The Word That Carries a Death Sentence ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, June 26, 2026

The Word That Carries a Death Sentence

Palestinians are trained from birth to believe one thing above all: Israel is the enemy, and anything that distracts from that fact is heresy. The word used to enforce the idea is "unity."

There is nothing wrong with unity in itself — I wish more Jews had it — but in the Palestinian context the word does specific work. It makes the worst behavior untouchable, whether terrorism against Jews or the treatment of Gazans as cannon fodder. Criticism of any kind is ferociously attacked. Any crack in the unity gets judged as treason, and the sentence for treason is death.

Today, a mass protest is being planned for Gaza against Hamas. It is being organized from Palestinians abroad. The reason is obvious: if they were still in Gaza they would be arrested, beaten and maybe worse.

The main organizer, a journalist named Abdul Ati now living in Cairo, had his slogan ready before the threats started: "We are one people, bound by pain and a shared fate, and unity remains the shortest path to protecting everyone." He meant it as a plea — let us disagree without anyone getting hurt. He believed unity was a shield.

The clerics of Hayʾat ʿUlamaʾ Filastin, the Palestinian Scholars Association, issued a fatwa the day before the protest and used the same word to try to quash it. The movement, they declared, is fitna — sedition, the tearing of the collective — and ifsad fil-ard, corruption in the land. It serves the occupation. To call for it is forbidden, to join it is forbidden, and staying silent about the people behind it is forbidden too; the duty of every believer is to expose them, denounce them, and strip them bare. The protest is a "criminal movement" that betrays God, His messenger, and the believers.

Abdul Ati reached for unity to protect the right to complain, and the men with religious authority reached for unity to make complaining a capital offense against the nation. His version comes with a slogan. Theirs comes with a precedent: last spring Hamas executed six Gazans who had marched in protests like this one, flogged others, and disappeared the rest.

This is the only unity that has ever actually held in Gaza, and it holds because the alternative is death. You may grieve, you may starve, you may bury your children, you may have been beaten and tortured by Hamas, but the only allowed target for anger is Israel. Abdul Ati learned the rule in real time: he announced he was quitting the campaign after his family was threatened, then reversed himself a few hours later. He's not in Gaza but Hamas' threats reached him. A man with three small daughters, had to decide whether a protest about bread is worth his children's lives. That is what the unity imperative looks like from the inside.

This imperative affects everything you read about Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular. Every Gazan who speaks to a foreign reporter speaks under that same rule. The stringer filing the copy lives in Gaza, his family lives in Gaza, and he reports under exactly the threat Abdul Ati was buckling under, knowing the penalty for blaming the wrong party. So the testimony flows one way. If a death can be possibly pinned on Israel, it must be; if it can't, avoid mentioning it at all if possible. Dissent against Hamas, when it surfaces in Western coverage at all, arrives nameless and hedged — a "resident" who "prefers to remain anonymous" — and that's the rare day. When the outlet is leaning on a Gaza-based stringer, it gets vanishingly rarer than that, for reasons everyone in the chain understands and nobody prints.

Hamas, for its part, is behaving exactly as a movement that executes its critics behaves. The failure belongs to the people facing no penalty at all. Every editor running a Gaza dateline knows the speaker isn't free. They know the fatwa, or they could; they know about the six bodies from last spring. And they run the quote as though it came from someone who could have answered differently and chose not to. The coercion is Hamas's crime. Laundering the coerced testimony into "what Gazans say" is the West's, committed in air-conditioned offices by people who will never be flogged for filing the wrong sentence.

Abdul Ati naively hoped that using the word "unity" might shield him. But it was never about unity. It always was about the Palestinian leaders, whether Hamas or Fatah, enforcing their views in the most brutal way possible and pretending that this is what unity looks like. The Western NGOs and media go along with the farce, because it protects their people under Palestinian rule and because it enforces their own desire to blame Israel for everything that Palestinians do to each other.

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