Daniel Lazare
04.09.2025
“It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.” If ever Talleyrand’s famous aphorism applied to anyone, it’s to Hamas.
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The so-called Islamic Resistance’s misdeeds are legion. Crushing “We want to live” labor demonstrations against poverty and unemployment that erupted in Gaza in March 2019 was one of them, and responding with equal brutality to similar protests that broke out in July-August 2023 was another. Slaughtering 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, most of them innocent civilians, was a third, while executing six Palestinians for taking part in anti-Hamas protests that began on Mar. 25 is a fourth.
Vicious as such acts are, they are exceeded by the sheer blind stupidity behind them. Hamas blunders would take even a Talleyrand aback. Members were reportedly surprised by the Zionist response to “Al Aqsa Flood” even though a child could have told them that it would be furious and overwhelming. The group expected Oct. 7 to ignite a region-wide holy war even though it was obvious that the Arab masses were too exhausted and demoralized after decades of war, poverty, and corruption to engage in any such misadventure.
Then there was Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, who, in an Oct. 24, 2023, interview on Beirut TV, taunted Zionists by declaring that “Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.” What was the purpose of such language other than to goad Israel into ramping up the onslaught even more? “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Yahya Sinwar added in June 2024, which was equally perplexing since it was in fact the Israelis who had him cornered. (Sinwar would die three months later in an IDF firefight.)
Finally, there was Hamas’s belief that some 250 hostages would serve as an insurance policy against Israeli retaliation. But with fewer than 25 hostages left alive after a year and a half of captivity, the strategy has backfired. If Hamas gives the remaining hostages up, Israel will have less reason than ever to hold back. If it doesn’t release them, it will follow up with an even greater offensive culminating in mass ethnic cleansing. Either way, Hamas will be destroyed, and more than two million Palestinians could wind up in exile.
Hamas has thus painted itself into a corner thanks to absurd policies that are without parallel in modern politics. But it’s not only the “resistance” that has blundered – vast sections of the international left have too. There’s the Socialist Workers Party, the largest self-proclaimed Marxist organization in the UK, whose newspaper welcomed Al Aqsa Flood with the words, “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.” There’s Cosmonaut.org, the pseudo-Marxist website, which, a week after Al Aqsa Flood, responded with a ludicrous chest-thumping editorial “affirm[ing] our unconditional support of the movement for Palestinian liberation, no matter the form their struggle may take. We’ll keep the red flag flying here.”
There are also individuals such as Norman Finkelstein, perhaps Hamas’s best-known western apologist, who wrote on Oct. 7 that the offensive “warms every fiber of my soul”; Columbia professor Joseph Massad who, a day later, hailed “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” and predicted that the flight of Israeli kibbutz residents “may prove to be a permanent exodus”; and Jodi Dean, who teaches politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York and who wrote on a New Left Review website that “images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating.”
Dean, a self-described Stalinist, went on:
The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas. Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left. One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation.
We must support Hamas or else the good professor will denounce us as counter-revolutionaries. But what is Dean’s message for the starving and brutalized people of Gaza who are at last rising up against Hamas – that they’re counter-revolutionaries too?
Finally, there’s the World Socialist Web Site, which hailed the Oct. 7 offensive within hours as “an uprising of the Palestinian people,” comparing it to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and suggesting that murderous gunmen should be “hailed as heroes.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, the site recently followed up with an article disparaging recent anti-Hamas protests as “small [and] politically heterogeneous” and blasting Jacobin magazine for not only reporting them but for describing the Zionist assault on Gaza as “Israel’s vengeance for October 7.”
Why is this bad?
Because, the WSWS hotly replies, it means that
had there been no armed resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation on October 7, there would be no Israeli war in Gaza. In making this statement, Jacobin is echoing the official position of the Netanyahu government, the Biden administration and the Trump administration, all of whom have claimed that Israel’s current war is a ‘response’ to October 7.
What is the WSWS suggesting – that Israel would have sent thousands of troops to level Gaza even if there had been no Oct. 7 massacre? This is like saying that FDR would have declared war on Japan even if there had been no Pearl Harbor, a proposition that no serious historian would entertain for a minute. The sole purpose of such nonsense is to get Hamas off the hook by declaring that its actions on Oct. 7 are irrelevant because Israel was intent on war regardless – and to get the WSWS off the hook for supporting an outfit as rancid as Hamas.
