The Changing Face of Palestinian Resistance: Hamas and the Defence of Palestine

Abstract

The scale and audacity of Hamas's attacks against Israel on 7 October 2023, surprised many and has generated intense debate about their causes and consequences. This article employs arguments from the critical terrorism and resistance literatures to argue that a series of critical junctures between 2017 – 2023 narrowed the range of viable alternate paths for Hamas to resist the increasing political, military, and societal asymmetry between Palestinians and Israelis. This asymmetry caused Palestinians to fear that the growing permanence and normalisation of Israel's occupation made the prospects of a state chimerical. The article demonstrates how these junctures changed the meaning and intent of Hamas's resistance, using the attacks to transform the status quo in the Occupied Territories and place resolving the Palestinian Question at the forefront of international consciousness. By unravelling the complex interplay between the causal conditions, configurations, and mechanisms surrounding these junctures, this article provides an alternate explanation of these terrorist attacks that stands in tension with more orthodox explanations and their causal reliance on Weberian and Hobbesian norms about non-state actor violence.