Gang warfare of a sort has burst into flames in the Gaza territories from which Israel withdrew military forces last weekend. Hamas immediately initiated a new round of killing to make sure everyone understands it’s the top gang. Its terrorists now roam the streets they’ve governed tyrannically for 20 years, hunting down rivals and murdering them.
Hamas “soldiers” are executing those they accuse of collaborating with Israel. It’s reportedly been between 50 and 100 victims since the weekend. Completely unconcerned with civilization and focused solely on the blunt exercise of power, they don’t bother with trials, evidence, or any form of defense pleading; they just put on a hideous public spectacle. They drag a line of broken men into the open, push them to their knees, and put a bullet in the back of the heads of each while enthusiasts shout, “God is great” (warning, graphic content).
To bastardize their endlessly repeated phrase, which they dishonor with their every action, what they are doing really isn’t “great.” It’s especially not great coming just days after the landmark peace agreement with Israel, which still holds out the prospect, faint though it may seem, of a wider Middle East peace.
Hamas’s actions, however grotesque, were expected. As I wrote last week, there is a total lack of good faith in the terrorist organization — its code of honor considers nothing but victory and the exercise of power — and “we should assume that [Hamas] and others will return to anti-Israel, anti-Western terrorism.”
In light of what is now being perpetrated by Hamas, it is ironic that its spokesman, Hazem Qassem, told the AFP newswire last weekend, “We call on all mediators and international parties to continue to monitor Israel’s conduct and to ensure it does not resume its aggression against our people in Gaza.” The only organization bent on aggression against Palestinians in Gaza is, as everyone can see, the organization Qassem represents: Hamas.
Its score settling by the murder of fellow Palestinians is just the first stage of its plan to resume control. It has already ruled out disarmament, arguing that it will not lay down its arms until it is assured of a Palestinian state. This means it rejects stage two of the peace plan and probably plans to restart its war of genocidal religious fanaticism against the Jewish state.
It’s possible that the Palestinian terrorists whose barbarities we’re watching again will turn out to be like the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army a generation ago, who quietly dropped their maximalist aim of eliminating an enemy and taking a tract of land, and will instead, after tacitly acknowledging they’ve lost their political struggle, dwindle into a role, less lionized by the Western Left, of simple gangsterism and self-enrichment by theft, drug running, extortion etc.
But one has to assume what is more likely, that once Hamas has reestablished its dominance over Gaza, it will return to its principal mission of murdering Jews, which is its way of chasing the chimerical goal of eliminating Israel altogether. The destruction of Israel is in the Hamas charter, in its DNA. It is its raison d’être.
Hamas is already breaking its word by handing over only four of the 28 bodies of dead hostages it held, rather than all of them, as it agreed. In consequence, Israel may not open the Rafah crossing into Gaza from Egypt.
So where are we now, and where do we go from here? We are probably returning to conflict between Israel and Hamas, as was always likely. It won’t be immediate because Israel will not intervene to stop internecine bloodshed among Palestinians, nor should it. (Nor, by the way, will the Western Left, which cares about Palestinian deaths only when it can blame them on Israel).
Israel will simply freeze the “peace process” where it is until Hamas complies with its undertakings. Given that these include disarmament, that probably means never. And Israel will not withdraw from the half of Gaza it still holds.
This predictable disappointment does not, however, mean that the recent peace accords will have achieved nothing. They have exposed Hamas more widely for what it is and have isolated the group from those who were its chief supporters in the Middle East. Its agreement to the deal is now a matter of honor for all the major Arab nations that subscribed to it and cajoled the terrorists into accepting it.
They have had it with Hamas; they want normalized, or at least better, relations with Israel. Even if Hamas returns to terrorism, not just against its own people but against Israel, it is a reasonable bet that more Arab nations will join the Abraham Accords, reap the economic and diplomatic benefits of vastly improved relations with Washington and Jerusalem, and Hamas’s ability to morally blackmail them will dwindle toward zero.
It is vital that if we are to move in this direction, President Donald Trump and future administrations stick to the promise to back Israel completely in the necessary defense of its land and people, in whatever way it deems necessary.