LOL Hamas didn't change the discussion, Israel did. I came into the news on Oct 07 with "Fucking Hamas" vibes, but that very quickly changed to, "Wow OK, Israel isn't fucking around." then "Woah Israel OK, maybe use a little more care there, I get that you were attacked but -- WOAH ISRAEL WTF ARE YOU DOING?"
As recently as 2020, Hamas committed to participate in Palestinian national elections; this plan fell apart not because of Hamas but because of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, whose leaders denounced Israel’s refusal to allow elections in East Jerusalem.
Had these apparent gestures of compromise all been part of a ruse to buy time while Hamas prepared a brutal assault? Abu Marzouk insisted that these efforts at negotiation and coexistence had been genuine. He blamed Israel and the Western powers for thwarting Hamas’s overtures. He told us, “We rolled down all of the pathways to get some of our rights—not all of them. We knocked on the door of reconciliation and we weren’t allowed in. We knocked on the door of elections and we were deprived of them. We knocked on the door of a political document for the whole world—we said, ‘We want peace, but give us some of our rights’—but they didn’t let us in.” He added, “We tried every path. We didn’t find one political path to take us out of this morass and free us from occupation.”
There is some evidence to support Abu Marzouk’s narrative. In recent years, Hamas had appeared willing to coexist with the Jewish state. But, as Abu Marzouk acknowledged to us, Hamas also never abandoned core demands such as full Palestinian independence and the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. Nor did the group relinquish its weapons. “But we didn’t mislead anyone,” he told us. “We never hid these slogans.”