Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer and scholar. He is the author of Hamas Contained (2018), a study of Palestinian resistance movements, and of Fire in Every Direction (2025), a memoir of "queer identity, family history, and political awakening". [1]
Baconi is the grandchild of Palestinian refugees and grew up in Amman and Beirut. [2] From 2016 to 2017 he was a fellow at Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network, [3] and as of 2025 is the president of Al-Shabaka's board, a position he assumed in 2021, succeeding Nadia Hijab. [4] He was also a senior analyst at the Ramallah-based International Crisis Group. [3]
His Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance was published by Stanford UP in 2018; [5] one reviewer praised the "meticulous analysis" of Hamas-publications and secondary literature in Arabic. [6] The book "traces developments within Hamas's ideology and politics from its inception to its entrenchment in the Gaza strip". [7] For the European Council on Foreign Relations, he wrote reports on the role the Eastern Mediterranean could play in energy distribution (2017) [8] and the geopolitical consequences of water scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa (2018). [9]
His memoir, Fire in Every Direction, was published in 2025. [1] Sceptre won the rights for the UK, while the US rights went to Atria Books. [2] The book was described as "a queer coming-of-age story told against a backdrop of generations of violence and displacement, as the grandson of Palestinian refugees growing up between Lebanon and Jordan". It was the subject of a bidding war between various publishers. [2] The memoir traces "three generations of displacement", beginning with his grandmother fleeing the Nakba, the uprooting of his family in Lebanon, and his own life, from his childhood in Amman where he fell in love with the boy next door through his college education in London. [1]