What is the real Hamas?

by Joshua Leifer

In late October 2023, the veteran Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin published an open letter denouncing a man he had long called a friend – Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official. Baskin, an architect of the deal that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in 2011, is one of the only Israeli citizens who has maintained consistent contact with leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement. Hamad, a former journalist with a degree in veterinary medicine, was also involved in the Shalit negotiations and served as deputy foreign minister in the 2012 Hamas government. Prior to the 7 October attacks, for more than a decade and a half, Hamad and Baskin had exchanged frequent phone calls and text messages. These mainly concerned negotiations around prisoner swap deals, and sometimes the possibility of a long-term truce between Israel and Hamas. The pair developed a warm working relationship based on mutual trust.

After 7 October and the start of Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, that relationship started to unravel. Hamad insisted that the attacks were entirely justified, and denied that Hamas fighters had carried out atrocities during their incursion into Israel. On 24 October, in an interview for a Lebanese TV channel, Hamad vowed that Hamas would commit the same acts “again and again”. He said that “Al-Aqsa Flood”, Hamas’s name for its armed offensive, “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth”. Once considered a thoughtful observer of Palestinian politics, Hamad now declared that “nobody should blame us for what we do – on 7 October, on 10 October, on October 1,000,000. Everything we do is justified.”

To Baskin, this did not sound like the man he had come to know. The proclamations by Hamad, “thought to be one of the most moderate people in Hamas”, Baskin noted, landed like a betrayal. Baskin had long argued that it was possible to broker an agreement with Hamas for a “hudna”, or a fixed-term armistice, in exchange for opening the land, air, and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, which Israel has enforced, with Egypt’s support, since Hamas came to power in 2007. Baskin had believed that Hamad could help move Hamas toward acceding to a two-state solution. In the months before 7 October, Baskin had been trying to organize a meeting with him in Europe to discuss the prospect of a long-term truce.

But after 7 October, Baskin, too, shifted his position. “Hamas has forfeited its right to exist as a government of any territory and especially the territory next to Israel,” he wrote in an article for the Times of Israel on 28 October. “Hamas now fully deserves the determination of Israel to eliminate them as the political and military body that controls Gaza.” More recently, Baskin has proposed exiling Hamas leaders such as Yahya Sinwar from Gaza as part of a potential ceasefire deal. He has also proposed that Hamas be barred from contesting future Palestinian elections unless they renounce violence. It is not that Baskin has given up on peace – he remains a fixture in international media coverage as a lonely, even desperate Israeli voice calling for an end to the war. It is that he no longer believes Hamas can be part of the equation. Since October, many Israelis, even or perhaps especially on the centre left, have gone on a similar journey.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/21/what-is-the-real-hamas