Hamas is a Cancer on Palestine
(Edit 10/11/2023: Added a link to a NYMag article which articulates my thoughts far better than I could have here. It’s in the first paragraph and is a must-read.)
If you’ve been paying any attention to the news at all, you’ll know at least a little of what’s been happening over the past few days. On the 7th of October, Hamas—a Palestinian militant group with the stated goal of a single Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” —descended upon a music festival near the Israel-Gaza border as well as other nearby towns, slaughtering over a thousand civilians and taking a number of others hostage. I called Hamas a militant group just now, but the label “terrorist group” seems more fitting at this point. This is a very short post, as there’s very little I have to say that hasn’t already been said by smarter people than me, but I do feel the need to say something regardless.
I’ve always considered myself an underdog supporter when it comes to international relations. Ukraine is the underdog in its struggle against Russian occupation and annexation, so I hope Ukraine comes out on top. For the same reasons, Palestine is the side I root for in that respective conflict; I wouldn’t want the government to kick me out of my house and off the land my family has called home for our entire lives, just so someone else could move in. Israel is guilty of that and more. It seems like there’s no time in human history when Jewish people haven’t been oppressed in some way or another, but that oppression doesn’t justify oppressing another group of people who—as far as I can tell—had nothing to do with it.
That said, no amount of historical or present-day oppression can justify the bloody murder of civilians, either, or the parading of their bodies through the streets. I won’t talk about the allegations of rape or claims that the music festival was an explicitly pro-Palestine event, since I don’t know how much of that is true or not, if any. But I wouldn’t put it past Hamas, and even without that, Israel has all the justification it could ever want for brutally cracking down on the Gaza Strip, with little regard for civilian casualties in their own right beyond some cursory warnings to leave the area.
This was to be expected, I suppose. Violence breeds more violence, and in this case, the cycle’s been going on for the better part of a century. I don’t know for sure what it’ll take to bring it all to an end, although I do think it would require that Israel make concessions that it’s simply not willing to make at this time. But what the past few days have shown me, at the very least, is that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip would be far better off without Hamas at the helm.