Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The London-based, Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily, Al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East], reports that demonstrations against Hamas broke out this week in Gaza, beginning in Beit Lahia on Tuesday, and continuing on Wednesday there and in Shuja’iyyah in the north of Gaza, where people set tires on fire. They chanted for the end of the war, but then began shouting slogans against Hamas and especially its late leader, Yahya al-Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that kicked off a year and a half of Israeli total war on Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
In Beit Lahia, many, but not all, chanted “Get out, Hamas!” An outbreak of violence as the crowd moved toward the Indonesian Hospital was averted when some young men intervened to calm things down.
On Wednesday, there was a smaller procession in Khan Yunis in south Gaza, though there were pro-Hamas and anti-Hamas chants, while others demanded an end to the war.
“Protest,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025.
People in Gaza are desperate because the Israeli government has cut off food, medical and other aid for the past few weeks and they are being stalked by hunger
On Thursday, Hamas finally issued a response, castigating the demonstrators for aiding Israel and calling on them to go on suffering rather than to go into the bloody hands of their persecutors.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of the desperation of the people he had bombed relentlessly — and deprived of homes, water, food, hospitals and medicine — to maintain that their desperation vindicated his repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute and the United Nations Charter. But he and the Israeli government bear their own responsibility for the longevity of Hamas
1. Israel and the Bush administration allowed Hamas to run in the 2006 election, which Hamas won. If the Israelis couldn’t live with a Hamas electoral victory, then they should not have permitted the party to contest the election for the Palestine Authority. Hamas came to power in Gaza and the West Bank at that point with the acquiescence of the Israeli government.
2. A subsequent 2007 coup arranged by Israeli intelligence and the CIA attempted to overturn the results of the election and install the Palestine Liberation Organization in power. The poorly planned and implemented coup succeeded in the Palestinian West Bank but not in Gaza.
3. From 2007, the Israeli government imposed an economic blockade on Gaza, limiting imports and exports. Real income in the Strip fell by 1/3 over the next five years. The unemployment rate rose to 50% and malnutrition spiked. The Israeli blockade harmed private sector employment much more than government employment. Since the government was controlled by Hamas, this outcome had the effect of making people in Gaza dependent on Hamas for what jobs there were, helping ensure the longevity of the Hamas statelet.
I make this point in my recent book:
Juan Cole, Gaza Yet Stands (Ann Arbor: Informed Comment KDP, 2024). Click here to buy.
4. Netanyahu and his successors made their peace with Hamas dominance in Gaza because the outcome of the 2007 split between Hamas and the PLO, with the former in Gaza and the latter in the West Bank, forestalled further progress toward a Palestinian state of the sort Israel had agreed to create in the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. In other words, maintaining Hamas rule in Gaza became a pretext for permanently derailing Oslo and keeping the Palestinians stateless forever.
5. To keep this scam going, Netanyahu convinced Qatar and Egypt to put money in Israeli bank accounts, which Netanyahu then transferred to Gaza. This money kept Palestinians from starving despite the economic blockade. To maintain its legitimacy inside Gaza, Hamas fired lots of small mostly ineffectual rockets into Israel, most of which landed uselessly in the desert, though occasionally they killed or wounded Israelis or did property damage. This harassment was apparently a price Netanyahu was willing to pay in order to keep Hamas in power and to ensure that the Palestinians remained politically divided and unable to escape their statelessness. If it weren’t for the external Arab money, Netanyahu wouldn’t have been able to keep Hamas in power. In 2019 Qatar was exasperated with Hamas and was going to cut off the money, and Netanyahu desperately sent the head of Mossad to Doha to plead with Qatar to keep supporting Gaza.
If the PLO had been put in power in Gaza instead, there would have been no October 7. Even if, after Oct. 7, the PLO had been sent in to Gaza, Netanyahu wouldn’t have had a pretext to level it and kill some 300,000 people — the likely death toll deriving from the current total war as its health effects unfold in coming years. Netanyahu has been conducting the vastest land grab in modern history in Palestine, and keeping Gaza under Hamas was key to it. Now he has a pretext, and the willing help of the Trump administration, to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of its Palestinians entirely. It was never about Israeli security. It was about Greater Israel.
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