Palestinian Resistance: A Contextual History with Myriam Charabaty

Pushing back against reductionist narratives that claim October 7th was a collaborationist event providing “Israel” with genocide pretext.

[Please note the conversation ends rather abruptly because of internet issues – the links to follow Myriam are at the end of this post.]

One narrative still persists in Western independent media circles and “liberal” Zionist spheres of influence – that ‘Israel’ helped create and fund Hamas in Gaza. I sit down with regional analyst Myriam Charabaty to unpack the history of Hamas and the very real complexities that surround the journey of the Palestinian resistance faction from Egypt to Palestine.

Myriam examines the internal conflicts and diverse opinions and ideologies within the leadership to paint a far more multi-layered picture of who is Hamas and how their role has both been restricted and controlled by the Zionists at certain times and how resistance actions and statements have forced ‘Israel’ to accommodate the resistance beyond their comfort zone. This is a hugely complicated subject and not one that can be condensed into a convenient ‘conspiracy’ narrative that denies agency to the armed resistance in Palestine and ignores the history, the culture and the environment in which Hamas is forced to operate.

I also refer you to a very in depth analysis by Substack author Mujamma Haraket:

Excerpt: In this article, I set out to dispel the narrative(s)—initially proffered by Yasser Arafat in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then popularized beyond intra-Palestine politics by liberal zionist journalists before being instrumentalized by the zionist entity’s intelligence apparatus—that the zionist entity “created”, “helped create”, or “funded” Hamas.[1] This set of claims enjoys deep popularity amongst would-be supporters of the Palestinian liberation struggle who, unwittingly, are repeating the choice framework of the zionist intelligence services and the Palestinian Authority’s Abu Mazen (viz., Mahmoud Abbas) who has pragmatically instrumentalized this claim to delegitimize the Hamas movement’s indigenous, local, and grassroots. Insofar as political science scholarship is concerned, this narrative also sports proponents like Beverly Milton-Edwards, who first proffers this thesis in her 1996 book, Islamic Politics in Palestine (London: Tauris Academic Studies) and repeats it in her co-authored 2010 text with Stephen Farrell, Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement (Cambridge: Polity Press) and the two’s more recent, revised book, Hamas: The Quest for Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024).

You can follow Myriam on Substack and X. We will also be, shortly, starting a project – Beyond Sykes Picot (BSP) – the greater resistance project.