More than a blunder, the result is a debacle that has spelled disaster for the Palestinians while shattering what little remains of middle-class radicalism. So why did Hamas foul up so badly and why did broad sectors of the left insist on following it over a cliff?
Hamas’s failure
The first question is easy. While one can argue over whether or not Hamas
fits the definition of fascist, there is no doubt as to its profoundly
reactionary politics. The slogan of the
Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organization, says it all:
Allah is
our objective, the prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our law, jihad is our
way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
Political science thus stopped in the seventh century, warfare is the answer to all problems, and martyrdom is ennobling. As a top Hamas leader named Ismail Haniyeh told a mass rally in Gaza in 2014: “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life.”[1] Or as Ghazi Hamad insisted in his notorious Beirut interview: “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Added Yahya Sinwar six months later: Palestinian deaths “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”
Life is death, and defeat is victory. According to such upside-down logic, Gaza should be brimming with vitality thanks to the bloodshed Hamas helped unleash. But it’s not. Rather, it’s a dead zone filled with misery and destruction.
Tareq Baconi, the Palestinian-American author of Hamas Contained (2018), an essential guide to what such logic leads to, notes that “success was thought to be predestined” by Hamas because it believes that God is on its side. The upshot was decades of faith-based arguments in which every new military setback had to be hailed as proof that jihad was working. When Israel called off military intervention in southern Lebanon in May 2000 in the face of unexpected Hezbollah resistance, Hamas seized on the “‘Lebanese model’ as proof that resistance was the only way to liberate Palestine,” according to Baconi, and that suicide bombings were therefore the way to go. When Israel responded to Hamas rocket barrages with weaponry that was far deadlier and more sophisticated, the organization concluded that jihad was more effective than ever because Hamas was “achieving liberation step by step ... through the accumulation of accomplishments and the draining of the enemy’s security, economy, and morale.”[2]
And when sending suicide bombers onto crowded buses triggered worldwide horror and revulsion, Hamas concluded that it must be on the right track because Israel was trapped between the “jaws of resistance.”[3] All it would take was a few more mangled bodies for the Jewish state to crack.
But it was Gaza that started to crack instead as the economy sank under the impact of a deepening Israeli blockade and complaints about Hamas corruption began to multiply. Baconi notes that Hamas’s religious fundamentalism “restricted any ideological maneuverability for the movement’s leaders” by making “concessions appear blasphemous.” Hamas was trapped by its own jihadist rhetoric. Baconi added:
Hamas’s reliance on jihad has had devastating implications for the Palestinian people. Aside from the moral bankruptcy and the corrosive effect of targeting and killing civilians, dedication to armed resistance against a superb foe like Israel has led to the disintegration of the Palestinian struggle. Strategically, this approach has not only failed; it has also threatened to erode the very social fabric of the Palestinian community under occupation.[4]
But jihad is good because the Muslim Brotherhood says so, and that’s all Hamas needed to know. Al Aqsa Flood can be seen as the culmination of years of mindless escalation in which fighters concluded that a failed policy would finally succeed if members believed in its strongly enough and implemented it on a grand enough scale. Yet the only result was failure of unprecedented proportions.
A general who allows his army to be destroyed through sheer incompetence should be court-martialed. A government that allows its people to be destroyed for the same reason should be turned out of office. This is what protesters in Gaza are demanding as they chant “barra, barra” (“out, out”). The silence from the ranks of supposedly pro-Palestinian protesters means that they effectively side with the Palestinians’ oppressors.
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| Protest against Hamas in Northern Gaza |
A hollowed-out left
Which leads to the second question: why have vast sectors of the international left gone along with such madness?
