At 11.30am on 27 December 2008, without warning, Israeli forces began a devastating bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip codenamed Operation “Cast Lead”. Its stated aim was to end rocket attacks into Israel by armed groups affiliated with Hamas and other Palestinian factions.What it doesn't mention is that Hamas had a different name for the war - calling it "Operation Oil Slick." And that Hamas declared that war three days before Israel's response, with a salvo of rockets and mortars sent to Israel on December 24. It wasn't a 22-day war started by Israel, but a 25-day war started by Hamas.
This has been how NGOs and the media have been writing about Hamas for over a decade - downplaying its terror, ignoring its own actions, not reporting its public threats to murder Israeli civilians, erasing its genocidal nature. Instead, Hamas is portrayed as merely reacting to Israeli actions.
Excusing Hamas in the West is standard operating procedure. And Hamas has taken full advantage of that - by manipulating Western analysts to believe that it is a pragmatic ruler in Gaza, it wants peace and that it really isn't antisemitic anymore.
In 2011, the New York Times had a scoop: Hamas accepted a two state solution!
But if one reads what Meshal actually said, he did not in any way accept Israel's existence. He said he would accept a Palestinian state in the territories, but not a word about stopping there and ending terror attacks to take over the rest of Israel.
Meshal didn't lie. He just knew that the reporter was too enamored with interviewing him that he could lead him to report things he never said. And it worked like a charm - throughout the 2010s, the tantalizing idea that Hamas accepted a two state solution kept popping up when they said no such thing - and explicitly denied accepting two states in Arabic..
Unless, of course, that second state is also Arab.
Hamas' main PR problem in the 2010s was that Hamas' charter was antisemitic and that fact was slowly becoming known thanks to Israelis mentioning it in TV interviews. The charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jews, quoting a hadith, "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." It has lots of incitement to kill Jews, such as
We should not forget to remind every Moslem that when the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that "Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women."Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."
To counter this, in 2017 Hamas fooled the entire Western world into claiming that it has changed. It announced with fanfare a new manifesto that didn't have the same explicit antisemitism as the charter.
And they knew that the media, wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, would misinterpret this document as a replacement for the antisemitic, genocidal Hamas charter .
There was only one problem: Hamas never claimed that this "political document" replaced the charter, this was all wishful thinking by Western "experts." It didn't need to lie - the clueless Western media was happy to fill in the blanks with their wishful thinking.
In Arabic, Hamas explicitly said that the charter - and its antisemitism - was still its legal covenant. And if you carefully read the new political document you can see that it doesn't contradict the charter.
And in Gaza, Hamas still held explicitly antisemitic events, like this 2014 rally:
Hamas knows how badly Westerners want to believe that it was moderating. it was a masterful manipulation of "experts" because wishful thinking about Hamas trumped sober analysis.
Hamas has never said one word that indicates that it has changed its positions since the charter was written. Yet pundits, professors, world leaders and the media have wanted to see a two state solution for so long, and wanted so much for the Hamas obstacle to such a solution to be removed, that they deluded themselves into thinking that Hamas has changed from the organization that proudly blew up Jewish children during the 1990s and 2000s.
Wishful thinking is no substitute for reality. I don't think there will be anyone apologizing for getting Hamas so wrong for so long, though.
