This is the second installment of “Preserving Gaza,” a series of interviews with Palestinian scholars and writers about particular aspects of Gaza’s history, heritage and cultural life, much of which has been destroyed by the Israeli siege and bombardment since October 7th. You can read the first installment, a conversation with Atef Alshaer about literature and writing from Gaza, here.
Toufic Haddad is a social scientist and political analyst. He is the author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory and served from 2020 to 2024 as the director of the Kenyon Institute, a British research institute in East Jerusalem. The following conversation is based on interviews that took place in January and February and written updates since. It has been edited for clarity and length.
●
Ursula Lindsey: Can you tell me about the time that you have spent in Gaza?
Toufic Haddad: My father was a Palestinian refugee from Jerusalem, who partially grew up in Gaza before 1948, while my mother is from the U.S. I grew up in Kuwait and the U.S., and only had the chance to go to Palestine and Gaza in the late 1990s. Back then you could still go to Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and find a collective taxi that would take you to Erez Crossing, where you did your paperwork and entered. My initial work was not research-oriented. In 2000 I got a job via the UN, working in a Palestinian Authority ministry that was developing a press and information bureau. I began following how the Second Intifada was unfolding while living in the Gaza Strip. I got a follow-up contract with the UN, contributing to an alternative tourism book, where I was tasked with writing sections on the 27 Palestinian refugee camps across the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). It became an amazing opportunity to visit all the refugee camps in Palestine, including the eight major ones in the Gaza Strip.
Later I linked up with investigative journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco, who I had heard was interested in working on a new book project on Gaza. I helped fix and translate for him, collecting oral testimonies with survivors of the 1956 massacres in Khan Younis and Rafah. The material we collected later became his monumental work, Footnotes in Gaza.
I was recruited by the UN again in 2005 to work in a press bureau in Gaza to manage the influx of journalists going there in the run-up to the Israeli army’s “disengagement.” In truth, the Israeli army was not disengaging but was unilaterally redeploying from the Strip. But the optics of removing Jewish settlers from the heart of Gaza was used to frame events positively as a step toward Israel ending the occupation. The World Bank and donor states were also pumping up the redeployment as though it heralded a new era where Gaza was going to become another Singapore.
Of course, in hindsight, that was all a bit of bait and switch. There was no way for the situation in Gaza to improve as long as Israel remained in control of all entry and exit, which it of course did. But at least getting this job allowed me to spend time on the ground in Gaza during a very interesting historical moment. Israel was pulling out for the first time since 1967, and Palestinians took over the areas where the settlements and army had been. There was a strong feeling that the Palestinian resistance had pushed Israel out of Gaza, as the previous design of Israeli control was proving too costly for Israel to protect the eight thousand Jewish settlers there while being surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians.
Israel’s control of Gaza had been organized around the settlements and their access roads: there was a cluster in the north, individual settlements in the middle of the Strip and a major block in the south. The army and settlers controlled about a third of the total territory, which is only 365 square kilometers. It also had the ability to internally divide the Strip in several locations. After the redeployment, internal movement restrictions ended, though the Strip overall was placed under a much more hermetic closure, enforced on land, in the air and by the sea. Israel also maintained control over considerable parts of Gaza’s water, electricity and telecommunications infrastructures, as well as the population registry. In this sense, it was clear that Israel wasn’t disengaging from the Strip but reorganizing the nature of its control, so it could exercise this more remotely.
Despite withdrawing troops and settlers, freeing up about a third of Gaza’s land, Israel would also begin imposing a no-go “buffer” zone around the northern and eastern perimeter of the Strip, which in some cases extended two kilometers into Gaza’s agricultural land. One of the last projects I did with the UN Office for Civilian and Humanitarian Affairs was in fact related to researching these “access restricted areas,” exploring their environmental, social and economic impact.
It’s noteworthy to see how today the Israeli army is attempting to enforce both a buffer zone around Gaza’s perimeter, as well as to bifurcate the Strip through the construction of a road and earthen barrier at the former settlement of Netzarim, south of Gaza City. In this sense, as much as things have changed since 2005, the basic geographic elements of control of this territory are repeating themselves.
UL: What about your academic work?
TH: I did my Ph.D. in development studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London, looking at the political economy of the aid industry in Palestine since the Oslo Accords. The book that was based on this work ended up looking more closely at how donors and international finance institutions attempted to instrumentalize their aid toward political and social engineering purposes. At a certain point in the study, I begin focusing on the West Bank, after the 2006 elections. If you recall, Hamas won those elections decisively, and Fatah (the main PLO faction), Israel and the U.S. attempted to prevent Hamas from ruling and taking over the institution of the Palestinian Authority, despite this victory. The ensuing mini civil war resulted in the division we see today between the Fatah-administered West Bank and the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip. It was during this period that donors heavily backed Fatah, using aid as a “carrot,” while Gaza received the “stick.” My book looked at the “carrot,” so to speak, but I intended to follow up that study with a complementary one that looked more closely at the specific trajectory of the Gaza Strip under siege and how Palestinian society there attempted to remain resilient under incredible hardship. I received a postdoc grant from the Arab Council for Social Sciences toward that end in 2016.
Unfortunately, Gaza was all but inaccessible to individual academic researchers by then, and I ended up working closely with a local academic in Gaza from Al Azhar University who mentored and assisted me.
But basically, since 2005, Gaza increasingly transformed into an open-air prison. Gaza’s population of two million people was basically prevented movement and access into and out of the Strip for almost two decades—not for violating any particular law but basically for political purposes and for who they were. Israel wanted to contain them in the Strip, preventing their interaction with other parts of the OPT, Israel or the rest of the world.
The more I came to experience and understand Gaza’s distinct history and trajectory, the more I realized that these were exceptional opportunities to witness and understand this particularly brutalized element of the Palestinian experience. Yet despite the large amounts of research produced on Israel-Palestine, most scholarship tends to ignore the Gaza side of the equation. As a result, I think Gaza is a major missing piece in the story that is told about Palestine, despite having this huge center of gravity and political and moral weight. It tends to be marginalized.
UL: Why is that the case?
TH: A great deal has to do with these access restrictions, which were two-way: preventing outsiders from going in, while preventing locals from getting out. The lack of interaction Gazans have had with the world or with Palestinians in the West Bank or Israel made it so that they were kind of out of sight, out of mind to most, with few aware or capable of comprehending what the situation was like there.
There are also forms of unintended bias that contribute to Gaza’s marginalization. The West Bank is much larger territorially, has more English speakers in it and is also the focus of intensive Jewish settlement construction as Israel attempts to integrate these territories into pre-1967 Israeli-held territory. Jerusalem, which was organically a part of the West Bank before 1967, also has a crucial international and of course religious dimension to it.
