 Thank you, Dina, for this introduction and for sharing the panel and Hassan and the LMEI for inviting me. It's an honor for me to be presenting my book at SOWAS. So what I want to do today is to try to speak for about 40 minutes or so and then hopefully have an engaging Q&A because that's always my favorite part. So I want to start by talking about the Gaza Strip. For most people reading Western media, the image they have of the Gaza Strip tends to be one of two things. It's either seen in an apocalyptic light as a strip of land that's been thoroughly destroyed where humanitarian suffering is unprecedented or it's seen as a terrorist haven, a piece of land that is run by an unruly terrorist organization that has taken the people of Gaza hostage in order to run a campaign of terror against Israel. It's exceedingly difficult for most people sitting in this country and other countries in the West to step beyond these two extremes and to make sense of the broader political context in which the Gaza Strip exists. Both these views, while certainly reductionist, contain an element of truth in them. In the Gaza Strip we have nearly two million Palestinians locked in a land mass the size of Philadelphia. The population, to say nothing of the infrastructure, has been suffering for more than a decade under a tightly controlled blockade that is administered by Israel and Egypt. The blockade ensures that the movement of goods and humans into and out of the Gaza Strip is severely restricted. The humanitarian suffering is so extreme that the UN has warned the Gaza Strip that it could become uninhabitable by 2020. A key reason for the blockade, we're consistently told, is that in 2007, so 11 years ago, the Gaza Strip was taken over by Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, a group that is designated a terrorist organization by most Western countries. I began the research that culminated in my book a year before, in 2006, when Hamas was democratically elected to form a government by the Palestinians living within the occupied territories. Through my research, I wanted to understand the different and often conflicting narratives that comprise this movement. The same organization that was responsible for horrific suicide bombings throughout Israel also ran an expansive social welfare program that enhanced the lives of thousands of Palestinians. The same movement that declared its constitution was the Quran was also a movement that ran and won democratic political elections. The inconsistencies within Hamas are endless, as are the misrepresentations that any talk of Hamas might elicit, and of course the strong emotions that come with talking about Hamas. Under the rubric of terrorism specifically, all efforts to complicate our understanding of Hamas are overwhelmingly met with opposition. There's no doubt that Hamas carries out terrorist activities within Israel and the Palestinian territories. The movement itself, through its various publications, explains how it seeks to create terror in order to pressure the Israeli government to end its occupation of Palestinian land. An occupation that last year entered its fifth decade. Hamas' actions also fit into the definition of terrorism used by the U.S. Department of State, and here I'm quoting, terrorism is premeditated, politically motivated violence, perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. Those, this definition fits Hamas' activities. But while Hamas itself admits that it uses such tactics, it vehemently rejects being designated a terrorist organization, and that's another inconsistency. The logic underpinning the seeming contradiction is the absence of a single definition of what constitutes terrorism. The term is malleable, it's subjective, and it's been used as an act of war and manipulated by countries, particularly countries in the West, to justify their actions in various places around the world, including the Middle East. More importantly, the definition given by the State Department is strongly contested. For example, why is terrorism limited to subnational groups or clandestine agents if states are the biggest perpetrators of violence against civilians, which is certainly the case in Israel-Palestine? And in such accusations, where is there room for the legitimate resistance against an occupation that is deemed illegal by international law? So, what I try to do in my book is to move beyond this discourse, to move beyond this rhetoric, which is ultimately ineffective at communicating or explaining what Hamas is, why it engages in these activities, and what its goals are. Instead of viewing Hamas as an anomalous terrorist organization that had somehow inexplicably emerged within the Palestinian territories, my work places the movement squarely within the context of the Palestinian national movement and its struggle for liberation. From this standpoint, I trace the architecture of Hamas's reality. On its own terms, Hamas contained offers a 30-year history of the movement from 1987 to 2017, written from the perspective of Hamas itself. The book constructs a counter-narrative, a storyline that is often elided in our analysis and understanding of Hamas. I do this by relying almost exclusively on Arabic source material published by Hamas over the course of this 30-year