Hamas Is Pure Evil. There Is No “But …”
There is NO excuse for trying to excuse Pure, Unadulterated Evil
Yes, Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt politician who has aligned himself with right-wing religious extremists who are misogynists, racists, and complete opponents of freedom—and worse. He has made many bad moves over his long career. His attempts to save himself from prison by ending the independence of the Israeli judiciary split Israel apart and almost certainly weakened the nation’s capabilities in intelligence and military response. Yes, Israel is far from perfect. Building settlements on seized territories was wrong.
None of that means that there is one iota of justification for the murderous terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas. Hamas is a hate group. It is completely anti-democracy and does nothing for the Palestinian people other than rile up hatred. It has no interest in improving the lives of the people. It has no interest in a two-state solution and peaceful coexistence. The only sort of peace they seek is a Carthaginian peace—one of the utter annihilation and slaughter of an entire people. As Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League correctly put it on Andrea Mitchell Reports today, Hamas doesn’t seek a two-state solution. “Hamas has pressed for a Final Solution.”
Hamas openly states its hatred for Jewish people. Its position on Jews is indistinguishable from that of the Nazis. They boast about slaughtering and torturing innocent people—beheading children, executing captives. Credible reports of what Hamas did to its victims are reminiscent of what happened in such massacres as that at Sand Creek in 1864, or countless pogroms, slaughters by the followers of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others.
Lanny Davis well summarized what Hamas is in a piece on RealClear Politics today.
Netanyahu ≠ Israel
Hamas ≠ the Palestinian people
Like the United States, Israel is a democracy. It values human rights, women’s rights, and the good. As we do, it falls short. As in the United States, there is a dangerous anti-democracy force operating there.
Hamas doesn’t even pretend to believe in any of these values. It is, as President Biden said in his speech this afternoon, this group unleashed “pure, unadulterated evil.” Their atrocities are sickening.
So, unless you would excuse the Holocaust, genocide, enslavement, rape, lynching, and so on, don’t dare try to excuse Hamas. No “whataboutism,” no “both sides do it.”
William Arkin talks about the very practical ways the dynamics of ”both sides“ function in practice.
”The two sides hate each other. They did so before the current conflict and the current government and they will after it’s gone. Both sides. And they will now hate each other even more.“
The US after the Clinton Administration essentially gave up on trying to promote any kind of peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today things have reached the point Jimmy Carter warned about in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Or Apartheid. Both US parties are now committed in practice to a policy toward the occupied territories than has nothing
to do with democracy, the rule of law or the ”rules-based international order.“
And part of the gruesome irony of US policy is that the Republican Party and the Trump cult (if there is any meaningful difference between them now) follow the program demanded by anti-Semitic Christian nationalists based on a crackpot apocalyptic narrative in which all the Jews of the world will be ”gathered“ in Israel, then most of them will be slaughtered in the Battle of Armageddon, and the few surviving Jews will convert to Christianity. With the world finally rid of The Jews, Jesus can come again and dump all the Mean Libruls into Hail.
The authoritarian theocrats in Israel like Natanyahu have been successful in leveraging these American Christian nationalists to keep the US government backing even their most brutal and self-destructive policies. How policies based on this ideology furthers any legitimate US national interest is not at all clear.
How any ”two-state“ solution could work now is also very hard to imagine. Israel and Palestine seem to be in the place Carter described back then. They can be a multiethnic democracy or a Jewish apartheid state with chronically brutal and discriminatory policy towards the Palestinians. In the Democracy vs. Autocracy binary, Netanyahu and the theocratic hardliners can only go in the latter direction.
https://governmentsecrets.substack.com/p/the-war-in-israel-is-already-lost