Collective blame and collective punishment have a special resonance for Jewish people. Throughout our long history, Jews have consistently been scapegoated for any number of real or imagined crimes, up to and including the killing of Jesus Christ. We see something similar in today’s arguments from Hamas and its apologists, who claim that Israeli civilians participate in the oppression of Palestinians simply by living in Israel, and are therefore legitimate targets of violence. From the pogroms to the Holocaust to October 7, the mass murder of Jews has always followed from this vengeful logic of antisemitism.
If “blame the Jews” has been the stock response to nearly every crisis in the history of western civilization, “blame the Arabs” is a similarly useful catchall for Israel and its staunchest defenders. Wars, acts of terrorism, and craven political decisions made by governments or individuals are attributed to an entire ethnic group. “The Arabs” don’t want peace. “The Arabs” want to drive the Jews into the sea. “The Arabs” won’t uphold their side of a deal. This impulse of collective blame is perhaps best encapsulated in the famous (disputed) quotation from Golda Meir that Israel will only have peace with the Arabs “when they love their children more than they hate us.”
The tendency to blame Palestinians collectively for violence against Israel is grimly relevant today, as Israel bombs the Gaza Strip once again and prepares to launch a ground invasion. When Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel from the strip on October 7, murdering over 1,000 Israelis and kidnapping over 100, there was no question that Israel would seek revenge on the militant group. As with past incursions into Gaza, Israel’s leaders have insisted that the country is at war with Hamas, not the Gazan people. The Israel Defense Forces do not, as a matter of policy, aim to kill Palestinian civilians, though it is debatable how sorry they really are when they inevitably do. This differentiates them from Hamas, which glorifies the killing of innocent Israelis (because again, in their worldview, no Israeli is innocent) and which deliberately houses its fighters and weapons in densely populated civilian areas, schools, hospitals, and mosques.
All the same, innocent Gazans are dying. Gaza’s health ministry says over 4,300 people have been killed in the bombing so far. These estimates are impossible to confirm and can’t be taken at face value, since Hamas runs the health ministry and is known to inflate casualty counts. Still, the pictures and stories coming out of Gaza paint an unmistakable picture of mass death and suffering. Even if Israel tries its hardest to avoid civilian casualties (and it seems to be trying less hard than usual this time around), it will end up with a lot of blood on its hands, fueling Palestinian grief and rage and perpetuating the cycle of violence.
What feels different about this war is that Israel’s leaders are unusually willing to make the implicit explicit and acknowledge that, yes, they are punishing Gazans for Hamas’ crimes. When defense minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “full siege” on Gaza on October 9, cutting off water, fuel, and electricity, he said: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Energy minister Israel Katz then responded to international calls for aid by saying there would be no lifting of the siege until Hamas released the hostages it had taken. Israel later backed down on the siege to a degree, following pressure from President Biden, but the damage to Israel’s moral standing was done.
These are not the actions of a government overly concerned with distinguishing civilians from military targets. Given the country’s rightward drift and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist governing coalition, perhaps that’s not surprising. But this disturbing rhetorical turn merits examination, and it is important to understand why it is wrong.
Claims that the people of Gaza are responsible for Hamas rest on two central pillars, both deeply flawed. The first is that Gaza voted for Hamas in the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, which led to the group taking power by force the next year. The second is that if Gaza residents don’t want to be governed by a terrorist organization, they could throw Hamas out. Since they haven’t done so over the last 17 years, this implies acquiescence at least, if not affirmative approval of Hamas’ ideology and activities.
To begin with, most Gazans alive today were either not yet born or not yet adults when that election took place. Hamas won it with less than 45 percent of the vote in Gaza and the West Bank, though it did win a clear majority in Gaza City. And polling data suggested that voters were motivated not by Hamas’ eliminationist stance toward Israel, but rather its promises to clean up corruption and improve internal security. In fact, an exit poll from that election found that three-quarters of Palestinian voters wanted Hamas to change its stance on Israel and around 80 percent supported a peace agreement.
And of course, the Palestinians haven’t gotten a second chance at democracy. When Hamas took over in 2007, it expelled the Palestinian Authority and formed its own Islamist government in Gaza. This violent takeover scuttled a national unity government and led to an acrimonious split between Palestinian leadership in Gaza and the West Bank, which persists to this day and has become one of the main obstacles to progress toward peace or Palestinian statehood. Hamas, which does not actually believe in democracy, has not held further elections or allowed the operation of any political opposition in Gaza. That’s the inherent vulnerability of democracy to authoritarianism; democrats need to keep winning elections, whereas dictators only need to win once.
Recent survey data paints a much more complicated picture of Gazan public opinion than conventional wisdom would have you believe. In a Washington Institute poll in July, a 57 percent majority indicated a positive opinion of Hamas, but greater numbers expressed positive views of both Fatah (the secular party in charge of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank) and other armed groups. However, over 60 percent supported Hamas maintaining a ceasefire with Israel, and 50 percent said Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and support a two-state solution instead. Other recent polling from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 77 percent of Gazans want new legislative and presidential elections in the Palestinian territories, but 67 percent of all Palestinians don’t see that happening anytime soon. In a hypothetical election, Hamas would win slightly over Fatah, 34 to 31 percent, but a 43 percent plurality of Palestinians believe neither group deserves to represent them.
Meanwhile, 73 percent said they believed there was corruption in Hamas-run institutions in the Gaza Strip, and 59 percent of Gazans said they could not criticize Hamas authorities without fear. These data points are important in understanding why the second part of the argument for collective blame (“Why don’t they just get rid of them?”) is nonsensical.
Overthrowing a government, even in a pseudo-state like Gaza, is much easier said than done. This is doubly true when the government is a violent organization of religious fanatics. Many Gazans would prefer not to be governed by Hamas militants, but they can’t simply start up a campaign to get rid of them — not without grave risks to their lives, livelihoods, and families. For one thing, they are too busy struggling to survive from day to day. For another, Hamas cements its hold on power through an outsize role in the Gazan economy: It is the only organization that can reliably pay salaries, it maintains a stranglehold on inflows of foreign aid, and it keeps Gaza dependent on Israel for water and electricity by refusing to build infrastructure instead of rockets. If your ability to feed your family depends on Hamas patronage, even if you’d like to stand up to them, why risk it?
If Israel waits around for Gazans to get rid of Hamas before making an effort at peace, they will be waiting forever. Of course, that suits the country’s far right just fine. Netanyahu and his allies have done a poor job concealing their tacit support for Hamas — they reason that as long as Gaza is under the control of a terrorist organization, there can be no serious talk of a Palestinian state. Supporters of Israel often say that no country could be expected to tolerate a terror group hell-bent on its destruction, operating right on its borders. The outrageous truth is that Israel, under a series of increasingly right-wing governments, has been doing exactly that for nearly two decades. Netanyahu’s cynical policy of allowing Hamas to operate while keeping Gaza under siege and periodically “mowing the grass” with bombing campaigns to contain Palestinian militias’ ability to launch attacks has been a great disservice to both Israel and the Palestinians.
In some sense, if Israel were to destroy Hamas for good in this war (a dubious proposition), it would be doing the Gazans a favor. However, the Israeli government’s thirst for revenge is not coupled with any plans for what comes after: Who will rebuild Gaza, who will govern it, and how will it avoid falling into an even greater humanitarian catastrophe? It is easy not to think about these questions if your starting point is that the Gazans had it coming.
If the war leads to both Hamas and Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition losing popular legitimacy and exiting the scene, it would be a silver lining to a very dark cloud since neither Israelis nor Palestinians deserve the mediocre leadership they’ve been saddled with. But at least the Israelis have some power to change that if they want to. The people of Gaza do not.
More on the war
- Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Ethnic Cleansing for Israel
- Why the Gaza Cease-fire Probably Won’t Last
- The World Reacts to Reported Israel-Hamas Cease-fire: Photos