period, including Palestine, al-Muslima, and al-Risala, which are the two mouthpieces that the movement publishes in Beirut and in Gaza. I also rely on extensive interviews with Hamas's members across its rank and file, both its internal leadership and its external leadership. As one might expect, the insight that emerges from such sustained engagement complicates efforts to dismiss Hamas as a blood-thirsty and irrational actor. Without condoning Hamas's activities or its ideology, my work demonstrates how Hamas is the latest manifestation of Palestinian nationalism. In my book, I argue that Hamas's current isolation within the Gaza Strip is a product of, among other things, Israel's long-standing inability and unwillingness to address core political drivers that have long animated the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. So in the next 40 minutes or so, I want to give a brief historical snapshot to contextualize these assertions before making three analytical interventions that I hope will pave the way for a good Q&A. So in the book, I begin this story on the eve of Hamas's founding at the beginning of the First Intifada. So this was a time when Palestinians across the occupied territories engaged in widespread acts of civil disobedience to disrupt the occupation. Palestinians planned their mass protests with leaflets and other underground forms of communication. On December 14, 1987, only a few days after the Intifada began, an unusual leaflet surfaced, celebrating the eruption of the Intifada. The authors of the memo denounced the incumbent Palestinian leadership for failing to end the occupation, which by then had already lasted 20 years. They presented an alternative liberation project, and the memo quoted, Islam is the solution and the alternative. The unusual memo did not yet bear the name of Hamas, which is the Arabic acronym for Harekat al-Mqawama al-Islamiyyah, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Nonetheless, this leaflet marked Hamas's first appearance within the Palestinian territories and with it the first formal indication that a new force had emerged within the Palestinian national movement. This is Hamas's logo. A few months after this memo appeared, in August 1988, Hamas issued its charter, a document that outlined the movement's mission, values, and goals. The charter articulated Hamas's motto as, and this is a quote, God is its goal, the messenger, the prophet Muhammad is its leader, the Quran is its constitution, Jihad is its methodology, and death for the sake of God is its most coveted desire. End quote. Alongside its Islamic nature, the charter defined Hamas as a distinct Palestinian movement. In that sense, Hamas emerged as a party that rose on Islam to define a particular political agenda, what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls a form of Islam or nationalism, a means of combining Islamic identity with nationalism. Like all nationalist movements, Hamas constructed a rich historical narrative to underpin its nascent ideological program, going back to the earliest days of the Palestinian opposition to Zionism at the turn of the 20th century. The charter celebrated a person who we see here on the left, who is often seen as the first true marker of Palestinian nationalism, a Syrian fighter named Az-Din Al-Qassam, who was a key figure in the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939 against British colonialism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine. Hamas mythologized Al-Qassam as the forefather of Islamic resistance in Palestine. The movement manipulated and exaggerated such legacies in a manner that allowed it to inflate a narrative of continuous Palestinian Islamist opposition to Zionism throughout the decades preceding and following the formation of the State of Israel, which in its charter Hamas made clear its refusal to recognize. Instead, the documents stressed the indivisibility of the land of historic Palestine, which was defined and quoting as an Islamic land entrusted to the Muslim generations until judgment day. End quote. Through its charter, Hamas spoke of creating an Islamic polity over Palestine, one that would allow for Christians and Jews to live in peace and harmony under Muslim rule. Despite this assertion, the rest of the charter shed light on Hamas' problematic understanding of Israel, Judaism and Zionism. The text was replete with anti-Semitic references that built on age-old stereotypes about the Jewish people, including their alleged accumulation of immense wealth, their treacherous and devious nature, and their ability to influence global media. Hamas' official launch in 1988 with the charter coincided with the major developments that were taking place in the wider trajectory of the Palestinian national movement. Decades before Hamas had come into being in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization, or the PLO, was created as an umbrella organization that could bring together the different Palestinian factions working towards national liberation. The PLO's core objective was initially back then the liberation of the entirety of the land of historic Palestine through military means, to secure the right to self-determination and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees who