Decolonizing Palestine, Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial
By Somdeep Sen
Cornell University Press, 2020, 171 pages, $25.95, ISBN: 9781501752742
Hamas Contained, The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
By Tareq Baconi
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018, 336 pages, $24.00, ISBN: 9780804797412
Gaza under Hamas, from Islamic Democracy to Islamist Governance
By Björn Brenner
London-New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, 2017, 252 pages, $27.85, ISBN: 9781784537777
These three books analyze the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and thus, add to previous related literature.1 While the three books give historical background on the emergence and roots of Hamas and contextualize its role in the broader Palestinian politics and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, their main focus is the period of post-2006 and Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip. The books take 2006 as a turning point for Hamas, in which Hamas succeeded in achieving a decisive victory in the Palestinian legislative election, changing its engagement with politics from being in opposition to being in power. This shift in Hamas’s role from being a ‘resistance movement’ to becoming a ‘ruling authority’ was advanced in 2007 when Hamas took over Gaza Strip