Damodar Dahal
Hamas, Hamas, Hamas
Tue 14 November 2023“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies,” Noam Chomsky.
On November 13, 2023, I received several questions and comments from my colleagues regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict. I will be responding to several of them in this post. I shall try to “speak the truth” to the best of my sources and expose prominent lies, knowing fully that mainstream media and governments often present false information, in whole or in part. If you have thoughts, I request a civil and respectful debate in the comments, one for each topic. I wish to have a dialectical debate on a sensitive topic in a scholarly manner.
1. Is Hamas the legitimately elected government of Gaza?
Hamas (under the name Change and Reform) won the election in 2006 (17 years ago), earning 44.45% of nearly one million votes and defeating Fatah by a single seat (29 to 28). However, around 50% of the Gazan population today are children, which means they did not vote for Hamas.
Hamas doesn’t represent the Gazans of 2023. See the graph below, published right before the conflict began:
2. Have you blamed [Hamas] even once?
All lives are sacred, and children more so than others. I condemn all governments and militias that kill children; it doesn’t matter to me whether they’re of their own or another country.
If I need to be further explicit, yes, I condemn Hamas for killing Israelis during a sacred Jewish holiday. Some of those who were killed were participating in an annual kite festival to foster peace between Israelis and Gazans.
But one war crime doesn’t justify another war crime. Go after the Hamas, but please let Gaza live.
3. What is the alternative to eliminating Hamas, every root, and every branch?
In my view, getting rid of Hamas in the brutal manner that Israel is currently trying to do will only create an even more extremist organization. Consider this: an innocent parent not affiliated with Hamas saw their children dying under the rubble as Israeli bombs dropped again and again. The same goes for the miraculously saved children whose entire family was wiped out. These people have nothing in life to live for; they have no future. Jihad is born not because some people are simply evil but from a circle of hatred, a desire for revenge.
Nearly 1 out of every 200 Gazans are dead now. Is it worth killing these many civilians to end terrorism? Is that kind of bloodshed going to end once and for all the entire conflict? How will it help to restore the dignity of the stateless Palestinians in the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and Gaza? While considering an alternative, was dropping the equivalent of 2 nuclear bombs in less than a month ever really a sane option? Collective punishment: as if it is ever justified. No, this isn’t the right way.
A letter signed by 2,870 “academics, clergy, and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad” even before the conflict started states that “Israel’s long-standing occupation…has yielded a regime of apartheid.” The last official apartheid regime was in South Africa, where they murdered protestors who demanded their rights, and a similar thing happened in Gaza in the March of Return protests when nearly 50,000 protesters demanded to escape the ongoing inhumane blockade. It was not about Hamas at all, yet 223 Palestinians were killed, including 46 of them under 18. When peaceful protests don’t work, the only protest remaining for them is “unpeaceful” protests. Depending on one’s extremism, that kind of protest could result somewhere between stone-throwing and Hamas.
The only way to end the conflict once and for all in the long run is to provide equal rights for Arabs and Jews, and that requires ending the apartheid regime. Look at the West Bank, which doesn’t have Hamas, yet, state-sponsored settler violence and IDF snipers regularly kill Palestinians. When 76.2% of Arab citizens of Israel think they are discriminated against (The Israeli Democracy Index 2022, p. 120), when more than 50% of Arabs are living under poverty lines (Adva Center, p. 13), and when a quarter of American Jews think that Israel is committing genocide (2021), it is not realistic to expect a peaceful resolution between even Jews and Arabs, forget about Israelis and Palestinians.
Among other things, it is also imperative to learn why the ‘Elephant in the Room’ letter also called on leaders to “end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organizations.” The signers include historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe who know Israeli/Palestine history well. So perhaps they thought that Israel had committed some sins against the Palestinians, including recently, and the UN had found out about it? How about we learn about the pain the Palestinians had been living under? Here’s some starters: UN GA A/77/356, 2022; UN GA A/77/328, 2022; A/HRC/40/74, 2019; ICJ case 131.
Originally published on Substack at https://penguing.substack.com/p/hamas-hamas-hamas.