typeReports

Tareq Baconi traces the group from its inception in the Muslim Brotherhood, to an armed resistance group, and then a democratically elected party. How did the group rise to power in Gaza? What were the conditions under which they adopted violence as a strategy? Did October 7 go as planned, or was there a miscalculation? And how is Tareq making sense of this moment in time, in the face of the ongoing genocide by Israel against the people of Palestine?

"The conference on the decolonisation of Palestine was organised jointly by Progressive International, the Palestinian thinktank Al-Shabaka and the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit. The university’s academics and students have had a long history of protest and clashes with Israeli forces, and the campus has been repeatedly raided by Israeli forces over the last two years."

I was too young to have witnessed this myself; I was only two in 1985. The entry in Tata’s diary, dated August 20 of that year, notes that she had heard deeply upsetting news on TV. I assemble the rest of the scene with recycled anecdotes, which is easy to do, because that evening has become the stuff of family folklore.