had been expelled from or fled their homes upon the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the PLO waged a global revolutionary struggle against Israel, leading to its designation as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and its marginalization from all forms of diplomatic engagement. The PLO's formal entry into the diplomatic field came in late 1988, coincidentally a few months after Hamas issued its charter. This followed a long process of recalibration within the PLO's leadership, whereby the movement indicated its willingness to accept the Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. This milestone by the PLO was of immense significance within the Palestinian struggle and one we often forget today, as it signaled the PLO's readiness to recognize Israel, to concede 78 percent of Palestinian land that had been lost in 1948 and its willingness to officially renounce the use of arms resistance. Through Arafat's declaration in 1988, the PLO transitioned into a diplomatic track that was focused on achieving statehood on a mere 22 percent of historic Palestine. The PLO's concessions were anathema for Hamas, whose charter proclaimed that Jihad for the liberation of Palestine is obligatory. Jihad here was defined not as a tactic, but rather as a holistic strategy around which the Palestinian community could rally. It comprised political, economic, social, and cultural facets, or what Hamas describes as an Islamic renaissance project. Waging the Jihad continues to be understood by Hamas as a way of being, as existing in a state of war or espousing a belligerent relationship with the enemy. So even in the absence of military operations, evoking Jihad conjures a sense of identity and purpose that reaffirms the Palestinian rejection of Israeli rule. Hamas dismissed diplomatic efforts as contrary to its ideology, primarily because they were premised on the partition of Palestine, but also because Hamas believed they were unlikely to secure core Palestinian rights, including the right of return. So with Hamas's charter being issued in August 1988 and the PLO's strategic shift a few months later, 1988 became a turning point, a moment of transition in the Palestinian national struggle. In that year, the PLO was resolved to sustain the imagined purity of the Palestinian nationalist struggle, which is full liberation of historic Palestine, dismantling of the Zionist entity. That appeared to wane. Almost seamlessly, Islamic nationalism rose to carry the mantle forward. Instead of armed struggle to regain the occupied homeland, as the PLO had once expressed its vision, Hamas stated there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except through Jihad. While the PLO had risen at a time of global revolutionary anti-colonialism, Hamas emerged against the backdrop of resurgent Islamism across the Middle East. The movement articulated the core demands of Palestinian nationalism that had previously animated the PLO in a different ideological framing than the nationalists of the 1960s. In the occupied territories, Hamas immediately challenged the PLO's redirection of the Palestinian struggle into the diplomatic arena. And it began competing for the leadership of the interfather. It began expanding as well its military capabilities. By the early 1990s, Hamas had morphed into a powerful player. And here on the right, we see Azid-Din al-Qassam brigades, which is Hamas's military wing. And you see it continuing to be rooted in this myth of the Azid-Din al-Qassam of the 1930s. Hamas believed that the lessons that the PLO had learned regarding the limitations of armed struggle and its own path towards concessions over the course of the three decades leading up to 1988 were not relevant for Hamas. The movement thought that in its case, success was preordained. Its own Islamic character would offer a robust ideological framework through which it would offset all the worldly pressures that had undermined the PLO before it. The PLO's shift to diplomacy was a few years later concretized with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. These accords entailed the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO and led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, ostensibly the embryo of a future Palestinian state. From the onset, Hamas condemned the Oslo Accords and throughout the 1990s, Hamas's military operations, including the use of suicide bombings, took the form of typical spoiler attacks that were aimed strategically at undermining the viability of any kind of peace negotiations. I'm not going to go into whether the Oslo Accords would have succeeded or not without Hamas. The debates around the peace process and the Oslo Accords continue to this day. But nonetheless, Hamas's actions were instrumental in derailing the negotiations in the mid-1990s and allowing for Benjamin Netanyahu to be elected into office in 1996. While Israel and the PLO continued paying lip service to the peace talks, it became increasingly evident that a final settlement was unlikely. Hamas's leaders maintained that Jihad, rather than diplomacy, was the only way the Palestinian Territories could be liberated. Hamas's vision was portrayed as one that would yield liberation, pride, dignity, while the PLO's policies of negotiations