Ask Haviv Anything - 142: Can Gaza ever move on from Hamas? With Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Can Gaza ever be rebuilt while Hamas remains armed? Gazan-American writer Ahmed Fouad Al-Khatib returns to trace Hamas’s rise — from Islamist charities and the slow remaking of Gazan society to authoritarian rule, October 7, and ruinous war. Drawing on his childhood in Gaza and his new book, Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages, Ahmed argues that foreign aid, international NGOs, and Al Jazeera helped Hamas entrench itself while ordinary Gazans paid the price. He and Haviv confront the hardest questions: Can Hamas be separated from Gazan society? Could a movement built around armed “resistance” ever disarm? And is there still a path from permanent war to Palestinian nation-building and coexistence?--This episode is sponsored by the family of Dr. Chalo Smukler, a beloved husband, father, grandfather, physician, and proud American Jew, on the occasion of his unveiling.Born in Paraguay and descended from Jews who fled persecution in Eastern Europe, Chalo was a leader from a young age in the Jewish youth movement Hanoar Hatzioni and first moved to Israel at sixteen. There he discovered a free society, a sense of Jewish brotherhood, and a refuge that would remain central to his life.He lived with humility, kindness, courage, and an extraordinary capacity to make every person feel heard and loved. He believed profoundly in the Jewish people, in Israel, and in tikun olam, the responsibility we share to build a better future for all humanity, Jewish or not.While he would have been dismayed by what Jews around the world have faced since his passing, he would have taken solace in a truth he deeply believed: that when the Jewish people stand together, there is nothing we cannot overcome.To all those whose lives he touched, his memory will forever be a blessing.--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv. Thanks for joining us. It is a distinct pleasure to welcome back to the podcast, Ahmed Fulad al-Khattib. We spoke almost a year ago, episode, I think it was 47 in October 2025, actually. It was a very hopeful time. And we had a lot to sort out about what's happening in Gaza. The last of the hostages, living in dead, had just come home. There was a whole new plan, a whole new sense. of a possible future in Gaza. The international community, led by the Trump administration, was going to push forward in a different direction. The war essentially ground to a halt. The Trump plan for rebuilding Gaza was on the table. It was full of holes at the time. We talked about those holes.

How do you ever convince Hamas to disarm? So a year later, not much has moved. Billions upon billions of dollars, Arab dollars, European dollars, American dollars, have been promised, stand ready, I think, to move into Gaza to rebuild. But the same obstacles as ever in the past stand in the way. Chief and foremost among them, according to Kaviv, is Khamas.

Today we're going to revisit the question of how Gaza rebuilds, how it moves forward. And we're going to go back to the most basic issues that have haunted Israelis and Palestinians since October 7. What is Hamas? Can it be deposed from ruling Gaza? Can it be separated from the people of Gaza? How do we sort through these complicated questions? And now that Ahmed has published a short book on this question, we're going to tackle that today.

Ahmed Fahad al-Hatib is a Gazan-American writer and advocate, the founder of Realline for Palestine and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council based in Washington. He writes analysis and commentary for publications such as the Atlantic and foreign policy. He's regularly in the American and international media. And the book, which he wrote for the Jewish Quarterly, is entitled Hamas and its two million. hostages. We're going to discuss both his story, his memoir of growing up in Gaza, the Islamization of Gaza society from the late 80s, roughly, and what he believes, the NGO ecosystem that provides education and welfare in Gaza, how some of that props up Hamas's rule, the role of Al Jazeera in the rise of Hamas and the broader regional divides and radicalizations, internal divisions

within Gaza society, including in support for Hamas in October 7. We're going to come right up to the current day with issues of disarming Hamas and the implementation of the Board of Peace Plan. Before we jump in, I just want to tell you that this episode is dedicated to and sponsored by the family of Dr. Chalo Smukler, beloved husband, father, grandfather, physician, and proud American Jew on the occasion of his unveiling. Born in Paraguay and descended from Jews who fled persecution in Eastern Europe, Chalo was a leader from a young age in the Jewish youth movement, Han Noel of Zioni, He first moved to Israel at the age of 16.

There he discovered a free society, a sense of Jewish brotherhood, and a refuge that would remain central to his life. He lived with humility, kindness, courage, and an extraordinary capacity to make every person feel heard and loved. He believed profoundly in the Jewish people, in Israel, and in Tikun Olam, the responsibility we share to build a better future for all humanity, Jewish or not. While he would have been dismayed by what Jews around the world of face since his passing, he would have taken solace in a truth he deeply believed in,

that when the Jewish people stand together, there is nothing we cannot overcome. To all those whose lives he touched, his memory will forever be a blessing. Thank you for that beautiful dedication. And I'd love finally to invite everyone to join our Patreon and our Substack. If you want to ask the questions that guide what we talk about, that's where it happens.

And you get to take part of monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com slash ask Habiv-anything or chavivgur.com. dot substact.com. Those links are in the show notes. Ahmed, how are you? Good to be with you, brother. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you. Thank you so much for coming on. And this was a really fascinating read. So let's take a dive into the book before we get into the news cycle. This book is personal memoir. It's the story, not just of you, however, it's also the story of Gaza, as you saw it over the course of

your childhood into your teenage years. You opened with your families, returned to Gaza. Your father had been working in Saudi Arabia. And how you flew into the Gaza International Airport in the 90s with these shiny new Palestinian passports. Everything seems so hopeful. And you write there about how that hope slowly disintegrates as Hamas rises. So early in the book, you talk about the Islamization of Gaza's society, which is a largely secular society, but then the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist charities gain hold in the late 80s, even before the political rise of Hamas, and suddenly women's dress is restricted,

their movements are restricted, their public executions of collaborators or suspected collaborators. These rules are enforced by dumping acid on women, all these actions that we've come to associate with ISIS, with the Iranian regime and other sort of Islamist revolutionary movements. And you talk about how now the women in your family are almost entirely covered

even though back then your mom used to wear her hair uncovered, your aunts had miniskirts. You know, there's a pattern so familiar to observers of the Middle East, to scholars of Egyptian society just a few decades earlier to what's happening to Turkish society. Can you tell us that story? What is that like? What is that childhood?

What is Gaza when you are first aware of it as a child? And what changes over the course of your childhood? Certainly. And I wanted to start by saying that part of why I put this book together and it's not an exhaustive memoir, nor is it an exhaustive history of Gaza's developments and evolution over the last four decades. But I wanted to weave in both personal themes with critical milestones, if you will, because so many people jump to the blockade and the 2005 withdrawal and Ariel Sharon and what he did and didn't do. and there's just this massive missing gap. And so many people who lionize Hamas, who celebrate the group,

who've normalized it after October 7th, failed to understand the really dark roots to this group. And so I wanted to share that. And so very briefly, the late 1970s throughout the Middle East, there was very much so an Islamic awakening that was happening throughout the region. And the two polls that I argue for in my book in the Arab and Muslim worlds where this began was in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt.

Egypt after the after Nasser passed away, he of course went after the Muslim Brotherhood, Yaf Sadat. He released a lot of the Muslim Brotherhood people after he was making the progress towards peace with Israel because he wanted to have healing and reconciliation with the Islamists and he thought that he could basically control them. It backfired horribly because they ended up actually assassinating him in 1982. So you have Egypt that kind of cut loose a lot of the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and then they began the proselyization and the charities and the activities. So that's Egypt, the most populous Arab country on one hand. Then in the late 70s, in 1979, you have the incident in the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia where these ultra-religious fanatics, ISIS-style Wahhabis,

take over the mosque and it's a bloody scene. And one of the reactions out of that following this, this very serious incident, is that the House of Saud, the Saudi royal family, and the religious clergy around it decided that we're not being seen as religious enough. We're seen as marching towards the secular, tune of the West and the United States.

So we're going to double and triple and quadruple down on a lot of the Islamization of the society and of the religion itself. So then you have Saudi Arabia and then you have Egypt. Add to that the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, a massive, an earthquake that changed the region forever. Then you add to that the Islamic jihad against the godless Soviets in Afghanistan. So you have basically four separate events that are concurrently in the late 70s converging to accelerate the Islamization of the Arab and Muslim worlds. And that takes off in the early 1980s.

And amidst all of that, you have the small number of people in Gaza, Sheikh Ahmad Yassine, the founder and the spiritual father of Hamas, if you were, world, who started seeing the trends. He saw the writing on the wall, and he brought that model into Gaza. And he very much so, Hassan al-Banna, who's the original founder, if you will, of the Muslim Brotherhood in, you know, the many decades before, they always leverage the whole charity model, the whole let's infiltrate the society and build infrastructure. So Ahmed Yassin, this is a time when Gaza was under the direct military control of the Israeli army that had set up a civilian control where all Gazans were doctors, teachers, nurses, my dad, my uncles, my whole family, they all worked.

