Responding to Nazi Germany‘s aerial bombing onslaught against European cities during World War II, Arthur Harris, commander of Britain’s own aerial bombing forces, invoked a biblical quote. Harris warned that the Nazis had “sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” The Nazis did reap the whirlwind of their unprecedented aggression. Today, Nazi political power exists via a disparate array of soccer hooligans, deluded commentators, and criminal gangs of limited power.
The same cannot be said of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Today, Hamas is riding an antisemitic whirlwind reaped from the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
True, two years after the attack, Hamas has lost thousands of fighters, control over the vast majority of its former Gaza Strip fiefdom, and the military means of conducting another spectacular attack on Israel. However, these losses notwithstanding, Hamas has gained something far more valuable on the global stage: a rising tide of antisemitism and a growing recognition of unconditional Palestinian statehood. These will be priceless tools, Hamas hopes, with which to galvanize more people and nations in support of a cause that seeks to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
The Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities were truly brutal.
Alongside other terrorist groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization and Palestinian civilians-turned-terrorists, Hamas took at least 1,195 lives that day. The scale of these losses for a country as small as Israel is hard to quantify. Israel’s 9.8 million population means that a population-proportional terrorist attack against the United States would have seen 480,000 dead. That would have meant an attack 161 times more lethal than the 9/11 attacks.
The Oct. 7 pogrom was made worse by the gleeful recording of its conduct, by the rape and torture of dozens of girls and women, by the social media celebrations that followed, and by the video-recorded kidnapping of 251 people, including bloodied teenage girls and screaming children. While 148 of these hostages have subsequently been released as part of ceasefire deals or rescued by Israeli forces, dozens of others have perished. Perhaps 20 hostages remain alive, having spent two years in underground conditions that would rival the most deviant imagination. The images we have seen of emaciated hostages testify to Hamas’s disregard for human life.
Of course, hiding its true nature is something that the Sunni-Islamist terrorist group has often masterfully veiled from the public discourse. Virtue signaling from the woke Left has seen Hamas presented not as a terrorist death cult but rather as a resistance group dedicated to the defense of Palestinian lives from unjust Israeli attacks. Many Hamas supporters in the West appear to presume that the group seeks only a secular, democratic Palestinian state. They assume that if only Israel would stop bombing Gaza, Hamas could start building a Singapore on the Mediterranean Sea.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Hamas is open and proud about its antisemitic credentials. As the Washington Examiner editorialized in June: “Hamas’s founding charter embraces the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early 20th-century document produced to advance antisemitic hate by using the fraudulent method of pretending to come from a Jewish conspiracy for global domination. The Hamas charter endorses an Islamic Hadith, questioned by many Islamic scholars, which states, ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘Oh Muslims … there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Hamas’s logo shows the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem encompassed by two swords. It paints Israel in Islamic Green. This formalizes Hamas’s desire to seize all of Israel for its caliphate, including all of Jerusalem’s holy sites, regardless of faith. Arab antipathy toward Jews in Palestine does not suggest an ancient or even a vaguely historical Palestinian people; it has always been the product of Islamist extremism.”
Sadly, thanks to anti-Israel propaganda movements funded by wealthy left-wing interests at home and abroad, and by Islamist-supremacist Qatar, many people have fallen for the delusion that Hamas is a legitimate nationalist resistance organization. Some represent their delusion simply by joining peaceful protests and wearing keffiyehs. But as we have seen on college campuses and too many city streets, others have supported Hamas by specifically targeting Jews for intimidation and violence. Indeed, antisemitic violence is soaring globally. Serious attacks against synagogues and Jews occur multiple times a day in Western cities.
There is an obvious mental sickness underpinning this activism for evil. It is hardly a secret that Hamas revels in using both Palestinian and Israeli civilians as human shields, in turning schools and mosques into arms depots, in throwing its political opponents off of buildings, as occurred in Gaza in June 2007, in subjugating sexual and religious minorities, and in hoarding money, food, and medicine. In these acts, this organization proves it is an enemy not just of Israel but of humanity itself. If more people read what Hamas leaders have actually said and written, perhaps they would engage in debates surrounding this conflict more carefully. But it’s easier and cooler to wear a keffiyeh.
