Zachary Foster
A few months ago, Time Magazine asked me to write a 1000 word piece on the history of Hamas. In their words, "we're of course open to different angles & ideas that you feel are most pertinent based on your analysis of the situation." Spoiler alert: that turned out to be false. I wrote the piece. First editor made some excellent suggestions. I revised & re-submitted. Then it went to a second editor (Adam Rasmi @adamrasmi). Adam went through the article & removed all of the important evidence for my argument. It was as if @TIME Magazine was only willing to publish the piece if I agreed to remove all of the supporting evidence for my argument. Strange. This was my response: "The argument of my essay is that Israeli violence radicalized Hamas. Four of the key pieces of evidence I share in the piece to support this argument are: 1. The violence committed by the Israeli military in Gaza during the first year of the intifada (142 Palestinians killed, 0 Israelis killed), the same time that Hamas officially transitioned from charity org. to militant group. 2. the Israeli violence committed against Palestinians up until 1991, i.e. the period in which Hamas transitioned from attacking Israeli military targets to also attacking Israeli civilian targets. 3. The torture of the son of Hamas's leader Ahmed Yassin in front of Yassin himself. 4. An excellent @NYMag piece based on many interviews w/ Hamas militants, saying they embraced violence not b/c of some eternal Jew hatred or Israel hatred, but rather b/c of the violence committed against them, especially against innocent Palestinian civilians. These four pieces of evidence, critical to the argument of the essay, were all removed in the latest round of edits. I wrote back to Time Magazine: I rejected the suggestion to remove the evidence for my argument. Needless to say, they never published the piece. So I published the piece here: https://palestine.beehiiv.com/p/israeli-violence-radicalized-hamas
