Reducing Hamas’s terrorism to a problem of ‘evil’ is a mistake. By Shadi Hamid

Read time: 5 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Reducing Hamas’s terrorism to a problem of ‘evil’ is a mistake

Columnist and Editorial Board member

October 31, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The sun sets over the Gaza Strip on Monday. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Add to your saved stories

Save

Terrorism doesn’t fall from the sky. Terror is a tactic. It is a choice. Hamas’s grisly assault on Israel must be analyzed with this in mind. If we ignore this, we make it more likely that other violent organizations will take Hamas’s place even if the group is neutralized or somehow eliminated.

This is already happening. In the West Bank, the stronghold of Hamas’s opponents, support for militancy appears to be deepening, including among Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah faction. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. While the world looked away, something frightening was building. According to one July poll, 60 to 75 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had positive views of Islamic Jihad and the Lions’ Den — groups just as or even more radical than Hamas. And in a more recent September survey, 54 percent of Palestinians said they supported armed attacks against Israeli civilians.

There are two ways to look at this. One is to say that something is inherently wrong with Palestinians — a view often expressed by both the Israeli and American right — or even that Palestinians, by supporting groups that are evil, are complicit in that evil. This perspective has dangerous implications: It means downplaying distinctions between combatants and civilians (as many Israeli officials have repeatedly done) and seeing all Palestinians as enemies to be destroyed.

The other way to interpret the survey results is to acknowledge a truth about all people: They’re complicated. In the July poll, half of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” But it is possible for Palestinians to support a two-state solution that would allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state while also supporting armed attacks against and inside Israel.

It’s more useful to ask how Palestinian attitudes toward violence have evolved. As journalist Peter Beinart recently noted, at the height of the Oslo accords in 1996 — when a settlement seemed possible — Palestinian support for the peace process reached 80 percent while support for violence dropped to around 20 percent. Clearly, Palestinians, like any group, are capable of supporting both violence and nonviolence, depending on the circumstances.

Unfortunately, officials in the United States and Israel, and in European capitals, have either not been paying attention or simply haven’t cared enough. For instance, in the original version of a new Foreign Affairs article, published after Hamas’s attacks but written before them, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, wrote, “In the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.” The Biden administration was effectively ignoring Gaza. But it was also ignoring the West Bank, doubling down instead on the Trump administration-brokered Abraham Accords between Israel and “pro-American” Arab dictators. Palestinians were not part of the equation.

The United States and Europe treated the plight of Gazans as a tragedy, while acting as if nothing could be done about it. Meanwhile, successive Israeli governments expanded settlements deep into what was meant to be a future Palestinian state. As a matter of policy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked to prevent reconciliation efforts between the dueling authorities in Gaza and the West Bank. According to this “separation policy,” Netanyahu used Hamas’s dominance in Gaza to justify the claim that Israel had no “partner for peace.”

In 2018, as Gaza’s plight became frozen in place, Palestinian activists launched the Great Return March along the border with Israel — one of the largest unarmed mass mobilizations since the Gaza blockade began in 2007. Israeli forces responded with violence, including the firing of live ammunition and use of snipers. Over the course of the months-long protests, about 150 Palestinians were killed. The lesson that many Palestinians took from this — and from the apparent futility of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement — was that nonviolence doesn’t work.

This is not to say that Hamas wouldn’t have committed its gruesome killings had political circumstances turned out differently. There is no way of knowing. But it would also be a mistake to dismiss Hamas’s terrorism as mere “evil.” As the philosopher John Gray notes, “A campaign of mass murder is never simply an expression of psychopathic aggression.” To describe the things we can’t comprehend as evil is a cop-out. It allows us to believe something is wrong with “them” but not with us. And, paradoxically, it exposes an unwillingness to take terrorists seriously, reducing them to “crazy” or “irrational” adversaries. They usually aren’t.

As has been the case with groups as seemingly unhinged as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, there has been a method to the madness, one that we ignore at our peril. As my Post colleague Damir Marusic recently wrote of Hamas, “Creating a catastrophe … was an act of breathtaking cynicism. It was a hijacking of the Palestinian cause.” Through spectacular violence and brutality, Hamas seized the initiative and demonstrated its own relevance. In a context of dramatic upheaval — think of the French or Russian revolutions — moderation, proportion and restraint never win the day. It’s unclear why anyone would expect them to win the day in Palestine.

The good news is that evil, however banal, can be fought. Hamas does not equal the Palestinian people. To believe that would be to accept Hamas’s claims at face value. Palestinians have diverse and often conflicting perspectives, and they have agency. As powerful as they are, the United States and Israel have agency, too. Millions of Palestinians can and must be incentivized away from violence. They once believed in a two-state solution, and for good reason: They could see progress, however halting, in their own lives. In recent years, however, they have seen only a series of dead ends.

That same alarming September poll contained notes of hope. A plurality in both Gaza and the West Bank said Palestinians’ first goal should be “Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.” Right now, a growing number of Palestinians see revolutionary violence as the best way to achieve that goal — and they’re probably wrong about this.

When the fighting stops, the United States, Israel and the international community must give Palestinians reasons to think otherwise. A nonviolent path to an independent Palestinian state must be made unmistakably clear. If such a path doesn’t appear, then defeat of Hamas on the battlefield will be a Pyrrhic victory. Because its ideas — and its belief in the power of violence — will remain, perhaps more alive than ever.