OPINION
“Do I Condemn Hamas?”
The question that cloaks tacit support for genocide, and a steeply asymmetric valuation of human life. (And other posts that got me censored.)
On the morning of Oct. 7, surprised as anyone by the Gazan breach of the Israeli blockade, I earned the ire of some Israeli connections by posting the photo above on LinkedIn. My caption simply noted that “invasion” was the wrong word. Considering that eighty percent of Gaza’s population are descended from refugees, those Gazans were returning to their homes in Yafa, and Asqalan (Ashkelon), and Isdud (Ashdod). I went further in a post that same afternoon, calling it “the Gazan liberation of Southern Palestine.”
My aim was not to provoke, but keep the conversation straight.
This was a harrowing time of uncertainty for Israelis. So it was for us, Palestinians. We all wondered what was happening, whether we were safe, or how our lives were going to change. I understood the natural concerns of my Israeli friends, and their primal fears.
That said, the talking heads in the West irritatingly started time from 6 AM on Oct. 7, expunging history, delivering an automatic “guilty” verdict to the Palestinian side. The last two years alone of this decades-old occupation had witnessed three bombing campaigns of Gaza, deadly army raids into West Bank cities, settler attacks on Palestinian villages, and eviction of isolated communities. To a Palestinian, this negation of history alarmingly felt like an authorization for Israeli rage.
I asked rhetorically, “Where were those voices [of condemnation] during the last 55 years when the Israeli occupation entrenched itself beyond repair?” The refugees of Gaza “have every right by Article 13 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights to return to their homes.”
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country,” continuing, “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”
Double standards aside, though persistently ignored, the one historical event I allude to in the opening paragraph is the key to unlocking any true peace.
Peace begins with recognizing the Nakba
My mother is from Yafa. “The Bride of the Sea,” Palestine’s largest city and cultural center, Yafa was ethnically cleansed in 1948. I write about that inherited memory in Fugitive Dreams:
In early May 1948, the Irgun terrorist group turned to Yafa, which was by then bombarded daily from the encircling ring of settlements. My grandfather worried about his family. He had no weapons, and their house lay in the remote outskirts. He took my mom and grandma for a day to Ramleh to visit mom’s sister, Laura, who had just delivered their first grandson. When they called for a taxi back to Yafa, they couldn’t find any. The road to Yafa was cut off. They had nothing on them, had taken no belongings. Ultimately, they thought it safest to move to the hills of Nablus. A few days after they left Yafa, the city fell to the Irgun, who again resorted to such tactics as throwing grenades inside houses. Palestinians trapped in Yafa by then had no escape but the sea, huddling in small, over-crowded fishing boats to Gaza, many perishing enroute.
By May 15, the day the British Mandate formally ended and Israel declared its “independence”, about 300,000 Palestinians were already displaced from their homes. Yafa, Palestine’s largest Arab city, had fallen. So had Haifa, the second largest. The Arab neighborhoods of Katamon and Talbiyyeh in West Jerusalem were emptied. Scores of Arab villages lay depopulated. Akka’s Arab inhabitants were expelled on May 17. …
Mother faced a new beginning. Her entire life was uprooted. Her belongings all gone, her memories of Yafa relegated to oblivion. She was 16 years old in the earliest photograph I saw of her. Her childhood photos were left in Yafa, to be trampled by the bulldozers that knocked down her house.
800,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948. To prevent their return, Israel systematically destroyed the 450+ villages they left behind, in most cases razing them to the ground. This is the Nakba, the Catastrophe that every Palestinian inherits. The house from which my father was evicted in 1948 still stands in Ramleh, a city like Yafa, now engulfed by the sprawling Tel Aviv.
Apparently, sharing this bit of family history on Oct. 7 was too much for my Israeli friends, who unfollowed me and sent messages of rebuke, accusing me of not wanting peace, and of “supporting Hamas.”