And so Hamas operated under that environment where there was the bare minimum of services provided by this Israeli-led civilian administration. They exploited that. And then in the 1980s, that actually accelerated. to not just be about school, private schools, kindergartens, small cash transfers, small clinics, small access to favors here and there. They've started in refugee camps,

the UNRWA funded and created refugee camps, but they very much so made it part of a cohesive body. This is before the official launch of Hamas. And so the reason why I say that, it's very important to remember, Hamas had deep roots in Gaza before it decided to turn to politics and to the resistance narrative. Come the first Intifada in 1987, the infrastructure was already in place. But before we get there super quick, Hamas very much so believed and thought that it was critical for this infrastructure to be mirrored not just by,

influence and by membership. The measure of success wasn't just can we recruit new people, can we expand the number of clinics and schools or whatever. They saw this as an intangible long-term goal, as with Islamists that take over anywhere. Can we cover up the women? Can we increase the number of mosques? Can we basically kill any secular aspirations? They burnt the cinema, the famous Al Nasser cinema in Gaza.

I didn't put that in the book. But there was a movie theater in Gaza that was burnt and it was never re-established. Can we go after those who sell liquor? And it was death by a thousand cuts that again, by the time 1987 came around where the first intifada started, Hamas's roots were already entrenched. And I want to briefly also mention that there's a somewhat of a fundamental, I think, misunderstanding of the first intifada whereby, okay, it wasn't certainly as violent as the second intifada.

There were many aspects of the first intifada that were 100% nonviolent. However, Hamas was a very major instigator of the first intifada. Hamas was actually a big part in order. organizing massive demonstrations and massive activities throughout the first Intifara in the Gaza Strip. Abd al-Aiz Erantisi, the second in command, whom I got to see regularly in Gaza, he was a major organizer in the first Intifada. And some of that then was transferred over to the West Bank, where the first Intifada took a life of its own. So that's basically Hamas in the 19 late 70s and 80s laying roots to what would then become the mutation.

I call that kind of Hamas 1.0 in the initial draft of the book, the way I laid it out is Hamas 1.0, which is up until the 87, the launch. Then Hamas 2.0, which was then basically from first intifada to the second intifada. Hamas 3.0 was that Hamas during the second Intifada from the year 2000 until 2007 when they took over and then Hamas as it currently stands over the last two decades is when they finally were able to hold territory

when they were able to control the population Gaza's population almost doubled under them and we'll talk about that later so those are the different epics if we want to understand Hamas in phases. And I think that's very critical. If you break down Hamas in those phases, then you understand when people talk about Hamas the social movement, Hamas the religious movement, Hamas the political movement, Hamas the terrorist group, Hamas the government.

Those different classifications correspond with the different aforementioned epics. And they model themselves explicitly after the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. And so the charity networks are part of the great, the great, um, pietistic revolution in society, which is also something that the jihad is part of. And so, you know, I will have been in multiple times in speaking in college campuses or whatever. And I've been challenged by a college student who asked chat GPT, if this is true or not. And they said, you know, the, the terrorism designation is, is Israeli propaganda. They're actually a charity network. And I'm like, no, they, They're definitely a charity network.

That's a huge part of their whole vision of themselves. And it continued up to the, almost up to the end. In other words, not quite, for example, they run the school systems, but with foreign money, right? Something I want to ask you about also. And you talk about in the book. But yeah, absolutely. And it is fundamental because their actual program is the Islamization of society. And that's included in the militant part.

That's included in the charity part and the educational takeover and all these different things. I want to address one thing about your personal experience. You talk in the book about how the local Chamas chapter shows interesting in your early teens. They're looking for clever, devout teens. You also spoke English from many hours of video gaming, is that right? Yes, video gaming, but also learning, actually. I don't know our schools were incredibly rigorous at the time. But yes, video gaming.

I was an excellent video gaming. I was an excellent video gamer. You can identify as a nerd on this podcast. I do. It's half our audience. I will admit this for the first time ever publicly that when I can sneak in a few minutes of freedom here and there, I will sit on my PC and play.

What? Really? That's so irresponsible and childish. So you have this great English. They show this interesting in you. and instead of walking down that path, you describe how, after, by the way, an Israeli airstrike in your neighborhood,

you want out. I don't know if you mean out of specifically Gaza or out of that situation, but you join an exchange program that takes you to the U.S. at the age of 15. The interesting piece of that story for me and that I would like you to tell us more about or just open up that story of your experience,

you face immense pressure from your teachers, from the mosque, Maybe from your family. I'm not clear on that. It's seen as a betrayal of Gaza to go to this exchange program in the U.S. And that's before Hamas takes over the strip. That's before the 2006 election. Why is studying in the U.S. a betrayal of Gaza?

And by the way, you plan to return and also tried to return. You almost succeeded in returning, in fact. What is that tension that you felt growing up in Gaza? Precisely. So this is the post-2000, the second intifada era, whereby Hamas, let's call it, Hamas 3.0 essentially, was ascending to power still. Before they took over, Hamas was omnipresent, truly everywhere.

They were present in our mosque. They were present in schools. They had their areas, their neighborhoods. You could tell where, in the same way that you have gangsters or little teenage gangs putting graffiti on the wall. just to mark their territory. Hamas would mark territories in different neighborhoods in Gaza by signs for martyrs, by signs for a new operation.

Amalia attacks against Israel, by planting certain flags, the green flags on the power poles. So there were territories throughout Gaza that were ostensibly under Palestinian authority control. The whole area was under PA-controlled. control, but that very much so were Hamas neighborhoods and Hamas territories. So contextually, there was that happening. Then there was the overall anger with the United States. This was, I began in 2004 applying for this and then got on in 2005. This was two years after the invasion of Iraq. There was just this broad resentment that the U.S. is who's

supporting Israel. The U.S. is trying to colonize the whole entire region. But, The interesting thing is there were 4,400 applicants for this program, for the cohort that I tried to get out. And only 10 ultimately left in 2005. And I was very blessed to be part of the 10. The resistance was because so many people believed strongly in my potential, in my possibilities, that I am somebody to be invested in and that somehow my departure to the United States, my traveling alone at the age of 15

is going to fundamentally corrupt me. I'm going to come back with bottles of liquor. I'm going to come back as a spy. I'm going to undergo this systematic brainwashing. But it was ironically precisely because so many people felt that I am, were that because my social, my quote unquote, my social and academic and professional potentiality was high, that that is worthy of protecting and preserving.

But this also goes back to the root of some of the, the interesting thing is back then, I was applying for this program along with people who were basically Islamists, who after Hamas took over, became part of Hamas and who had their sons and daughters compete in the same scholarship that I was going for, the same scholarship that I was participating in.

In other words, there is this bizarre hypocrisy whereby publicly, no, we hate the United States and the great Satan garbage, blah, blah, blah, blah. But privately, if somebody could actually get their son or daughter to be a part of this

and to join the elite club to learn English, to obtain training in the United States, they absolutely went for it. Remember that Musa Abu Marzouk, one of the chief leaders of Hamas, who resides in Qatar right now, he lived in the United States. He has a green card. His daughter is right now an American citizen. She lives here in the United States, the daughter of Hamas. You have Musab Hassan Yusuf, the son of Hamas for a totally different reason. You have the daughter of Hamas, but she hasn't defected. She still very much so loves her daddy and loves Hamas.

So finally, I have always been an old soul in a young body. I very quickly, early as a child, and I'm not going to sit here and say I wasn't, I was, I engaged in a ton of anti-Semitism. I was

just as susceptible to a lot of the trends that the society was experiencing and going through. the other hand, I always ask critical questions. For example, one time there was an attack in the West Bank that killed, it was against the settlement and it killed a two-year-old child.

And I remember sitting in an unrued school and it was the painting class. And I remember sitting a large classroom and arguing with a group of, this was in probably in 2003, we were 13 years old. and arguing with classmates that is really wrong. Like, fine, you want to kill soldiers? Fine. But don't kill children. That is deeply wrong and deeply horrible.

And then there were a bunch of people that were a student saying, no, they kill our children, we kill their children. And I just said, no, dude, we're not going to be defined by what anyone else does. Like, just the mere idea, just as a human being, the idea of killing any child is so wrong. is so evil, is so inconsistent with Islam because we had a subject in our classroom. It was called religion. We learned religion.

And every, you know, everyone will tell you when we grew up in religion, they told us how the Prophet Muhammad supposedly always told his soldiers before embarking on a battle, don't kill a tree, don't kill an elderly, don't hurt a woman, don't burn a tree, don't destroy a rock

that the unnecessarily don't. So I said to the kids, I was like, then why are we wasting time in religion class? I was like engaged in this full reasoning exercise and I'll never forget this, Haviv. Like as I kept pushing and there was like a little, I mean we were sitting,

but it was like a little mob of these tiny little kids saying like, now I'll kill the children. A small number of kids slowly were like, yeah, no, you're right. Either. They already knew that this was wrong

but they just didn't want to go up against the the mob or a small number actually were convinced of the fundamentals that killing a child is wrong no matter the resistance narrative. I mentioned this. I mentioned this as an example of how I had a loud mouth. I went to, I don't know, I think I mentioned it also in the book. There was so much I wanted to include in the book. It's a treatment basically for a larger book incoming book in the next year or two. But there was another time where I went to a summer camp. And it, unbeknownst to my parents, like truly, because my parents were not Hamas. It turns out to be a Hamas summer camp.

