Tareq Baconi serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka. He was Al-Shabaka’s US Policy Fellow from 2016 – 2017. Tareq is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah, and the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). Tareq’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, among others, and he is a frequent commentator in regional and international media. He is the book review editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies.
From this author
As the Israeli regime continues its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, many have begun to weigh in on the future of Hamas and of Palestinian leadership more broadly once the bombardment ends. One of the dominant proposals circulating amongst analysts, Palestinian and otherwise, is the revival of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with Hamas as a member party.
Hamas’s surprise offensive on October 7th, 2023, dealt the most lethal blow to the Israeli military and public since the establishment of the state in 1948. In retaliation, Israel launched the most extensive military assault on Gaza in its history, destroying large swathes of the territory and killing more than 14,000 Palestinians, over a third of whom were children.
As of 2023, Mahmoud Abbas surpasses his democratic mandate as President of the Palestinian Authority by 14 years. And as speculation mounts about his successor, the question of his legacy lingers. In a new Al-Shabaka roundtable, policy analysts Tareq Baconi, Yara Hawari, Alaa Tartir, and Tariq Kenney-Shawa reflect on Abbas’s impact on Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
This commentary is based on a lecture delivered by Al-Shabaka policy analyst, Tareq Baconi, during Birzeit University’s Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies’ annual conference. Held in May 2022, the three-day conference, titled “The Palestinian Cause in a Troubled Region,” brought scholars and experts from Palestine and beyond to examine recent global and regional trends and their implications for the Palestinian cause.
Jerusalem continues to lie at the center of political developments in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and in the shifting landscape of US and EU foreign policy toward Palestine and the Israeli regime.
From the COVID-19 pandemic to the Black Lives Matter movement, events that have unfolded on the global stage have impacted our realities over the past two years.
The Palestinian national movement is in an acute state of crisis, and the Palestinian political system and institutions are incapable of bringing the Palestinian people closer to realize their rights. The existing style of governance and models of leadership prove on a daily basis to be unfit for present and future Palestinian generations seeking equality, justice, and freedom above all.
Tareq Baconi and host Yara Hawari discuss this year in Palestine, focusing on the failure of the Palestinian leadership to provide a challenge to the Israeli regime on the ground and to unite an increasingly socially, geographically, and politically fragmented people.
Have Arab states abandoned the Palestinian people? In this policy lab, Al-Shabaka analysts Tareq Baconi and Ibrahim Fraihat join host Nur Arafeh to weigh in on the historical understanding of normalization, implications of the UAE-Israel agreement and other normalization developments across the region, and ways forward for Palestinians in light of these changing dynamics.
Historic Palestine has long had an abundance of natural resources, ranging from fresh and ground water, arable land and, more recently, oil and natural gas. In the seven decades since the establishment of the state of Israel, these resources have been compromised and exploited through a variety of measures. These include widespread Palestinian dispossession of land in the ongoing Nakba, exploitation of water through failed negotiations, and a finders-keepers approach to gas and oil found in or under occupied land.
