Jewish Studies welcomes journalist Shlomi Eldar to Stanford
The Taube Center for Jewish Studies was pleased to welcome award-winning journalist, author, documentary filmmaker, and podcaster Shlomi Eldar to campus to for various engagements with students and faculty around the university. A renowned expert on Hamas, Gaza, and Israeli-Palestinian relations, the Taube Center interviewed Eldar in advance of his visit. The excerpt below has been edited for clarity:
Jeiwsh Studies: What drove you to focus so much of your work on Hamas?
Shlomi Eldar: I started covering the Gaza strip for the Israeli TV in 1991. It was the emergence of the Hamas movement in the Gaza strip. I've seen the process, I've seen the Israeli mistakes, and I've seen with my eyes the changes on the ground. Hamas was a different movement from everything I've seen before. It was a welfare organization and at the same time a terror organization. Both branches went together like the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt, and they challenged the PLO for the leadership in the Palestinian territories.
JS: Have your views on Hamas changed over the past year? If so, is it your perspective that has shifted or their ideology that has changed?
SE: Sure. But my perspective has changed because Hamas has changed.
Since Yahya Sinwar was released from Israeli prison in 2011, he took the movement on a new path. Until then, Hamas was a terror organization, they had clear characteristics. [They focused on] "Calibrated Violence." All the previous leaders of the Hamas movement knew the limits of their power, and if they wanted to survive and keep the movement alive, they must calculate their moves. Sinwar made a military coup inside Hamas and broke all the limits. He would be ready to sacrifice all Palestinian lives just to fulfill his ambitions.
Shlomi Eldar (born Salman Farj to an Iraqi Jewish family) is a veteran journalist and documentary film director who has been covering Palestinian affairs, especially the Gaza Strip and Hamas for decades. In 2007, he was awarded the Sokolov Prize, Israel's most important media award, for his groundbreaking journalistic work in Gaza and the West Bank. Eldar has published three books: Eyeless in Gaza (2005), Getting to Know Hamas (2012), and Hamas (2024). In 2010, Eldar directed the documentary feature film Precious Life, a struggle of a Palestinian mother and an Israeli pediatrician to treat a four-month-old Palestinian baby with a genetic disease. Precious Life won the Ophir Award (the Israeli Oscar for best documentary in 2010) official selection of the 2010 Toronto international film festival and the 2010 Telluride film festival, shortlisted to the Oscar Academy Award (2011) and broadcast on HBO. In 2017, his documentary Foreign Land was awarded the best documentary feature film at the Haifa film Festival (October 2017).