No Haven for Hamas
Hamas isn't a state worthy of recognition. It's a terrorist entity governing a population through fear, terror, and zealotry. Which is why Americans deal not with Hamas but with Hamas's intermediaries in Egypt and Qatar. We still have some scruples, after all. And if a terror organization does not deserve our direct contact, then it does not deserve our rescue.When it comes to Israel, brains go out the window
Nor is Hamas interested in bringing the Gaza war to a close. As the secretary of state was engaged in another round of shuffle diplomacy, desultorily flying from capital to capital with nothing to show for it, the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster story confirming what some of us already knew: Hamas's psychopathic terror leader, Yahya Sinwar, follows Vladimir Lenin's dictum of "the worse, the better." The greater the number of Palestinian casualties, the greater the devastation to Gaza's infrastructure, the further isolated the Jewish state becomes, and the more anti-Semitism intensifies around the globe.
Most people are horrified at what Hamas unleashed on October 7. Not Sinwar. He thinks he's winning. No surprise, then, that Hamas responded to the Biden ceasefire proposal with what Blinken described as "numerous changes." Revisions, it should be said, that are too much even for Blinken. Thus Hamas gives every indication of rejecting this latest ceasefire plan—just as it rejected the four previous ceasefire plans that have been floated since November 2023.
Yet the Biden administration continues to act as if Hamas's mass murderer in chief has a conscience. In a June 13 interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC's Today Show, Blinken said that while Sinwar hides underground, "the people that he purports to represent, they're suffering every day. So if he has their interests at heart, he will come to a conclusion to bring this to a conclusion."
Represent? This isn't the Grand Forks City Council we're talking about. It's Hamas. And Yahya Sinwar isn't James Madison. He's a little Hitler. He doesn't give a whit about suffering. Nor does he have anyone's "interests at heart." He has no heart! He's a kidnapper and a torturer and a killer. How on earth can Blinken say these words with a straight face?
Something has gone wrong when a senior U.S. official persists in the delusion that a terrorist shares his sense of morality, sympathy, and personal responsibility. Something has gone wrong when an administration that responded admirably to the worst crime against the Jewish people since the Holocaust now tries to tie Israel's hands, slow Israel down, undermine Israel's elected leadership, and freeze the current multifront war against Israel in place in a misguided and counterproductive effort to quiet the gross pro-Hamas anti-Semites within the Democratic Party. And something has gone wrong, terribly wrong, when the administration's response to the heroic and triumphal rescue of four Israeli hostages from Hamas and their civilian accomplices is to double down on a plan that increases Hamas's leverage.
"I don't think the deal is blown up," Secretary Blinken told Guthrie. "I think it's still—it's still possible. But at the end of the day, this has to come to a point where it's either yes or no." That came long ago—on October 7, in fact.
The war in Gaza won't end with another ceasefire or food package or humanitarian pier. The war will end when Israel completes its task of destroying Hamas as a military force and rescues the surviving men, women, and children, including five Americans, who were taken from their homes and spirited away to Palestinian captivity. America's role in this task is to help our ally Israel by supplying military aid and assistance, by providing diplomatic cover in a world where Hamas sympathizers have captured the institutions of global governance, and by enforcing the rule of law against the Hamas supporters on our college campuses, in our city streets, and in our public squares. The closer America is with Israel, the stronger our support, and the better we articulate Israel's right to exist and right to self-defense, the faster Israel will achieve her military aims.
Enough with the ceasefires. Put the plans back in the briefcase, Mr. Secretary. Let Israel win.
THIS HAS long been Hamas’s strategy: civilians are killed in Gaza, and the terrorist organization knows that no one is going to bother to ask why it embeds itself in civilian infrastructure, why it keeps hostages in apartments, or why it shoots rockets from children’s bedrooms. Instead, Sinwar knows that people will blame Israel and Israel alone.Forever the victim: Even if Hamas is defeated, Palestinians will blame external powers
The problem is that when Borrell and Albanese do this, they are emboldening Hamas, putting Israel – as Sinwar himself wrote, according to the WSJ report – “right where we want them” when it comes to the question of who is winning the war. When Sinwar sees that Israel rescues hostages and comes under fierce international criticism, does that make him feel motivated to release hostages in a deal or to hold on to them for longer? Why wouldn’t he feel emboldened when Israel is slammed every time it attacks Gaza?
What these Western politicians fail to understand is that their response is actually prolonging the war. Just look at Hamas’s reaction to President Biden’s proposed ceasefire deal. Why would Hamas say yes when it knows that the world will nonetheless blame Israel and push its government into a corner to accept a version that does not do enough to ensure the Jewish state’s security?
For the war to end, Hamas needs to feel that it has something to lose. Because it does not care about human life, appealing to some moral or humanitarian interest will not work. What stands the chance of getting Hamas to agree to a deal that will return the hostages and potentially end the war is for Hamas to feel that Israel is not restricted, that there is no ticking clock that has been placed in front of Jerusalem, and that the US will continue and even accelerate the delivery of strategic weapons to Israel.
If Hamas leaders in Doha were expelled or arrested, and if Sinwar felt that Israel was not right where he wanted it to be, then maybe he would agree to release the hostages and accept the US-proposed ceasefire.
And if that doesn’t happen? At the very least, the West will have stood on the right side of history. That should also count for something.
In 2023 and 2024 anti-Israel activists believed that victory against Israel had never been closer. In the hours after the October 7 massacre, anti-Israel activists took to social media to proclaim that the attack would be celebrated as a future Palestinian national holiday, signifying the supposed weakness and crumbling of Zionism.
At the May 24 Detroit People’s Conference for Palestine, speakers bragged how Hamas was supposedly humiliating the IDF on the battlefield, transforming Gaza into “the graveyard of the Merkava tank, the Namer troop carrier, the D9 bulldozer, and the occupation.” The infamous chant “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” has been regularly altered to “from the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free.”
WHEN HAMAS loses the war, and the full cost of the war is appreciated, anti-Israel activists will once again explain the discrepancy between their propaganda and the loss on the battlefield by appealing to the tired theory of foreigners rigging the outcome. Since the beginning of the war, anti-Israel operatives in the West have laser-focused on the complicity of the US and other countries by arming Israel.
They have pushed for arms embargoes and boycotts because they believe that if they disconnect the US from Israel, then Palestinians will finally be able to achieve the victory that has been repeatedly stolen from them. The Israeli war machine being unable to conduct its campaign without US support has been a regular refrain at protests and in speeches at the Detroit conference. Israel is an illegitimate, settler-colonial state, therefore its people couldn’t possibly have the will to match Hamas freedom fighters without US aid.
Everyone and everything but Palestinian intransigence will be to blame for the inevitable defeat of Hamas. Lost in stories of foreign powers or Israeli brutality taking advantage of Palestinian vulnerability, there will be no reflection on how Hamas shouldn’t have slaughtered and raped its way through southern Israel, or shouldn’t have taken hostages, or ignored the opportunity available every day for eight months to surrender and release its captives.
The path of compromise, of peace, of accepting that there is no Palestinian future in which Israel does not exist alongside them, will never be considered, nor will be the consequences to be found on the path of violence be considered. Their suffering in the wake of a war Hamas began is not a consequence of its action, but one more bout of unfair victimization inflicted on them by Israel and the US – and so they will continue to endure them.
Hamas supporters will forever hold onto the fleeting moment of October 7, and, as always, promise themselves that next time victory will be theirs, if only it wasn’t for those meddling kids in the White House.