But a significant factor also relates to the fact that the question of Gaza was being dealt with by the international community and Israel as largely a done deal, where basically the apartheid-like military containment of the territory was accepted by the international community as a stasis that could be indefinitely enforced. The political questions of Gaza—the occupation, the refugees, the siege, the question of Palestinian self-determination—all these were ignored and substituted with a policy of targeted humanitarian interventions to ensure that people didn’t starve and had very basic needs met, but not much more. This approach was also largely justified by the existence of Hamas, which acted as the convenient excuse for the world to ignore what was happening there. But the truth is that Hamas and its rise in popularity as an actor in Palestinian politics emerged from the denial of these political questions, not the other way around. Gaza was an intense concentration of all these problems put together, and the international community and Israel dealt with it in this reductive and cynical way. This approach also ended up being reflected in the kinds of knowledge that have been generated around Gaza in recent years, which overwhelmingly focused on problems of humanitarian management, without addressing sources of problems or, for that matter, how Gazans attempted to resist their fate.
UL: And what about Palestinian scholars in Gaza, what about the work or research that they were able to produce themselves?
TH: Despite the very difficult conditions of life and work in Gaza, and the fact these conditions induce brain drain, Gaza still had a lively and dedicated university sector and an active civil society, with these institutions playing important roles in attempting to manage, organize and resolve the myriad of issues arising in that context. The Islamic University, for instance, had well-developed engineering departments. They had researchers who came up with how to develop alternative energy and solar options for Gaza in the context of its electricity cuts; they looked at agricultural solutions for Gaza and alternative water solutions for chronic and poor water issues. Israel strictly controls cement importation into the Strip, so scientists were working on how to recycle rubble and turn it into brick that could be used for rebuilding.
UL: The Islamic University has been bombed and destroyed, as has most of Gaza City. Can you talk about what this destruction has meant?
TH: It’s unclear what Israel intends for the Gaza Strip or Gaza City, though it’s noteworthy that Netanyahu recently announced the provision of nineteen billion shekels (around five billion dollars) to renew and rebuild the region bordering the Strip, while also declaring that Israel intends to hold on to Gaza indefinitely on a “security” level. But as a city and as an urban space, which of course includes Gaza’s institutions of higher education (there were three main large universities), I think it is pretty clear that Israel wants this “dead.” In leveling most of Gaza City, Israel has destroyed the largest Palestinian city—one that has huge political significance to Palestinians, acting as a kind of ground zero to Palestinian nationalism since 1948. Gaza City has acted as one of the main organizing urban contexts where the modern Palestinian project emerged, which is something entirely independent from Hamas and which of course preceded Hamas.
Gaza City was a major city in Palestine prior to 1948. It is also one of the few Palestinian cities that survived the 1948 Nakba, given that most Palestinian cities were lost in the creation of the state of Israel—West Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, etc. Gaza City became a city that was teeming with all these refugees who were displaced from their lands, and subsequently it became the seat of the first attempt to try and form an all-Palestinian national government after 1948. Gaza would go on to become the city that produced the most important Palestinian national initiatives, with the territory becoming known for its pan-Arabists and communists in the 1950s and Sixties, and then later the PLO factions after 1967. Hamas would of course also arise there in the late 1980s.
The PLO would make Gaza City its de facto capital in the first stage of the Oslo agreements with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority there in 1994. The city functioned as the kind of center of gravity to the Palestinian national movement; it is where the majority of PLO exiles returned. Gaza is also where the First Intifada started, and where Palestinian political factions began developing their military wings to challenge Israel at the end of the First Intifada, and of course during the Second Intifada.
For these reasons among others, Israel has an interest in taking out Gaza because of what it represents and what it has contributed to Palestinian national consciousness and organizing. By destroying the urban environment and infrastructure of Gaza City, it is attempting to kill the potential for it to be a viable city, for it to be able to revive or regenerate a new project.
UL: What has it meant for the Gaza Strip to have been made into a place that could not sustain itself, that was controlled externally and isolated this way?
TH: A grave injustice befell Gaza from the very beginning of the Oslo process. Basically, implementation of the Accords on the ground meant mass unemployment of its workforce, which was overwhelmingly employed in Israel before 1993. These workers were unemployed almost overnight in the early 1990s, and then contained in the Gaza Strip where there were no real economic establishments that could absorb them. Israel also built the first of its three walls around Gaza in 1994. So “peace” for Gazans meant their containment and isolation from the world in this nonviable, overcrowded territory and at the whim of their occupiers who controlled most of the main spigots related to their development. If you needed something like medical treatment from a health-care provider outside the Strip, or if you obtained a scholarship at a university somewhere abroad, or even if you just wanted to be a merchant engaged in import or export—all this activity required going through Israeli-controlled portals and to some extent the Egyptians as well. This gave these entities enormous leverage which they exploited toward their own ends, be this financially or politically. Access to health care outside the Strip became notorious as a means by which the Israeli army attempted to recruit Palestinians to collaborate with them, to act as eyes and ears for them when they returned to Gaza. If they failed to collaborate, these persons could be denied their entry permit that gave them lifesaving medical care. So this is how Gazans experienced Oslo and, later, the siege, with the latter essentially growing out of the separation regime established by the former.
The means of control that developed over Gaza were truly Orwellian and had reached scientific rational proportions—Israel was literally calculating the amount of calories entering the Strip, to ensure starvation did not occur, but not more. It was this enormous and cruel regime of control that led Gazans first, and Hamas second, to develop spaces where they were free from this control, via the construction of an underground city and transportation network beneath Gaza.
UL: So the purpose of the tunnels was not necessarily always military?
TH: No, the tunnels are a phenomenon that is actually much older. Gaza has sandy soil that is ideal for digging tunnels. Jean-Pierre Filiu in his book Gaza: A History speaks about how there was an attempted siege of Gaza in the era of Alexander the Great, where tunnels were apparently operational. In modern times, tunnels and underground spaces became a more prominent feature of the landscape when the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord was implemented after Camp David in 1981. There was a need to reassert the border between the Egyptian Sinai, the Gaza Strip and Israel at the time, because Israel had eliminated all borders after 1967 and was busy building settlements in the newly occupied territories, including within the Sinai. The Rafah refugee camp, which had been the southernmost camp in the Gaza Strip, also spilled over in this period onto the Egyptian side of the border. So when the demarcation of the old border was reinforced, Rafah was literally split in two, in some cases separating families on either side. Tunnels began to appear to allow families to reconnect with one another and the city of Rafah. Like all borderlands, Rafah became a site that was ideal for smuggling, given that there were two very different economic regimes on either side. But tunnel construction was still limited in this period as 1967 also meant Gaza’s reconnection with the West Bank, the Israeli labor market and Palestinian ancestral land within Israel.