And we had no idea. My parents were just like, ah, yeah, just go, whatever. And it was a week-long summer camp. And I think this is in the book, actually. And I just remember this was in 2002. I think I was 12. I was 12. And I remember it was so easy to tell through the lies of just the guys that were there.

So at first they wanted to tell us who they were and why we were here in the role of the young people in the next generation in Palestine and the next generation. And I was like, oh my God, I left my video games to come sit here with these idiots talking about resistance and whatever. So I went one day and then I went to my mom and my dad and I told them this is like total garbage Hamas like Islamist trashed. And my family are super religious. My family are super devout Muslims. But I said to them, oh my God, I've never seen anything more cringe than these guys. Like this isn't even nationalism. This was just cringe.

And my parents were like, okay, okay, okay. They were like, did you say anything loud? Did you offend anyone? Did you? So, like, my parents knew that I had this, like, rebellious thing within me that I'm not just going to sit there and tolerate. I'm a no-nonsense guy. And I think that's ultimately, that was a long way to explain to your question, why I think ultimately my immediate family supported me against all the societal pressure. Because they knew that I had this fierce spirit within me that was not just going to take it sitting down. and just be like, yeah, no, resistance is great. Yeah, you know, let's... And even, by the way, the Palestinian nationalist, on the other hand, like, one of my problems with the Palestinian nationalist,

the Fethe guys, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO guys, the problem with them, even to this day, when Hamas says, no, you guys are treacherous sellouts, whatever, I remember these discussions very well. They in Hamas, Hamas was like, no, you sold us out in Oslo, you gave up 78% of him, historic Palestine and you accepted Zionism and blah blah blah blah and like we are the resistors instead of Fetach saying and now the armed resistance is going to work instead of Fethah being like

hey guys we actually as the PLO and Fattah we spent many decades before Hamas was even a thing being involved in armed resistance and we came to the conclusion that it doesn't work there is no erasing Israel. There's no getting rid of dismantling, quote-unquote, the Zionist entity. Instead of them saying that, their counter-argument while I was in Gaza and that persists to this

day. Nothing has changed in the 20 years that have left Gaza. Well, no, that's not true. We were the first to kill Jews. We were the first to shoot. Fetah's famous tagline or what's the

marketing line. is the first bullet, the first bullet, literally. They say, fattah, colon, the first bullet. And it's like, no, you should say we've been there, done that. It doesn't work. So, like, I remember also arguing with the nationalist and being like, why are you guys acquiescing? Like, why are you letting Hamas set the stage for you?

So it's not that Hamas wanted me, wanted to recruit me. It's not that the Islamization of the society was taking place. And then I was like, okay, I have this ready alternative here that I can engage with. It's that I felt that there really wasn't political life in Gaza. There really wasn't space for intellectual independence. And that in its totality made me determined to get out, especially after having that near-death experience, where I felt that somehow escaping to the Gaza temporarily even would,

would open up my horizons and will plant seeds abroad. And little did I know that Hamas 4.0 or Hamas, you know, like the new iteration of Hamas post the elections, post the Gilad Shalit abduction in June of 2006, was actually going to very much so ensure that I cannot go back to my homeland. You were literally coming home in 2000. You're near the Rafakh crossing on the Egyptian side. Yes.

When Hamas carries out its bloody coup against the PA. And you can't go in. And you head back to the U.S. and apply for asylum. Is that right? So that was before. The bloody coup happened a year later in 2007. But I was near the Rafak crossing about going to Gaza. When they attacked Gilad Shalit, they did a...

It was a very miniaturized October 7 style attack, whereby they crossed the Israeli border. They attacked an Israeli military point, abducted Gilad Shalit, and brought him back into Gaza. And three weeks later, Hezbollah attacked from the north. And also, that's triggered the 33-day war. So there was actually a two-front war that Israel had with Gaza and with Hezbollah in the north. And that's when I was stuck in Gaza. And thanks to the support of human rights and peace activists, including actually a friend of mine.

Annette Herskovitz, a Holocaust survivor who both of her parents, she was French. She is French and her parents were shipped off to Auschwitz when she was two. And part of what she dedicated her life, I mean, she did a lot of research on how the Muslim community in Paris actually worked to save a lot of Jewish children by pretending that they were Muslim children and they hid them in mosque. So she dedicated her life to kind of tracing the, like, how did the Holocaust unfold in the early days of the Nazi occupation? She financed my return to the United States. She made it possible for me to come back. And I began applying for political asylum. The very day of my political asylum interview was June 14, 2007, which is the very day that Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip and ejected.

the PA. So I was actually the first Palestinian from Gaza to receive political asylum in the United States because of Hamas' takeover. That story about the Muslims in Paris, if I knew I've forgotten, that's a story worth looking into. You talk often in the book about getting back to the policy questions. You talk often in the book about ways in which as Hamas's slow rolling sort of takeover of Gaza and society is underway, once they take power in 2007, even though they are the government of Gaza, even though they themselves talk about how their justification, their validation, their authority flows from having been elected in 2006, they don't actually provide any, or most, they don't provide most of the actual governmental resources or governmental services to

citizens, like education and welfare and health care. Almost all of that is outsourced to, this NGO ecosystem that pops up Hamas at a massive scale. I mean, maybe per capita the biggest in the world in history. And that allows Hamas to focus its own tax base, its own collection of taxes as its tax in the Ghazan population. You have argued that without this international NGO infrastructure propping Hamas up, not against aid for Gazans, which I have heard you

very loudly, you know, demanding and arguing for and going to Gaza, overflying Gaza to call for, but that the way the NGO system has replaced Hamas and government services in Gaza, it has almost literally paid for Hamas to rebuild Gaza, retool Gaza for endless devastation, for endless war. And without that NGO ecosystem, Hamas would have failed long ago. And this is something that goes back to your own experience in Gaza growing up. Can you tell us more about this and how you understand this? And did I get that right?

Absolutely, without a doubt, it is my belief that without the NGO-industrial complex, without the ways in which, as you've been saying over and over, that Gaza, over the last 20 years under Hamas, has received more per capita aid, development, and support money than any other conflict zone in the world, period, end of story. And what has been the result of that? without the aforementioned, Hamas would not have been able to survive. Hamas would not have been able to build the infrastructure, to entrench itself as a governance apparatus, to control the population, to basically commingle with the population. And on the point, by the way, that they derive their authority from elections,

that elections, by the way, and this is a fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of the, even the smart academics and journalists and the pro-palysis, Palestine industrial complex don't get. That elections was based on the Oslo framework and the Palestinian Authority framework. And it required per the quartet, per the UN, per the U.S., per the Arabs, that Hamas would have, if it participates in the elections, it basically would need to renounce violence and accept Israel. You are evolving into a political organization. And instead, Hamas said, oh, well, we're going to be a political. governance apparatus and we're going to also be a resistance organization.

So that is just, and that's partly why the minute that Hamas won the elections and ultimately decided not to adhere to that, it invalidated in my view and the view of many Palestinians. It invalidated their claim to legitimacy. It invalidated the outcomes of the elections. When Hamas took over or when Hamas tried to say, oh, the U.S. and the U.S. Palestinian authority tried to coup us. Yes, because you are an illegitimate body that couped the very principle upon which this political process was based upon.

Haviv, this is such a key fundamental point of view that even, and with due respect, a lot of Israelis don't also understand about when people say, oh, well, Hamas was elected and people in Gaza, they love Hamas and blah, blah, blah. We're talking about a point in time exercise. that Hamas very quickly didn't adhere to. Anyway, moving to the NGO industrial complex. So people forget immediately after the coup, the Palestinian Authority,

and people can fact-check me and go research that in 2007, the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, after they actually went after Hamas' charities and offices and members in the West Bank, and they arrested them and turned some of them over, etc., They declared Gaza a renegade territory. Renegate territory. And there was basically a variety of steps taken to go ahead and cease the Palestinian Authority funding

because the Palestinian Authority budget goes to Gaza and the West Bank. And basically stop the PA from paying for Hamas. It says like, okay, fine, you guys took it over? Yalla, take care of it. What happens just soon after that? Basically, you have an amalgamation of UNRWA that then swells and swells and swells and grows up to become a pseudo-parallel governance apparatus that increases the amount of aid and support. It is providing to Gaza slowly.

And it then invites other UN entities to begin executing infrastructure projects, massive health. health care projects beyond just the UNRWA system and the UNRWA ecosystem. So you have UNRWA. Then what happens also? The Europeans who are the biggest financial backers of the Palestinian Authority, ostensibly maybe with good intentions, I'm charitable, I'll give people the benefit of the doubt. They actually eventually make the Palestinian Authority, will force the Palestinian Authority to commit one third of the PA.

budget to Gaza. Even though the PA is not in Gaza, they basically have to have a continuity, some continuity of service provision to education, to healthcare, and to infrastructure projects in Gaza, per the demands of European donors and funders of the Palestinian Authority. Then you have the surge of the Qataris, and by the way, this is before the Netanyahu deals, before the like suitcases full of cash that everybody likes to talk about. Just broadly speaking, there's, there's the Qataris, some Saudi, some other Arabs, and some amalgamation of Arab and Muslim countries, start sending in a little bit of money. Then you have a whole other class of Doctors Without Borders, International Rescue Committee, Islamic Relief, the biggest names in charity.

Oxfam, blah, blah, blah, you name it. They start opening offices in Gaza. They start opening big operations. The pro-Palestine industrial complex takes shape as Hamas starts firing rockets. Israel retaliates, then that evolves into wars. Every war results in a massive surge of humanitarian needs that then get capitalized on by the NGO sector to raise a ton of money from governments and from activists and from just average people in the Western world and in the Arab and Muslim world. So now you have these multiple streams of funding coming in and Hamas is literally kicking back and just drinking tea and saying thank you guys, thank you. It is exporting the responsibility of caring for the people of Gaza onto the shoulders of the Arabs and the world and everybody else. Then Hamas sets up

tax collection. I mean, the joke in Gaza was like, Gaza is like, I mean, Hamas wants to tax the air, the people breathe because Hamas would steal the diesel that's going to the power generation. Hamas then would actually, and so that created electricity problems. Then Hamas, all the Gazans turned to power generators and then some neighborhood entrepreneurs started buying big generators and then providing lines to people for like a monthly subscription of like 150 shekels. You will get eight hours of a faint line that powers your computer, your charger, your fan, basic stuff, not your refrigerator or your washing machine or whatever. And then Hamas goes and taxes all the generators.

And anybody with a generator, you have to pay an electric generator tax. On and on. Traffic citations. Gaza has terrible roads and terrible times. Hamas would literally start. They have guys with like thick traffic tickets, citations. And your job as a Hamas, traffic cop was to come back at the end of the day with this book completely empty.

And you're passing out 70 shekels, 100 shekels, 80 shekels of violations for the small... They even tried one time to force Gazans to wear seatbelts, but it didn't work because half of the cars in Gaza don't even have seatbelts. They're so old and decrepit. There were several cases. There were at least two cases that I remember of guys, really poor guys driving their cars. is one was a taxi driver. I forget what the other one was getting traffic tickets and then self-immolating in Gaza in protest saying like I am so dirt poor and broke and you guys are just making life force for me. So you have taxation. You have the Islamic Republic of Iran sending money. You have the Qataris were sending money above the table and then it was rumored there was money below the table. And then finally you have Hamas has financial interest in. Malaysia, Indonesia, in Turkey, in Algeria, in Mauritania, in Qatar. They have investments.

They have cryptocurrency. They have real estate assets. They have in Moscow. In Russia, they have some commercial interests. So any money that was coming to Hamas was for the purpose of paying its people, building rockets, building tunnels, building terror infrastructure. So why did I just go to great length to describe the aforeamination? mentioned. You tell me that this system does not fundamentally incentivize Hamas to not actually care about the people of Gaza. Hamas, I mentioned it in the book, how they would actually

brag about more war equaled more donations. The international NGO ecosystem ended up what began as an attempt to fill in a gap that should have been a temporary gap after this coup and we need to figure things out. Instead of actually saying, hey, guys, we can't have this terrorist organization holding territory and actually controlling Gaza. We need you guys to figure it out. We need the Palestinian Authority to come back in. Instead of that being a temporary stopgap measure here, we'll give you some aid temporarily, but this is temporary. This is temporary. This is only for six months until you guys figure it out. It actually became an ongoing scheme to enrich Hamas, to enrich these NGO practitioners and administrators to provide an opportunity

for Gazans that became grifters and became addicted to this money for their own self-engorgement. And meanwhile, unemployment continued to persist in Gaza. Poverty continued the inequality between the rich and poor widen. So this, I think, is a condemnation just as much of Hamas as it is of the international aid and development system. And the answer was always ready there. We need more aid. And Israel is not letting in more aid. And Israel is to blame for this because Israel has a blockade.

So therefore, we just, because of the blockade, which was the result of a terrorist organization, taken over right next and saying we're going to we're going to build bombs we're going to build rockets we're going to build tunnels the whole blockade narrative became so skewed and so misused and misappropriated that it became about excusing hamass's behavior about engorging gaza with more aid that got nowhere and it became about sustaining an inherently unsustainable condition and circumstances that ultimately led to October 7th. The scale of the exploitation of Gazans, you know, you are one of the writers over the last three years.

People, Western audiences don't understand that things can look very different depending on where you stand, utterly, profoundly, and reasonably. The part of Lebanon that speaks to me, that tries to speak to me, is Hezbollah. No other part of Lebanon has anything to say to me. On social media, never mind on, you know, in public and in the part of Gaza that tries to speak to me is Hamas. And what it has to say to me is that I'm absolutely right in every measure I take against Gaza. That is what Hamas says to me as I hear it because they literally say that there's never going to be anything but internal war until my kids are dead and gone. And there are writers who have repeatedly and consistently refocused me onto just how much the suffering and how much it sucks.

And certainly, you know, the Israeli war and what it has done to civilians and the experience of those civilians, that is huge. I'm not avoiding it. I'm not at all avoiding it. It's just not the topic right here, which is your book, and it's about what Hamas has done to Gaza and how Hamas cannot but lead Gaza into. bad places. Nobody sits with the scale of this exploitation. And there were multiple, many mass protests, public protests, even small public protests are extraordinary in that kind of place, because they're very dangerous, personally dangerous. In 2018, for example, against this massive taxation that was sending people home hungry, and it was all to build, and all this aid essentially allowed Hamas to be free to build this massive tunnel system. And you can say,

well, Gazans need to be defended. Hamas knew the war wasn't okay. You can even defend Hamas. But in three years of war, of terrible war, no Gazan child was allowed into the biggest, most comprehensive bond shelter system ever built in any society. And so this Hamas never did this for Gazans, never pretended to do this for Gazans. And about how much aid went into Gaza, Hamas enriched itself and as you say engorged itself Hamas produced billionaires while Gaza

still even under this massive aid regime actually wasn't doing well actually was poor actually was poor and so the scale of the exploitation no matter how you think of Israel you cannot escape Hamas you can't escape what Hamas is represented for Gaza

and I want to just touch on something that you raise in the book which is the the way in which parts of the Arab world have also reinforced this, doubled down on this, been enablers of Hamas and even champions of Hamas. And specifically to focus in on Al Jazeera, or you can take it beyond Al Jazeera and beyond Kantar. But Al Jazeera has had this extraordinary role in the Gaza war. I did a little explainer episode, I think four or five episodes ago, about Qatar's interests and how Al Jazeera really produced, turned Hamas into this grand heroic story in the Arab world. It was a platform online.

like any other, a trailblazed this pan-Arab conversation that had never really been before and did it all in the name of this Muslim brother of ideology of Imam Karadawi from Egypt that the Qataris put in place and he taught, you know, the Arab world, Sunni Arab world, what Sharia was for 30 years and on the channels of Al Jazeera all over the Arab world. And when they doubled down on Hamas the way they did, how they produced in Paris, and repeated edlessly. Not an anti-Israel narrative, that's obviously. You know, give it to them, that's free.

An anti-P.A. narrative. And a pro-Islamist narrative that the only way to be loyal to Palestinians is to be loyal to Hamas. And that became, you know, doubly and triply true after October 7, where they whitewashed Hamas', you know, vast use of civilian human shields,

the tunnel system, the... Hmm, excuse me, the exploitation, the taxis. the abuse, the way of so much of the aid money, so much of the concrete that was sent into Gaza between the various rounds of war, to build schools and hospitals and roads, went into that tunnel system. The radicalization of Israelis that Al Jazeera has done, has done such terrible harm to Gazans, those hostage release ceremonies, where Hamas humiliates the hostages, where hostages whose family were murdered by Hamas on October 7, and they've been 500 days in a dungeon in Gaza.

And in their release, Chamas mocks them by telling them that they'll be able to see their family again. Those are almost produced live by Al Jazeera. We have information that the people actually running the ceremony broadcast to Israelis with Hamas in uniform. The only time they were ever in uniform in the last three years, they distinguished them from civilians, was in those ceremonies meant to mock Israelis. That's all broadcast on Al Jazeera and it's literally produced on the phone.

Someone is standing in Gaza and someone else. And Al Jazeera has access to all the videos, right? The Israeli government keeps getting criticized for not letting foreign journalists into Gaza. But there were foreign journalists in Gaza. They were just totally Hamas, right? They were Al Jazeera. So that force that in the Arab imagination

lionizes Hamas and empowers Hamas and gives it that massive strategic depth and also helps divide Palestinian society, helps make permanent by giving Hamas those deep, you know, that support, makes permanent the divide between Hamas and Fatah, between the West Bank in Gaza. Hamas becomes the totality of Gaza in politics, comes to utterly control Gaza society, and has these immense platforms shepherding them along. Is that an accurate way of describing your view? It's certainly something that I've come to believe over the last three years and really understand.

