by Melanie Phillips
Hatred of Hamas doesn’t alter the endemic hatred of Israel and the Jews.
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| Palestinians move from the Shujaiya neighborhood in the Gaza Strip after
the Israeli army ordered its evacuation due to Hamas rocket fire, April
3, 2025. Photo by Ali Hassan/Flash90. |
It is striking, if unsurprising, that the
demonstrations against Hamas being mounted by thousands of Gazans have
gone almost totally unremarked by the media and supposedly
pro-Palestinian supporters in Britain and America.
The protests have been going on for
several days. On Wednesday, hundreds of Palestinian Arabs rallied in
Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, chanting “Hamas out” and “Enough
death.” This was despite some high-profile killings of protesters by
Hamas designed to put the uprising down.
Abdulrahman Sha’aban Abu Samra was shot
dead by Hamas while waiting in line for flour in Deir al-Balah. Uday
Al-Raba’i had denounced Hamas on social media and in a coffee shop.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, Hamas operatives dragged him alive
through the streets tied to the back of a car and then dumped him on
his family to die.
This uprising has been almost totally
ignored in the West because—just as with the Hamas-led atrocities in
Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—nothing can be allowed to challenge the
“progressive” narrative that the bad guys are the Israelis, that the
Palestinian Arabs are their victims and that Hamas is an understandable
resistance movement.
Of course, this silence over the protests
also illuminates the rank hypocrisy of Western liberals, whose purported
concern for the oppressed of Gaza is thus shown to be bogus. What
drives them isn’t compassion but hatred of Israel—a hatred so
obsessional and unhinged that they blank out the reality that’s staring
them in the face.
The reason for such willful blindness is
that, for such liberals, their view of themselves as good people is
wrapped up in supporting the Palestinian Arabs as a people fighting
their Israeli oppressors. To acknowledge that the Gazans may actually be
oppressed by their own people threatens to destroy their entire
progressive identity. So these developments must be ignored.
What sparked the protests was fury and
despair over the resumption of the war after the ceasefire ended and the
Israel Defense Forces started pummeling Gaza with even greater
ferocity.
As the protesters have repeatedly
declared, they hold Hamas responsible for inflicting upon them the
disaster of a war that has ruined their lives. They also accuse Hamas of
stealing their food and foreign aid supplies, as well as using them to
make millions of dollars on the black market.
There have long been signs that the Gazans
were turning against Hamas over its corruption and repression. A large
proportion of the population—some say as much as half—are desperate to
emigrate.
Until now, they have been prevented from
doing so by Egypt, which sealed its border with Gaza, and by Hamas
itself, intent as it was upon its strategy of effectively holding the
entire population hostage as cannon fodder and human shields.
Plans now being advanced by Israel,
falsely characterized by its enemies in the West as forcible transfer,
would enable those who wish to leave to do so.
Some people, however, are misinterpreting
the revolt as demonstrating that the Gazans are people who have a range
of attitudes that show they’re fit to produce an alternative form of
self-government.
That’s a delusion. This is a population
that—day in, day out and over many generations—has been indoctrinated
not only with the myth that their national inheritance has been stolen
from them but that their highest calling is to murder Israelis and
appropriate all their land.
More profoundly still, they have been
turned into fanatics in the cause of genocidal Islamic holy war by the
unremitting transmission of Nazi-style propaganda that the Jews are a
demonic conspiracy of blood-sucking parasites that must be eliminated
from the world.
The fact that they hate Hamas doesn’t
change any of that. The people protesting on the streets are the same
people who, on Oct. 7, poured into Israel across the shattered border
fence behind the Hamas stormtroopers and themselves took part in that
barbaric orgy of rape, slaughter and kidnapping.
They are the same people who took to the
same streets to jeer at, abuse and desecrate the bodies of the Israelis
who were dragged into Gaza on that terrible day.
The hostages who have returned have said
that they were shown no kindness by those ordinary Gazans who held them
captive in their houses. Unlike the Holocaust, when there were righteous
gentiles who hid Jews from the Nazis at enormous risk to themselves,
not one Gazan shielded them or helped them escape.
After Hamas murdered the protester Abu
Samra, his family members from one of Gaza’s most prominent clans killed
the Hamas operative who they said had murdered him.
There are several powerful clans in Gaza. Might they not have taken similar action to free the Israeli hostages? They have not.
The endemic hatred of Israel and the Jews
is not confined to the inhabitants of Gaza. The Arabs living in the
disputed territories of Judea and Samaria are similarly indoctrinated.
Fatah, the ruling party in the Palestinian
Authority led by the allegedly “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas, has repeatedly
celebrated the Oct. 7 atrocities. Opinion polling has shown that the
Palestinian Arabs in these territories overwhelmingly support further
such attacks against Israeli Jews.
People in the West refuse to accept the
implacable nature of Palestinian Arab rejectionism, and the murderous
hatred of Israel and the Jews.
This is partly a refusal to face up to the
reality of Islamic holy war. Partly, it’s due to widespread ignorance
of the Middle East, Jewish history in the land and the spurious nature
of Palestinian peoplehood—the fictitious identity that was cooked up in
the 1960s to play the credulous West for the suckers they’ve turned out
to be.
But what you hear over and over again in
Western countries is that “something has to be done with all those
Palestinians”—and what else could be done with them other than to give
them their own state, which sounds so very reasonable?
This is a very strange attitude. There’s
never been another conflict like this, where people who set out to
exterminate another people and its homeland but lose that war then
become the focus of global sympathy and can dictate the policies of the
world.
In other conflicts, if aggressors lose the
war of conquest they have waged, they are in no position to dictate to
anyone. They may have to move or disperse. They may find themselves
ruled in the same place by others. As aggressors, they have forfeited
the right to have any say over their future.
Yet despite the fact that the Palestinian
Arabs have waged a campaign of extermination against the Jewish homeland
for the best part of a century, they’ve been treated with kid gloves
and have dictated the global agenda.
Even more extraordinary, they’ve been
treated as a discrete people on the basis of an utterly spurious
designation as refugees that uniquely was passed down from generation to
generation—a formula devised solely to turn them into a weapon against
Israel’s existence.
They are indeed victims—not of Israel but
of the lies with which their own Arab world has enslaved them to a cult
of death and destruction.
We don’t know what the day after this war
will look like on the ground. We hear reports that the Trump
administration, Israel and Saudi Arabia are trying to broker a permanent
settlement of the war against the Jewish state. We don’t know whether
this is intended to result in a canton-style formula for the Palestinian
Arabs in the disputed territories, their relocation to Egypt or Jordan,
or some other kind of arrangement.
Whatever the outcome, however, if there is
ever to be peace and justice in the Middle East, then it must be
understood that the idea that there is such a thing as a Palestinian
people and that they should have their own state of Palestine—the
unthinking and unchallengeable orthodoxy in the West—is now over.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son and can be purchased on Amazon. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
Source: https://www.jns.org/the-gazan-revolt/
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