Yes, it’s true. Hamas is a figment of your imagination.
I understand that your impulse is to ask about decapitated babies and mass rape and bearded men hiding in the treetops, but it will do no good. Those are also figments of your imagination.
Now, I don’t necessarily blame you for these fever dreams. Hamas is all you hear about from aggrieved Zionists and corporate media (two groups with no meaningful distinction). Of course you’re fixated on Hamas. That’s the point. The fixation stops you from thinking about everything else.
(“Everything else” includes wholesale slaughter of civilians, shelling of schools and hospitals, arrest and murder of medical personnel, chemical warfare, ethnic cleansing, homicidal rhetoric, forced starvation, and systematic dehumanization. In short, a genocide.)
I’m not here to explain what Hamas is or how Hamas operates. I can tell you that it is in fact real even as it is also a figment of your imagination. How is that possible? Because Hamas is mythical and tangible at the same time. It is an actual organization with a structure, purpose, ideology, and membership. It is also one of the greatest red herrings of the modern age—part rhetorical device, part hobgoblin, part delusion.
How can we separate image from reality?
Doing so is nearly impossible from the outside in part because outsiders are apt to misapprehend resistance groups. This is especially true of Palestine. Because it supplies the main rationale for Israel’s war on civilians, Hamas is a perpetual cipher and simulation. People outside of Palestine know Hamas mainly through layers of discourse appended to Israeli points of view. Palestinian liberation rarely figures into the process. Palestinian society is completely abstracted. Journalists and intellectuals of the imperial core mediate discourse according to age-old prejudices about swarthy creatures of the Islamic world, operating from the assumption that Hamas exemplifies a peculiar and unknowable Palestinian savagery.
Hamas is one of the most complex formations of the past few decades. We know it exists by the rockets streaking through the nighttime sky, the soldiers adorned with green headbands, the theatrical destruction of Merkava tanks. It has a leadership, a command structure, a stash of weapons, a rank-and-file. It offers policy proposals and position papers. It negotiates with various state actors. Yet popular understanding of Hamas largely derives from its apocryphal position in the colonial imagination. The settler has transformed Hamas into a manifestation of his own paranoia and violence.
And so Hamas is removed from history and history itself is divested of material properties. This form of invention plays well to Western audiences, who are conditioned to view anti-colonial movements of the Global South as inherently senseless. The Hamas that Zionists invented isn’t hermetic, though. It has generated an irresistible momentum that exposes the oppressor’s illusions and anxieties. Zionists are terrified of both Hamas and the idea of Hamas. In turn, they transfer responsibility for their barbarism onto the victim.
Israel blows up a school? Hamas!
Israel gets caught lying? Hamas!
Israel wipes out an entire family? Hamas!
Israel murders a journalist? Hamas!
Israel besieges a neonatal unit? Hamas!
Students march against genocide? Hamas!
A Zionist farts at the dinner table? Hamas!
The absurdity doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It only works in spaces of deep-seated racism. The demonization of Hamas comes to life through the audience’s demented impression of Palestinians.
This element of racism gives Zionists license to express hideous, genocidal sentiments from a supposedly defensive position. Settlers can act out fantasies of conquest and displacement by feeding themselves visions of a superior civilization.
Zionists say they want to rid the world of Hamas but are ironically beholden to Hamas’s endurance. Which other pretext could better facilitate Israeli ethnic cleansing? More than that, Zionists talk up Hamas to the point of mythic proportions and have thereby entered into a state of what Baudrillard called hyperreality. The world wouldn’t make any sense to Israelis if Hamas suddenly went away. Their own identity would go away, as well.
Hamas is everywhere in the Zionist psyche. It is an untreatable condition.
Yet it is the Palestinian people onto whom the Zionist displaces this obsession. All Palestinians are Hamas. Therefore, no Palestinian has a right to live. The conflation deracinates Palestinians and erases Palestine’s long and distinguished history. The process also grants to Zionists a type of rhetorical control in the public sphere: they get to determine the culture of the native; they get to prescribe (and proscribe) the contours of resistance; they get to adjudicate the work of national liberation. Palestinians are entrapped by the crude and self-serving imagination of the oppressor.
It is with an unironic sense of generosity, then, that Zionists offer us the chance to enter into humanity if only we condemn Hamas (other terms and conditions apply). Condemnation is a precondition of speaking, of working, of educating, of being educated—in other words, a precondition of accessing any kind of civic life (which will naturally occur under their supervision).