Without a doubt, Al Jazeera has been one of the, I would say, the most consequential enemies of the people of Gaza. Al Jazeera is so loathed by such a large number of the people of Gaza right now, because throughout not just the last 20 years, but just the last three years, especially following October 7th, they went out of their way to show Hamas as if it's this superpower, as if it's this entity that can really take on Israel, this powerful, you know, they got their anti-tank missiles and the anti-air and the Israelis are never going to be able to attack Gaza, because Hamas has achieved strategic deterrence. There's a famous, an infamous Jordanian retired military officer, Faiza Dueri. that Gazans have come to really hate and despise.

Because throughout the war, where Gazans were getting annihilated and killed and destroyed, and Hamas wasn't given up and wasn't releasing the hostages, he kept promising impending victories and impending disasters for the Israelis. And the Israelis cannot win this war. And there's just no ways. And a simple, you know, RPG shot that a Hamas dude would emerge from, a tunnel. He would shoot an RPG, shell at an Israeli tank, and disappear. Al Jazeera would work with Hamas to showcase just the nanosecond of the blast to show a ball of fire.

But what I thought was hilarious is that the Israeli military managed to capture after a bunch of dead, dead guys from Hamas, like they were killed in the battle, and the Israelis went into the tunnel. they caught the raw footage and they show how many of these shots Hamas fires at these tanks and then the tank just drives off it's like it's like it's like it's like a little like because of the armor that they have and their explosive reactive armor and all of that but al Jazeera would air all of these statements by Hamas that at one time claimed Hamas has hit and damaged and destroyed a thousand Israeli armored vehicles I mean completely complete nonsense, complete parallel universes that Al Jazeera was in. So that's on the like the offensive resistance side of things.

Then on the suffering side, Al Jazeera was working with Hamas to highlight the civilian casualties, say in a tent area that was hit without mentioning why was the tent hit. Of course I'm heartbroken and devastated to see all the children and the women and the elderly that were. killed in these humanitarian areas. But they would conveniently work with Hamas, Al Jazeera, to just broadcast these endless images of devastation when everyone in Gaza was saying, yeah, the strike took place because this famous leader from Hamas, this famous leader from the Al-Kasan Brigades,

oh, look at the secondary explosions. Oh, look at, like, this isn't Hasbara, this isn't Israeli propaganda. This isn't, you know, Zionist misinformation, as people were telling me whenever I was, would try to speak about it. Gazans themselves were saying, I know that my next door neighbor in the tents, three doors down,

is an Islamic jihad leader because there are two armed sentinels, guards, outside of his tents with weapons that they're carrying. And they were like, we're just waiting for an Israeli air strike to come at any moment right now to just to wipe us all out. And then the Israeli strike would come out.

And then people would be like, oh, and Al Jazeera was. immediately ready there and they've already counted the dead and they've already just, you know, so that's in the last three years. But let's step back before, even before, I mean, Al-Qaradawi was one of the first to actually issue his infamous fatwa on Al Jazeera that went into hundreds of millions of Arab and Muslim homes that said, suicide bombings are not suicidal. They are not suicidal. They are martyrdom.

They are acts. So it went from in Arabic. We say Amalia, Intihariya, a suicidal operation, to Amalia istachadiyahe. A martyrdom operation, where the dude blows himself up. So it was the massive convergence of political Islam and Islamism with mass manipulation and propaganda at like Goebel's level. I mean, it would put Goebel's to shame. because he didn't have access to satellite TV and the ability to so quickly disseminate information.

And then in my book, I keep using the word, the term, move the overton window. Hamas is ISIS with better propaganda. Hamas is a gradualist form of ISIS. They don't just take over and they say, okay, everybody dress up this way, this is that. It's a gradualist. It's that infamous allegory of the board. boiling frog that you slowly turn up the water so that the fraud doesn't jump up. And what Al Jazeera did is provide billions of dollars worth of free propaganda and accessibility.

It made Hamas not just a Palestinian organization and not just one that's largely based in Gaza. But it made Hamas a trans Arab, trans-Muslim, transnational phenomenon that took what is essential, an ISIS-like organization at a miniature-scale and normalized it as a supposed resistance entity and a resistance organization. And in so doing, devastated the Palestinian National Project and legitimate aspirations and showed, I mean, you spoke about the Israeli interests and how the Israelis are traumatized from what Al Jazeera has done. But I'm just giving you a glimpse of how I and many actual Palestinian call it

nationalists, call it activists, call it advocates, call it nationalists, whatever you want to say. Intellectuals fundamentally think that Al Jazeera

is at the core of the degradation of the contemporary Palestinian national project towards Islamism and how Hamas would not be what it is without Al Jazeera.

And if the only thing the Palestinian national movement really has to say to Israelis, as Al Jazeera framed it, as the Qatari money, the Qatari regime. Al Jazeera does nothing at that scale without the Qatari command. If that is the only kind of Palestine on offer, that is a second avenue by which, again, it doesn't matter how much you hate Israel or how bad you think Israelis are.

You have condemned Palestinian. Palestinian well-being and welfare, not on the ground when it comes to exploitation and taxation and aid, and not at the sort of grand strategic scale of ideology and region and Islamization and all of these grand contests of ideas in the Middle East. The last thing anybody gave a shit about is the ordinary Palestinians on the ground. They're used as moral touchstones for these grand morality plays, but their actual well-being has never factored in. Because if it did, you wouldn't turn to Hamas.

And now, in light of everything we've talked about, right, it seems that Ghazans are completely abused and totally deserved by Hamas to the point of the destruction of Gaza, to the point of a, you know, that tunnel network tells us they wanted this kind of war, prepared to survive this kind of war.

And Hamas has basically admitted it repeatedly and constantly for three years. And yet, the popularity of Hamas in Gaza remains louder. The criticism remains quieter. Unless you're right next to the Israeli army, you don't march against Hamas in any way, even now,

even in their desperation. And by the way, including in places where Hamas doesn't rule, like in the West Bank, where Hamas way outstrips the Fatah or the PA or the nationalist in the polling in Palestinian communities, expat communities in L.A., in London.

The support for Hamas is wall-to-wall. And they suffer through this war, and they can hate Hamas for putting them through the war, But they don't actually rise up demanding freedom. They don't think that Hamas is abuse of them, control of them, use of them cynically in this war as this vast human shield system. They don't think that's something they need to rebel against.

They basically believe Hamas's version of Islam. They basically find dignity in the constant forever war that never ends until the great religious redemption. And there's no democratic baseline belief or experience to wrap. Bottom line, they just agree with Hamas. Even those who hate Hamas. When it comes to Israel and Israelis and the future possibilities with them,

don't they just agree with Hamas? That's how thousands of civilians can cross the border on October 7 and kidnap and assault and murder and pillage and have that rapturous and religiously coded joy. They scream religious things in the streets of Gaza as the mutilated bodies of Israeli women

are dragged through those streets. Nothing any Israeli right-winger ever said about Palestinians. was as convincing to a majority of ordinary Israeli Jews as those images. And again, it's not that we suffered that, now you have to suffer 15 times that, which is how it's often talked about in the pro-Palestinian world. It's not the numbers.

It's that that's all you will ever offer me, and you will never be able to offer me anything else. And if that's all that awaits us, yeah, this is a forever war. What else? There's the testimony of hostages, like Eli Shari and Tal Shoham. They've both been on this podcast.

And one of the things that's interesting about, specifically Sharabi and Sean, Sharabin knows Arabic, spoke Arabic to his, to his captors. Both of them were left-wingers who supported Palestinian independence. Both of them came on this podcast and both of them said that they never considered trying to escape because they knew they would be lynched by ordinary gauzens in the street if they were discovered. Now, in Israeli audience hearing that on prime time television by this person who does want separation between Israelis. Hamas itself has said, repeatedly, in trying to defend itself, you know, to the useful idiots in the West to refuse to see

it's Hamas for what it is. A, that they will never stop trying to, you know, commit more October 7s. But B, they've said specifically, B, that Gazans support them. They're the one, they're arguing against the separation between Gaza society and Hamas. But more importantly, Hamas leaders have literally said on Al Jazeera in interviews that the very worst atrocities on October 7, well, those weren't Hamas. Hamas always respected civilians. Those are committed by civilian Gazans, not Hamas fighters. So I'm going to just wrap up the question, but Israelis have so many data points they feel, they believe. And it's a very dark and pessimistic view that emerges from those data points. If the goal is a better

Palestinian future, that perspective has to be seriously engaged with. In what sense, you have argued that Gazans are victims of Hamas. I absolutely agree with you that Gazans are victimized by Hamas. But what if Hamas really is an authentic representation of Gazans of the worldview of the vast majority of Gazans? Not all, but enough of a majority for there not to really be another political reality that anybody can find, that anybody can build. What if Hamas represents Gaza fairly accurately and authentically, and we all have to figure out a way around that or live with that or not get around that. What if we're stuck in that? I mean, I will start by acknowledging the, like, validity in how a lot of Israelis feel towards Ghazans.

