After Hamas’s attack on October 7 killed 1,400 Israelis, the political class in the United States and across the world were quick to rally behind Israel as it launched its own brutal campaign of retribution. So far, over eight thousand Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were civilians, have been killed by Israeli bombs that have landed on schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and refugee camps.

Despite public support for a ceasefire, politicians have insisted that even to attempt to contextualize Hamas’ actions is to offer a defense for terrorism. Tareq Baconi, the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, spoke to Daniel Denvir on Jacobin’s podcast The Dig about the origins of Hamas in the failure decades of peace talks between Israel and Fatah. These efforts, whose high-water mark was the 1993 Oslo Accords, only succeeded in normalizing Israeli apartheid, creating a regime in which Israel policed the West Bank and kept Gaza as an open-air prison, Baconi argues.

In this interview, he offers much-needed context to the events of October 7, which he sees as Hamas’s effort to prevent any attempt to normalize the apartheid regime and ensure that Middle Eastern stability cannot not be achieved without Palestinian liberation.