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The Foreign Policy of Hamas: Ideology, Decision Making and Political Supremacy
Despite the boycott Hamas was subjected to since its victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections, it has become a significant player on the international stage. It boasts a territory identifiable by its borders, internationally recognized cease-fire lines and effective authority over a population.
This book, a study in international relations, shows how Hamas willingly mobilizes Palestinian internal issues to establish its legitimacy on a global scale, and at the same time, uses its relations with non-Palestinian players to compete against its political rivals on the Palestinian national stage. Leila Seurat reveals that Hamas's foreign and internal policy are strongly intertwined and centred mainly on Hamas's quest for recognition. The book then is a comprehensive diplomatic history of Palestine, focused on the political orientations of Hamas towards both Israel and other countries. Its coverage spans the movement's victory in 2006 up until more recent momentous events, including, Hamas' response to Trump's 'deal of the century' and Israel's announcement of the annexation of the Jordan Valley, as well as the proclamation of normalization accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and the impact of Covid19. The book is based on Leila Seurat's extensive fieldwork and interviews with Hamas's leading officials across the West Bank, Gaza, Damascus, Geneva and Beirut in addition to recent video-conferences planned by various NGOs and attended by West Bank, Gaza and Diaspora Palestinians.
This book, a study in international relations, shows how Hamas willingly mobilizes Palestinian internal issues to establish its legitimacy on a global scale, and at the same time, uses its relations with non-Palestinian players to compete against its political rivals on the Palestinian national stage. Leila Seurat reveals that Hamas's foreign and internal policy are strongly intertwined and centred mainly on Hamas's quest for recognition. The book then is a comprehensive diplomatic history of Palestine, focused on the political orientations of Hamas towards both Israel and other countries. Its coverage spans the movement's victory in 2006 up until more recent momentous events, including, Hamas' response to Trump's 'deal of the century' and Israel's announcement of the annexation of the Jordan Valley, as well as the proclamation of normalization accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and the impact of Covid19. The book is based on Leila Seurat's extensive fieldwork and interviews with Hamas's leading officials across the West Bank, Gaza, Damascus, Geneva and Beirut in addition to recent video-conferences planned by various NGOs and attended by West Bank, Gaza and Diaspora Palestinians.
312 pages, Paperback
Published March 24, 2022
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February 28, 2024
This book changed how I think about Hamas.
First of all, let's get something out of the way: this is totally apolitical stuff. It's neither an apologia for the group nor a denunciation of it. In other words, it's not really "pro" or "anti" Hamas. I wouldn't even say it's neutral, since it simply doesn't concern itself with whether Hamas's actions are justified (or not) or helpful (or not) in achieving its goals.
What the heck is it, then? It's just a bunch of analyses about how Hamas operates. The analyses cover all the different tensions and factors that drive Hamas's decision making as it interacts with external players (Qatar, Fatah, Israel, Iran, Syria, the US, etc.). It's based on a deep bench of primary source interviews that Seurat conducted with key players in and outside Hamas.
There's a lot here to dig your teeth into. Unsurprisingly, there are endless instances where Israel and the US take actions that ironically end up benefitting Hamas. For example, certain US decisions that were ostensibly meant to harm Hamas -- including restricting funds to Gaza after the Hamas takeover and labelling Hamas as a terrorist organization -- ended up essentially forcing Hamas to finally turn to Iran for aid. Until that point, Hamas leadership had largely shied away from Iran because it did not want Hamas's strictly nationalist Palestinian movement to be contorted to support Iran's broader anti-American and anti-western agenda. Another example: Israel's economic blockade of Gaza only ended up strengthening Hamas. Why? Because Hamas controls the smuggling tunnels. The blockade massively shrunk the aid and revenue that had previously supported the strip, but virtually all of the smaller pool of profits that did eke its way into the strip came through the tunnels and thus went straight to Hamas. The end result is that Hamas was able to tighten its control even as the average resident suffered a loss of services and resources.
Sometimes stuff gets weird because Hamas has four key leadership constituencies -- the inside leadership (in Gaza), external leadership (currently largely in Qatar), those in Israeli prisons, and those in the West Bank -- that each bring different interests and skillsets to the table. The inside leadership is generally more radical than the external leadership, which often values the concessions that allow Hamas to secure foreign funding, which in turn allows external leadership to maintain influence by lording economic support over the Gazan leaders that can't otherwise fundraise because they cannot physically leave Gaza. The decision making process among these four groups is almost entirely decentralized, as various groups provide input in what seems to be a dynamic process. That should inform how we view hostage negotiations, which percolate among these four groups. It should also inform how we view the relative value of eliminating leadership, which may be less valuable in a decentralized ecosystem.
There's all kinds of other stuff. They play up their ideology to certain allies but instead emphasize shared interests with others. They have personal rivalries and power contests and those sometimes spill over into foreign policy decisions. They maximize foreign diplomacy by remaining vague about leadership titles, because some countries will allow visits from things like ministers of state while others may only allow representatives of interest groups or of the PLO. They find ways to take advantage of a crisis to manufacture new legitimacy. For example, after a border migration crisis in Rafah, the Egyptian government was forced to finally acknowledge and work with Hamas -- which it had hitherto refused to do -- because it wanted to achieve the shared goal of constructing a border fence. There are dozens of other angles like this.