Like, I'm not here to say that your feelings are inaccurate. Your feelings are completely not based in some aspects of reality that your feelings don't matter. I absolutely understand why there's this broad sense of trauma, this broad sense of fatigue from Gaza, not just from October 7th, but the 20 years that preceded it or the 18 years that preceded it. So with that, my main pushback is that I think there are two angles to think about this misan, I think there's a misunderstanding of what does it mean to be a hostage of Hamas or to be captive by Hamas?

I mean, when I say, when Hamas took over Gaza's population was one point, an estimated 1.4 million people. In 2007, right before October 7th, it was estimated at 2.3 million. We're talking about almost, almost a doubling of the population. An entire generation, two-thirds of Gaza's population, roughly, being potentially under the age of 30. Folks that basically have grown, including even those who were born before Hamas took over, most of their kind of, and awake and alert life has been under Hamas. And so people are a product of their environment. 20 years, two decades is a long time for a singular entity to control Gaza with an iron fist,

with an enforced cohesion and forced conformity, with the type of ridiculous, violent Islamist ideology that may not have been straight up ISIS, but like I said was two steps below what ISIS and the Taliban do. The problem with Hamas, and I've said this already on the podcast today, is that it moved slowly but also deliberately, the over-ten window, where even opposers of Hamas, who were Fetah or the PA, who are ideological opposition, in ideological opposition, who are against the armed resistance narrative.

They had to basically qualify their own. opposition and say, well, I oppose Hamas for, and then at the end, they would say, even though I respect sincere resistors. One of the things I mentioned in the book is that Hamas realized quickly how unpopular it was going to be. And then it decided to basically separate itself from itself. I know that sounds like an oxymoron. It decided to separate Hamas, the concept of resistance from Hamas, the administrative and controlling state. And it said, fine, hate us for the control and hate us for the administration and hate us for whatever.

But remember, those guys in masks in the tunnels shooting rockets, those are the Palestinian army. Those are here for you. Those are the resistors. And unfortunately, in an area that is largely dominated by young people that worked for a lot of people. That absolutely worked. So you will find Gossans.

And this is the kind of nuance that I think it's important if we really want to understand Ghazen society. Like we, this isn't to justify, this isn't to try to cut them excuses or loose, but like if you want to understand the complexity of Gassan society and navigate it, but also identify windows of opportunities, which is what I've been all about, is identifying the windows of opportunities to shift the narratives away from Hamas. You will have Gazans that despise Hamas,

but at least before October 7th, were bought into the resistance narrative. So they're like, it was cognitive dissonance personified. You will have people that will talk smack about Hamas, but like I said, at the end said, I am with the resistors. What does that mean the resistors? But then this is very critical.

You also had people who said, you know what? Because at the end of the day, Hamas police, the guys that were oppressing the people, and there were mass, and they were mass protests. They were absolutely mass protest in 2017, in 2019, and in 2023, before, like three months before October 7th, against Hamas's rule.

The people with the sticks, the people that beat the crap out of people, of the protesters, the people who arrested protesters. At night, these guys put on the masks and enter the tunnels. During the day, they put on police uniforms. So this actually, there was a breaking of people started putting two and two together. That you cannot, there is no separating Hamas, the administrative authoritarian fascist regime from Hamas, the supposed resistors.

So I'm saying that narrative was going. like there was an arc to that narrative that I argue after October 7th, the demise of even the armed resistance narrative has very much so accelerated and has reached new heights. Now, the people that entered Gaza, entered Israel in the Israeli communities. I mean, yeah, people are a product of their envis. 70% of Gazans have not left the Gaza Strip ever. they've only seen the outside world and Israelis and Jews and Zionists and whatever all through their computer screens, their cell phone screens, and their TVs.

And unfortunately, to some of them, this, I mean, not to use a callous expression, but to some of them, this was almost like a picnic of going into like Israel and looting. Some of them were looters. Some of them it was a spectacle and like, hey, let's cross in eight hours. of the IDF not showing up, that is a long window in which people felt that there were zero consequences. It was

total lawlessness and chaos and I'm sorry. Like, unfortunately in Hamas control territory, there isn't this sense of internally led, hey, I'm not going to cross into areas that we've been told forever are

originally Palestine and the Zionists came and stole from us. So like contextually also, this was the first, time in modern Palestinian history that something even remotely, there was no, there's nothing to pivot the collective memory to. Some of those people lived near the borders, by the way, those people that went in. Some of them came in on motorcycles. Some of them were in fact, I mean, there are extensive criminal and drug, criminal enterprises and drug induced elements of Ghazan society.

Then there are elements who just thought of this as like, oh my God, this is just another round of the war that we've engaged with. But even then, we're talking about, what, 5,000 people that may have in totality gone into Israel or been part of these mass public celebrations. We were talking about 3 to 5,000 of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. the direct terrorists that went in, but also the support infrastructure behind. Let's say between the direct on that day, we're talking about 10,000 Gazans that were directly involved in October 7th. And let's say maybe another 300,000 in their homes were cheering this on.

I'm coming out of these numbers. Like, we're still talking about a population of out of a 2.3 million. population that is largely made up of young people. Like, this is where I'm talking about the act of Hamas arresting Gaza's development isn't just about the physical development, but it is about the intellectual development. It is about the degradation of the Palestinian national movement. It is about the overtone window of violence, of jihadism, of the rejection of the other.

So does, to the Israelis, you. You guys get to see the consequences of that. What I'm describing, nevertheless, is the multi-layered, multifaceted way in which we either arrived there or in which those who support Hamas. I mean, Hamas, there's a core ideological support for Hamas. Then beyond that, you start getting into different layers of patronage, whether it be jobs, the terrorists that crossed them, man, all the Nakhba guys. the Nakhba guys would compete for training courses in Tehran and in Lebanon

because that corresponded with higher pay band, a pay scale, and more health benefits and more access to public lands, to public this, to public. So that's what I'm going to, the opposition to Hamas is also multi-layered. Some people oppose Hamas from an ideological point of view because they are fundamentally still secular. Some people want to wear whatever they want. Some people want to drink alcohol. Some people believe that Hamas basically sabotaged, spent the last 30 years sabotaging the Oslo process, the departure away, the journey away from armed resistance towards negotiations, et cetera. And that it pushed Arafat into not saying yes, and Camp David in 2000.

It kind of brought like restricted before cooing the Palestinian Authority. Airfat tried, and I speak about that in the book, he tried to accommodate them. There were times when he actually would use them nefariously to get a better bargaining position with the Israelis, where they hold Barack and Sharon. But ultimately, Hamas made it so that Airfat had to always look to his rightward flank and say, oh, I got to worry about these guys here. So the totality of the aforementioned is to, and finally, actually, there is this narrative in Israel that says Hamas is using Palestinians as human shields.

And that's partly why, like how you explain the mass human, civilian casualties that the IDF says are at times inevitable because of Hamas's choice and embedding itself in civilian targets in different parts of the social infrastructure. using someone as human shield in principle necessitates that you are ultimately holding them hostage. So actually what I'm saying, the title of the book, in addition to the kind of intellectual or the political or the religious or the social, in terms of the tactical and the operational side by way of the demeanor and the conduct of Hamas in the warfare, it very much so is about holding the Palestinian people hostage, whether they support Hamas, whether they hate Hamas, They want Hamas to stop, whether they support the idea of resistance, but they hate Hamas. In totality, we're talking about Hamas using two million Palestinians in Gaza as hostages by virtue of the fact that it's using them as human shield, holding them hostage by virtue of the fact that it's using them as human shields.

So that's my message to Israelis is that I hear your skepticism. I hear, but I want to end that just this segment on a much more, this section, on a much, more optimistic note. And this is why I keep going. This isn't, listen, 44% of American Muslims a month ago told Pew Research that they support Hamas. I think it's more like, you know, and I don't believe the polling in Gaza, by the way, because that's like going to North Korea or Belarus or Putin's Russia and asking people, what do you think of the great leader? Palestinian society is not free. It is not democratic. People also have this culture of, we have to posture publicly to the world.

The individual is smart, the group are dumb. You will talk to Palestinians one-on-one, and they will tell you that armed resistance is a failure. There's no getting rid of the Jews. There's no getting rid of Zionism. We actually want to work in Israel. We want treatment in Israel. We want economic cooperation with Israel.

