The Hamas Red Herring
By 
Israel’s claim that its campaign in Gaza is about destroying Hamas becomes even less convincing when one considers its conduct in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority, controlled by Fatah, which is opposed to Hamas, is in power. Israel has killed a thousand Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, employing many of the same tactics used in Gaza. Israeli settlers have been armed with more than 150,000 assault rifles by the government; access to Palestinian towns and villages has been blocked by occupying forces. Water and food have been withheld from herding communities throughout the West Bank, in an effort to force their displacement – a tactic that has been successful in villages such as Wadi al-Siq. Israel has also ravaged refugee camps, including Jenin and Tulkarm, destroying homes and infrastructure.
The UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, has noted that the West Bank is suffering the worst military assault since the Second Intifada, and that its purpose is ethnic cleansing. Médecins sans Frontières staff have observed ‘ambulances blocked by Israeli forces at checkpoints while carrying critical patients, medical facilities surrounded and raided during active operations, and healthcare workers subjected to physical violence while trying to save lives’. In the fourteen months following 7 October, the WHO recorded more than 694 attacks against healthcare in the West Bank, including on hospitals, infrastructure and personnel. A recent editorial in Haaretz referred to the ‘Gazafication of the West Bank’, a term Palestinians have long used. ‘Everything has been permissible in Gaza,’ it went on, ‘and now, everything is permissible to soldiers in the West Bank as well. In both places, nothing is as cheap in the IDF’s eyes as Palestinian lives.’
Israel’s efforts since 2007 to use the civilian population to put pressure on Hamas have consistently failed. The Israeli security establishment understands this: it’s the reason it negotiated with Hamas in the years leading up to 7 October. And Hamas knows that were it to fulfil Israel’s demands that it disarm and leave Gaza, the genocide would probably continue: within days of the PLO’s capitulation and exit from Lebanon in 1982, more than a thousand of the Palestinian refugees left behind were slaughtered in the camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hamas is in many ways a red herring. In carrying out the genocide and annexing the West Bank – on 11 May, the government announced that all land in Area C, which makes up 60 per cent of the territory, will now be subject to Israeli land registration processes, essentially revoking Palestinian ownership – Israel’s goal is to complete the unfinished business of the Nakba.
What can be done? A good question:
Despite all this, the answer is not simply to allow UNRWA to operate and let the aid flow in. The response to this genocide shouldn’t be to allow more food into Gaza so that Palestinians can be saved from starving but killed by Israeli bombing. Rather, it should be to undo the system of control and killing that Israel has forced on Palestinians, and to hold those responsible for it accountable. The discourse around aid allows politicians to avert their gaze from the political crisis, as if Palestinians had suffered a natural disaster.
‘What can be done?’ the European diplomat might ask me today. For a start, call a spade a spade. This is an apartheid regime carrying out a genocide on a captive population. End military assistance. Suspend arms exports to Israel and stop buying Israeli weapons (Israel’s arms exports increased 14 per cent last year to a record $14.8 billion, more than half of which went to Europe). Impose sanctions: end financial and economic co-operation in trade and banking relations; stop all cultural links and diplomatic partnerships. Support the ICC and the ICJ and meet third-party obligations under international law. Bring criminal investigations against dual nationals who have committed war crimes in Gaza. Stop demonising the Palestinian struggle to end apartheid. The diplomat would no doubt tell me that none of this is possible or pragmatic.
The irony of Israel conducting one of the two or three worst campaigns of genocide on the globe since the Nazis is lost on no one except Israel’s supporters. But hey, maybe Israel’s actions are perhaps not as horrible as what happened in Rwanda, that’s something.