Palestinians recoil at this demand to condemn Hamas not out of any particular political loyalty, but because we recognize the disparity of power that Zionists want us to affirm. We recognize that Zionists are in no moral position to ask anyone else about violence. In any case, we cannot condemn Hamas because we don’t know what exactly we’re being asked to ratify or disavow. We don’t know what Hamas even means in their insidious lexicon.
We only know that what the Zionist really wants is for us to condemn our own existence.
Steven, tonight in the local bar, my friend described Hamas’s Oct 7, attacks as despicable. I tried to tell him that what Israel claimed to have happened was not entirely true, I was wasting my time. He had heard about the false story of the beheaded babies, the rapes, and the burnings. I tried to explain about Israel’s previous attacks on Gaza killing thousands, but I couldn’t get through to him. He thinks that there are two sides to the story.
Well Sean, do you really think Steve is unaware of how Amerikkkans are the most propagandized population in the world?
Steve, yes and. Yes and there are non-Zionists, such as myself who listen for a condemnation of 10/7 and hear crickets or a blather of avoidance. And I know, already, that by this sentence some people will know all there is to know about me. It matters not that I support BDS, that I paid for that stance with my career (good riddance to the censors), and everything else I said or did. We are in an age, when on all sides the guiding principle is: if you are not with me 100%, you are against me 100%. Massacre denial too.
I get why it is hard for Palestinians and allies to condemn Hamas’ savagery and war crimes on 10/7. 10/7 launched a new age for Palestinians. How can any of that be wrong? But leaders have a responsibility to call out what’s wrong. That Zionists demand a condemnation of 10/7 as the price of admission doesn’t mean that 10/7 was right or that a condemnation is not right. If your moral stance is a reaction to what the bad guys say then it ain’t a moral stance.
I spent the day yesterday at the American Muslims for Palestine conference. The only one who would condemn 10/ 7 without reservation was a political candidate with no connection to the conference. Everybody else I asked refused to condemn the atrocities.
Here is a partial list of prevarications I heard there and elsewhere, in the last week alone, in response to “do you condemn 10/7”? For what it’s worth, all of these comments were made by Muslim immigrants, not all of them Palestinian:
1. It’s political.
2. How do you know they were all innocent?
3. You know, the Israelis killed people who they counted as victims.
4. It wasn’t quite the number they said it was.
5. I refuse to condemn this as a precondition for dialog (20 mins into a dialog after I had condemned Israel and affirmed the analysis of the occupation as inherently violent and the rest of it).
6. You shouldn’t bring this up?
7. Do you distinguish between the violence of the occupied and the violence of the occupier?
8. Various forms of poking holes in the Israeli accounts of the atrocities
It’s not that some of these points don’t have merit. It’s that they are used to fill the air time in lieu of a clear condemnation of the atrocities.
Those who respond this way are lost in their own narrative and will continue to lose allies who will only stand with Palestinians based on our common humanity and shared respect for the sanctity of life.
And now, please go right ahead and attack me for not being 100% behind massacre denial.
Once you obey the demands of the Zionists for “a clear condemnation of the atrocities” you might find it hard not to continue. Then there is the demand to condemn Hamas as a terrorist (not resistance) organisation with no redeeming features; followed by the insistence that Hamas is composed of fanatics… ‘human animals’… and that all Palestinians are the same… and where will you be then?
I am not obeying anybody’s demands. There is a moral call to call out the murder of innocents. Reducing everything to the political game of how this plays with the other side robs us of our moral voice. We should denounce killers war criminals irrespective of whether or not that makes other war criminals happy. Who cares what they think.
Michael, you speak so smugly from a position of such shallow but seemingly moral arrogance about Hamas savagery and war crimes. Give me some evidence of those war crimes. I hear this constantly from the apologists of Israel? I can show you plenty of evidence of the savagery of the Israeli military. What is the evidence of these war crimes and why is Israel so hell-bent on not looking for evidence? Why are they so interested in destroying the incinerated cars, which they blame Hamas for, without corroborating that they are actually the actions of Hamas. Why have we gotten no confirmed numbers o the dead and their identities after so many days. Why is such an advanced society so inept in producing exact figures? Or maybe they are not interested because the truth of the savagery will come out? Have you even bothered to read the well-documented research of Electronic Intifada and the Grayzone showing how unsubstantiated these claims to savagery are. You are proving precisely the point that Steve is making. Why do you accept these claims with not a shred of evidence. The reason you are so disposed to do it is precisely what Steve is so beautifully explaining. Enough of this nonsense of about Hamas savagery.