Leila Seurat is a French professor that specializes in... exactly this. I found her book after reading a post-Oct 7 article she wrote for the Foreign Affairs journal. Click here to read -- it's free if you give them your email. Anyway, she's a professor, so the book is pretty technical. It's a dry and dense read that assumes deep prior knowledge and is full of academic theory. The writing sucked on a technical level, and that made it pretty confusing to follow what were otherwise already pretty complicated arguments.
I would probably only recommend the book to folks that are writing dissertation-level papers or that have otherwise achieved the trifecta of being like, potentially on the spectrum, and unfortunately landing on Hamas as their special interest, and already having read Sara Roy's Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector and Tareq Baconi's Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance and Beverley Milton-Edwards's Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement. Those are probably the most serious and well-respected books on the subject besides this one. But if you can't get enough, then it's true that Seurat put together a level of super interesting substantive content from primary sources that you just can't get anywhere else.
Rating: 5/5 for the unbelievably thorough primary source information, but 1/5 or 2/5 for how poorly it was presented. Settling on a 3/5.
First of all, let's get something out of the way: this is totally apolitical stuff. It's neither an apologia for the group nor a denunciation of it. In other words, it's not really "pro" or "anti" Hamas. I wouldn't even say it's neutral, since it simply doesn't concern itself with whether Hamas's actions are justified (or not) or helpful (or not) in achieving its goals.
What the heck is it, then? It's just a bunch of analyses about how Hamas operates. The analyses cover all the different tensions and factors that drive Hamas's decision making as it interacts with external players (Qatar, Fatah, Israel, Iran, Syria, the US, etc.). It's based on a deep bench of primary source interviews that Seurat conducted with key players in and outside Hamas.
There's a lot here to dig your teeth into. Unsurprisingly, there are endless instances where Israel and the US take actions that ironically end up benefitting Hamas. For example, certain US decisions that were ostensibly meant to harm Hamas -- including restricting funds to Gaza after the Hamas takeover and labelling Hamas as a terrorist organization -- ended up essentially forcing Hamas to finally turn to Iran for aid. Until that point, Hamas leadership had largely shied away from Iran because it did not want Hamas's strictly nationalist Palestinian movement to be contorted to support Iran's broader anti-American and anti-western agenda. Another example: Israel's economic blockade of Gaza only ended up strengthening Hamas. Why? Because Hamas controls the smuggling tunnels. The blockade massively shrunk the aid and revenue that had previously supported the strip, but virtually all of the smaller pool of profits that did eke its way into the strip came through the tunnels and thus went straight to Hamas. The end result is that Hamas was able to tighten its control even as the average resident suffered a loss of services and resources.
Sometimes stuff gets weird because Hamas has four key leadership constituencies -- the inside leadership (in Gaza), external leadership (currently largely in Qatar), those in Israeli prisons, and those in the West Bank -- that each bring different interests and skillsets to the table. The inside leadership is generally more radical than the external leadership, which often values the concessions that allow Hamas to secure foreign funding, which in turn allows external leadership to maintain influence by lording economic support over the Gazan leaders that can't otherwise fundraise because they cannot physically leave Gaza. The decision making process among these four groups is almost entirely decentralized, as various groups provide input in what seems to be a dynamic process. That should inform how we view hostage negotiations, which percolate among these four groups. It should also inform how we view the relative value of eliminating leadership, which may be less valuable in a decentralized ecosystem.
There's all kinds of other stuff. They play up their ideology to certain allies but instead emphasize shared interests with others. They have personal rivalries and power contests and those sometimes spill over into foreign policy decisions. They maximize foreign diplomacy by remaining vague about leadership titles, because some countries will allow visits from things like ministers of state while others may only allow representatives of interest groups or of the PLO. They find ways to take advantage of a crisis to manufacture new legitimacy. For example, after a border migration crisis in Rafah, the Egyptian government was forced to finally acknowledge and work with Hamas -- which it had hitherto refused to do -- because it wanted to achieve the shared goal of constructing a border fence. There are dozens of other angles like this.
Leila Seurat is a French professor that specializes in... exactly this. I found her book after reading a post-Oct 7 article she wrote for the Foreign Affairs journal. Click here to read -- it's free if you give them your email. Anyway, she's a professor, so the book is pretty technical. It's a dry and dense read that assumes deep prior knowledge and is full of academic theory. The writing sucked on a technical level, and that made it pretty confusing to follow what were otherwise already pretty complicated arguments.
I would probably only recommend the book to folks that are writing dissertation-level papers or that have otherwise achieved the trifecta of being like, potentially on the spectrum, and unfortunately landing on Hamas as their special interest, and already having read Sara Roy's Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector and Tareq Baconi's Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance and Beverley Milton-Edwards's Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement. Those are probably the most serious and well-respected books on the subject besides this one. But if you can't get enough, then it's true that Seurat put together a level of super interesting substantive content from primary sources that you just can't get anywhere else.
Rating: 5/5 for the unbelievably thorough primary source information, but 1/5 or 2/5 for how poorly it was presented. Settling on a 3/5.
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