conformed to what Hamas called a life of humiliation under a despicable occupation. Their evidence for this was the Palestinian Authority that had assumed the functions of states under the Oslo Accords while still existing under Israel's occupation. This message resonated very strongly with the Palestinians, who by 2000 were deeply resentful of Oslo's failure. And here you see the expansion of Israel's settlement enterprise over the period that was ostensibly to lead to a Palestinian state. After the PLO had made a significant concession of recognizing Israel in the hope that a Palestinian state would emerge, Israel's colonization of Palestinian land through expanding Jewish settlements had continued relentlessly throughout the process of negotiations, affirming for many the belief that Israel would never relinquish its hold over the Palestinian Territories. The eruption of the Second Intifada in 2000 radically altered the landscape between Israel and the Palestinians. Unlike the First Intifada, this uprising rapidly militarized, leading to the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel's Prime Minister in February 2001. A deeply controversial figure within Israel itself, Sharon was despised by the Palestinians, given that he had built a military and political career that was rooted in destroying all semblance of Palestinian nationalism. Many viewed his mission as aimed at the pacification of the Palestinian Territories and their inhabitants. In other words, subjugating Palestinians to Israeli rule without conferring any political rights and without incurring any resistance. Sharon's election had far-reaching consequences, with the immediate effect being that the Second Intifada transitioned into a war of attrition. Sharon expanded Israel's military crackdown across the Palestinian Territories. Here, we have two images that probably evoke what the Second Intifada looked like for Israelis and Palestinians. On the left, we have a suicide bombing carried out by Hamas in Jerusalem in 2002. And on the right, we have an operation carried out by Sharon about a month, about a year before that in the Janine refugee camp in the West Bank that led to the complete decimation of the refugee camp. So less than a month after Sharon came into office, Hamas carried out its first suicide operation since the beginning of the uprising. That was about 18 months after the Second Intifada had begun. Hamas, funnily enough, wasn't the initial instigator of armed resistance from the Palestinian side. But on March 4, 2001, Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing, detonating explosives in Netanya, Israel, killing three Israelis and injuring 66. With that operation, Hamas rapidly became the central instigator of armed resistance against Israel. Its military approach was strategic, and it took the form of what its leaders referred to as the balance of terror. As they explained it, in return for the brutal and indiscriminate killing of elderly women and children within the Palestinian territories, now the Zionists also suffer from being killed. Now, Israeli buses have no one riding in them, and Israeli shopping centers are not what they used to be. Using terror was a tool for Hamas to try to deter Israeli attacks against Palestinians by forcing Israel to anticipate the inevitable retaliation that Hamas would carry out. Both fronts locked horns in an increasingly deadly spiral. Hamas' goal in using violent operations was clear from the onset, as one of its leaders noted, and I'm quoting here, I'm not saying that the Intifada will lead to the complete liberation of Palestinian land from the river to the sea. Still, the Intifada can achieve the complete withdrawal from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem without giving up on 80% of Palestine. So Hamas' leaders believed that if enough pain was inflicted on the Israeli public, they would force their government to end the occupation and allow for the emergence of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines. In this strategy was an implicit acceptance of the notion of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, with an important difference that Hamas would refuse to recognize Israel. Instead, its acceptance of the 1967 lines was couched within the framework of a long-term ceasefire or a hudna that would break the cycle of civilian deaths and allow for Palestinian self-determination. Hamas believed that the PLO's past experience of having recognized Israel in 1988 and receiving nothing in return underscored to them that Israel was not a benevolent occupier, and that the end of the occupation should be gained by force. The movement's publications explained that the PLO's experience verified that, and I'm quoting, a return of the lands with truncated sovereignty, subservience to the occupation, deformation of Jerusalem, and without the rights of refugees. That's what Hamas believed negotiations would entail. In other words, without any of the core elements that constitute Palestinian nationalism, which is self-determination, the right of the return of refugees and the capital in Jerusalem. Hamas's conviction that violence would force Israel to relinquish its hold on the territories, in my opinion, reflected a fundamental misunderstanding on its part