Downstream: The Truth About Hamas, October 7th & Israel’s Ongoing Genocide w/ Tareq Baconi

Novara Media

Philosophy, News, Politics, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2025

⏱️ 85 minutes

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Summary

Since Hamas launched its assault on October 7th, 2023, the group has become synonymous with evil in large parts of the Western media. Condemnation has come at the expense of critical engagement with the group’s actions, objectives, and history, leaving a vacuum that has been filled with racist assumptions and conspiracy theories.

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian scholar whose doctoral thesis on Hamas was published in 2018 as a book, ‘Hamas Contained’. The book drew on interviews with the organisation’s leaders and their archives. Tareq’s goal when writing it was to ‘get out of the way’ and let the group speak for itself. Tareq’s newest book, ‘A Fire in Every Direction,’ is a memoir about growing up as a queer Palestinian man in Amman. The title is a reference to Tareq’s activist mother, who fought for Palestinian liberation from exile.

In conversation with Ash Sarkar, Tareq 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?

Transcript

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0:00.0	There are some things you're simply not allowed to do in British media,
0:11.4	and prime amongst them is talk about Hamas as if they're anything other than brutal, bloodthirsty, monstrous and irrational.
0:20.0	But that moralistic framing doesn't really tell you anything about anything.
0:26.6	How did Hamas come to govern Gaza?
0:29.5	Why did they choose to contest elections at all?
0:33.1	What was the strategic reasoning behind October 7th?
0:37.6	And what does the future hold for Palestinian armed struggle after more than two years of ongoing genocide?
0:44.8	Terak Bikoni is one of the very few people I've heard addressing these questions in public.
0:50.0	His 2018 book Hamas contained is an immaculately researched analysis of the period between 2007 and 2017,
0:59.6	when Hamas and Israel occupied an uneasy equilibrium.
1:03.5	We talk about the history of Hamas and how the movement might evolve,
1:06.4	but we also talk about his beautiful memoir published this year called Fire in Every Direction, about his upbringing in Jordan. I hope you enjoy the interview. Tarek Bikoni, welcome to Downstream. Thank you for having me. I've been wanting to do this for so long. I've been so, so excited. So we're here to talk about two of your books. One is Hamas contained. the other is fire in every direction. They are two
1:27.8	very different kind of books. I realized when I opened the second one, expecting a follow-up to
1:32.6	Hamas-contained and got a really beautiful memoir instead. How many other people had that experience?
1:38.6	I'm pretty sure quite a few. I leave people on their toes. I was like, when's the
1:43.1	a Sinai going to be in this one. He does not feature.
1:46.0	He does not pop up. So we're going to talk about these two separately.
1:51.1	In terms of Hamas contained, which is really, it's an analysis of the period, you know, post-Oslo, up to 2018.
2:01.7	What led you to write not just a book on Hamas, but that book on Hamas?
2:06.5	Well, I mean, the book came out of my doctorate thesis.
2:09.8	During my doctorate, I was focused on a very particular period.
2:12.6	I was looking at Hamas between 2000 and 2010.
	...

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