This is not to say that Israel’s response to Hamas’s atrocities has been ideal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has too often relied upon air power to avoid riskier ground clearance operations. This has sometimes significantly exacerbated civilian casualties in Gaza’s densely populated urban environment. Netanyahu has also too often played to the fringes of his coalition government, enabling the whims of extremist ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would happily see all Palestinians dead or pushed into the River Jordan and Mediterranean Sea.
Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries into Gaza and on aid convoy routes inside Gaza have also been excessive at times. While Israel’s motive has been to prevent Hamas from seizing aid that it can then use to bolster its own forces, a very legitimate concern considering Hamas’s systemic manipulation of aid flows, aid restrictions have increased the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This has damaged Israel’s international standing, helping facilitate the otherwise absurd excesses of Hamas’s propaganda.
Speaking of absurd, it should be emphasized, for example, that the notion of a genocide in Gaza is patently ridiculous. Had Israel wanted to commit a genocide, it could easily have entirely starved Gaza or simply littered it with nuclear weapons.
Nor has the Trump administration always helped Israel’s cause. Even as it has rightly provided diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations and rightly imposed consequences on universities that refuse to protect Jewish students’ civil rights, it has excessively penalized anti-Israel speakers who do not otherwise engage in harassment. A standout example here is that of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year after writing an op-ed calling for sanctions on Israel. The better American speech tradition is to tolerate even perceivably hateful speech, such as Ozturk’s, to foster more vigorous debate on matters of public import. Instead, by pursuing anti-Israel student visa holders simply for their idiotic views, the Trump administration has helped anti-Israel activists falsely present their cause as a moral struggle against U.S.-Israeli government overreach.
But by far, the most stunning victory Hamas has secured since Oct. 7 is that of international recognition of Palestinian statehood.
The recent decisions by France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and a growing number of other nations to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally have taught Hamas and terrorists everywhere that the more blood they spill and the more brutally they spill it, the more they have to gain. That these close American allies would indirectly but so potently reward a terrorist group that still keeps emaciated innocents in dark dungeons of despair suggests that everything is possible if terrorists are only bold enough. The broader strategic stupidity on display here by leaders such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron is thus hard to encapsulate. But there is a good reason that the words “we do not negotiate with terrorists” have been part of the American political lexicon for decades.
Governments recognizing Palestinian statehood say their actions are a response to Israel’s military strategy in Gaza. They say that Hamas can play no part in any future Palestinian government. But only a fool would believe such inanity. After all, there is an unambiguously direct line between the Oct. 7 atrocities and the recognition of Palestinian statehood. These recognition announcements might temporarily placate protest movements, but they jeopardize the cause of a just peace.
The only peaceful, mutually beneficial long-term resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that of a two-state solution. A solution in which a Palestinian state, connected by an elevated highway between the West Bank and Gaza, and committed to peaceful coexistence and counterterrorism cooperation with Israel, lives side by side with the Jewish state. The unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood does nothing to advance this cause.
On the contrary, it will only reinforce the already understandably significant Israeli disinterest in any future two-state solution. It will also disincentivize the Palestinian leadership today and tomorrow, both Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, from making meaningful concessions toward better relations with Israel. Most tragically, the Palestinians have been given abundant reason to believe that obstinacy and terrorism are far better tools than concession and diplomacy.
DECONSTRUCT THE ‘DEEP STATE.’ DON’T BECOME IT
Israel is in an unenviable position today. It has imposed great military destruction on Hamas while simultaneously finding itself isolated internationally and, far more ominously, with Jews facing an upsurge in antisemitic violence. Sustained pressure on Hamas by both the U.S. and Israel offers the best chance of bringing this conflict to a speedy and beneficial conclusion. In the longer term, however, the West must urgently embrace civic engagement that highlights Hamas for its true nature.
Hamas is a modern heir to 20th-century Nazism in ideology and in form.
Tom Rogan is an editor and national security writer for the Washington Examiner.
