Do I Condemn Hamas?
A Former Zionist Settler's Perspective
For decades, I watched Israeli leadership deploy a common obfuscation tactic with Hamas: publicly branding them as the ultimate evil, while also describing them as useful assets - their very extremism serving to keep Palestinians divided and controlled. I would also read about suitcases of cash facilitated into Gaza by Israel, and heard a former prime minister admit on broadcast that Israeli engineers originally built the bunkers under Gaza’s hospitals.
Without holding these facts together, I was forced into a false choice between narratives. But this was a hall of mirrors. The raw desperation of the oppressed and the cynical manipulation of the state are two realities that can coexist and feed each other.
First, the desperation of Palestinians living in a crushing blockade is entirely real. When generations are stripped of life, freedom, and hope, violent resistance becomes an understandable reaction. If I endured what Palestinians have endured, I might have chosen to join too - a sentiment shared by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. It echoes the desperation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Second, that reaction exists entirely within a larger framework that has been cultivated by Israel. The policy of propping up violent, extreme resistance explicitly to block Palestinian aspirations is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented strategy championed for years by Israeli leadership. Whether the support for an entity like Hamas was direct, indirect, or both, is not the point. The system successfully created the very conditions to shape the violence that it needs to justify itself.
The same system then uses the violence of some Palestinians to terrify Israelis, weaponizing that fear to blindly justify more destruction, which inevitably validates Hamas’s claim and creates more resistance. It is a symbiotic system.
Because the reality of grassroots resistance and systemic collaboration can exist at the same time, asking someone to simply “condemn Hamas” is a rhetorical trap - a better question would be: “What is Hamas?”
In reality, the question is deployed to deflect from the human horrors unfolding before our eyes. The question isn’t whether one condemns an entity like Hamas, but rather whether one is willing to honestly look at the deeper system that benefited from it.
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نُدِّدَ بِهِ
Spot-on, again, Daniel.
That took courage to put together. And, it forces you to look beyond actions - even the objectively evil actions of Hamas - in light of the big picture. I will go way out on a limb here but you can say the same about the actions of Germans in Nazi Germany relating to Jews. It is factual that Jews during the Weimar Republic wrecked Christian culture in Berlin, at the time the Arts Center of Eurupe. Jews owned much of the film and arts community. They were an early promoter of Pornography and may have started the LGBT movement their media promoted. Defilement of humans was rampant. They twisted an imperfect Christian Christian culture to what Germans felt was a growing cancer that was spreading because of Jewish influence in business and media and finance. That there was animosity and resentment towards the Ashkanazi Jews doesn't justify Aushwitz or Dachau but we can't look at what happened in a vacuum. Many were guilty of turning their back on God yet we have heard only one side from the education and media complex run largely by the victors. The CIA has taught us how easy brainwashing is - and how hard it is to debrief.