The famous Macbethian couplet “Full of sound and fury/signifying nothing” would make for a good description of many of the recent college anti-Israel protests. The campus cretins who furiously sounded their anger didn’t know what river and sea they were screaming about, conflated fighters against genocide with its perpetrators and didn’t even realize that Palestine is already free; it’s called Israel.
What they prefer instead is a Hamastan.
If, along with “progressive” values, the students have also been taught to read, they might wish to use that skill to carefully peruse a May 13 front-page article in the decidedly non-Zionist New York Times.
It sheds a bright light on what pre-October Gaza was like under Hamas rule, and what would assuredly reestablish itself were, chalilah, Hamas or some similar death cult to survive the current liberation of Gaza.
The Times article, based on pre-October information and internal Hamas documents recently discovered by Israeli forces in Gaza, describes how Hamas fuhrer Yahya Sinwar oversaw a secret police force that conducted surveillance on everyday Palestinians, created files on anyone who questioned the Hamas government and generally sowed terror in the hearts of Gazan civilians.
The General Security Service, Gaza’s version of the FBI, relied on a network of informants to identify residents who were less than wholeheartedly supportive of Hamas. Some faithful citizens reported their own neighbors for attending protests or voicing criticism of their terrorist overseers, and the names of the “guilty”—some 10,000 people, according to Israeli intelligence—were kept in security files for future reference.
Hamas agents also censored social media posts and discussed ways to defame political adversaries. One man identified in the files, Gazan journalist Ehab Fasfous, said that, among various forms of harassment he suffered, Hamas agents used his phone to send incriminating messages to a colleague in order to “pin a moral violation on me.”
None of that should surprise anyone. Hamas openly boasted of executing “traitors” and “morally corrupt” Gazans. Spying and intimidation are relatively benign violations of citizens’ rights. At least until they lead to worse, which they often did.
Even Human Rights Watch, which is seldom understanding of the dangers Israel faces, has minced no words when it has come to Hamas’ reign in Gaza.
As far back as 2008, the rights group described Hamas authorities as taking “extraordinary steps to control, intimidate, punish, and at times eliminate their internal political rivals and those suspected of collaboration with Israel.”
It described how Hamas security forces “extra-judicially” executed people, and beat and shot the terror group’s “political opponents, especially members and supporters of its main political rival, Fatah.”
Hamas’ preferred means of stifling dissent, HRW reported back then, was to shoot people in the legs. The Palestinian Authority, Hamas’ on-again, off-again rival, accused Hamas of dealing with “at least 49 P.A.-affiliated citizens that way between December 28, 2008, and January 31, 2009. Torture of various types was also a feature of Hamas “law enforcement.”
(Fatah-led security forces have also been accused by Arab residents of Yehudah and Shomron of torture. It is, in effect, “Hamas lite.”)
And intimidation and murder on the part of Hamas in Gaza hardly ended in 2009. As the newly discovered documents illustrate, the terror group’s suppression of dissent was alive and well until its operations were interrupted (hopefully permanently) with Israel’s entry into Gaza last October.
Hamas’ plans for Israelis are rather more directly violative of human rights—even the right to life. At a conference it held in 2021, it declared that its goal is to take over all of the Holy Land. And to consider any Jew in the region it considered a “fighter” to “be killed”; Jews who flee could either “be left alone” or “prosecuted”; peaceful individuals could either be “integrated or given time to leave”; and “educated Jews” with valuable skills “should not be allowed to leave.”
One would think that Gazans should be pining for Hamas’ demise as much as Israelis are.
And that “from the river to the sea” chanters should understand what they are supporting.
They should have their noses rubbed in the filth of what Hamas has in store, should it, chalilah, survive, for both Gazans and Jews. Although with regard to the latter, some of the protesters might just smell roses.
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