regarding how Israel would react. Sharon had no interest in dealing with Palestinian political demands or engaging with Hamas. Marrying the manner in which successive Israeli governments had once dealt with the PLO, the Israeli Prime Minister presented Palestinian resistance broadly and Hamas specifically as a form of terrorism, in this case akin to Al-Qaeda, bent on the destruction of the State of Israel. This charge carried a great deal of weight with the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, particularly after the attacks of September 11. With a green light from the U.S., Israel responded to the Second Intifada with an iron fist, entirely pulverizing the Palestinian political and security establishment. For Hamas, this meant a series of high-profile targeted assassinations that killed off its top leadership, including its founders. More lasting, however, was Sharon's decision to respond to the uprising by unilaterally reconfiguring the structure of the occupation. On December 18, 2003, Sharon told the crowd gathered at the 4th Herzliya Conference north of Tel Aviv that Israel would initiate what he called the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians. Reducing the number of Israelis settled within the Palestinian area of the Gaza Strip. Simultaneously, Sharon stated, and I'm quoting, Israel will strengthen its control of other areas in the land of Israel, which will constitute an inseparable part of the State of Israel, of course, referring here to the West Bank. Sharon's disengagement plan entailed the withdrawal of 9,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. While Sharon's effort was lauded in the U.S. and internationally as a heroic act of peace, the motivations behind this withdrawal were more cynical. This unilateral disengagement was in line with Sharon's long-standing political goals of ensuring that Israel would control maximum Palestinian territories with minimum Palestinian inhabitants. By removing 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza from Israel's direct jurisdiction, Israel was able to maintain its control over the territories of the West Bank without threatening its overall Jewish majority. In other words, Sharon's disengagement was a form of demographic engineering. Sharon's initiative also reflected a continuation of his refusal to pursue any form of political engagement with the Palestinians. As his top aide, Dov Weiss Klass, explicitly articulated in an interview with Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, and I'm quoting, that disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians. So by the end of the Antifa diet had become clear to Hamas' leaders that its attacks were neither effective nor sustainable. Rather than forcing Israel to relinquish its hold, the attacks had provided Sharon with a pretext to consolidate Israel's hold over the territories in a manner that safeguarded its own interests. Moreover, rather than deter Israel from attacking Palestinians, Hamas' operations had given Israel the excuse to entirely decimate the Palestinian political establishment. So Hamas began seeking alternative means to ensure the sustainability of its ideological platform beyond the military arena. The opportunity to do this came unexpectedly under the guise of the Bush administration's democratization agenda. As part of the U.S. war on terror, and following the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration encouraged the Palestinians to undergo elections and to create a new government that, quote, does not support terrorism. The death of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian struggle in 2004, affirmed the need for the Palestinians to rebuild their political program from the ashes of the second Antifa. After much deliberation among its leadership, Hamas decided to engage in the political process and run in the elections. Importantly, Hamas stressed that the second Antifa had rendered the Oslo Accords obsolete. In a clear contradiction to the vision of the Bush administration, Hamas was seeking to rebuild a new Palestinian political program that was no longer rooted in the principles of peacemaking that had guided the discussions between Israelis and Palestinians to date. Hamas argued that rather than remain committed to the notions of gradual state building under overarching Israeli hegemony, Palestinians needed to reconstitute their struggle back to the goal of liberation. In other words, to return to the PLO and to return to the Palestinian political establishment pre-Oslo, to a point pre-1988, which is when the PLO conceded on the partition of Palestine. This sentiment spoke to many Palestinians who believed that negotiations had merely produced a compliant Palestinian leadership that in effect allowed Israel to outsource its occupation. So in January 2006, in a historic watershed, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections. Proclamations of tsunami, earthquake, and coup peppered the movement's publications. While there were many factors for Hamas's victory, the movement interpreted this milestone as a revolution to dismantle the Oslo project. As a senior leader stated, and I'm quoting, this is a peaceful coup on the present political reality, which was born out of defeat, corruption, and