Israel is not freeing Gazans from Hamas
One of the most grotesque lies circulating widely, despite ample evidence to the contrary, is that Israel is ultimately doing Gaza’s civilians a favor by killing them en masse.
Israel wants it both ways. It spreads the message that Hamas doesn’t care if Palestinian civilians die, while using Hamas to defend its crass decision to deprive them of food, shelter and clean water. Hamas is the reason you’re in this position, Israel says, as it sends missiles soaring into a refugee camp, executing the doubly displaced.
The dissonance is deafening.
It is also, at this point, second nature.
The Israeli government contends that it has not occupied Gaza since 2005, as Hamas was about to come into power. But there is hardly a difference between military occupation and being a de facto occupying force, where access to basic goods and services are severely restricted. By deploying the strategy of mowing the grass, Israel paints the distorted picture that Hamas is the only obstacle to Palestinian self-determination. It is impossible, however, to pull weeds without yanking perfectly harmless pieces of earth along with them.
Throughout this siege, the Israel Defense Forces have shoved accountability for the disproportionate response toward the Palestinians onto the militant faction of the region’s governing body. When a bomb explodes near hospitals, the IDF foists responsibility. When dozens of Gazan civilians die in Israel’s attempt to kill one Hamas commander, the IDF claims those souls martyred, mere collateral in the righteous pursuit of exterminating terrorists. And when Palestinians call for liberation, the IDF pleads ignorance and points the finger squarely at Hamas.
It would be nice if Gaza had a government that embraced non-violence, sought to share its reported 200 gallons of fuel with the rest of the Strip and disassembled its secretive tunnel system that is a source of fear and consternation among Israelis. That Hamas prioritizes its fighting prowess over providing basic necessities for its residents is seemingly antithetical to the idea that everyone should be driven to the shared goal of peace in the Middle East.
Justice, though, is a precursor to peace, not an outgrowth of it. Without excusing the virulent antisemitism inherent in Hamas’s founding — some of which is part and parcel of the organization today — nor its ruthless assault on Oct. 7, Hamas has acknowledged, from the failed Oslo Accords to the present-day blockade, that peace cannot be conditional. And though its aims of creating an Islamic state in place of a Jewish one are rooted in a deluded revanchism, it is difficult for the Palestinians to express the same level of scorn toward Hamas than it shows to the state of Israel, regardless of the extent of their brutality.
Because the dehumanizing day-to-day conditions that people in Gaza have been subjected to not only prior to Oct. 7 but long before Hamas’s founding in 1987 cannot be explained away by bad local governance. Israel, which purportedly lifted its occupation of Gaza 18 years ago, still controls the perimeter, the tax system, the crossings with the West Bank, and the population registry. Despite Israel saying that Hamas can keep hospitals and houses running with the fuel it’s hoarding for military operations, the reality remains that most Gaza residents have been dependent on Israel for the most fundamental of resources for their whole lives. Gazans consuming brackish water from agricultural wells and coastal aquifers and rationing morsels from the few bakeries that haven’t been blown up have only Israelis to blame for their starvation and disease. If the IDF truly had concern for Gazan safety as it conducted its manhunt, it wouldn’t be flattening the very structures it says Hamas should light back up with its fuel reserves.
That the Israeli response has not been commensurate almost misses the point. Israel is not defending itself, nor is it securing a safer future for its inhabitants. It is a vanity project of a far-right government, with members who have repeatedly used racist language to refer to Palestinians. It is a meeting of the minds between extremist officials hell-bent on ethnic cleansing, center-left leaders who see no other way to promise security to their constituents and a tyrannical prime minister in Benjamin Netanyahu, whose primary motivation for prolonging the incursion is to quiet the calls for him to step down.