As I’ve made clear in Fugitive Dreams: “True peace… can never be built atop a forged history.” The Nakba is a historical reality for every Palestinian — an ongoing reality as one sees new militarized Israeli stolenments erupting across the idyllic West Bank landscape, squeezing our communities the way Yafa was noosed by a collar of stolenments (a more apt term for those products of land grabs).
What I call “Israel’s vacuous foundation of Nakba-denial,” has spawned an entire industry. For decades, my parents had to struggle against a manufactured narrative that claimed they left their homes “voluntarily,” never mind that their Right of Return is absolute. “Everyone has the right … to return to his country,” regardless of how, or why, they have left.
Meanwhile, Israelis appropriated our food and music and place names to construct an alternate reality where we are invisible — erased from the maps and the history books — from place and time. “There is no such thing as Palestinians,” repeats one Israeli leader after another. While flexing a trigger-happy sensitivity for Israel’s “right to exist,” Zionism denies our very existence as a people.
To them, we are “Arabs” who somehow wandered onto the land in the 1930s — “squatters,” they call us in an act of projection. I write in Fugitive Dreams about my encounters with the Zionist thought police. A simple review on Amazon praising a book that tells the history of the Nakba becomes a target for an email campaign to remove that review, so that fewer people would read the book and learn the truth. That’s how far Nakba-deniers go to micromanage information such that their narrative, and only their narrative, is considered mainstream.
Condemn what exactly?
As I said, the fear that the ordinary Israeli felt on Oct. 7 was understandable. Then dubious stories appeared to stir that fear and marshal it to advance a bloody agenda. A story accusing Hamas of “beheading 40 babies” was circulating unverified. Biden assured us to take his word for it. There was no question, no discussion, no evidence. On his word, Biden smeared Hamas as “barbarians” in the public eye, effectively giving license to Israel to commit real atrocities, as we have seen. His administration, and CNN, later quietly retracted that false claim, and the Israeli army couldn’t confirm the story, either.
While Biden’s fake news circulated, hundreds of real bodies, including babies, were crushed under bombed out buildings.
Truth matters! Facts matter. Propaganda is a long-established tool of war, and we as citizens have every right to be critical of what is reported to us. That is why we need independent reporters. Aiming for total narrative control, Israel has so far killed 53 journalists in Gaza, and several in Lebanon, forcing information from Gaza to go through their “embedded” reporters.
To my Israeli friends, however, my skepticism was equivalent to “supporting Hamas.” There is a subtext to this accusation, as well as to the mandatory media question to every Palestinian guest, “Do you condemn Hamas?”
As usual, when conversing with Israelis or former Israelis, we have to first prove our innocence. Convicted by virtue of our identity! Hamas, rockets, suicide bombs. We have to convince them we are not that type of Palestinian, then prove again that we are not the exception.
That last message was lost on him:
“Palestinians voted for Hamas, which means they want to destroy Israel.”
How to explain that Palestinians are more than simply “Hamas”? That we have an identity independent and unrelated to Israel? That we are, first of all, human beings?
This passage from Fugitive Dreams was about the Hamas of 2007. Today, we are asked to condemn the Hamas of the “40 babies.” To answer, any answer, is to admit to a false worldview in which we Palestinians are the worst villains. The choices are to confirm our villainy, or apologize for it.
The racist implications of this “barbarian” smear puts a price on the scalp of every Palestinian in the Western world. First, a six-year-old child was brutally murdered in Chicago; and as I write this, three Palestinian American students were shot in Vermont for wearing kufiyahs. (Adding insult to injury, some law enforcement officials are telling us to “be smart” and hide our cultural heritage, instead of clearly telling the public that it’s wrong to kill people based on their identities.)
“But the Hostages…”
For 50 days, Gaza was bombed and starved and made homeless. Fifteen thousand lives were prematurely ended. Millions of others’ were forever changed by forced homelessness, disability, or the psychological toll of living through such horror. Fifteen thousand hopes and dreams and possibilities were extinguished, the world losing their contributions. A million traumatized children will carry this scar for life.