With the onset of the Second Intifada, and particularly after Hamas was elected to power in 2006, the tunnel phenomenon really began to accelerate as Palestinians attempted to circumvent the Israeli and international blockade on the Strip. This mass construction of tunnels, and their flourishing under conditions of siege, has important political economic implications on the territory, as it led to the rise of a new set of economic elites—a smuggler class—some of whom are also linked with Hamas. As the siege became increasingly restrictive, entrepreneurial families from Rafah, many with tribal connections in North Sinai, activated networks to start bringing in a whole range of products into Gaza that had been restricted because of the siege, and which in some cases had never been allowed in Gaza or the OPT to begin with. For instance, motorcycles were prevented from being sold in the OPT by Israel because they were seen as potential weapons, but all a sudden the tunnels got sophisticated enough to bring in livestock, cars, motorcycles and tuk-tuks. Hamas also established a “ministry of tunnels,” where it monitored, taxed and controlled the products that came in, like any ministry. The aboveground road-access channels were basically controlled by Israel and the Palestinian Authority and were more expensive. Hamas also maintained independent tunnels of its own to bring in military materiel.
The tunnel phenomenon absorbed part of the enormous labor surpluses that arose out of the unemployment generated by the siege. It also arose during the latter years of the Mubarak regime, when the central Egyptian state found it difficult to exercise control over its own territorial periphery. The Egyptian military presence in Sinai is itself restricted by the Egyptian-Israeli peace accords. This period also witnessed the Arab revolutionary uprisings, the overthrow of the Mubarak regime and the brief rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood under Morsi. So it was a period where the phenomenon and expertise of tunnel building really proliferates, while there was also a lot of unregulated activity on Egypt’s borders.
When the Sisi government came to power in 2013, it attempted to organize the Egyptian side of the border more, and to centralize and control the revenue generation from both above- and underground trade. The Egyptian army subsequently destroyed the Egyptian side of Rafah together with perhaps as many as two thousand tunnels. But some tunnels would clearly remain, serving as an essential lifeline that both sides had interests in preserving, given that they provided forms of rent that the Egyptian army and Hamas were keen to preserve and control. Informally, items on Israel’s no-enter “red” list became lucrative parts of Egyptian smugglers’ “green” list.
All this is to say that there were different kinds of tunnels: commercial tunnels, resistance tunnels, attack tunnels. Resistance tunnels are internal tunnels to Gaza where freedom of movement could take place and you could have storage, for military materiel but also for foodstuffs or medical purposes. They are places for people to safely operate, becoming the basis of an alternative infrastructure that Hamas could control because everything aboveground was controlled or heavily monitored by Israel—via satellites, balloons, drones, observation posts, etc. I think all political factions also anticipated that Israel would one day attempt to reoccupy the Strip, so they prepared spaces for their people and weapons accordingly. Clearly Hamas, as the faction in power over the past eighteen years, had ample time to fashion and prep a substantial infrastructure that could meet its ends. Recall that the movement also lost considerable numbers of its top cadres in assassinations before the tunnel networks were constructed.
The tunnels below Gaza might extend as much as five hundred kilometers in length if added up, comprising perhaps as many as 1,300 individual tunnels. They are not all one network, which would be lost if one part of it was discovered. They also are apparently constructed on three different depths below ground, servicing multiple needs including protective bunkers, storage facilities, command centers, health facilities and transportation networks. The tunnel network is informally termed the “metro” in Gaza, though it is something of a legend, of course, not accessible to all Gazans but only to those affiliated with the factions, and with knowledge of it highly compartmentalized at that.
Of course, the problem from a researcher’s perspective is that nothing is independently verifiable, while Israel’s revelations on the phenomenon are also selective. You need to collate the information from different sources, while also taking into consideration many ethical and security questions as well. We don’t know when the movement decided to build this massive city under the Strip, but it’s not a stretch for Hamas to have concluded that there was a need for such spaces early on—from the time before they won the elections to more organized efforts, and then after, when they could operate more freely on the ground within the Strip, considering they had local powers and authority.
UL: We often hear that Gaza is “controlled” by Hamas. What does that mean? What has their role been?
TH: This framing implies a kind of imposed or captured nature to Hamas’s governance over the Strip, which is largely unfair. It is Israel that really controls Gaza. Hamas has limited governance powers within the Strip and tries to organize these opportunities as it sees fit, according to its vision and politics, which many Palestinians support and believe in. Hamas was also founded in the Gaza Strip and has acted as an organic part of its political scene for more than thirty years. The notion that Hamas wrested power in Gaza is also false because it resoundingly won a democratic election there and would likely win one again. This doesn’t mean they haven’t been heavy-handed at times, or that they don’t have their local enemies. But observers need to also acknowledge that Hamas was able to win over substantial sections of Gaza and Palestinian society.
The notion of Hamas wresting power comes from the fact that the movement was considered a spoiler to Israel and Western designs for the Oslo process, which preferred to have Fatah indefinitely rule the “autonomous” areas of the OPT. Fatah, via the PLO, had steered the Palestinian movement toward the Oslo track, and maintained a quietist approach, waiting for the process to bear fruit toward realizing Palestinian national aspirations on the international stage. When the process failed to realize these ends, and Oslo began to be seen as an Israeli-U.S./Western state trap, there was a wide-scale popular shift toward Hamas as the main opposition faction that warned against the dangers of Oslo initially and which was seen as a viable actor that could lead an alternative path.
For this reason, the social composition and leadership of Hamas is actually very similar to that of Fatah in the sense that it’s an educated lower- and middle-class social constituency who largely come from refugee backgrounds: teachers, doctors, engineers and traders who embrace a traditional Islamic interpretation of Palestinian national rights.
Hamas proved itself particularly effective as a grassroots organization engaged in social provision to the poor. It was part of the movement of Palestinian political activity in the 1980s that attempted to establish mass-based political parties, in a context that was previously restricted to select political actors. Hamas turned to charity work, including day-care centers, soup kitchens and health clinics, to build its social bases. It also built a student movement in universities and a women’s movement. The need for this kind of activity arose in light of the fact that there was no Palestinian government allowed at the time, as Israel ruled the OPT through military orders that were enforced by its army and “civil administration.” So Hamas, like other factions, arose in a context where they attempted to meet people’s needs, and in so doing they built a base and legitimacy of their own.
Of course, the movement would greatly evolve over the years, expanding its capacity and popularity as the PLO factions weakened. The movement’s successful 2006 parliamentary bid ushered in the era where Hamas formally entered national politics and frontally challenged Fatah’s control over the Palestinian Authority. This represented a historical shift for the movement, insofar as Hamas had disapproved of the Oslo process and the structures it created, but opted to run in elections anyway because it recognized the widespread Palestinian disaffection around the Oslo process and wished to pose a genuine alternative to it, and not just act as a spoiler. In so doing it demonstrated a kind of political maturity by daring to play the liberal democratic game.
It should be kept in mind, of course, that Palestinians were not voting for a sovereign government in the 2006 elections, but for administration of a governance structure that had limited autonomous powers to begin with, and where the Israeli occupation persisted across the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Within this framework, there was indeed a rationale for Hamas maintaining its military wing—a position which was not exceptional to Hamas either. Moreover, this position would be further substantiated in retrospect when Fatah, the international community and Israel tried to prevent Hamas from ruling after winning the elections. Essentially these powers wanted to maintain their hegemony and hierarchy over coercive force.
