Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial by Somdeep Sen (review)

Decolonizing Palestine by Somdeep Sen is not a book about the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas from its Arabic name Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, but about the Palestinian struggle more broadly. The book argues that Hamas, as an anticolonial movement, is stuck in the artificial divide that separates an anticolonial struggle from the postcolonial state it acquires after liberation. Stated simplistically, in the anticolonial phase, the actor is committed to tactics of liberation, including armed resistance, while in the postcolonial state, the actor shifts to governance and state-building. In the case of Hamas, both these states coexist in the Gaza Strip, complicating the linear expectations that often underpin accounts of liberation. This leaves Hamas to wage its anticolonial struggle from the very systems of postcolonial governance—the framework of the pseudo-state—that Palestinians were awarded through the Oslo Accords.

Sen rightly points out that "the Gaza Strip under Hamas's leadership as both anticolonial resistance and postcolonial government is also a microcosm of the entirety of the Palestinian long moment of liberation" (p. 126). The Palestinian National Liberation Movement—or Fatah, a reverse acronym from the Arabic Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini—dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and is equally in liberation purgatory, busying itself with performances of statehood while claiming to lead the struggle for liberation. As Sen argues:

The introduction of a formal political-administrative system . . . symbolizes the manner in which the Oslo Accords introduced postcoloniality into a settler colonial condition. At the very outset, it did so by creating "a realm of official Palestinian politics" encapsulated in the institutions and bureaucracies of the statelike Palestinian Authority

(p. 60).

Unlike Hamas, the PA in the West Bank views the tactics of liberation as resting on diplomacy and international arbitration and, as such, has less in common with the military activity of other anticolonial movements than Hamas does. Another difference is crucial; Hamas's government exists in a corner of Palestine that no longer has direct Israeli settlement, and therefore, despite the hermetic blockade around the Gaza Strip, has the illusion of liberation within it. For both these reasons, exploring Hamas specifically as a case study through which to understand this transition from the anticolonial to the postcolonial offers powerful insights.

The central question that haunts Decolonizing Palestine has to do with the implications of this performance of the postcolonial: is it in service of becoming liberated or a perpetuation of being (un)liberated?

In the case of the PA, the answer is clear. Extensive security coordination is the principal way the PA has become, despite all its performances of the postcolonial, an extension of Israel's apartheid. Hamas's case is a bit more complex. In Gaza, Hamas administers the affairs of the two million inhabitants of the strip and, as such, is often the actor that gets blamed for poor services and a deteriorating quality of life, despite the causes for this resting principally within Israeli settler-colonialism. Hamas officials have often spoken to me about being trapped by the public burden of governance. Since it took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has repeatedly had to make military decisions regarding its armed resistance through the lens of its responsibility as an acting government. In other words, implicating its anticolonial struggle with its postcolonial responsibility.

This is a far cry from what Hamas had anticipated when it participated in the 2006 elections; as Sen and others have argued, the movement had sought to revolutionize the very body of the PA so that it would become the launching pad, or the infrastructure, of the liberation struggle. This has arguably not had the successes Hamas may have desired, but as Sen outlines in the book, through its governance, Hamas still works to nourish a society of resistance even as it inhabits the hallways of the PA.

Sen traces how the mundane delivery of services...