respond to evolving geopolitical conditions? What guides its strategic decisions? How can Palestinians grow beyond our focus on popular grassroots mobilization and start to develop political power?

Thirty years after its transition to democracy, South Africa faces significant challenges, including racial inequality and the entrenchment of the apartheid regime’s economic model. But in 1994 the anti-apartheid movement was incredibly successful at dismantling white domination, decolonizing the state by embracing democratic rule for all South Africans, disrupting the settler/native binary, and engaging with Black Consciousness, Pan Africanism, and the African National Congress’s approach of non-racialism. These are all important questions for Palestinians to grapple with.

And not only Palestinians. The US, for instance, the most powerful settler colony, lags far behind South Africa in addressing these questions. It has failed to adequately confront its own legacies of colonialism and slavery, or its imperialist present. Studying South Africa, then, seemed like a way to reflect on what it means to work toward a free Palestine today—both for Palestinians and for a more just world order.

We’re more than eleven months into Israel’s indescribably devastating war on Gaza. You wrote recently for the site about Israel’s intransigence in the cease-fire talks and its recent regional escalations—what sort of pressure, in your view, would it take to reverse that pattern and force a deal?

The Netanyahu government has made it quite clear that it has no intention of agreeing to a permanent cease-fire. For the genocide to end, the US would have to stop arming Israel and enabling it to carry out mass killings—but the Biden administration has shown no interest in doing so. The negotiations have in this sense been political theater; both governments are clearly ideologically and politically committed to the eradication of life in Gaza.

Within Israel, there is significant pressure on Netanyahu to end the war—not out of any regret over the genocidal violence the country has unleashed, but because Israeli politicians, military and security officials, and significant swathes of the public have come to acknowledge that the war is not achieving its objectives or securing Israeli interests. This is true for the US, too: the country is involving itself in another endless war in the region because of Netanyahu’s politics. Why are Americans comfortable with their country being driven into a war that threatens their own national security?

These questions must be confronted if there is any hope of achieving a cease-fire deal. And ending the killing is only the beginning. Israeli leaders must be charged with genocide at the world’s highest courts; the future integrity of our international legal system depends on ending Israel’s impunity. As Palestinians, meanwhile, we face challenging questions. Where do we go from here? Gaza is uninhabitable. We are living through the biggest atrocity since the Nakba—indeed we have lost far more people since October 7 than we did during that catastrophe seventy-six years ago.

The collective and personal grief of the past year will take us generations to mourn. But we are already clear that there can be no return to October 6. It should also be self-evident, at this stage, that there is no security for Israeli Jews either as long as apartheid persists. So perhaps we can finally start talking about what freedom, justice, and equality look like between the river and the sea