The answer has to do with deep decay caused by decades of isolation, confusion, and retreat. Not only have leftwing numbers collapsed in terms of union members or votes racked up by social democrats, communists, and other working-class parties, but ideology has collapsed too. Class politics have disintegrated as middle-class radicalism has risen to take their place. Everyone knows the horrors that ensued as bourgeois liberalism drifted to the right: identity politics, cancel culture, “lean-in” corporate feminism, etc. It’s a sickening brew, but the results are especially unfortunate when it comes to the Middle East. Legitimately outraged by the war that the Jewish state is waging against the Palestinian people, protesters followed a seemingly simple chain of logic. Since Israel is bad, Hamas must be good, or at least less bad than Zionist propaganda maintains. Civilian deaths on Oct. 7 therefore had to be written off as collateral damage, the result of a Zionist false-flag operation, or perhaps legitimate payback for the crime of living in an oppressor state. “A propaganda deluge has inundated the mainstream US media sphere with pornographic descriptions of horrendous actions allegedly carried out by Hamas, the leading organization of Gazan armed resistance,” complained Cosmonaut on Oct. 15, 2023. Allegedly? Rather than “pornographic,” the violence carried out on Oct. 7 was as real as the violence carried out on 9/11, which Al Aqsa Flood all too closely resembles.
This is how petty-bourgeois radicalism works. Flighty, unstable, a middle force forever vacillating between left and right, the working class and the bourgeoisie, it is incapable of confronting reality head on and must instead tailor the facts to fit its own needs. Protesters turned a blind eye to Hamas’s reactionary politics – its sectarianism, know-nothing fundamentalism, jihadism, and deep anti-Semitism – because they don't fit their blinkered worldview. Since Hamas is a “resistance” organization, the atrocities of Oct. 7 must be Israeli propaganda or an outright lie. The problem of Hamas’s pre-modern politics was thus wished away.
None of which is to say that pro-Palestinian protests were wrong. To the contrary, they performed a vital service by demonstrating that a growing portion of the public is finally saying no to Zionist brutality. But the failure to say no to Hamas brutality was a crippling flaw. Even if Trump had not launched his crackdown, protesters would still have found themselves isolated due to their inability to acknowledge the massacre that set the latest violence off in the first place. Professional activists tried to cover up such crimes in order to promote a stereotypical view of Palestinians as helpless victims of Zionist terror. But the effort strikes others as evasive and dishonest. As we have seen, it does nothing to benefit Palestinians themselves.
Self-induced amnesia
When WSWS describes Oct. 7 as “an uprising of the Palestinian people,” it advances the dangerous proposition that Hamas and the Palestinian masses are one and the same, which is precisely the rationale that Israel uses to justify its mass bombings in the face of 50,000-plus civilian deaths. When it compares Al Aqsa Flood to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, it slanders World War II partisans who did not have the slightest intention of engaging in mass reprisals and instead hoped that Polish civilians would join in the anti-Nazi revolt. Headlines expressing glee over Israel’s humiliation were a betrayal because they failed to warn Palestinians of mass reprisals that were already on the way.
What makes the International Committee for the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party, the parent organizations that puts out the WSWS, even more bizarre is that it was not long ago that they were saying the opposite. In July 2002, while Hamas was sending out suicide bombers to target buses and discos, a top WSWS writer named Jean Shaoul published a three-part series describing the attacks as
...desperate and horrific acts by young people influenced by political tendencies that have no progressive perspective upon which to base their opposition to Israeli oppression. Designed to slaughter innocent civilians, they do not advance the interests and aspirations of the Palestinian people one iota.
“Nothing illustrates more clearly its utterly repugnant and ultimately bankrupt perspective,” she said of Hamas, “than the dispatch of its youth cadre, with bombs strapped to their bodies, to blow up their targets and themselves as martyrs for their cause. With reputed payments to their families of $US30,000 for their martyrdom, these young men were worth more dead than alive.” Shaoul added that Hamas “…blended nationalism with religion and naked anti-Semitism” and that its founding charter, published in 1988,
...called
for an exclusively Islamic Palestinian state, repudiating the PLO’s formulation
of a democratic secular state as anti-Islamic, and made territorial
nationalism, previously a form of idolatry, into a religious mission or jihad. It called for the destruction of the state of
Israel and falsely equated political Zionism with the Jewish people, both
within Israel and beyond. The Jews were
denounced as the secret architects of both the French Revolution and the
Communist revolution, of two World Wars, of creating the League of Nations and
the United Nations as secret organs of world domination and, above all, of
being the destroyers of the Islamic Caliphate.