Seizing civilian hostages is a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. That doesn’t seem hard to state objectively. Now exactly what the word “condemn” means I have no idea. What a “revolutionary act” is I would also have a hard time defining. It sounds like a lot of people are confusing politics for religious devotion.
Unless Michael Davis was in Gaza on October 7 and is describing what he personally witnessed, he is just puking Zionist propaganda. Nobody rational will trust the “news” produced by any party to a war. Those of us who weren’t in Gaza on October 7 have no way of knowing what happened, and as Israel continues rabidly to murder journalists, we never will know.
Michael, does Yanis Yaroufakis make a case in the video as to why he refuses to condemn Hamas?
https://youtube.com/shorts/KvTWNaDUzWg?si=Migv9Oov1Xvmky2_
regardless if the accounts of hamas’ actions on 10/7 are true or not, condemnation of revolutionary acts is an inherent allegiance with the oppressor. revolution is not neat, revolution is not friendly, revolution is not ideal- revolution is necessary. refusal to understand ugly aspects of revolution blocks you from understanding revolution as a need, not a want.
“Ugly aspects of revolution” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Some of us would like to have a democratic and humanistic legal tradition to sustain human decency rather than trusting the self-defined revolutionaries who always seem to be disagreeing with some other self-defined revolutionaries over who gets to define the “revolutionary acts” so pure in purpose they are beyond any humanistic democratic or free speech critique.
You hear crickets? What are you listening to?
“ And now, please go right ahead and attack me for not being 100% behind massacre denial.”
Wow, you feel really sorry for yourself.
I think this comes from us (Palestinians in particular, but Arabs in general) feeling damned if we do damned if we dont, which we also see play out in the socalled ‘peace process’.
We can condemn Hamas all day long and until the cows come home, but it won’t stop the Israeli governments response. This also happens around antisemitism, whereby Palestinians and pro-Palestinians can put all the qualifiers to demonstrate they have no issue with Jewish people, but will still get branded as antisemities.
Brilliant article. We in Africa can relate to this. Any freedom fighting organisation struggling against it’s colonial masters occupying their homeland has been historically termed as terrorists and burdened with blame for imagined atrocities and consequences of destruction metted by a more powerful occupier. The MauMau in Kenya, the ANC and hell even Nelson Mandela himself termed as terrorists. It is inherent of belligerent powers to villify a struggling people by labels and ensuing violence poured on them in the name of that very label christened by the more powerful illegal occupier. The worst outcome of this is that gullible onlookers globally will pick up this narrative as God’s truth on earth and peddle it further, only of there was a way to reach ears in remote parts of the cosmos. We have learnt nothing from history and sadly are none the brighter. Thus history will repeat itself.
Very true, although it is not the case that your examples engaged only in “imagined atrocities”. Most if not all revolutionary or resistance organisations commit some acts that we would deem atrocious. The question is whether we let that fact destroy those organisations, or whether we admit that they were engaged in a war – which is a set of appalling behaviours that in other situations would likely result in long prison terms.
“ “You cannot just put people into prison, deprive them of their fundamental rights, and then see nothing in response,’ Hasaneen replied. ‘You cannot dehumanise people and expect nothing … I am not Hamas, and I was never a big fan of Hamas … But what’s happening here is not about Hamas at all.’
Vengeful Pathologies
Adam Shatz on the war in Gaza
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies
More and more evidence has steadily accumulated that a majority, perhaps even a large majority of the Israeli civilians killed in the Hamas attack died at the hands of their own country’s trigger-happy military, the victims of tank shells and Hellfire missiles. So the actual number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed by Hamas fighters might have been as low as just 100 to 200, suggesting that the body-count of Palestinian civilians is at least 100 times larger. Yet despite this 100-to-1 casualty ratio, a recent front-page article in the New York Times by longtime correspondent Roger Cohen treated the tragedy in less than even terms, with a decided tilt towards the Israelis.
I know what HAMAS is… see here https://voza0db.substack.com/p/morons-just-dont-get-it-882
But HAMAS is pretty much like ISIS… A western nurtured and funded group of modern moron slaves, in this case a special herd since they’ve been “living” in a lovely prison (aka Gaza) since birth and subjected to violence, torture and death since then… so who wouldn’t want to be like them? Only meek and coward slaves would.
But, let the SHOW proceed.
We (herds of modern moron slaves from the western plantations) for sure aren’t very disturbed by the glorious Party the IsRaEL Attack Forces are presenting us.