acquiescence to rotten political solutions. These results are an excellent political renewal, as if the Palestinian people are reborn, and it's a new birth for the project of resistance, for the development of a society of resistance. Reaffirming this renewal, another leader told me, we will not be in the politics of free concessions. What was before January 25, 2006, will be different from what comes after, in terms of the mechanisms for engaging with the Zionist enemy. Because that old manner of dealing with the enemy did not produce any gains on the ground. It produced castles in the sky. End quote. In other words, rather than accepting the premise of the PLA, the PA that Hamas had just joined, Hamas's election was seen as an accidental revolution that was aimed at dismantling the PA, and reviving the PLO. Hamas looked towards a different form of politics, to develop a defiant Palestinian government that refused to engage with or facilitate Israel's control over Palestinian land. Hamas's victory caused utter confusion within the Bush administration. The most immediate reaction was trepidation regarding the place of a designated terrorist organization in public office. As Elliot Abrams, a senior member of the administration noted, and I'm quoting, legally we have to treat Hamas as we treat Al Qaeda. End quote. In high level meetings within the White House, shortly after Hamas's victory was confirmed, it was quickly decided that the optimal response to deal with Hamas's victory was to adopt a strategy that would overturn the results of the democratic election. To isolate Hamas, and to reassert the PLO's dominance. A plan was developed that included military, financial, and diplomatic efforts to undermine Hamas's government in order to ensure the continuation of the Oslo project. International engagement with Hamas was predicated on three conditions. Commitment to the principles of non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations signed with the PLO. These preconditions mirrored the same preconditions that the PLO had faced two decades prior to Hamas's victory. Hamas consistently upheld the failed experience of the PLO after these conditions as a lesson for how not to repeat the same mistakes. So instead of outright concessions, throughout the months that followed its election victory, Hamas officially indicated a willingness to accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders without conceding any trump cards, in the form of the right to arm struggle and all recognition of Israel. This is what Khaled Mishal said at the time, and I'm quoting. Khaled Mishal Sari being the head of Hamas's political bureau at that time. As a Palestinian, I speak of an Arab and a Palestinian demand to have a state on the 67 borders. By inference, this will mean that there is an entity or a state called Israel on the rest of the Palestinian land. That is a reality, and I will not deal with this reality by recognizing it or validating it. It's just a reality based on historic circumstance. Today, we speak of a Palestinian and Arab preparedness to accept a Palestinian state on the 67 borders. The question is, is there an Israeli, American, or international readiness to recognize this? End quote. Such assertions were deemed insufficient as a means of engagement with the movement. Instead, Israel and the US maintained a strategy of direct intervention on every level of government within the Palestinian territories to overturn the election results, ultimately facilitating the eruption of a bloody domestic clash within the Palestinian territories between Hamas and the forces of the Palestinian authority. Following a few days of intense fighting in 2007, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, while the West Bank remained under the control of the Palestinian authority. This split marked the beginning of the reality we live in today, which is the institutional and political rupture of the Palestinian territories and Hamas' containment and isolation in Gaza. Immediately after Hamas' takeover of the Strip, an international boycott of the movement was reconstituted to focus directly on the Gaza Strip in the form of a blockade. All five crossings leading into the territory from Israel were shut, as was the Rafah border with Egypt, hermetically sealing the Strip. Israel cut fuel shipments by half and reduced the import into Gaza to the minimum amount of food and medical supplies required for survival. The blockade's philosophy was this. While the West Bank could be embraced and empowered, Gaza was to be ring-fenced. Once Gazans suffered and their lives were badly hit relative to West Bankers, they would revolt against Hamas' political program. This would pave the way for Hamas' collapse and the return of the Palestinian authority to the Gaza Strip, thereby reunifying the Palestinian territories under a single leadership committed to negotiations with Israel. Apart from the fact that this approach constituted a form of collective punishment of two million Palestinians in Gaza, it's also failed. Instead of the collapse of Hamas' government, since 2007, the movement has consolidated its grip within the Gaza Strip and created what it calls a government of resistance. Here, we have Hamas' political leadership today. We have Yahya