Over the last two weeks, the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip have been at the mercy not of Israel but of Hamas. One feels for the Gazans. They’re suffering serious deprivation, lacking basic supplies and food and water, watching their homes and hospitals and neighborhoods get leveled, trying to flee the country while Hamas thugs block them, and being held by Hamas as human shields. All this ugliness unraveled with Hamas’ attack on Israel on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. What has erupted since was detonated by Hamas.
Having thus expressed my sincere sympathy for what these people are enduring, I must bear this bad news, which isn’t news to anyone knowledgeable of the history and politics of the region: These Palestinians have gotten who they voted for. Sure, Gazans didn’t vote for this hell, but they did vote for Hamas. And this is what Hamas is.
I will not here offer a deep dive into the history and politics of the modern “Palestinian state,” or lack thereof, but here are a few salient details helpful to know.
On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly issued Resolution 181, which established two states in the territory of Palestine: the new nation-state of Israel and a Palestinian state comprised of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (that’s the West Bank of the Jordan River). For decades thereafter, what ruled Gaza and the West Bank was chaos.
By the late 1990s, after surprising, historic peace agreements signed between Israel and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian state finally began to emerge, with Arafat’s so-called “Palestinian Authority” as the governing body. Those peace accords were the best thing Arafat ever did, but, even then, he was a problem. He needed to go.
With Arafat’s long-awaited death in November 2004, Palestinians, just two months later, in January 2005, elected Mahmoud Abbas as their president, for better or worse. He was now president of the governing Palestinian Authority and successor to Arafat. Abbas became the leader of the Palestinian state.
But then, a year later, in January 2006, something crazy happened. The Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip elected Hamas to a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority’s governing legislature. The people democratically elected members of an organization long and widely considered to be a terrorist group — one committed in its charter to the destruction of Israel.
Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, which translates into the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” A splinter from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, Hamas exploded onto the scene with a suicide bombing in April 1993 in protest of Arafat negotiating a peace agreement (ultimately the Oslo Accords) with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Over the next decade, Hamas and Fatah — the party of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas — were in dispute. Immediately upon the legislative victory of Hamas in January 2006, Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas went after each other. Fierce fighting commenced. Ever since, Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah have run the West Bank while Hamas has run Gaza in a very divided, fractured Palestinian state.
Putting the two sides further at odds, Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah recognize Israel’s right to exist, in keeping with the Oslo and Wye accords in the 1990s signed between Arafat and the Israeli leadership, whereas Hamas categorically does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Fatah made an uneasy peace with Israel; Hamas makes war with Israel.
Adding to the intrigue is Iran. Whereas Abbas’ Fatah party doesn’t back Hamas, Iran’s party of Hezbollah does. Hamas is backed not by the Palestinian West Bank but by the Iranian mullahs.
That’s a lot of background information, but it circles us back to the Palestinian people in Gaza, my focus here.
The world was shocked when the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip in January 2006 democratically elected a terrorist organization to govern them. The Bush administration and Western allies had a cow. Gee, this isn’t why we’ve been touting “democracy” in the Middle East!
But hey, live by democracy, die by democracy. Many of us warned the Bush administration that when democracy is the be-all and end-all, your alpha and omega, be prepared to be mightily disappointed sometimes. If you dump the king of Saudi Arabia and let the people vote, don’t be shocked if they elect an Osama bin Laden.
Of course, most such voters, one hopes, wouldn’t elect someone they fear might become an Osama bin Laden. We were told by Western “experts” that when Gazans elected Hamas, it wasn’t because they wanted terrorists committed to invading Israel and taking hostages. Rather, we were told, Gazans elected Hamas in 2006 because its political candidates did a bang-up job of “campaigning,” promising better “social services,” going door to door selling themselves like politicians do, handshaking and backslapping, handing out lollipops to the kiddies, kissing babies.
I could show you emails from colleagues in 2006 telling me to calm down and please understand that Hamas simply did a swell job campaigning. This was not a choice for terrorism by the good folks in Gaza.
Well, maybe not. But their choice led to terrorism, because they elected terrorists. The smiling political candidate put aside a hand grenade for the Jews while he handed the Muslim granddad a cigar. But behind the smile, he was still a terrorist, ready at any moment to light a fuse with the cigar.
So here we are now. The Palestinians of Gaza are captive to the terrorists they voted for in 2006. And they are under siege. Many are dying.
Live by democracy, die by democracy. Be careful who you vote for.