"Do you condemn Hamas?" is a disingenuous question. Here's why
The Israel apologists may try to insinuate otherwise, but history didn’t begin on October 7.
Anyone asking for the condemnation of Hamas first thing for its October 7 incursion into Israel and killing of Israeli nationals is being disingenuous. Hamas didn’t pop into existence on October 7. Hamas is one of the manifestations of the Palestinian resistance to the brutal Israeli occupation that has been ongoing with brutal and ever-escalating savagery since 1948.
Any question about the condemnation of Hamas must begin by first acknowledging an ever-expanding list of injustices, including ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide, that has been the Palestinian reality for the past 75 years.
The creation of the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel in 1948 was the beginning of large-scale violence against the people of Palestine. Israel was built upon the land stolen from the Palestinians and their forced expulsion. To create the Jewish ethnostate, 15,000 Palestinians were massacred, and over 800,000 Palestinians were either expelled into neighbouring countries or forced into Palestinian-only ghettos of the West Bank and Gaza.
If the Palestinians call the atrocities of 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe), they call the 1967 Israeli annexation of their two enclaves — the West Bank and Gaza — the Naksa (setback).
But the Israeli atrocities on the Palestinian territories aren’t limited to the Nakba and the Naksa. Bearing the brunt of their settler colonial occupiers’ aggression and inhuman treatment has been a constant feature of the Palestinian existence.
So, if someone asks you the question, “Do you condemn Hamas?”
Ask them if they condemn the Nakba.
Ask them if they condemn the Naksa.
Ask them if they condemn the unabated Israeli encroachments and the continued building of illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of 117 civilians during the so-called “Operation Summer Rains” in 2006.
Ask them if they condemn the complete blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of over 40 civilians near Beit Hannoun, Gaza Strip, in 2006.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of over 50 civilians in Gaza between February 28 and March 3, 2008.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of over 900 civilians in Gaza during the so-called “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-09.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of 5 civilians in Gaza during the so-called “Operation Returning Echo” in 2012.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of over 100 civilians in Gaza during the so-called “Operation Pillar of Defense” in 2012.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of over 1,600 civilians in Gaza during the so-called “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of over 223 civilians in Gaza during their peaceful protest, the Great March of Return, that began on March 30, 2018, and went on until December 27, 2019.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of 9 civilians in Gaza during the so-called “Operation Black Belt” in November 2019.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of 275 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza in May 2021.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of 36 civilians in Gaza during the so-called “Operation Breaking Dawn” from August 5-7, 2022.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of 14 civilians in Gaza during the so-called “Operation Shield and Arrow” in May 2023.
Ask them if they condemn the targeted killing of journalists — including American nationals — working in Palestine.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of foreign activists — including Americans — advocating for the rights of the besieged Palestinians.
Ask them if they condemn the killing of innocent Palestinian children playing football on the beach.
Ask them if they condemn the repeated incursions and attacks on Muslim worshippers inside the Al Aqsa mosque compound.
Ask them if they condemn the routine humiliation of the occupied Palestinians who suffer a string of abuses, including house demolitions, night curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits, racial discrimination, and ethnic prejudice.
After these condemnations, we can perhaps start talking about the resistance of the occupied and get to Hamas because history didn’t begin on October 7.
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“The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.”
— CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
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“Those who try very hard to extract from people like me, from DiEM25, a condemnation of the attack by the Hamas guerillas will never get it. And they will never get it for a very simple reason. Those who care about humans without any discrimination, those who care equally about a Jew and an Arab, must ask themselves a very simple question: what exactly is their idea of the cessation of hostilities? That Palestinians are going to lay down their arms and go back into the largest open-air prison in the world where they are constantly suffocated by the apartheid state?”
“[…] Any human being living under apartheid at some point will either die a terrible silent death or rebel and often take innocent people with them. The criminals here are not Hamas, not even the Israeli settlers who are killing Palestinians. The criminals are Europeans, us. Every single member of our German society, our French society, our Greek society, United States society. We have participated in this crime against humanity over the decades by keeping our mouths shut as long as there is no trouble down there, as long as people are dying outside the reach of cameras, as long as it’s Palestinians who die and not the occupiers. So, this incredible tragedy must be converted into an opportunity for us Europeans to wake up and to redeem ourselves by demanding that collectively, we take the first decisive step towards peace, and that is the destruction of the state of apartheid just like we did in South Africa.”
— Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's former Minister of Finance
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“Give me liberty, or give me death!”
— Patrick Henry, an American Founding Father
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The "terrorists" Israel has killed and terrorised since October 7
Since October 7 — when it was attacked by the Palestinian resistance for its brutal, inhuman, illegal, and genocidal occupation of Palestine — Israel has been on a barbaric genocidal campaign against the civilians of Gaza. Israeli ministers have gloated about laying a complete siege — stopping water, food, and electricity supply — on Gaza, a territory t…
A powerful list I would like to get together, for similar reasons, is that of victims shot, matyred, wounded, taunted terrorised; their ages, their stories. I think this would be a powerful list, and would perhaps give them some honour in someway, to serve as both rebellion and remembrance.
Powerful and concrete, thankyou. How do I mention the thousand of Palestinian hostages as part of that list, and do so in a concise and powerful way like you have done?