Sinwar on the right, who is the head of Hamas, and on the left is Maid Haniya, who's the prime minister. The blockade, Hamas has worked to institutionalize the notion of resistance into the very fabric of daily life in the Gaza Strip, whether economic, social, or military. While the Palestinian authority is today seen as an entity that's complicit with the occupation, Hamas wanted to create a governing entity that was defiant in the face of Israel's occupation. Effectively, we have two national strategies that have become institutionalized over different parts of the Palestinian territories. Hamas remains committed to the notion of armed struggle, while in the West Bank, the Palestinian authority continues to pursue economic development under the guise of negotiations. These strategies today compete for legitimacy, even though they've both failed to elicit any political concessions from Israel, which continues to control all aspects of life in the entirety of the Palestinian territories. So we remain in this fragmented reality today. The rupture within the Palestinian territories and the Israeli efforts to contain and isolate Hamas in the Gaza Strip builds on and reinforces several lasting dynamics. So in the few minutes I have left, I want to make three interventions that can perhaps explain some of the contemporary implications of this history and offer some insight into the themes that I try to explore in my book. The first intervention I make is that with Hamas's containment and isolation in the Gaza Strip, Israel has been able to legitimate policies of separation of Gaza that actually long predate Hamas. Gaza has always presented an exceptional challenge for Israel, even though it forms only 1.3 percent of the land of historic Palestine. This is primarily because of its population density, which threatens to offset Israel's Jewish majority, as well as the fact that two-thirds of the Palestinians in Gaza are actually refugees from homes now within Israel. This population makes means that Gaza has consistently been a hotbed of resistance. Since 1948, Israel has waged more than 12 wars on Gaza. It's reoccupied the territory, isolated its inhabitants, placed the enclave under siege, and unilaterally disengaged all in attempts to pacify the Gaza Strip. In the 1950s, decades before Hamas was created, Israel designated Gaza a Hidayeen's nest in reference to the PLO fighters, a territory that merited constant isolation and bombardment to break the resistance. In the late 1980s, with the adoption of the first Stintifada, and before Hamas was even a viable actor, Israel had begun restricting the mobility of Palestinians from Gaza into Israel through the use of a complex permit system. This evolved into a gradual adoption of closure tactics and soft quarantining throughout the 1990s, as Gaza was repeatedly placed under blockade. This is decades before Hamas took over the Gaza Strip. None of these policies and no combination of them have worked. It's no surprise that Gaza has made its way into Israeli contemporary vernacular, whereby the phrase go to hell is now a popular way of saying go to hell. Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip now offers the perfect fig leaf. It offers Israel the opportunity to formalize these various means of severing Gaza from the rest of Palestine without addressing the underlying drivers of resistance emanating from the Gaza Strip. Under Hamas's rule, Gaza has moved from being a Hidayeen's nest to becoming a hostile entity and an enclave of terrorism that can remain indefinitely under hermetic blockade. Based on this reading, one of the questions that I ask in the book is, is Gaza under blockade because of Hamas, or is it actually that Hamas is under blockade because of Gaza? The second intervention that I want to leave you with is that since 2007, Israel has gradually institutionalized a process of pacification of Hamas that's ongoing but inconclusive. Israel's goal with every military assault on the Gaza Strip is to ensure what it calls calm for its southern towns to end the security challenge that Hamas with its constant firing of rockets presents to Israel. But paradoxically, Israel wants to achieve this calm without lifting the blockade, which is itself a violent act of war. So to achieve this goal, Israel's policy towards the Gaza Strip has taken the form of what its own security establishment have referred to as mawing the lawn. This entails the intermittent use of overwhelming military power to build deterrence and continuously undercut any growth by the resistance factions in Gaza. Israel has carried out three major operations since 2007, including the last one in 2014 that resulted in the killing of 500 children. Despite this overwhelming use of force, lasting deterrence remains elusive. Hamas has indeed become more effective at policing the resistance from the Gaza Strip, as many of you may have noticed earlier this month when Hamas restrained the Great March of Return protests to initiate a ceasefire with Israel. Yet Hamas remains ideologically consistent, or in other words, it remains unpassified. Instead, Israel and Hamas are now locked in what I call an equilibrium of belligerence, where Hamas relies on rocket fire to unsettle the status quo and force Israel to renegotiate access