By Melanie Phillips, JNS
Hatred of Hamas doesn’t alter the endemic hatred of Israel and the Jews.
It is striking, if unsurprising, that the demonstrations against Hamas being mounted by thousands of Gazans have gone almost totally unremarked by the media and supposedly pro-Palestinian supporters in Britain and America.
The protests have been going on for several days. On Wednesday, hundreds of Palestinian Arabs rallied in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, chanting “Hamas out” and “Enough death.” This was despite some high-profile killings of protesters by Hamas designed to put the uprising down.
Abdulrahman Sha’aban Abu Samra was shot dead by Hamas while waiting in line for flour in Deir al-Balah. Uday Al-Raba’i had denounced Hamas on social media and in a coffee shop. According to Palestinian Media Watch, Hamas operatives dragged him alive through the streets tied to the back of a car and then dumped him on his family to die.
This uprising has been almost totally ignored in the West because—just as with the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—nothing can be allowed to challenge the “progressive” narrative that the bad guys are the Israelis, that the Palestinian Arabs are their victims and that Hamas is an understandable resistance movement.
Of course, this silence over the protests also illuminates the rank hypocrisy of Western liberals, whose purported concern for the oppressed of Gaza is thus shown to be bogus. What drives them isn’t compassion but hatred of Israel—a hatred so obsessional and unhinged that they blank out the reality that’s staring them in the face.
The reason for such willful blindness is that, for such liberals, their view of themselves as good people is wrapped up in supporting the Palestinian Arabs as a people fighting their Israeli oppressors. To acknowledge that the Gazans may actually be oppressed by their own people threatens to destroy their entire progressive identity. So these developments must be ignored.
What sparked the protests was fury and despair over the resumption of the war after the ceasefire ended and the Israel Defense Forces started pummeling Gaza with even greater ferocity.
As the protesters have repeatedly declared, they hold Hamas responsible for inflicting upon them the disaster of a war that has ruined their lives. They also accuse Hamas of stealing their food and foreign aid supplies, as well as using them to make millions of dollars on the black market.
There have long been signs that the Gazans were turning against Hamas over its corruption and repression. A large proportion of the population—some say as much as half—are desperate to emigrate.
Until now, they have been prevented from doing so by Egypt, which sealed its border with Gaza, and by Hamas itself, intent as it was upon its strategy of effectively holding the entire population hostage as cannon fodder and human shields.
Plans now being advanced by Israel, falsely characterized by its enemies in the West as forcible transfer, would enable those who wish to leave to do so.
Some people, however, are misinterpreting the revolt as demonstrating that the Gazans are people who have a range of attitudes that show they’re fit to produce an alternative form of self-government.
That’s a delusion. This is a population that—day in, day out and over many generations—has been indoctrinated not only with the myth that their national inheritance has been stolen from them but that their highest calling is to murder Israelis and appropriate all their land.
More profoundly still, they have been turned into fanatics in the cause of genocidal Islamic holy war by the unremitting transmission of Nazi-style propaganda that the Jews are a demonic conspiracy of blood-sucking parasites that must be eliminated from the world.
The fact that they hate Hamas doesn’t change any of that. The people protesting on the streets are the same people who, on Oct. 7, poured into Israel across the shattered border fence behind the Hamas stormtroopers and themselves took part in that barbaric orgy of rape, slaughter and kidnapping.
They are the same people who took to the same streets to jeer at, abuse and desecrate the bodies of the Israelis who were dragged into Gaza on that terrible day.
The hostages who have returned have said that they were shown no kindness by those ordinary Gazans who held them captive in their houses. Unlike the Holocaust, when there were righteous gentiles who hid Jews from the Nazis at enormous risk to themselves, not one Gazan shielded them or helped them escape.
After Hamas murdered the protester Abu Samra, his family members from one of Gaza’s most prominent clans killed the Hamas operative who they said had murdered him.
There are several powerful clans in Gaza. Might they not have taken similar action to free the Israeli hostages? They have not.
The endemic hatred of Israel and the Jews is not confined to the inhabitants of Gaza. The Arabs living in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria are similarly indoctrinated.
Fatah, the ruling party in the Palestinian Authority led by the allegedly “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas, has repeatedly celebrated the Oct. 7 atrocities. Opinion polling has shown that the Palestinian Arabs in these territories overwhelmingly support further such attacks against Israeli Jews.
People in the West refuse to accept the implacable nature of Palestinian Arab rejectionism, and the murderous hatred of Israel and the Jews.
This is partly a refusal to face up to the reality of Islamic holy war. Partly, it’s due to widespread ignorance of the Middle East, Jewish history in the land and the spurious nature of Palestinian peoplehood—the fictitious identity that was cooked up in the 1960s to play the credulous West for the suckers they’ve turned out to be.
But what you hear over and over again in Western countries is that “something has to be done with all those Palestinians”—and what else could be done with them other than to give them their own state, which sounds so very reasonable?
This is a very strange attitude. There’s never been another conflict like this, where people who set out to exterminate another people and its homeland but lose that war then become the focus of global sympathy and can dictate the policies of the world.
In other conflicts, if aggressors lose the war of conquest they have waged, they are in no position to dictate to anyone. They may have to move or disperse. They may find themselves ruled in the same place by others. As aggressors, they have forfeited the right to have any say over their future.
Yet despite the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have waged a campaign of extermination against the Jewish homeland for the best part of a century, they’ve been treated with kid gloves and have dictated the global agenda.
Even more extraordinary, they’ve been treated as a discrete people on the basis of an utterly spurious designation as refugees that uniquely was passed down from generation to generation—a formula devised solely to turn them into a weapon against Israel’s existence.
They are indeed victims—not of Israel but of the lies with which their own Arab world has enslaved them to a cult of death and destruction.
We don’t know what the day after this war will look like on the ground. We hear reports that the Trump administration, Israel and Saudi Arabia are trying to broker a permanent settlement of the war against the Jewish state. We don’t know whether this is intended to result in a canton-style formula for the Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories, their relocation to Egypt or Jordan, or some other kind of arrangement.
Whatever the outcome, however, if there is ever to be peace and justice in the Middle East, then it must be understood that the idea that there is such a thing as a Palestinian people and that they should have their own state of Palestine—the unthinking and unchallengeable orthodoxy in the West—is now over.
