The Palestinian Arabs’ Real Enemies

Brendan O’Neill argues that the Palestinians in Gaza are the victims both of a death cult —Hamas — and of what he calls “woke elites” in the West, for whom the “issue of Palestine” has become “a vessel for the fashionable anxieties of the privileged.” More on his twofold denunciation of Hamas and Hamas’ Western supporters can be found here.

…Yet there was a tint of tragedy to the events of last week. Not in the death of Sinwar – no one should mourn a pogromist. But in that drone footage we also glimpsed the consequences of Sinwar’s murderous vanity. All around him we saw the wages of his futile war against the Jews. We saw the devastation of a patch of land, and of a people, that Sinwar clearly viewed as expendable entities, as mere chess pieces in his game of hate against the Jewish nation. It was brutally confirmed: courtesy of the hijacking of the Palestinian issue by the Islamist demagogues of Hamas, the very idea of Palestine is now as pulverised as that building Sinwar perished in.

The response of the woke West to the death of Sinwar has been mad, even by their standards. In the grimmest nooks of online Israelophobia, there is actual mourning. Even mainstream voices are saying Israel lied and Sinwar wasn’t in fact scurried in a tunnel underground but was on the frontline, fighting with his men. Shorter version: hero. Others say it is a grave folly on Israel’s part to think it can crush a ‘national liberation movement’ by bumping off its leaders. Honestly, the speed with which Western leftists went from saying ‘The only good fascist is a dead fascist’ to saying ‘We can’t just kill everyone in Hamas’ has been mindblowing. From puffed-up anti-fascists who fancied themselves the heirs to the International Brigades to snivelling weepers at the coffins of the fallen fascists of Hamas – it would be funny if it were not so tragic.

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The category error of these garment-renders is to view Hamas as a ‘national liberation movement’. In truth, Hamas aspires not to ‘free Palestine’ but to subjugate it to the unforgiving dominion of Islamist diktat. Hamas’s aim is not the creation of a democratic, independent Palestine but the ruthless subsumption of all Palestinian territory – and Israel, of course – into the ideology of the Caliphate. By its own confession, Hamas longs to enforce not the rule of the Palestinian people but the rule of God. Until the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ is imposed ‘in this region’, it decrees, there will be ‘nothing but carnage, displacement and terror’. So it’s Islamism or death, bowing down to Allah or butchery – does that sound like liberation to you?

Hamas is not interested in the welfare of the Palestinians in Gaza. It has embedded its men and weapons in the midst of civilian areas and buildings, supremely indifferent to the dangers this causes those civilians. Just as the IDF makes extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas tries to maximize civilian deaths, for it is keenly aware that such casualties are useful in the propaganda war against Israel.

Hamas does not want the people of Gaza to rule themselves, but, as O’Neill says, it wants “the rule of God,” that is, a theocracy akin to those now to be found in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Is that something Palestinians should look forward to with pleasure?

O’Neill offers a lapidary summary of the state of affairs for the Palestinians in Gaza. They are “physical fodder for the holy warmongering of Hamas” and “moral fodder for the virtue-signaling of the West’s elites.” They don’t exist as real people, but as a vessel for fundamentalisms, “whether of the Islamist variety or of the woke variety.” As long as they remain in thrall to the terror group Hamas, or to any Islamist ideology, it will be impossible for Israel to offer them the only conceivable arrangement that the Jewish state could accept — not that idiotic “two-state solution” that would be a death warrant for Israel, but a political arrangement that Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly described in the following words: “I’m certainly willing to have them [the Palestinians] have all the powers that they need to govern themselves, but none of the powers that can threaten us.” What’s wrong with that?