When Negotiation is Only “As If” – Hamas |
A striking observation by an Israeli interlocutor raises a different question: what if Hamas is not operating at the level of articulated, responsive communication we assume? This essay considers the implications of that gap.
This post was first published at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack AI translations can be found there in Hebrew and Portuguese
On Communication with Hamas
What appears to be dialogue may not function as such
I have not been able to relocate the exact source, but a recent remark attributed to an Israeli expert who had direct contact with Hamas has stayed with me because of how striking it was. He described being genuinely shocked—not only by the intransigent and demanding tone, which one expects—but by something much more basic: the way Hamas communicated. What struck him was how limited and poorly developed their expression seemed. They struggled, so to speak, to put two words together in any coherent, responsive way. And this raised a disturbing question: how had we come to construct Hamas as so sophisticated, so strategically articulate, even “larger than life,” if at the level of actual communication something so constrained was being encountered?
It was, in effect, an as-if moment. The exchange took the form of negotiation, but did not function as such. The outer structure was there—demands, responses, positions—but the expected qualities of dialogue were missing. There was little sense of articulated thought being developed, modified, or engaged. Instead, communication appeared repetitive, fixed, and resistant to real exchange.
This matters. Because much of the analytic and policy framework assumes that Hamas can be engaged as a strategic actor operating within a recognizable logic—one in which language conveys intention, and intention can be interpreted, negotiated, and influenced. But if the communication itself is constrained, then that assumption may be part of the problem. What may have been missed is not only a misreading of Hamas’s intentions, but a misreading of its form of expression. In retrospect, one has to ask whether this “oddity”—this gap between expectation and encounter—could have been used differently, perhaps even as a point of leverage in counterterrorism thinking.
None of this diminishes the reality of Hamas’s brutality. The massacre of October 7 demonstrated, in the most horrific way, its capacity for violence. The organization is unquestionably dangerous. But danger and sophistication are not the same thing—and conflating the two may have contributed to a Konseptzia: an inflated analytic frame that endowed Hamas with a level of coherence and sophistication it did not, in fact, possess.
If that is the case, then the “as-if” moment does more than disrupt the idea of negotiation—it forces a different question altogether: what kind of communicative organization is being encountered, if the basic conditions for dialogue are not present? The shock described by the Israeli observer suggests that something shifted in how he was listening—not only to what was being said, but to how it was being said.
In psychoanalysis, we speak of a “third ear”—a way of listening that attends to gaps, repetitions, and failures of articulation. Not to diagnose, but to understand how thinking and feeling are organized and expressed. What appears to have registered in that encounter was not simply intransigence, but a limitation in the capacity to elaborate, to respond, and to develop thought through language.
None of this makes Hamas less dangerous. October 7 put that beyond doubt. But danger is not the same as sophistication. If we have mistaken one for the other—if we have engaged “as if” a fully articulated strategic actor were present—we may have overlooked something essential. The question is whether that moment of listening revealed not only a gap in communication, but a limitation in thinking itself—and whether that, too, should have informed how Hamas was understood and confronted.