Sunday roundup: Horror without hope

Palestinians inspect debris after an Israeli strike near a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) school in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 21, 2023.

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Greetings after another grim week. You can tell how grim because policy intellectuals are scrambling for crumbs of comfort. This is a perfectly human reaction, but the crumbs are, I am afraid, so small you can barely see them.

Writing in Foreign Affairs Amaney A. Jamal and Michael Robbins asked “What do Palestinians Really Think of Hamas?”

It was a very good question.  I wrote a piece earlier this week, that the Spectator picked up, which discussed a tendency in liberal journalism to get round Hamas's clerical fascist ideology by acting as if it did not exist. Look at the obfuscation that followed Hamas's success in  persuading the BBC,* New York Times and many other liberal news outlets run with the fake news that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City.

They did not say that the claim came from Hamas. If they had, readers and viewers might have wondered why they should take the word of  a terrorist organization.  Instead they said, to quote the headline of the New York Times, "Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say,”

What is cheering about Jamal and Robbins's  research is that it destroys the notion that Hamas and the Palestinians are synonymous.  They write

The argument that the entire population of Gaza can be held responsible for Hamas’s actions is quickly discredited when one looks at the facts. Arab Barometer, a research network where we serve as co-principal investigators, conducted a survey in Gaza and the West Bank days before the Israel-Hamas war broke out. The findings reveal that, rather than supporting Hamas, the vast majority of Gazans have been frustrated with the armed group’s ineffective governance as they endure extreme economic hardship. Most Gazans do not align themselves with Hamas’s ideology, either. Unlike Hamas, whose goal is to destroy the Israeli state, the majority of survey respondents favored a two-state solution with an independent Palestine and Israel existing side by side.

A moment of hope? Not really, I am afraid.