My piece on Hamas in Boston Review
I got home from Kansas to find the heavy envelope containing my six copies of the edition of Boston Review that contains my big article on Hamas. Then today I checked their website, and it's there too. Actually, here.
It's an intriguing-looking issue altogether. I read the article on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with interest, and look forward to reading the pieces on Venezuela and Argentina. Managing Editors Josh Cohen and Deb Chasman have been doing a super job of building the mag up into a really good, thoughtful place for consideration and discussion of policy issues both global and national. Josh is on the point of leaving MIT, which has hosted BR for many years now. He's going to teach at Stanford instead-- on the far side of the country. But I gather he will still keep his editorial role at BR, which is great. I admired his work on democratic theory long before I ever even knew he was an editor as well...
Back to my piece. The first half is my big wrap-up of the important points from the interviews and reporting I did during my Feb-March trip to Palestine and Israel. Haniyeh, Zahar, etc. Much (but not all) will be familiar to attentive JWN readers. In the second half, I did something new and just interviewed myself, teasing out in Q&A format some of the implications of the sea-change in Palestinian politics that the Hamas electoral victory in Januray represented.
I asked myself questions like:
- Will the Hamas government be able to exert its control over the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, including the many lawless Fateh offshoots?
How will Israel and the international community react to Hamas’s attempt to establish a PA government?
I wrote the first draft of the piece, oh my, maybe back in late March? Then it sat for a while, according to BR's bimonthly publishing schedule; then it got tossed between me and an editor a couple of times, and updated... At the end of all that work I pleaded with Josh and Deb to be allowed to have a dateline put on it. Given how fast political developments move in Palestine, I wanted the "closing date" for updates to be quite clear.. So the dateline is May 1.
It still holds up pretty well, though May is now far advanced.
Anyway, I'll finish this post now. Tomorrow I'll have one about more current Palestinian developments.