Meanwhile, all the cameras are on the families of 200+ Israeli “hostages”. Don’t get me wrong. I am sympathetic to their plight, too, and can feel their pain of having a loved one in a dangerous situation, not knowing if they’ll ever see them again. I can extend a human compassion towards those families who got caught in this.
The Palestinian “prisoners” lingering in Israeli jails by the thousands also have families and stories. When I was a teenager during the First Intifada, Israel built tent camps in the desert to imprison youths accused of throwing stones. Many of my childhood friends did 3–6 months without due process. At peak times, Israel had held tens of thousands in those camps. Some prisoners remained for decades. Earlier in the year, Khader Adnan died after 87 days on hunger strike to protest his twelfth stretch of “administrative detention,” i.e., imprisonment without trial.
Each year approximately 500–700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. The most common charge is stone throwing.
- Defense for Children International, Aug. 2023
Nowhere is the asymmetry in reporting more indicative of a different valuation of human life.
President Biden celebrated the hostage deal, as if the 15,000 lives lost in Gaza were a natural price to be exacted for their abduction. Fifteen thousand families in Gaza will never celebrate the return of their loved ones. To the likes of him, those Gazan families are non-people, their very humanity subject to the test “Do you condemn Hamas?”
The bitter irony is that, for the two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, whether or not they supported Hamas, the likelihood of having their lives destroyed is just the same.
Hamasyahu
My last post on LinkedIn, on Oct. 13 (the one that likely got my account suspended), consisted of a few passages excerpted from Fugitive Dreams about the complex dance in the mid-1990s between Hamas and the Jewish extremist groups championing Netanyahu.
In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli extremist…stormed the Abrahamic mosque in Hebron. Armed with an automatic rifle, he proceeded to gun down Muslim worshippers in the midst of prayer. Those inside had no escape. By the time he was overcome by the unarmed worshippers, he left 29 Palestinians dead, including children, and 150 injured. The Israeli soldiers posted nearby did nothing to stop him. He became a hero to Israeli extremists…
Two months after Baruch Goldstein’s shooting spree, Hamas detonated its first suicide bomb, in a bus, killing eight Israelis. …As Israel responded to attacks by stopping negotiations with the PLO, however, Hamas realized its own power to sabotage the [“Oslo”] peace process. Hamas hence stepped up its suicide attacks over the next two years, peaking in 1996.
The loss of life saddened me. Pizza parlors, nightclubs, weddings. The bodies fell. The aftermath, the sadness, the funerals. It was no different than what the families of our dead were going through. I was left wondering what justice was served by the killing of innocents?
1994 was the 27th year of the occupation. I was an adult by then. I remember a time when Hamas didn’t exist. It felt sinister of the world to be asking Palestinians to apologize for Hamas, when Hamas itself was a product of the occupation. One Palestinian TV guest after another was stabbed with that question. I stopped listening. With the sonic booms of Israeli planes cracking Ramallah’s sky every five minutes, I was too busy counting how many Gazan apartment buildings must have collapsed.
My collected observations from the 1990s, of Hamas attacks and Netanyahu provocations, such as opening a tunnel under the Aqsa mosque or restarting stolenment construction, led me to conclude that:
…Ironically, both Hamas and Jewish extremist groups appeared to share the common goal of torpedoing Oslo, feeding off of each other’s actions.
In a way, Netanyahu’s modus operandi was little different from Hamas’s, except, as Prime Minister invested with the power of the state, his provocations were more damaging.
So as far back as 1995, I had decided:
I got tired from the condolences my friendly Jewish officemate and I exchanged every time something happened. Why should I feel responsible for every Hamas extremist, and why should he feel sorry for the actions of Jewish fanatics?
Given all this, I reject the poison-pill question entirely. While the world celebrates the return of the “hostages,” Gaza reels from a man-made cataclysm that shames the deadliest of earthquakes and floods. Forget condemnations.
“Do you recognize Palestinians as human beings?”
That’s the question all world leaders and media commentators should be asking themselves. They are the ones that ought to be put to the test. For peace will never reign without recognizing the humanity of the other.
With love,
Ramsey Hanhan