into the Gaza Strip, and Israel employs military might to try to debilitate Hamas. This modus operandi has enabled both Israel and Hamas to pursue short-term victories at the expense of a sustainable long-term resolution, as they both bid their time. So, of course, this cycle of violence is one of which the Palestinians in Gaza pay the heaviest price. The third intervention, and this is perhaps the most important one I'll leave you with, is that this Israeli approach of containment and pacification, this military approach, entails the adoption of a military tactic to resolve a political dilemma. The Gaza Strip is only one parcel of the broader Palestinian experience. Attempts to vilify Hamas and the Gaza Strip depoliticize and decontextualize their reality, giving credence to what the Israeli scholar Baruch Kemmerling terms the politicide of Palestinian nationalism, that is, Israel's process of erasing the political ideology animating the Palestinian struggle. In this form, the threat linking the early days of Palestinian nationalism from Al-Qassam to the PLO through to Hamas has been eclipsed. Yet key Palestinian political demands are consistent all along this historical thread, and they remain unmet and unanswered. These demands form the basis of the Palestinian struggle, and they are the pursuit of self-determination with Jerusalem as the capital, and the need to deal with the festering injustice of that refugee problem created by Israel in 1948. So in this light, Hamas is merely the contemporary manifestation of broader Palestinian demands that began a century ago. The fixed fundamentals that Hamas has consistently reiterated are the reflection of demands to deal with the tragedy of 1948, as well as the ongoing implications of Israel's occupation in 1967. But attempts to deal with Hamas and the Palestinians more broadly have historically focused on managing, rather than resolving their struggle for self-determination. Palestinian demands are placated through economic deals or promises of future resolutions, or even administrative governing authorities that resemble a state in all matters except collective sovereignty. Such an approach has allowed successive Israeli governments to avoid taking a position on the demands that Palestinians have upheld since before the creation of the State of Israel. And today, when we think about the humanitarian assistance being offered to the Gaza Strip, it's important for us to think about that in the context of this effort to depoliticize Gaza and make it look as if it's a humanitarian rather than a political problem. Many Palestinians reject the rhetoric and action within which Hamas coaches its political thought. But while Hamas' discourse is exceptional to the movement, a lot of its politics are actually at the heart of the popular Palestinian sentiment. This is evident in the rallies against Israel's military operations in Gaza. During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, for example, backing for Hamas was around 40 percent. But support for the notion of resistance writ large claimed a majority of 90 percent or more. In other words, the political reality that makes Gaza a hostile entity for Israel and that for Israel merits its isolation extends beyond the strip of land and animates the Palestinian struggle in its entirety. In carrying out this research, I spent time in the Gaza Strip and conversations with people on the ground demonstrates their continued rootedness in the righteousness of the struggle and the demand for full liberation. Almost every conversation alluded to the fact that Israelis can break into any house in the West Bank, even the house of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and torment its inhabitants. Yesterday and the day before yesterday, the IDF was driving down the streets of Ramallah in search of the Palestinian attackers that had carried out an operation in the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, when they see this reality that the IDF can go into the West Bank whenever they want, see the West Bank ironically as a place that suffers under the boot of occupation. West bankers are seen as having sold the struggle, as having been pacified for a higher quality of life, but without rights and without dignity. Gaza, on the other hand, remains proudly rooted in the core demands of Palestinian nationalism. The great march of return, the protests that have been taking place since March reflect that sentiment. Hamas understands this and it understands that Israel has failed to capitalize on the PLO's concessions or on negotiations to pave the way for a Palestinian state. It understands the resentments of the Palestinian people. The movement's strength lies in the fact that it has unapologetically called the bluff of successive Israeli governments about their intention to end the occupation that began in 1967. Instead, Hamas has reclaimed the narrative by returning to the injustices of 1948. The only way for us to break the cycle of violence that has become entrenched on the ground is to understand this reality, to grapple with the aspects that are indeed legitimate within Hamas's ideology, and to take seriously the Palestinian motivations to sustain their struggle, despite the overwhelming force seeking to pacify it. Thank you.