All of which is
entirely accurate, as anyone who has perused Hamas’s 1988 covenant will agree. The only thing Shaoul got wrong, in fact, was
her prediction that Hamas would not “advance the interests and aspirations of
the Palestinian people one iota.” Today,
the organization’s misbegotten policies are sending them sharply into reverse.
So why say one thing in 2002 and another in 2025? Even though the ICFI has been politically disoriented for decades it was still capable of writing about Hamas in a way that was honest and smart. Two decades later, any such capacity is gone – vanished, kaput. Instead, the heirs of Healy’s legacy are indistinguishable from thousands of other mixed-up radicals eager to whitewash Hamas’ crimes in the belief that it will somehow bring about Palestinian liberation. But it won’t.
A socialist response
In addition to mass destruction, Palestinians
now face the horrifying prospect of mass expulsion. Israeli Defense
Minister Israel Katz is warning that the next phase of warfare will be
“significantly worse” and that the goal will be to “seize large areas” of Gaza
and annex them to the Jewish state. “We
will implement the Trump Plan, the voluntary migration plan,” Netanyahu
informed his cabinet on Mar. 30.
If so, the effect will be to raise the Palestinian nightmare to near-impossible
levels. If Israel drives millions of
people into the Sinai, who will feed them – the United States? Rather than overthrowing the Hamas
dictatorship, herding millions of Palestinians into miserable desert refugee
camps will provide it with an effective monopoly. The Egyptian military regime will impose a cordon sanitaire to prevent Muslim
Brotherhood influence from spreading to the nation at large while Israel will
send in F-16s to periodically bomb and strafe Hamas strongholds. But it will only strengthen it vis-à-vis the
captive Palestinian masses.
And what about the West Bank, which is also under siege? Will Israel expel millions there too? If so, what will it mean for the Jordanian
monarchy? Amman is so unstable that King
Hussein has placed his own son under arrest because he represents a threat to
the throne. Yet an influx of three
million refugees will destabilize it all the more.
If Israel succeeds in stamping out the flames in the Occupied
Territories, it will thus be at the cost of spreading them abroad. The Jewish state will be surrounded by a no-man’s-land
of hopelessness and destruction. This is
good news for Netanyahu and Trump since both are forever on the lookout for new
ways of grinding the Muslim masses into dust.
But it is bad news for the Israeli working class, Jewish or Arab, which
will find itself increasingly a prisoner of a fascist garrison state.
On Mar. 25, the same day that anti-Hamas protests broke out in Gaza, Israel saw an intensification of mass protests against plans for a crackdown on the Israeli judiciary. The protests are entirely justified since the prospects of Trump-style authoritarianism inside Israel itself are quite real. As Netanyahu tweeted on Elon Musk’s X:
In America and in Israel, when a strong rightwing leader wins an
election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the
people's will. They won't win in either
place! We stand strong together.
Not that the Israeli protests are beyond criticism – they’re not, and neither, for that matter, are anti-Hamas
protests in Gaza. But the symmetry is striking. While nationalists on both sides tell us that
the differences between Israeli and Palestinian workers are irreconcilable, the
demonstrations suggest something different – that not only are Palestinians and
Israelis “interpenetrated
peoples” grappling for the same slice of
territory, but that their politics are interpenetrated too. While one groups battles authoritarianism that
is already in place, another battles dictatorship that is just beginning to
crystallize. Both are locked in combat
with theocratic oppression – with Hamas on one hand and with followers of the
American-Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane whose goals and ideology are virtually
identical to those of Hamas and whose influence is spreading throughout Israeli
politics.
For all their enmity, Hamas and Netanyahu stand for essentially the same thing – intercommunal slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and a growing lurch toward fascism. Israel-Palestine is ground zero for Mideast socialist revolution because it is where national conflict is most incendiary and where workers must battle most fiercely in order to overcome ethno-religious hatred and division. This – not slaughtering neighbors in their bed – is the only way forward.
[1] Tareq
Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and
Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2018), xix.
[2] Ibid.,
28, 35. 51.
[3] Ibid.,
117.
[4] Ibid.,
228, 243.
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