Our conversation with writer, scholar, and activist, Tareq Baconi, about the many forms of containment forced onto Palestinians and the need to reclaim the Palestinian revolutionary legacy. We discuss Tareq’s book, "Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance" (2018), his disillusionment with the limits of commentary, what a free Palestine actually means, and his new memoir "Fire in Every Direction" (2025). 

Recorded on October 17, 2025

0:00 Introduction: Hamas as a Red Herring

2:05 Becoming Palestinian: Identity and Politicization in Amman and the West

7:05 Studying Hamas: A Legitimate Political Actor

11:57 "Hamas Contained" Book: The Real Story Is Gaza

15:55 The Ceiling Is Low: Navigating Western Structures

23:05 The Zionist Sensibility: Confronting Western Complicity

25:22 Abolition and Singularity: A Vision for Liberation

30:38 Recognition and the Management of Conflict

33:34 Reclaiming the Revolutionary Legacy

37:10 Genocide and the Existential War

47:56 Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir As a Political Act

57:57 The Art That Sustains the Struggle

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award, and Fire in Every Direction.

Hosted by Yazan Kopty 👉 https://instagram.com/yazankopty

Yazan Kopty is a writer, researcher, and community archivist. His work explores the relationship between narrative and power and advocates for storytelling grounded in self-representation and community collaboration. Shaped by his background as an oral historian, his practice aims to gather polyphony of voices and transform memory into a force for resistance, reckoning, and reconciliation. Since 2018, Yazan has been a National Geographic Explorer and lead investigator of Imagining the Holy, a community-based archive project indigenizing historic photographs of Palestinians and their homeland and activating them as sites of gathering, reconnection, and new cultural production. Beginning in October 2025, Yazan will be producer and host of This is Not a Watermelon, afikra’s podcast series reframing Palestine through conversations with experts and practitioners working to preserve its past, document its present, and imagine better futures for the land and its people.

Theme music: Peninsular, Tarek Yamani 🔊 

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