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?