Of course, Hamas rule was a mixed bag. On the one hand, the movement was able to widen and consolidate its base of popular support by vocally and militarily opposing the occupation, while providing Palestinians some basic services integrated into a comprehensible vision for interpreting what Palestinians were going through. On the other hand, the movement and Palestinian society certainly paid a heavy price for this defiance, while significant parts of Gazan society and Palestinian society more broadly didn’t share its vision and felt alienated by its rule. With this said, the desperate conditions that arose in Gaza made most less interested in who sat in power per se, but with survival. That’s why you started to have this phenomenon of people leaving Gaza on boats to Greece or to Egypt. Because the situation in Gaza was unsustainable. In 2017, the UN even declared it “unlivable.”
In this respect, it’s important to maintain a broader understanding of the situation, and not become preoccupied with Hamas. Well before October 7th, and before Hamas even came to power, Gaza’s population had no potable water. Much of the population was food-insecure. Hamas didn’t create this situation—it arose out of a will to change it. It is the latest Palestinian attempt to undertake this challenge, bearing in mind the longer historical arc of grievances Palestinians have experienced since Israel’s creation as well. Of course, a key feature of Hamas’s profile is its active military wing, though this, too, was not something unique to Hamas within Palestinian organizing. It only worked to develop this dimension, doing so in a particular historical context that was seen as both conducive and rational.
UL: This brings up the question of nonmilitary alternatives to the Palestinian question. Where do these fit in within what we witness today, especially after we witnessed the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019, where thousands of peaceful demonstrators marched regularly to the Gaza perimeter?
TH: I’m glad you raise this, because events today tend to draw too much attention to the military dimensions of what’s taking place—for obvious reasons—even though this obscures the broader historical dynamic that has been at play. It’s important to underline that Hamas did not simply pursue military tactics since taking power. In fact, it extensively engaged in trying to build its political credibility internationally to gain legitimacy as a political actor that could replace the PLO and lead the national struggle.
Part of these efforts can be seen in the way the movement engaged in the electoral process, and also changed and updated its charter to be more in alignment with the PLO national consensus. It also engaged with the popular movement you mention—known as the “Great March of Return and to Break the Siege.” Basically, by 2018 you had a couple of generations of folks who had grown up under total siege in Gaza and had never even left the Strip. This army of disaffected youth began organizing marches to the Gaza perimeter fence, to protest their living conditions, explicitly calling for an end to the siege and for refugee return. Despite a very high casualty toll, these demonstrations persisted weekly for a year and a half, attempting to generate political traction. But the movement failed to bring about significant political interest internationally, and at least eight thousand unarmed protesters were shot with live ammunition. The total number of injured was staggering, as each victim was the target of Israeli snipers who relentlessly picked off protesters one after the next, week after week.
Hamas initially felt threatened by the movement, fearing how independent organizing could threaten its rule within Gaza. But then the movement actually began to throw its political and organizational weight behind the marches, because fundamentally it supported the protester’s demands and shared a desire to build international pressure to end the siege. I think Hamas also intuitively understood the importance of demonstrating that the movement was willing to support nonviolent protest and was not just an Islamic bogeyman set on violence.
In this sense the March of Return was an important political transition for Hamas because it demonstrated the movement’s political maturity and flexibility. But these events were also very significant for Gazan society because the ruthless repression of the protests over the course of a year and a half really prepared the ground for Palestinian society coming to the conclusion that there was no solution to their predicament through strictly nonviolent means—be it through an internationally sanctioned peace process (the Oslo process), or, for that matter, civil disobedience and protest campaigns like the Great March of Return. Direct coercive military force was seen as necessary as to get the situation to change.
For this reason, I was not entirely surprised with what came about on October 7th. I even suggest its possibility in an interview published right before October 7th. Because if you understood what Gazan society had been through, and if you understood how Hamas saw its role within Palestinian politics, and if you understood how the international community and Israel assumed they could indefinitely manage the contradictions of this situation, it was obvious that the status quo ante could not hold, and that Palestinians would attempt to break it.
UL: In light of this prediction, what do you expect will happen next?
TH: Hamas wanted to change the entire paradigm on October 7th, and to shock the Israeli state to its core. They wanted to inflict major military losses. They wanted to crush the military command that was enforcing the siege. They wanted to extract extensive political capital from Israel in terms of the large numbers of prisoners and to use this as leverage for political concessions from Israel and its allies. They basically aimed to force a new political dynamic overall, saying, “This is what we can do. We’re going to fight back. We’re going to inflict a heavy loss upon you. And we think we can wage a long-term war of attrition that you don’t have a solution to.” And the only way to find a solution to this issue is to address the question of Palestine, which the Gaza Strip represents the most concentrated instantiation of. Without this, there will be no solution and there will be no winners. But the era of Israeli impunity is over. If Israel can selectively interpret Oslo to establish apartheid, Palestinians can collapse the mythology of separation, and expose it for what it truly is—direct and brutal military control sponsored by Western governments.
In this context, Israel claims to seek to retrieve its captives and destroy Hamas. But months into this campaign, Israel is actually no closer to achieving these objectives, even though it is much closer to achieving a perhaps more significant historical objective of attempting to complete the Nakba in the Gaza Strip, pushing the population into North Sinai, or conducting a genocide that kills significant numbers of them.
In this regard, Israel also wants to change the rules of the game, reintroducing a mass-transfer component into the equation, as had been the case in previous eras—namely, 1967 and 1948. In this reading, the apartheid scenario established by the Oslo process ultimately proved unsustainable because Palestinians didn’t cooperate, didn’t accept their lot in the ghettos that were established for them. Now the question will be whether the U.S., and the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement in particular, can tolerate these paradigmatic shifts, and whether a regional war can be averted as well.
The political, ideological and even personal vectors at play in the scenario unfolding seem too charged at this stage to result in de-escalation. I don’t have any illusions that what is happening in Gaza is going to end anytime soon, as an exceptionally volatile period opens up the next few years that vacillates between waves of accelerated violence, followed by slower bouts of attrition, all while the threat of regional conflagrations remains ever present. While the cost is already enormous for Gazan society, the Oslo paradigm, which relied upon separation and control, has all but collapsed. Israel is now stuck in Gaza and has no solution for its people, nor any true means to eliminate the resistance there. Israel is thus also inclined to suffer increasing losses on the battlefield, while the Israeli polity itself becomes more divided and subject to splintering and even significant emigration. The West will attempt to mitigate these net effects as best it can, although there will be limits to how far it can operationally, financially and militarily protect Israel in a context where it becomes more reckless, divided and acts as a liability to itself and allies, especially if a broad international campaign also arises to demand a ceasefire and realize a just solution for the Palestinian people.