Again, none of this provides cover for Hamas, whose response to occupation has been cruel and terrible in its own right. As professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton Michael Walzer wrote today in The Atlantic, “To cast Hamas solely as an agent of resistance is to overlook a lot. It is a government that has failed its people.” All of that is true. And yet, the thrust of Walzer’s piece, titled “Even the Oppressed Have Obligations”, is wildly off-base. Take this paragraph, for example:
[P]recisely because all lives do matter, we must also draw universal moral lines. What about you and me, random individuals, who are sitting in a café or attending a music festival and are suddenly blown up or machine-gunned by attackers who are deliberately trying to kill us? I can’t understand anyone on the left or the right who, when thinking of themselves in the café or at the festival, would say that such violence is all right.
This mode of thinking, like the endless takes that have emerged from that day condemning violence on all sides, dilutes the conversation. Hamas’s struggle is one borne of armed resistance, not wanton ISIS-like terrorism. Its methods of killing — from the suicide bombings of the late ‘90s and early- and mid-aughts, to the indiscriminate slaughter on a Saturday in October — are planted permanently in the Jewish psyche. They are also not unprovoked. Non-violent attempts at negotiation from the Palestinian Authority has led to Israeli accusations of “diplomatic terrorism.” Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions resulted in illegitimate charges of anti-Semitism.
Thus, armed struggle arrives out of exasperation, not a natural predisposition toward aggression. Hamas didn’t sprout from evil soil. Israel tilled its discontents by closing the avenues of reconciliation. Many Hamas militants were boys when they lost loved ones during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and have grown up in poverty with good reason to direct their anger eastward.
The context doesn’t change the truth that Hamas committed war crimes on Oct. 7. No one is asking Jews to forget that. Proper time to grieve and come together in solidarity is crucial. It was heartening to see an immediate groundswell of support globally for the return of the 200-plus hostages remaining in Hamas’s clutches.
Unfortunately, the campaign to release the hostages has — perhaps, predictably — morphed into an Islamophobic catch-all, an excuse to blame Hamas for every explosion that results from Israel’s stated intent to bring them home. As Israel’s staunchest allies have been drawn into the belief that all the killing stems from Hamas (and by proxy the Arab people who elected them), the Israeli military has moved in relative secrecy. It has played coy about why it targets densely populated areas and hasn’t outlined a vision for what happens once Hamas is eradicated.
Palestine historians and scholars have underlined next steps if Hamas is wiped out: absent an end to occupation, another Hamas takes its place. And so on and so on. Contrary to Walzer’s wishes of the oppressed adhering to a moral code, oppression, sadly, breeds extremist subgroups. Building a public relations apparatus around casting Hamas as bloodthirsty anti-Semites demonizes Palestinians at-large. It helps explain, not justify, why pictures of hostages are being ripped off telephone poles; the Palestinian diaspora is desperate to reclaim the narrative.
What is best for Palestinians is ultimately what is best for Israelis. The answer is not a military one. That does not mean a solution exists that is completely non-violent. As Palestine historian Tareq Baconi emphasized, “There’s a difference between violence and armed resistance.” Armed resistance is often unchecked in its breadth and limitations, whereas violence is a more accurate descriptor when power dynamics such as the colonizer and the colonized aren’t a factor. In this case, they are.
Writers at the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, among others, have pushed back against the pulsating wave of Palestinian activism calling for decolonization, suggesting it foments racism against Jews, since they once were victims of genocide, and asserting that it must portend a bleak future for the colonizers, who are not individually at fault for the choices of their ancestors. These are reasonable fears, and Jews should never be complacent about a radical change that threatens their standing in a community.
But the alternative to ending apartheid is to effectively do nothing. The alternative is to be lulled into advocating for détente or coaxed into sloganeering for a two-state solution. The alternative is to watch Gaza burn, to let Israeli settlers continue to abuse and murder Palestinians in the West Bank unrestrained and to allow a more emboldened totalitarian Israeli regime harm and silence Arabs living within its borders.
The alternative is to fall victim to the torrent of propaganda the IDF pumps out, valorizing itself and further terrorizing the people it says it’s protecting.
Israel isn’t freeing Gaza from Hamas. It’s freeing itself from ever having to admit that it did anything wrong.