The Lessons We're Not Learning From Hamas

In Gaza right now, Palestinians are beginning to starve, and many thousands have probably died as the result of a suicidally one-sided military campaign against Israel, initiated by Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

The history of the Palestinians is already a long tale of tragedy and woe. But this is, in large part, because of their own leadership—a leadership imposed on them by force, but also largely accepted and in many cases supported by the Palestinian population. In the most recent event that might be called a Palestinian election, 18 years ago, Hamas won overwhelmingly in Gaza—and then it consistently brought disaster on its own people.

This doesn’t mean all Palestinians deserve what’s happening to them, particularly since a majority of Palestinians were born after that last election. But it does offer a cautionary tale on an epic scale, because the leaders of Gaza represent a synthesis of two of the dominant illiberal ideas offered across the world today.

Theocratic Blood-and-Soil Nationalism

One of the “populist” political alternatives offered to Americans right now is an authoritarian movement that seeks to install a strongman, immune from petty checks and balances, who will revive traditional religious morality. This also happens to describe Hamas, the ruling Palestinian faction in Gaza.

New York magazine’s Eric Levitz, shaking his head in disbelief at support for Hamas from his fellow leftists, described the group accurately as “a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism.” The core of Hamas ideology is that the whole of the region “from the river to the sea”—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, including all of Israel—must be dominated by Arabs, ruled by the code of fundamentalist Islam and purged of Jews. And while Hamas came to power after winning an election, its faction used this victory as an excuse to seize control from a rival political faction, Yasser Arafat’s old Fatah gang, and never hold another election.

Hamas offers all the elements we would recognize in the West as belonging to the farthest of the far right: fanatical religious traditionalism, xenophobia and authoritarianism.

Now consider what I mean when I say that the plight of the Palestinians was brought upon them by their own leaders. The October 7 attack on Israel was undertaken with full knowledge that Hamas fighters were no match for the Israeli military. They could not run riot for more than a day or two, and by murdering hundreds of Israeli civilians, they would invite massive retaliation. Hamas made no preparations for what would happen to the Palestinian people when that retaliation came. The group smuggled in vast quantities of concrete to build massive tunnel systems for its own fighters—and not a single bomb shelter for civilians. It stockpiled food and continues to pilfer aid sent in for civilians, but it made no provision for the average Palestinian.

The Hamas Death Cult

None of this is an accident. It is deliberate, and the Hamas leadership will tell you so. Top Hamas official Ali Baraka described the group’s creed of death worship on Russian TV: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs. The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah.” Their goal is not success and happiness but martyrdom, and it’s a goal they choose, not necessarily for themselves—Baraka was talking from the relative safety of Lebanon—but for ordinary people. Another Hamas leader on Saudi television talked complacently about “millions of martyrs” because “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”

This is all a cautionary tale about religious authoritarianism. These movements are not oriented toward the ordinary politicians’ goals of providing their people with benefits and security or being able to boast about peace and prosperity. Hamas leaders draft their citizens as religious martyrs. Their goal is that the people suffer for a religious cause.

Compare this to Israel’s attitude toward the remaining hostages held by Hamas. For the sake of about 100 Israelis still remaining in captivity, there is increasing pressure within Israel to cut a cease-fire deal, and the government just might do it. But no one questions the determination of Hamas to keep endangering two million Palestinians effectively held hostage to its war, exposed to bombing and gunfire and rapidly running out of food and medicine.

That’s the difference between a culture that values life and one that worships death.

This Is What Decolonization Looks Like

But Hamas doesn’t just warn us about the priorities of the authoritarian religious right. As we have observed recently, it enjoys widespread support in the West from the “anti-colonial” left.

Hamas displays all the worst characteristics of the cultural far left, which defines itself primarily in opposition to Western culture and political systems and is determined to overthrow them in favor of—what? This segment of the left has a fantasy in which somehow hundreds of years of history will be repealed, everything will be “decolonized” and all the “settler-colonialists” will go—well, somewhere. It’s not clear where. The only vision it offers is a contest between the claims of competing oppressed groups, forever.

Similarly, Hamas offers no vision for peace, no strategic goals, no plan for how two peoples are going to live side by side in peace. It offers a fantasy of armed conquest followed by genocide or ethnic cleansing, in which Hamas will rise up and push out the Jews. But it’s only a fantasy.

This is why modern, highbrow Western intellectual constructs such as “decolonization” end up looking like plain old unreconstructed antisemitism in practice. Like the old Marxists before them, this faction of the left is very clear on what it wants to tear down but has no notion of what to build—and thus tends to fall back onto the most primitive existing sentiments and prejudices. This is essentially a nihilistic movement, in which the tearing down is the point. Defund the police—and then what? Lash out at the Jews—and then what? The “then what,” the positive ideal, is not the point.

This is one of the lessons we should have already learned from the revolutionary left, which time and again has been able to tear down the old regime but has never been able to build a stable, humane alternative in its place and usually just ends up creating a copy of the old regressive order, but with new slogans.

Hamas has been true to this legacy. It is good at killing civilians, at rape and murder and destruction. But because it defines itself by hatred of the “oppressors,” it has been unable and unwilling to build up or protect the prosperity and well-being of the Palestinian people.

The Lesson We’re Not Learning

Because we in the U.S. haven’t learned these lessons, we continue to flirt with our own domestic versions of the ideologies that produced these disastrous results.

I wrote a few years ago about how a political and economic disaster in Sri Lanka demonstrated the failure of a combination many Americans profess to like: a fusion of the authoritarianism of the political right with the economics of the political left. In Sri Lanka’s case, that meant a strongman ruler imposing an “organic farming” mandate that crashed the nation’s agricultural economy.

The repeated disasters suffered by the Palestinian people give a similar warning, showing how both the revolutionary anti-Westernism we associate with the left and the religious authoritarianism we associate with the right have repeatedly led their people to disaster—and now to this new apocalypse of war and starvation.

Yet somehow, these are the two illiberal political alignments we keep gravitating toward—sometimes a synthesis of the two—even as real life keeps showing us what a bad idea this is.