Photo credit: Marius Arnesen (Flickr, CC / BY-NC 2.0)
This is the second installment of “Preserving Gaza,” a series of interviews with Palestinian scholars and writers about particular aspects of Gaza’s history, heritage and cultural life, much of which has been destroyed by the Israeli siege and bombardment since October 7th. You can read the first installment, a conversation with Atef Alshaer about literature and writing from Gaza, here.
Toufic Haddad is a social scientist and political analyst. He is the author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory and served from 2020 to 2024 as the director of the Kenyon Institute, a British research institute in East Jerusalem. The following conversation is based on interviews that took place in January and February and written updates since. It has been edited for clarity and length.
●
Ursula Lindsey: Can you tell me about the time that you have spent in Gaza?
Toufic Haddad: My father was a Palestinian refugee from Jerusalem, who partially grew up in Gaza before 1948, while my mother is from the U.S. I grew up in Kuwait and the U.S., and only had the chance to go to Palestine and Gaza in the late 1990s. Back then you could still go to Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and find a collective taxi that would take you to Erez Crossing, where you did your paperwork and entered. My initial work was not research-oriented. In 2000 I got a job via the UN, working in a Palestinian Authority ministry that was developing a press and information bureau. I began following how the Second Intifada was unfolding while living in the Gaza Strip. I got a follow-up contract with the UN, contributing to an alternative tourism book, where I was tasked with writing sections on the 27 Palestinian refugee camps across the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). It became an amazing opportunity to visit all the refugee camps in Palestine, including the eight major ones in the Gaza Strip.
Later I linked up with investigative journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco, who I had heard was interested in working on a new book project on Gaza. I helped fix and translate for him, collecting oral testimonies with survivors of the 1956 massacres in Khan Younis and Rafah. The material we collected later became his monumental work, Footnotes in Gaza.
I was recruited by the UN again in 2005 to work in a press bureau in Gaza to manage the influx of journalists going there in the run-up to the Israeli army’s “disengagement.” In truth, the Israeli army was not disengaging but was unilaterally redeploying from the Strip. But the optics of removing Jewish settlers from the heart of Gaza was used to frame events positively as a step toward Israel ending the occupation. The World Bank and donor states were also pumping up the redeployment as though it heralded a new era where Gaza was going to become another Singapore.
Of course, in hindsight, that was all a bit of bait and switch. There was no way for the situation in Gaza to improve as long as Israel remained in control of all entry and exit, which it of course did. But at least getting this job allowed me to spend time on the ground in Gaza during a very interesting historical moment. Israel was pulling out for the first time since 1967, and Palestinians took over the areas where the settlements and army had been. There was a strong feeling that the Palestinian resistance had pushed Israel out of Gaza, as the previous design of Israeli control was proving too costly for Israel to protect the eight thousand Jewish settlers there while being surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians.
Israel’s control of Gaza had been organized around the settlements and their access roads: there was a cluster in the north, individual settlements in the middle of the Strip and a major block in the south. The army and settlers controlled about a third of the total territory, which is only 365 square kilometers. It also had the ability to internally divide the Strip in several locations. After the redeployment, internal movement restrictions ended, though the Strip overall was placed under a much more hermetic closure, enforced on land, in the air and by the sea. Israel also maintained control over considerable parts of Gaza’s water, electricity and telecommunications infrastructures, as well as the population registry. In this sense, it was clear that Israel wasn’t disengaging from the Strip but reorganizing the nature of its control, so it could exercise this more remotely.
Despite withdrawing troops and settlers, freeing up about a third of Gaza’s land, Israel would also begin imposing a no-go “buffer” zone around the northern and eastern perimeter of the Strip, which in some cases extended two kilometers into Gaza’s agricultural land. One of the last projects I did with the UN Office for Civilian and Humanitarian Affairs was in fact related to researching these “access restricted areas,” exploring their environmental, social and economic impact.
It’s noteworthy to see how today the Israeli army is attempting to enforce both a buffer zone around Gaza’s perimeter, as well as to bifurcate the Strip through the construction of a road and earthen barrier at the former settlement of Netzarim, south of Gaza City. In this sense, as much as things have changed since 2005, the basic geographic elements of control of this territory are repeating themselves.
UL: What about your academic work?
TH: I did my Ph.D. in development studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London, looking at the political economy of the aid industry in Palestine since the Oslo Accords. The book that was based on this work ended up looking more closely at how donors and international finance institutions attempted to instrumentalize their aid toward political and social engineering purposes. At a certain point in the study, I begin focusing on the West Bank, after the 2006 elections. If you recall, Hamas won those elections decisively, and Fatah (the main PLO faction), Israel and the U.S. attempted to prevent Hamas from ruling and taking over the institution of the Palestinian Authority, despite this victory. The ensuing mini civil war resulted in the division we see today between the Fatah-administered West Bank and the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip. It was during this period that donors heavily backed Fatah, using aid as a “carrot,” while Gaza received the “stick.” My book looked at the “carrot,” so to speak, but I intended to follow up that study with a complementary one that looked more closely at the specific trajectory of the Gaza Strip under siege and how Palestinian society there attempted to remain resilient under incredible hardship. I received a postdoc grant from the Arab Council for Social Sciences toward that end in 2016.
Unfortunately, Gaza was all but inaccessible to individual academic researchers by then, and I ended up working closely with a local academic in Gaza from Al Azhar University who mentored and assisted me.
But basically, since 2005, Gaza increasingly transformed into an open-air prison. Gaza’s population of two million people was basically prevented movement and access into and out of the Strip for almost two decades—not for violating any particular law but basically for political purposes and for who they were. Israel wanted to contain them in the Strip, preventing their interaction with other parts of the OPT, Israel or the rest of the world.
The more I came to experience and understand Gaza’s distinct history and trajectory, the more I realized that these were exceptional opportunities to witness and understand this particularly brutalized element of the Palestinian experience. Yet despite the large amounts of research produced on Israel-Palestine, most scholarship tends to ignore the Gaza side of the equation. As a result, I think Gaza is a major missing piece in the story that is told about Palestine, despite having this huge center of gravity and political and moral weight. It tends to be marginalized.
UL: Why is that the case?
TH: A great deal has to do with these access restrictions, which were two-way: preventing outsiders from going in, while preventing locals from getting out. The lack of interaction Gazans have had with the world or with Palestinians in the West Bank or Israel made it so that they were kind of out of sight, out of mind to most, with few aware or capable of comprehending what the situation was like there.
There are also forms of unintended bias that contribute to Gaza’s marginalization. The West Bank is much larger territorially, has more English speakers in it and is also the focus of intensive Jewish settlement construction as Israel attempts to integrate these territories into pre-1967 Israeli-held territory. Jerusalem, which was organically a part of the West Bank before 1967, also has a crucial international and of course religious dimension to it.
But a significant factor also relates to the fact that the question of Gaza was being dealt with by the international community and Israel as largely a done deal, where basically the apartheid-like military containment of the territory was accepted by the international community as a stasis that could be indefinitely enforced. The political questions of Gaza—the occupation, the refugees, the siege, the question of Palestinian self-determination—all these were ignored and substituted with a policy of targeted humanitarian interventions to ensure that people didn’t starve and had very basic needs met, but not much more. This approach was also largely justified by the existence of Hamas, which acted as the convenient excuse for the world to ignore what was happening there. But the truth is that Hamas and its rise in popularity as an actor in Palestinian politics emerged from the denial of these political questions, not the other way around. Gaza was an intense concentration of all these problems put together, and the international community and Israel dealt with it in this reductive and cynical way. This approach also ended up being reflected in the kinds of knowledge that have been generated around Gaza in recent years, which overwhelmingly focused on problems of humanitarian management, without addressing sources of problems or, for that matter, how Gazans attempted to resist their fate.
UL: And what about Palestinian scholars in Gaza, what about the work or research that they were able to produce themselves?
TH: Despite the very difficult conditions of life and work in Gaza, and the fact these conditions induce brain drain, Gaza still had a lively and dedicated university sector and an active civil society, with these institutions playing important roles in attempting to manage, organize and resolve the myriad of issues arising in that context. The Islamic University, for instance, had well-developed engineering departments. They had researchers who came up with how to develop alternative energy and solar options for Gaza in the context of its electricity cuts; they looked at agricultural solutions for Gaza and alternative water solutions for chronic and poor water issues. Israel strictly controls cement importation into the Strip, so scientists were working on how to recycle rubble and turn it into brick that could be used for rebuilding.
UL: The Islamic University has been bombed and destroyed, as has most of Gaza City. Can you talk about what this destruction has meant?
TH: It’s unclear what Israel intends for the Gaza Strip or Gaza City, though it’s noteworthy that Netanyahu recently announced the provision of nineteen billion shekels (around five billion dollars) to renew and rebuild the region bordering the Strip, while also declaring that Israel intends to hold on to Gaza indefinitely on a “security” level. But as a city and as an urban space, which of course includes Gaza’s institutions of higher education (there were three main large universities), I think it is pretty clear that Israel wants this “dead.” In leveling most of Gaza City, Israel has destroyed the largest Palestinian city—one that has huge political significance to Palestinians, acting as a kind of ground zero to Palestinian nationalism since 1948. Gaza City has acted as one of the main organizing urban contexts where the modern Palestinian project emerged, which is something entirely independent from Hamas and which of course preceded Hamas.
Gaza City was a major city in Palestine prior to 1948. It is also one of the few Palestinian cities that survived the 1948 Nakba, given that most Palestinian cities were lost in the creation of the state of Israel—West Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, etc. Gaza City became a city that was teeming with all these refugees who were displaced from their lands, and subsequently it became the seat of the first attempt to try and form an all-Palestinian national government after 1948. Gaza would go on to become the city that produced the most important Palestinian national initiatives, with the territory becoming known for its pan-Arabists and communists in the 1950s and Sixties, and then later the PLO factions after 1967. Hamas would of course also arise there in the late 1980s.
The PLO would make Gaza City its de facto capital in the first stage of the Oslo agreements with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority there in 1994. The city functioned as the kind of center of gravity to the Palestinian national movement; it is where the majority of PLO exiles returned. Gaza is also where the First Intifada started, and where Palestinian political factions began developing their military wings to challenge Israel at the end of the First Intifada, and of course during the Second Intifada.
For these reasons among others, Israel has an interest in taking out Gaza because of what it represents and what it has contributed to Palestinian national consciousness and organizing. By destroying the urban environment and infrastructure of Gaza City, it is attempting to kill the potential for it to be a viable city, for it to be able to revive or regenerate a new project.
UL: What has it meant for the Gaza Strip to have been made into a place that could not sustain itself, that was controlled externally and isolated this way?
TH: A grave injustice befell Gaza from the very beginning of the Oslo process. Basically, implementation of the Accords on the ground meant mass unemployment of its workforce, which was overwhelmingly employed in Israel before 1993. These workers were unemployed almost overnight in the early 1990s, and then contained in the Gaza Strip where there were no real economic establishments that could absorb them. Israel also built the first of its three walls around Gaza in 1994. So “peace” for Gazans meant their containment and isolation from the world in this nonviable, overcrowded territory and at the whim of their occupiers who controlled most of the main spigots related to their development. If you needed something like medical treatment from a health-care provider outside the Strip, or if you obtained a scholarship at a university somewhere abroad, or even if you just wanted to be a merchant engaged in import or export—all this activity required going through Israeli-controlled portals and to some extent the Egyptians as well. This gave these entities enormous leverage which they exploited toward their own ends, be this financially or politically. Access to health care outside the Strip became notorious as a means by which the Israeli army attempted to recruit Palestinians to collaborate with them, to act as eyes and ears for them when they returned to Gaza. If they failed to collaborate, these persons could be denied their entry permit that gave them lifesaving medical care. So this is how Gazans experienced Oslo and, later, the siege, with the latter essentially growing out of the separation regime established by the former.
The means of control that developed over Gaza were truly Orwellian and had reached scientific rational proportions—Israel was literally calculating the amount of calories entering the Strip, to ensure starvation did not occur, but not more. It was this enormous and cruel regime of control that led Gazans first, and Hamas second, to develop spaces where they were free from this control, via the construction of an underground city and transportation network beneath Gaza.
UL: So the purpose of the tunnels was not necessarily always military?
TH: No, the tunnels are a phenomenon that is actually much older. Gaza has sandy soil that is ideal for digging tunnels. Jean-Pierre Filiu in his book Gaza: A History speaks about how there was an attempted siege of Gaza in the era of Alexander the Great, where tunnels were apparently operational. In modern times, tunnels and underground spaces became a more prominent feature of the landscape when the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord was implemented after Camp David in 1981. There was a need to reassert the border between the Egyptian Sinai, the Gaza Strip and Israel at the time, because Israel had eliminated all borders after 1967 and was busy building settlements in the newly occupied territories, including within the Sinai. The Rafah refugee camp, which had been the southernmost camp in the Gaza Strip, also spilled over in this period onto the Egyptian side of the border. So when the demarcation of the old border was reinforced, Rafah was literally split in two, in some cases separating families on either side. Tunnels began to appear to allow families to reconnect with one another and the city of Rafah. Like all borderlands, Rafah became a site that was ideal for smuggling, given that there were two very different economic regimes on either side. But tunnel construction was still limited in this period as 1967 also meant Gaza’s reconnection with the West Bank, the Israeli labor market and Palestinian ancestral land within Israel.
