The world woke up this morning to read that Israel had rounded up more than 30 senior members of Hamas, including Nasser Shaer, the education minister in the Palestinian Authority’s cabinet. Was this a mistake on Israel’s part? After all, Shaer is “considered a pragmatist in the movement,” according to the Associated Press.

Hamas is on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. But if one is to judge by much of the reporting about Hamas in recent years, the Islamic organization is a veritable hotbed not of terrorism but of pragmatism.

Thus, according to an April dispatch from the AP, Hamas filled its seats in the Palestinian Authority cabinet “with professionals and pragmatists, keeping its ideologues at home.”

Azik Dweik, the Hamas speaker of the parliament, is “viewed as a pragmatist,” according to the New York Times.

And then, of course, there is the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, whose “folksy nature,” reports the AP, “has won him the label of pragmatist.”

For its part, the Economist sees a path to end the “cycle of violence”: interested parties should seek to “cajole the relative pragmatists in Hamas (yes, they do exist) into accepting the reality of Israel and, of course, into disavowing violence.”

What exactly is pragmatism in the context of Hamas? It is rarely defined. One exception can be found in a 2003 column in the Washington Post by a Jerusalem-based producer for ABC news under the headline “A True Palestinian Pragmatist.” It was a portrait of a senior member of Hamas, who had only just been killed by missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter. “The last time I visited Ismail Abu Shanab three weeks ago he was smiling” and “[s]troking his daughter’s head.” His death “affords a glimpse into the paradoxical life of a Palestinian pragmatist—a person who backs peace while railing against it.”

Of course, this “true Palestinian pragmatist,” the Post column was careful to caution, “was no saint.” He was an active participant in “an Islamic terrorist organization that has killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in suicide bombings. He served time in prison for the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. He denounced American imperialism and Washington’s conspiracies against the Arabs. He often spoke of how the Zionist lobby controlled the United States.”

Yet on the other side of the coin, Shanab “was not your average terrorist either” and he “tried to avoid praising suicide bombings.” In the end, he only “grudgingly offered himself as a martyr for the national cause.” But grudging martyr for the national cause or not, at least he was a pragmatist—“a person who backs peace while railing against it.”

Even though Shanab was killed by Israel, Hamas seems to contain many more pragmatists just like him. They fervently back peace even as they grudgingly, or not so grudgingly, fire Qassam rockets into Israel and call for its inhabitants to be driven into the sea. As journalists around the world all seem to know—perhaps it is something taught in journalism school—pragmatism is a wonderfully flexible term.