They'll say that one-on-one. But trying to collectively have that be part of the, the cultural psyche is really, really difficult. It is so challenging because of the multi-decade, multi-layered, you have the Al Jazeera and you have Hamas, and then you have the ding-dongs in the West, and then you have the Ayatollahs, and then you have the Egyptians and the Jordanians

and the other Arabs and the imbeciles in the Muslim world. But the hope, where's my hope in all of this? Why do I keep going? Because I don't want to just be a desert in the rose. I don't want to just be a singular voice. I believe there are thousands of Ahmeds out there who believe in parts and bits and pieces of what I'm doing and would have an opportunity to rise up

once there's an actual safe way for them to do so. I see a window in Gaza. People are against Hamas because of the consequences of October 7th. They're realizing that Hamas wasted two decades of Gaza's history. They're seeing the arc of Hamas now with the upcoming disarmament deal. And they're realizing that, oh my goodness, you told us

you'll never going to give up your weapons. On resistance is it? Iran and the access of resistance is going to work. And this is total garbage. And you stole all the aid. You prolonged the war unnecessarily for two years. And you

cause civilian casualties because you wanted the world to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. And that all failed. The ICC failed. The ICJ failed, the genocide case went nowhere. So I see a window in which I wholeheartedly believe, and I have an army of contacts on the ground. My brother is there. My cousins are there. My friends are there. Everybody I know is there. I talk to hundreds on a weekly basis. People are willing. There's a willingness to go away from the armed resistance narrative, I believe, towards the

nation-building agenda, ultimately in pursuit of peace and coexistence. as you and I know it. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody who's against Hamas is pro-Israel or is ready to talk about peace in the way that we believe peace should prevail. It doesn't mean they don't have grievances towards Israelis, whether from the war or whether historic. But it means that there's an opening for different narratives to commence and to begin the long journey of de-radicalization and transformation.

And that's where I genuinely think. there is a window and there is an opportunity. And I hope that I understand Israeli skepticism, but I hope that that is not reflexively dismissed. Because what's the alternative? We cannot just live in perpetual pessimism. We have to hope that those hostages in Gaza, and I'm not belittling the suffering of Israeli hostages,

by the way, by calling Gaza and hostages. But ultimately, I'm trying to speak to the pro-Palestine community. I'm trying to speak to the international community and to a certain extent to the Israelis that ultimately Gossans are still hostages to a narrative and to a terrorist organization and we have to think about that.

I sounded as an Israeli and listened to your answer and you described a lot of detail and a lot of nuance and a lot of complexity and a lot of humanity and your deep sympathy for Gossens is, you know, is saturated in everything you say. These are real people trying to make sense of a world and of a situation and of an awful moment.

But none of that is the kind of political power base. None of that is the kind of ideological counter to Hamas's worldview and to Hamas' resistance and endless war. Right now we have a Board of Peace. And the plan of the Board of View, the Trump's 20-point plan, was signed, was voted on in the UN Security Council. It is the official sort of international community plan for Gaza.

The Arabs are on board. The Saudis and the Qataris are on board. There's infinite money. There's infinite desire to get this the hell off the agenda. Sorry, goodwill by the Europeans and the Americans. There is, and the Arab world and everybody. China and Russia abstained from the vote. I don't think they wanted to give Trump the victory,

but they also didn't want their allies, Iran, et cetera, but they also didn't want to prevent it to right stop it. And you have this huge plan to rebuild Gaza. But what are you going to do? One of the 20 points of the 20 point plan is Hamas disarming. And we are now a year into this process. And we're discussing whether or not Hamas can disarm from the big stuff or the little stuff or now or later or win the Israelis with drugs.

There is no patience in Israel. If the Israeli left wins the election on October 27, then the world is going to discover that the Israeli left has no patience for these diplomatic games. We have been playing diplomatic games and the world has been sometimes imposing diplomatic games, sometimes these games and these processes and these ways that diplomats and think tank people talk, none of it matters anymore. There is no actual process by which the Board of Peace can actually disarm Hamas. the Saudi expeditionary force in Gaza

to police Gaza, I'm just imagining, is not going to disarm Hamas. The Turks, if they come in, and they're one of the few who actually want to come in, are going to fight for Hamas. They are going to hand Hamas weapons. They are ideologically of Hamas and Qatar's side of the larger Middle Eastern Muslim divide.

And so Hamas won't disarm. The suffering of Gazans in the tent cities of Gaza right now is not a motivation for Hamas. The disarmament never has been. We just discussed how they built themselves out of mass exploitation of Gazans. You call them hostages. I completely agree with you that they're hostages

unless they don't all know that they're hostages, right? Because they're kind of on board because it was run the school system for a generation. And so why? Why would Hamas ever actually disarm? It's just not rational to me to think Hamas can ever disarm or that this diplomatic process can produce it. Jared Kushner, meeting Khalil al-Kaya is going to get Hamas to disarm? Is that really what Jared Kushner believes?

I would like you, if you can, or if you disagree or whatever, to address this point. There's this process now. We're all watching the details. And you can go as much in the details as you want. This is the last question. I'm not going to ask you another. Can they be disarmed? Does this process have any hope?

Is this real? Can you extract Hamas from a society? society that you've just described all kinds of reasons why we should be sympathetic of Ghazans not actually seeing a different horizon to Hamas, but it doesn't change the bottom line policy point, which is there isn't really another political horizon in Gaza other than Hamas. Is that better future for Gaza really possible? Absolutely. I have been very skeptical myself.

I've been using the metaphor. It's like you can't have olive oil without olives. You can't have Hamas without weapons and terrorism. Like that is the whole, that is the spinal cord of what Hamas is. However, stepping back, I have been able to acknowledge that I actually think, I mean, I do believe that even if partial, Hamas politically and principally, agrees to the idea of disarmament. And some of this is because they, in part by the influence of the Turks, Hamas is actually moving significantly from pivoting away from Qatar to Turkey.

The Qataris right now, they're stuck. They can't get their LNG. They can't get through the Strait of Hormuz. They can't pump the kind of billions that they used to pump into Gaza. The Turks have experience with the military cooing the Islamist parties three separate times before Erdogan and the AKP were able to come to power in 2003 in Istanbul and then slowly, slowly rise to power. I believe that the Turks convinced Hamas

that the real future is not in arms and armed resistance, quote unquote resistance, but that the real future is in evolving as a political entity, as a political player, and that the Turks are going to have an easier time hosting and nurturing Hamas and mentoring them into that evolution, if you will, which I think that could spell disaster for the further disaster for a lot of players, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Arabs.

I mean, it's bad enough to go from the Islamic Republic of Iran, a non-Arab player to another non-Arab player, Turkey, being the sponsor of Hamas. I think we're past. So anyway, I actually believe Hamas is very much so willing to disarm. The problem is that the guys on the ground. ground in Gaza do have a different calculus than Khalil al-Haya and the guys in Qatar, in Turkey, in Egypt, and elsewhere. My concern is that even if Hamas gives the order to proceed, we could see splinter cells

from Hamas emerging in the same way that in the past, I mean, Fetach, the main body of the PLO, the party from which Abu Mazen and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority descend, they've had their own internal splits. I mean, look at Mohamed Dahlan and how he split the Gaza native, who's now based in the U.A. And so you look at the PFLP, the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, that hijacked a bunch of airplanes and all the different groups.

And how, you know, in the 70s, they had a bunch of different splinter cells. They had a PFLP general command that then moved to Syria, and became a total tool of the Assad regime. So my concern is that we could see a splintering of Hamas in Gaza, whereby part of them decide, yes, we want jobs, we want amnesty, we want reintegration, which were promised by the Americans and by the end of the Board of Peace.

The Americans are trying to go for something in between total debaffification or what they thought they could do after their October 2025 ceasefire. which is, let's just flood Gaza with aid and commercial goods that Hamas can tax. Let's offer them amnesty and money. Let's just bribe Hamas. This is what Steve Wickoff and Jared Kushner thought, is if we can just bribe these guys, then they'll just acquiesce. And they're foolishly trying that with the Islamic Republic of Iran right now.

And I think they're underappreciating how ideologically based Islamist organizations tend to be immune to that sort of incentive structure. So Israel, on the other hand, is very much so that this is the only thing that it will accept before it gives up any level of control over Gaza, whether it be withdrawing to the original boundary of the Yellow Line as determined by the ceasefire in October 2025, or the actual boundaries of Israel and Gaza, the actual borders. Israel feels that it paid a high political and diplomatic price internationally for the war. It feels that it paid a massive economic price, the number of soldiers who were killed in the war,

just the cost internally to Israeli society. And it is not going to really acquiesce to this idea that we will withdraw and simply leave a neutered Hamas that is basically without its heavy weapons. and then the Board of Peace is International Stabilization Force, which we promise is not going to be like UNIFEL in southern Lebanon, and the newly trained Palestinian force got police force that the Egyptians and the Jordanis are going to train, are going to move in, and then finish the light weapons.

Israel basically put down its feet and said absolutely not. But also, let's be honest, there's an election season in Israel, and I think Prime Minister Netanyahu is under a lot of pressure not to be seen as having acquiesced to a diplomatic track that doesn't deliver the kind of total and decisive victory that he long promised following October 7th. I want to say something real quick about the many voices that kept saying, oh, Hamas cannot be defeated, Hamas is an idea, Hamas is an ideology.

