Imagine that tomorrow the protesters on campus got their wish: Not just a “Ceasefire Now” in Gaza, but the creation of a “Free Palestine.” How free will future Palestine be?
This is not a speculative question. Palestinians have enjoyed a degree of autonomy in the West Bank since Yasir Arafat entered Gaza in 1994. Israel evacuated settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority that same year, and Hamas won legislative elections the following year.
How much freedom have Palestinians enjoyed since then? They and their allies abroad argue that they do not have that right because Israel has denied it to them – not only by refusing to accept a Palestinian state but also by closing the roads, land recovery in the West Bank, the economic blockade of Gaza and frequent Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas.
There is some truth to this. Israeli settlers have rioting against their Palestinian neighbors. The Israeli government imposes heavy and unfair restrictions on Palestinians, like my colleagues Megan Stack reported in harrowing details. The frequent mistreat of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints is an enduring disgrace.
At the same time, Israeli leaders were many times offered the establishment of a Palestinian state – requests by Arafat and Abbas were both rejected. Allegations of an Israeli economic blockade tend to ignore several facts: Gaza also shares a border with Egypt; many goods, including fuel and electricity, flows from Israel to Gaza until October 7; Much of the international aid given to Gaza to build civilian infrastructure was diverted to Hamas tunnels, and Hamas used the territory to start five wars with Israel in 15 years.
But there is an equally important dimension to Palestinian politics, which is purely domestic. When Abbas was elected in 2005, his term was for four years. He is now in the 20th year of his four-year term. When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, it did not just defeat its political opponents in Fatah. It completely overthrew the Palestinian Authority in Gaza after a brief and subsequent civil war killing, torture and terror removed all political opposition.
Perhaps the absence of Palestinian democracy is not such a shock. The regime established by Hamas is not merely autocratic. It was more like the old East Germany, with its own version of the Stasi, specializing in spying on, blackmailing, and abusing its own citizens.
“Hamas leaders, despite claiming to represent the people of Gaza, will not tolerate even the slightest bit of dissent,” Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman of The Times reported on Monday. “Security officials have been monitoring journalists and people they suspect of unethical behavior. Agents removed criticism from social media and discussed ways to smear political opponents. Political protests are seen as a threat of vandalism.”
Even this does not show the full extent of Hamas’s cruelty. Consider its treatment of gay Palestinians – a point worth emphasizing because “Queers for Palestine” is a sign sometimes seen at anti-Israel rallies.
In 2019, Palestinian Authority banned the activities of LGBTQ rights groups in the West Bank, arguing that they are “harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society.” In 2016, Hamas tortured and killed one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, on suspicion of “moral turpitude” — code for homosexuality. “Relatives said Mr. Ishtiwi told them he had been hanging from the ceiling for hours on end for days on end,” The Times’ Diaa Hadid and Majd Al Waheidi Written.
Would an independent Palestinian state, living alongside Israel, improve its internal governance? Not if Hamas takes control – which it almost certainly will if it is not completely defeated in the current war. And what if the protesters achieve their larger goal – that of a Palestine “from river to sea”?
We know something about Hamas’s intentions thanks closing statement about a conference to be held in 2021 on a plan to “liberate” Gaza. Any Jew considered a “soldier” “must be killed”; Jews who fled could be “left alone” or “prosecuted”; Moderate individuals can be “integrated or given time to leave.” Finally, “educated Jews” with valuable skills “were not allowed to leave.”
In other words, what campus protesters happily envision as a utopian, post-Zionist “state for all citizens” under Hamas would be a state in which Jews were killed, exiled, prosecuted, assimilated into an Islamic state, or forced into slavery. of a Levantine version of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. Those same protesters may say again that they do not want a future led by Hamas — but that only begs the question of why they are doing absolutely nothing to oppose it.
This was not the first generation of Western activists to support movements that promised liberation in theory as well as suffering and murder in practice: the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975. before the cheers of even the people. mainstream liberal voices. Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer of the past 100 years, was never completely lost. his mark towards the political left. And magazines like The Nation Eulogy of Hugo Chávez as a model of democracy.
These attitudes are a luxury that people living in safe and free societies can freely enjoy. Israelis, whose freedoms are made more precious by virtue of being less secure, could be forgiven if they thought differently.