With the onset of the Second Intifada, and particularly after Hamas was elected to power in 2006, the tunnel phenomenon really began to accelerate as Palestinians attempted to circumvent the Israeli and international blockade on the Strip. This mass construction of tunnels, and their flourishing under conditions of siege, has important political economic implications on the territory, as it led to the rise of a new set of economic elites—a smuggler class—some of whom are also linked with Hamas. As the siege became increasingly restrictive, entrepreneurial families from Rafah, many with tribal connections in North Sinai, activated networks to start bringing in a whole range of products into Gaza that had been restricted because of the siege, and which in some cases had never been allowed in Gaza or the OPT to begin with. For instance, motorcycles were prevented from being sold in the OPT by Israel because they were seen as potential weapons, but all a sudden the tunnels got sophisticated enough to bring in livestock, cars, motorcycles and tuk-tuks. Hamas also established a “ministry of tunnels,” where it monitored, taxed and controlled the products that came in, like any ministry. The aboveground road-access channels were basically controlled by Israel and the Palestinian Authority and were more expensive. Hamas also maintained independent tunnels of its own to bring in military materiel.
The tunnel phenomenon absorbed part of the enormous labor surpluses that arose out of the unemployment generated by the siege. It also arose during the latter years of the Mubarak regime, when the central Egyptian state found it difficult to exercise control over its own territorial periphery. The Egyptian military presence in Sinai is itself restricted by the Egyptian-Israeli peace accords. This period also witnessed the Arab revolutionary uprisings, the overthrow of the Mubarak regime and the brief rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood under Morsi. So it was a period where the phenomenon and expertise of tunnel building really proliferates, while there was also a lot of unregulated activity on Egypt’s borders.
When the Sisi government came to power in 2013, it attempted to organize the Egyptian side of the border more, and to centralize and control the revenue generation from both above- and underground trade. The Egyptian army subsequently destroyed the Egyptian side of Rafah together with perhaps as many as two thousand tunnels. But some tunnels would clearly remain, serving as an essential lifeline that both sides had interests in preserving, given that they provided forms of rent that the Egyptian army and Hamas were keen to preserve and control. Informally, items on Israel’s no-enter “red” list became lucrative parts of Egyptian smugglers’ “green” list.
All this is to say that there were different kinds of tunnels: commercial tunnels, resistance tunnels, attack tunnels. Resistance tunnels are internal tunnels to Gaza where freedom of movement could take place and you could have storage, for military materiel but also for foodstuffs or medical purposes. They are places for people to safely operate, becoming the basis of an alternative infrastructure that Hamas could control because everything aboveground was controlled or heavily monitored by Israel—via satellites, balloons, drones, observation posts, etc. I think all political factions also anticipated that Israel would one day attempt to reoccupy the Strip, so they prepared spaces for their people and weapons accordingly. Clearly Hamas, as the faction in power over the past eighteen years, had ample time to fashion and prep a substantial infrastructure that could meet its ends. Recall that the movement also lost considerable numbers of its top cadres in assassinations before the tunnel networks were constructed.
The tunnels below Gaza might extend as much as five hundred kilometers in length if added up, comprising perhaps as many as 1,300 individual tunnels. They are not all one network, which would be lost if one part of it was discovered. They also are apparently constructed on three different depths below ground, servicing multiple needs including protective bunkers, storage facilities, command centers, health facilities and transportation networks. The tunnel network is informally termed the “metro” in Gaza, though it is something of a legend, of course, not accessible to all Gazans but only to those affiliated with the factions, and with knowledge of it highly compartmentalized at that.
Of course, the problem from a researcher’s perspective is that nothing is independently verifiable, while Israel’s revelations on the phenomenon are also selective. You need to collate the information from different sources, while also taking into consideration many ethical and security questions as well. We don’t know when the movement decided to build this massive city under the Strip, but it’s not a stretch for Hamas to have concluded that there was a need for such spaces early on—from the time before they won the elections to more organized efforts, and then after, when they could operate more freely on the ground within the Strip, considering they had local powers and authority.
UL: We often hear that Gaza is “controlled” by Hamas. What does that mean? What has their role been?
TH: This framing implies a kind of imposed or captured nature to Hamas’s governance over the Strip, which is largely unfair. It is Israel that really controls Gaza. Hamas has limited governance powers within the Strip and tries to organize these opportunities as it sees fit, according to its vision and politics, which many Palestinians support and believe in. Hamas was also founded in the Gaza Strip and has acted as an organic part of its political scene for more than thirty years. The notion that Hamas wrested power in Gaza is also false because it resoundingly won a democratic election there and would likely win one again. This doesn’t mean they haven’t been heavy-handed at times, or that they don’t have their local enemies. But observers need to also acknowledge that Hamas was able to win over substantial sections of Gaza and Palestinian society.
The notion of Hamas wresting power comes from the fact that the movement was considered a spoiler to Israel and Western designs for the Oslo process, which preferred to have Fatah indefinitely rule the “autonomous” areas of the OPT. Fatah, via the PLO, had steered the Palestinian movement toward the Oslo track, and maintained a quietist approach, waiting for the process to bear fruit toward realizing Palestinian national aspirations on the international stage. When the process failed to realize these ends, and Oslo began to be seen as an Israeli-U.S./Western state trap, there was a wide-scale popular shift toward Hamas as the main opposition faction that warned against the dangers of Oslo initially and which was seen as a viable actor that could lead an alternative path.
For this reason, the social composition and leadership of Hamas is actually very similar to that of Fatah in the sense that it’s an educated lower- and middle-class social constituency who largely come from refugee backgrounds: teachers, doctors, engineers and traders who embrace a traditional Islamic interpretation of Palestinian national rights.
Hamas proved itself particularly effective as a grassroots organization engaged in social provision to the poor. It was part of the movement of Palestinian political activity in the 1980s that attempted to establish mass-based political parties, in a context that was previously restricted to select political actors. Hamas turned to charity work, including day-care centers, soup kitchens and health clinics, to build its social bases. It also built a student movement in universities and a women’s movement. The need for this kind of activity arose in light of the fact that there was no Palestinian government allowed at the time, as Israel ruled the OPT through military orders that were enforced by its army and “civil administration.” So Hamas, like other factions, arose in a context where they attempted to meet people’s needs, and in so doing they built a base and legitimacy of their own.
Of course, the movement would greatly evolve over the years, expanding its capacity and popularity as the PLO factions weakened. The movement’s successful 2006 parliamentary bid ushered in the era where Hamas formally entered national politics and frontally challenged Fatah’s control over the Palestinian Authority. This represented a historical shift for the movement, insofar as Hamas had disapproved of the Oslo process and the structures it created, but opted to run in elections anyway because it recognized the widespread Palestinian disaffection around the Oslo process and wished to pose a genuine alternative to it, and not just act as a spoiler. In so doing it demonstrated a kind of political maturity by daring to play the liberal democratic game.
It should be kept in mind, of course, that Palestinians were not voting for a sovereign government in the 2006 elections, but for administration of a governance structure that had limited autonomous powers to begin with, and where the Israeli occupation persisted across the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Within this framework, there was indeed a rationale for Hamas maintaining its military wing—a position which was not exceptional to Hamas either. Moreover, this position would be further substantiated in retrospect when Fatah, the international community and Israel tried to prevent Hamas from ruling after winning the elections. Essentially these powers wanted to maintain their hegemony and hierarchy over coercive force.