If I had a penny for every time I heard that stupid argument, the Nazis are an ideology that lives on almost 100,000, years later, who cares if Hamas as an idea lives on and persists? There are three metrics to Hamas' defeat in Gaza that we need to pay attention to, from my point of view. Number one is, do they control territory? Number two, do they have an executive presence and force and control on the ground, such as fighters, terrorists, police, and the ability to control the population and to administer said

territory. Number three, do they have control of resources? And the resources being money, taxation, humanitarian aid, and reconstruction supplies and money and other tangible resources. On all three metrics, if you want to assess Hamas, according to these three metrics, it has been, I think, severely rolled back, not entirely defeated, but it has has. been severely rolled back. And, you know, the question is, let's pretend, you know, it's like your fingers, like Hamas is up to this, this part of your finger. It's this last 10% that matters the most. Can we actually use military force to seize, to end Hamas's control of territory? Can we use military force to end Hamas's executive presence on the ground, whether it be having any forces

or any police or administrative bodies, and can we use military force to prevent Hamas from having access to resources? I think, unfortunately, we're realizing, just as the U.S. is realizing the limits of military force in Iran, and that does, I mean, yes, I acknowledge the U.S. administration has made a lot of mistakes in how it carried out the war in Iran, but military force alone is not going to topple the regime in Iran,

at least from the air. So this last 10% on the three aforementioned metrics, I do think as it stands right now, the plan for disarmament actually is the only thing that we have to try to further erode Hamas's control. Because again, I don't think they have any options. I actually see the arc of Hamas coming down, whereby they're, just they're not going to disappear, but I think they're going to be rendered to yet another. It's like the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP, Feta, like, there's all the small groups inside the PLO that you've never heard about. Hamas will still be on the scene, but I genuinely,

not because I'm against them, not because I'm just, I'm looking at the metrics. I'm looking at how the Israeli military is never going to let them take over in the West Bank. Believe it or not, Hamas is popular in the West Bank. But once the beginning of the month comes around, the same people that vote in these stupid polls, we love Hamas and we want Hamas to rule us, they want a Palestinian authority salary. They want to be able to register for the schools

or for the medical insurance that the Palestinian Authority underwrites half of. Everybody loves Hamas until they need something. thing. So I don't, and after the Gaza devastation, after the experience in Janine and Tobas and parts of the northern part of the West Bank, where the Israeli military went in after these cells and basically pushed out, tens of thousands of people lost their homes. And like, there's a realization in the West Bank, and especially now with the violent settler terrorism, really, that's getting out of control. There is actual fear that we cannot. import the Gaza experience onto the West Bank, such that I don't believe we're ever going

to see Hamas replicate what it did in Gaza in the West Bank, even if they might win a couple of seats here and there. So I actually think Hamas is, if you think about their arc and think about, and we're tying it back to my book, think about the rise in the 70s and the riding the wave of the Islamic awakening across the Arab and Muslim worlds. And think about 2007 as the beginning of their rise and they peaked in the last decade or so. And then after October 7th was the like the climax of the terror group. And now it's just been like the sharp decline. I think Hamas is going to disarm. I think the Israelis are going to agree to the disarmament plan. I think the American. So so the only problem, and I'll close with

this. The disarmament question is no longer a political one. There's finally an agreement that we need to do this. The problem is that, as with many things with the Trump administration, great ideas, very poor execution, very poor follow-through. They don't want to pour any money into the Board of Peace. There is, I was talking to folks. I know, I know Mladenov. I think Mladenov is an honorable men. I know Ali Shah, the head of the technocratic committee. I know a lot of these people. Very good people, wonderful people. But thus far, we don't really have a mechanism through this international security force, stabilization force. Like, we have a few hundred soldiers from Morocco and some guys from

Uganda, whatever. How are they going to be? go in and like collect the weapons? Are we the United Arab Emirates allocated a hundred million dollars to three months ago to the newly to the new Palestinian police force for Gaza under the auspices of the Board of Peace. They wanted 5,000 initial officers, 78,000 people from Gaza applied. I know some of the people who applied from Gaza. Not one has been called out of of Gaza to go train in the U.S. Israeli approved facilities in Jordan or in Egypt. So we've wasted 10 months, Haviv, 10 months we've wasted, talking about the nuclear force. But what has been the waste? I have never had a positive international force experience,

not the umbrella that folds in the rain in the Sinai with the UN forces in the Sinai in 67, where, you know, Nasir said go and they just fled. Not the forces, the sub-enational. forces on the Golan, where as soon as Jabot al-Nusra comes down the Golan Plateau in 2015, conquering its way in the Syrian Civil War, the Irish, the Fijian, I forget who it was, the Indians maybe, all run behind the IDF line. Mazel Tov, you're the International Separation Force who need to be protected by the IDF. And not, and the worst offenders, UNIFEL. Or UNIFEL, precisely.

Where every UNIFEL position was the Hezbollah front, was a Hezbollah dug under them. because one of the Israelis going to bomb uniform? I've never had. But the good news, brother, the good news is these guys are not going to take over Gaza per se. On the disarmament, let's just stick very specifically with disarmament. The idea is that they're going to actually, instead of hand, they're going to collect, instead of Hamas, giving the weapons to this new non-existent Palestinian police force or to the IDF, they're going to give it to the international force for destruction.

Here's where I think this is important, and I'll actually, we'll close with this. And this is where I hope for the sake of emboldening anti-Hamas Palestinians, for the sake of accelerating the demise of Hamas, for the sake of invalidating the armed resistance narrative, for the sake of pushing back against the hordes of pro-Hamas imbeciles in the West, I hope that we, even if it's partial disarmament, the scene of Hamas guys, especially if they're covered up. I hope to God they're covered up.

Coming out and handing Kalashnikovs, handing their RPGs, handing their IEDs, handing the motors and the rocket launchers, even if they just hand a few hundred or a few thousand systems, and handing that to the American-led Board of Peace is going to so thoroughly humiliate Hamas and invalidate their identity. and invalid. And it's going to,

that I think is going to de-radicalize more Palestinians than anyone is thinking about. Javiv, I cannot overstate this or understate. Ahmed, isn't that why

it'll never happen? It's not quite the victory image Netanyahu needs, but you're right that it's certainly the loss image for Hamas, but isn't that why it's never going to happen?

But, well, I think, though, what I am assessing and I have spent a lot of time really research. It really does seem like Hamas is up against a literal wall. The IDF is picking off their dudes one by one now that the war is basically not in a large kinetic phase. The IDF is able, I mean, they went after Azaddin al-Haddad and like all the major bench of the pre-October 7th old generation of the military commanders is gone. So now you have basically the mid-tier commanders who are part of the police, who are involved in October 7th, the individual terrorists

who are part of it. But basically, Hamas is no longer, Hamas's whole pride and joy for decades has been the ability to regenerate leadership, to recreate. I mean, I was in Gaza when all of their leaders were assassinated. And then Hamas became huge and a behemoth and it regenerated. That's not happening anymore. Because Israel has gone after. tens of thousands of their leadership, of their cadre. And also, there's a very finite pool of weapons that are in Gaza. The smuggling from Egypt is long gone. It's done.

The kids that we hear about them recruiting to join the ranks of the fighting, they can't train them even on AKs or RPGs because they don't want to run out of ammunition rounds. They have very finite. They have to conserve their ammo. So I have sources in Gaza telling me that they're showing these kids. They're training them on YouTube videos on how to fire RPGs, how to hold a gun, how to execute. Because the resources are too precious. So I genuinely believe from a financial point of view, from a military point of view, from like the Qataris and the Egyptians and the Saudi, the Iranians that can't support them anymore.

Hamas just has no option. and it knows that the people of Gaza are against them. So that's why, to answer your question, no, I do believe it will happen. I just think the humiliation will be so strong. It might cause some elements of Hamas to splinter and to break off in Gaza. Those guys aren't exactly going to have an amazing fate awaiting them. But if we just get just enough disarmament to happen, it'll erode the existing finite arsenal. and it will actually de-radicalize people.

It'll show them full circle. You guys made when I was, and I wrote about it in the book, when I was in Gaza in the 90s, they made fun of Arafat and the PLO for, for rejected or denouncing armed resistance and saying, no, we want to try peace and negotiations, whatever. You guys spent 30 years saying how armed resistance, you know, we love martyrdom and death more than you, Zionists and Jews, and more than you, treacherous Palestinians love life.

And now the death cultism comes back full circle to what has it all been for. So that is something that I am holding out hope for. I just worry that the issue now is a logistical problem. And we cannot underestimate logistics because that's ultimately what defeated Russia's war aims in Ukraine. They have a massive army, but logistics ultimately defeated their aims. Similarly, we have near agreement between Israel, Hamas, and the U.S.-led international order on disarmament. But as far as the sequencing and the implementation, as of now, I don't see anything that can actually make this happen anytime soon. Ahmed Vaud al-Khattib, I have so much to say that I'm not going to say anything at all.

folks send us questions, send us thoughts. You know, I will forward any interesting emails or responses that I get to you. And this is a conversation that's going to continue. Thank you for teaching us and for everything that you do. Thank you, brother, for talking to me. Really appreciate the opportunity.