Although I was using anti-Zionist talking points 11 years ago, my intense pro-Palestine activism began immediately after Oct. 7. I learned a very simple and one-sided version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Red-Green Alliance, which goes: Palestinians lived peacefully until 1948, the Nakba happened, then the occupation, and Oct. 7 was the first time they struck back in a way the world noticed.
I recently saw several clips from Motaz Azaiza giving an interview about his experience with Hamas. Azaiza is the Gaza photographer whose images of the war’s first months made him one of its most recognized witnesses in the West. In the interview, he described a WhatsApp group managed by a Hamas media official at the Rafah crossing, used to organize online campaigns against journalists who challenged the group’s narrative. He said photographers in Gaza learned to lower their cameras when someone criticized Hamas. He said he filmed Israeli hostages being beaten by a crowd on Oct. 7 and chose not to publish it because he feared Israel would identify and target the people in it. And he criticized Hamas’s leadership directly, asking for anyone to name a single Palestinian in Gaza whom Hamas’ weapons had protected since the war began.
Azaiza still describes himself as a supporter of armed resistance, so he hasn’t changed sides. This makes his testimony worth taking seriously, since it comes from someone with every reason not to give it. Ironically, some pro-Palestinian activists are claiming he was made to say these things or that he decided to betray the cause. I see such claims constantly when uncomfortable truths come out or when someone from that side takes accountability.
But I digress.
The last few months for me have been truly tranformative, full of a lot of fact-checking and dismantling long-held beliefs. Although I never supported Hamas, this story led me down another rabbit hole, which was the opposite of what I was told regarding the Palestinians and their history.
As I was always told, “Everything was just fine before Israel showed up.” Except it wasn’t.
In August 1929, Arab rioters killed 67 Jews in Hebron, and the British evacuated the city’s surviving Jewish community. Across the Mandate that week, 133 Jews were killed; 116 Arabs were also killed, most of them by British police putting down the riots. The Arab revolt of 1936–39 followed, with thousands dead on all sides, most of them Arabs killed by British forces.
Israel didn’t exist at this time, so what’s this killing Jews about?
In 1970, the PLO had essentially built a state within a state in Jordan. That September, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked several airliners and blew three of them up on an airstrip in the Jordanian desert after an earlier attempt on King Hussein’s life. The Jordanian army moved against the Palestinian militias in what became known as Black September, and thousands were killed. Palestinians remember it as a massacre; Jordanians remember it as the defense of their kingdom.
Learning this was another shock to me. I was always told that “the Jews” were the only terrorists in the region, that they in fact invented terrorism.
But it gets even worse.
After Jordan expelled the PLO, it relocated to Lebanon, where it became one of many armed factions in a fifteen-year civil war that killed somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 people—Lebanese Christians and Muslims, Palestinians, Syrians, and Israelis among them. Israel invaded in 1982; that summer, Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with Israel massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila. An Israeli inquiry found its defense minister personally responsible for failing to prevent it.
Clearly, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is much more complicated than I previously knew, and yet, I was parroting the narrative from one side without knowing the whole story. Its complicated history also answered the question that I never got a real answer to: “Why isn’t the entire Muslim world helping these people?” The answer I usually got from the pro-Palestinians is that they were “Muslim, Zionist traitors.” But I now see why these Arab governments have kept their distance from them.
When Hamas smashed through Israel’s defenses on Oct. 7, I wondered what the attack was meant to achieve. It could not defeat Israel militarily, and an overwhelming Israeli response was predictable. I had a terrible feeling that Gaza was going to be leveled.
Weeks after the attack, senior official Ghazi Hamad said on Lebanese television that Hamas would repeat Oct. 7 again and again. Another senior figure, Khalil al-Hayya, told the New York Times the aim was to change the whole equation rather than to govern Gaza quietly. Mousa Abu Marzouk said on Russian Arabic television that Gaza’s tunnels were built to protect fighters and that protecting civilians was the responsibility of the United Nations and Israel.
Those are their words, indicating they don’t care at all about the civilians that they’re supposedly fighting for. Their words also suggest the leadership anticipated the war and accepted its cost to Gaza’s civilians.
I used to think the things Israel told us about Hamas were just lies. But hearing similar things echoed by Azaiza tells me that the Israelis weren’t lying about everything.
As I continue to do my due diligence and learn more about the region, I don’t blame Israel for wanting to wipe Hamas off the map. This war ends when Hamas gives up power or is eliminated. I can’t expect the Israelis not to do anything about Hamas after they have threatened to repeat Oct. 7 over and over again, especially hearing how they treat their own people. We wouldn’t tolerate any group that said they would repeat 9/11 again and again, so how can we expect the Israelis to?
I hope this conflict ends soon. Civilian casualties will only continue to rise so long as Hamas continues to convince Gazans to engage in this futile jihad. I wish the Gazans would rebel against their oppressors and make a deal, rebuilding under different leadership. But is Hamas oppressing them? In the interview Azaiza said that many Gazans wanted the war to bring about change. In fact, some of them have been interviewed recently and said they have no regrets about Oct. 7.
How can you reason with a population that has faced such destruction but has not faced reality? How do you reason with a culture that embraces matrydom as a form of victory? These Gazans remind me of the Japanese in World War II, who refused to surrender until two atomic bombs were dropped on them. It’s been said that the amount of explosives used on Gaza is equivalent to six Hiroshima bombs, yet there seems to be no sign of surrender to this day.
So long as the Palestinians are seen as cannon fodder by their Iranian puppet masters, and so long as the flow of arms and money doesn’t stop, it seems Hamas is willing to sacrifice every person they are supposedly fighting for to achieve their aims. And those who will continue to suffer most will be the innocent men, women, and children, who deserve a better life that Hamas refuses to give them.
We should press every person who advocates for Palestine, and criticizes Israel, to explicitly endorse Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and/or to explicitly condemn Hamas/terrorism.
If they can’t do that, then we have to assume they either want to see Israel destroyed by Hamas more than they want to help Palestinians, or that they’re indifferent to allying with people that do.
Literally, the people doing the most good for Palestinians today are advocating for them while condemning Hamas. I wish there were way more of them, and that they separated themselves from the Hamas sympathizers in their movement. We can and should force that split.
You know that the Zionists have been planing this since 1897 and that they have already stepped food on the grounds before? This is a Colony and to call the Palestinians the Rootcause of Problems is very ignorant to their Reality. Hamas Fighters are Gazans, young men, in wornoff shoes, and of course they need other Ways to protect themselfs since they dont have Tanks and Fighterjets. So you want Gaza to surrender and complety obey to Western Powers? And to call Iran, the only huge Anti-Colonial power that can strangle the Epstein-class a Puppetmaster, is beyond neoliberal blindness.