Of course, Hamas rule was a mixed bag. On the one hand, the movement was able to widen and consolidate its base of popular support by vocally and militarily opposing the occupation, while providing Palestinians some basic services integrated into a comprehensible vision for interpreting what Palestinians were going through. On the other hand, the movement and Palestinian society certainly paid a heavy price for this defiance, while significant parts of Gazan society and Palestinian society more broadly didn’t share its vision and felt alienated by its rule. With this said, the desperate conditions that arose in Gaza made most less interested in who sat in power per se, but with survival. That’s why you started to have this phenomenon of people leaving Gaza on boats to Greece or to Egypt. Because the situation in Gaza was unsustainable. In 2017, the UN even declared it “unlivable.”
In this respect, it’s important to maintain a broader understanding of the situation, and not become preoccupied with Hamas. Well before October 7th, and before Hamas even came to power, Gaza’s population had no potable water. Much of the population was food-insecure. Hamas didn’t create this situation—it arose out of a will to change it. It is the latest Palestinian attempt to undertake this challenge, bearing in mind the longer historical arc of grievances Palestinians have experienced since Israel’s creation as well. Of course, a key feature of Hamas’s profile is its active military wing, though this, too, was not something unique to Hamas within Palestinian organizing. It only worked to develop this dimension, doing so in a particular historical context that was seen as both conducive and rational.
UL: This brings up the question of nonmilitary alternatives to the Palestinian question. Where do these fit in within what we witness today, especially after we witnessed the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019, where thousands of peaceful demonstrators marched regularly to the Gaza perimeter?
TH: I’m glad you raise this, because events today tend to draw too much attention to the military dimensions of what’s taking place—for obvious reasons—even though this obscures the broader historical dynamic that has been at play. It’s important to underline that Hamas did not simply pursue military tactics since taking power. In fact, it extensively engaged in trying to build its political credibility internationally to gain legitimacy as a political actor that could replace the PLO and lead the national struggle.
Part of these efforts can be seen in the way the movement engaged in the electoral process, and also changed and updated its charter to be more in alignment with the PLO national consensus. It also engaged with the popular movement you mention—known as the “Great March of Return and to Break the Siege.” Basically, by 2018 you had a couple of generations of folks who had grown up under total siege in Gaza and had never even left the Strip. This army of disaffected youth began organizing marches to the Gaza perimeter fence, to protest their living conditions, explicitly calling for an end to the siege and for refugee return. Despite a very high casualty toll, these demonstrations persisted weekly for a year and a half, attempting to generate political traction. But the movement failed to bring about significant political interest internationally, and at least eight thousand unarmed protesters were shot with live ammunition. The total number of injured was staggering, as each victim was the target of Israeli snipers who relentlessly picked off protesters one after the next, week after week.
Hamas initially felt threatened by the movement, fearing how independent organizing could threaten its rule within Gaza. But then the movement actually began to throw its political and organizational weight behind the marches, because fundamentally it supported the protester’s demands and shared a desire to build international pressure to end the siege. I think Hamas also intuitively understood the importance of demonstrating that the movement was willing to support nonviolent protest and was not just an Islamic bogeyman set on violence.
In this sense the March of Return was an important political transition for Hamas because it demonstrated the movement’s political maturity and flexibility. But these events were also very significant for Gazan society because the ruthless repression of the protests over the course of a year and a half really prepared the ground for Palestinian society coming to the conclusion that there was no solution to their predicament through strictly nonviolent means—be it through an internationally sanctioned peace process (the Oslo process), or, for that matter, civil disobedience and protest campaigns like the Great March of Return. Direct coercive military force was seen as necessary as to get the situation to change.
For this reason, I was not entirely surprised with what came about on October 7th. I even suggest its possibility in an interview published right before October 7th. Because if you understood what Gazan society had been through, and if you understood how Hamas saw its role within Palestinian politics, and if you understood how the international community and Israel assumed they could indefinitely manage the contradictions of this situation, it was obvious that the status quo ante could not hold, and that Palestinians would attempt to break it.
UL: In light of this prediction, what do you expect will happen next?
TH: Hamas wanted to change the entire paradigm on October 7th, and to shock the Israeli state to its core. They wanted to inflict major military losses. They wanted to crush the military command that was enforcing the siege. They wanted to extract extensive political capital from Israel in terms of the large numbers of prisoners and to use this as leverage for political concessions from Israel and its allies. They basically aimed to force a new political dynamic overall, saying, “This is what we can do. We’re going to fight back. We’re going to inflict a heavy loss upon you. And we think we can wage a long-term war of attrition that you don’t have a solution to.” And the only way to find a solution to this issue is to address the question of Palestine, which the Gaza Strip represents the most concentrated instantiation of. Without this, there will be no solution and there will be no winners. But the era of Israeli impunity is over. If Israel can selectively interpret Oslo to establish apartheid, Palestinians can collapse the mythology of separation, and expose it for what it truly is—direct and brutal military control sponsored by Western governments.
In this context, Israel claims to seek to retrieve its captives and destroy Hamas. But months into this campaign, Israel is actually no closer to achieving these objectives, even though it is much closer to achieving a perhaps more significant historical objective of attempting to complete the Nakba in the Gaza Strip, pushing the population into North Sinai, or conducting a genocide that kills significant numbers of them.
In this regard, Israel also wants to change the rules of the game, reintroducing a mass-transfer component into the equation, as had been the case in previous eras—namely, 1967 and 1948. In this reading, the apartheid scenario established by the Oslo process ultimately proved unsustainable because Palestinians didn’t cooperate, didn’t accept their lot in the ghettos that were established for them. Now the question will be whether the U.S., and the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement in particular, can tolerate these paradigmatic shifts, and whether a regional war can be averted as well.
The political, ideological and even personal vectors at play in the scenario unfolding seem too charged at this stage to result in de-escalation. I don’t have any illusions that what is happening in Gaza is going to end anytime soon, as an exceptionally volatile period opens up the next few years that vacillates between waves of accelerated violence, followed by slower bouts of attrition, all while the threat of regional conflagrations remains ever present. While the cost is already enormous for Gazan society, the Oslo paradigm, which relied upon separation and control, has all but collapsed. Israel is now stuck in Gaza and has no solution for its people, nor any true means to eliminate the resistance there. Israel is thus also inclined to suffer increasing losses on the battlefield, while the Israeli polity itself becomes more divided and subject to splintering and even significant emigration. The West will attempt to mitigate these net effects as best it can, although there will be limits to how far it can operationally, financially and militarily protect Israel in a context where it becomes more reckless, divided and acts as a liability to itself and allies, especially if a broad international campaign also arises to demand a ceasefire and realize a just solution for the Palestinian people.
Photo credit: Marius Arnesen (Flickr, CC / BY-NC 2.0)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.