It’s surreal to watch campus demonstrators wave Hamas flags and wear Hamas headbands and hand out pro-Hamas literature while Palestinians in Gaza are demonstrating—and risking their lives to do so—against Hamas’s continued despotic rule.
It’s as though U.S. universities had erupted in fanatical pro-CCP riots after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. (Though the current Hamas protests are arguably pro-CCP riots, considering Beijing’s support for the underlying propaganda.)
“No, it’s not the Jews—it’s Hamas,” shouted one Gazan evacuating Khan Younis yesterday. Another in the line of cars cursed Hamas’s leaders. And hundreds filled the streets chanting “Hamas out.”
The protests came after Israel ordered civilians to evacuate the area ahead of a new military push to finish off Hamas. The demonstrations are now into their second day.
Gazans would like Hamas to surrender. There is no reason Gazans should be the only ones demanding this. And it is ever more proof that the Western governments pressuring Israel to leave Hamas in power are doing so not out of any concern for Palestinians or the goodness of their hearts. They are, rather, bending to public pressure. That pressure is being applied by pro-Hamas protesters and orchestrated by pro-Hamas entities.
In other words, in reacting to the demands of crowds in Western streets, these governments are reacting to the demands of Hamas and acting in the interests of Hamas.
How Hamas came to dominate the supposedly “pro-Palestinian” movement in the West is its own story, but now that that is undeniably the case, we have to deal with the ramifications of it.
And the ramifications are such that there is no moral dimension to the concerted pressure campaign against Israel.
Consider the Wall Street Journal revelation from Sunday:
“Top leaders of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched their Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel aiming to torpedo peace negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, according to minutes of a high-level meeting in Gaza that Israel’s military said it discovered in a tunnel beneath the enclave.
“Days before the assault that left nearly 1,200 dead, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza chief, told fellow militants that an ‘extraordinary act’ was required to derail the normalization talks that he said risked marginalizing the Palestinian cause, the document, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, said.”
Now, the normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia only threaten to marginalize “the Palestinian cause” if you define “the Palestinian cause” the way Hamas does: a permanent genocidal campaign against Israel. If you define “the Palestinian cause” as a quest for self-determination and ultimately statehood alongside the state of Israel, then normalization between Israel and the Saudis is exactly what you want.
In other words, the two definitions of “the Palestinian cause” can be boiled down to: war and peace. Hamas understood that regional normalization with Israel threatens the forever war to eradicate the Jewish people from their homeland. They aren’t wrong: Since Israel’s normalization with Egypt and Jordan, the people of all three countries have been safer and more prosperous. Thus, what Hamas sought to torpedo on Oct. 7 was peace.
What do you suppose the Gazan protesters desire, war or peace? Well, it’s definitely not war. And they do not want to be governed by Hamas, which exists to torpedo regional peace and normalization. So Hamas thugs are finding various protesters and shooting them, cheered on by throngs of campus activists and street demonstrators in the West.
And those activists and demonstrators in the West, in turn, are influencing their governments to ignore the will of the Gazans suffering under Hamas.
To elevate Hamas is to prevent any chance at a two-state solution. It is the sole reason the terror group exists. If Western governments were smart, they would do everything in their power to tip the scales in favor of the Palestinian Authority over Hamas. The PA is no great institution of statesmanship, but it is not Hamas, and its increased political sovereignty over the years probably could not withstand the survival and rebounding of Hamas.
The U.S. diplomatic corps and the foreign ministries of our allies in Western Europe don’t like Israel; we get it. So if you grow a spine and push back against the Hamasniks in your streets, don’t do it for Israel. Do it for the people you are claiming to help. And if you won’t help the people of Gaza and the IDF get rid of Hamas, the least you can do is get out of their way.
