Tareq Baconi
Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist.
The author of Hamas Contained and the memoir, Fire in Every Direction, Tareq Baconi writes the legacy and future of Palestinian resistance, and how love and rage empowers the personal and political.
Tareq is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. He is the author of the landmark book on Palestinian politics, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. Challenging portrayals of Hamas as purely militant or purely political, Tareq uses research and interviews with Hamas leaders to tell the story of Hamas’s evolution from fringe faction to governing body with all the nuance therein. For his astute analysis on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Tareq served as an Al-Shabaka US Policy Fellow and as a senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Tareq is a frequent commentator in regional and international media on the evolution and state of Palestinian resistance and literary culture.
In 2024, Tareq released Fire in Every Direction, a memoir tracing his mother’s activist lineage in Beirut and Palestine alongside a budding love story with a childhood best friend, Ramzi. Fire in Every Direction is a tender account of what it means to come of age as a queer person amid a larger political search for belonging. Tareq has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals.
Tareq’s latest book, What Now On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future, is set to release in November 2026.
“Tareq Baconi offers us a love letter, a blueprint on how to craft a life that questions the present, dreaming a better future in the process. By reading this beautifully honest memoir, we can learn to shed what must be shed in order to regain an allegiance toward justice, toward freedom, toward a liberation for all. Baconi has shown me that revolutions begin in the self; I am forever changed after reading this book.”
—Javier Zamora, author of Solito, on Fire in Every Direction
Azura Says
“Tareq is a wonderfully poignant, sensitive, and generous writer and spirit. The first time I heard him speak, I felt instantly drawn in. You will want to know how he writes what he writes.”
Expertise
- Political analyst of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Middle East and the future of Palestinian resistance
- Queer memoirist, speaking to the intersection of Arab and LGTBQ identities
- An advocate for global solidarity to answer the question: “how do we build political power?”
Video Highlight
“I have finally bent time, held her history in my present.” —Tareq Baconi on visiting his displaced grandmother’s house in Haifa, in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates