Without Hamas Palestinian Terror is still Killing

October 7, 2023, was one of the most horrific days in Jewish history.

It is impossible for historians to record it as a major event in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  It was far more tectonic than that.

The Hamas attack was not an expression Palestinian frustration. It was the clear expression of the ultimate goal of all Palestinians against Israel and Jews.

Israel may eradicate Hamas in Gaza, but the heart of Hamas still festers in its leadership controlling its terror network not from the basement of Shifa Hospital in Gaza but from their luxury penthouses in Doha, protected by the rich rulers of Qatar.

But even if these people are temporarily isolated, the heart of Palestinian terrorism is alive and killing, with or without Hamas.

Let me give you examples.

Yasser Arafat was a terrorist before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat was a more deadly terrorist after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mahmoud Abbas – terrorist. After getting his degree in Holocaust denial in Moscow he was a major planner in the Munich Olympic Games massacre of the Israeli athletes.

The aging Abbas’s life’s work has been dedicated to killing Jews, rather than working strongly with Israel to give his people a more prosperous and peaceful future.

Instead of investing in progressive education, he installs his terrorism into the hearts and minds of Palestinian children educated to hate Jews and of a world without Israel. Instead of receiving hi tech training in their summer camps they get military training, sponsored by the United Nations.

Abbas has built a “Pay to Slay” reward system in which his killers receive money according to the number of Israelis they murder. If arrested, their money accumulates even as they sit in Israeli prisons. If they are killed, their gory glory lives on in payments made to their families.

All the major political parties of the Palestinian Authority are terrorists – Fatah, PLO, PLFP, and all the other soup salad groups. All terrorists.

But what of the Palestinian people? We are told they are simple folk who only want peace and the possibly of earning enough money to feed their families.

Really? If only that were true. Let’s look at the facts.

The last time there was a national Palestinian election was back in 2006. Hamas won.

Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah-led Palestinian Authority are rightly afraid of holding an election since. They know they would lose to Hamas because Hamas controls the hearts and minds of the Palestinian street, and I am not referring to the streets of Gaza.

This year we saw several indicators that Hamas rules despite, or because of, the corrupt failed Fatah-PLO leadership.

The Palestinians may not have held a national election since 2006, but this year, the students of Birzeit University did, and they voted in a Hamas student body. Birzeit is not in the Gaza Strip. It is just five miles north of Ramallah where the failed leadership of the Palestinian Authority rules.

This vote was followed by the students at the Al-Najah University in Nablus who also turned to Hamas.

According to a survey undertaken by the Palestinian Center for Polls and Survey in September 2023, Palestinians overwhelmingly preferred Hamas leader, Ishmail Haniya who lives in Doha luxury to Mahmoud Abbas 58% to only 37% to be their next President of the Palestinian Authority.

That poll was taken less than one month before the Hamas massacres in Israel.

Let me be brutally clear. The majority of Palestinians are with Hamas and the reason there was no major flare ups inside the territories supposedly controlled by the PA was because Israel was smart enough to swoop in and arrest several hundred Hamas operators and keep them in Israeli jails because, without that, you would have been seeing the           e slaughter of Jews at the hands of Palestinian butchers coming out of territories supposedly controlled by Abbas and his incompetent and unpopular Palestinian Authority..

The Fatah-PLO Palestinian Authority have the same ultimate ambition as Hamas, though they do not express it in Islamic terms, except in their mosques.

What we witnessed on that fateful day was The Day of Judgement as expressed in the Hamas Charter.

“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.” 

It is incredulous that, in our modern progressive age, this is what millions passionately believe, but this medieval chant is shared by apparently secular, supposedly non-Hamas, brainwashers in your country whose ultimate aim is also written in the Hamas Charter. Namely, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” 

They, and the Palestinian Authority, express it differently.

They want a “Free Palestine.” That’s far more palatable, but it means the same.  A world where Jews and Israel no longer exist.

This is the world of a polite Hamas.

Hamas is Palestine, Palestine is Hamas,

Palestinian terror is alive and killing, even if we eradicate Hamas in Gaza.

Barry Shaw,

International Public Diplomacy Associate,

Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

Author of “Fighting Hamas, BDS & Anti-Semitism.”