“Terrorism doesn’t fall from the sky. Terror is a tactic. It is a choice. Hamas’s grisly assault on 🇮🇱 must be analyzed with this in mind. If we ignore this, we make it more likely that other violent organizations will take Hamas’s place even if the group is neutralized..” 1/11
“According to one July poll, 60 to 75% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had positive views of Islamic Jihad &.. groups just as or even more radical than Hamas.. more recent.. survey, 54% of Palestinians said they supported armed attacks against Israeli civilians.” 2/11
“There are two ways to look at this. One is to say that something is inherently wrong with Palestinians — a view often expressed by both the Israeli and American right — or even that Palestinians, by supporting groups that are evil, are complicit in that evil.” 3/11
“other way to interpret the survey results is to acknowledge a truth about all people: They’re complicated. In the July poll, half of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for 🇮🇱’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.”
“More useful to ask how Palestinian attitudes toward violence have evolved.. at the height of the Oslo accords in 1996.. Palestinian support for the peace process reached 80% while support for violence dropped to around 20%.” 5/11
“it would also be a mistake to dismiss Hamas’s terrorism as mere “evil.” As the philosopher John Gray notes, “A campaign of mass murder is never simply an expression of psychopathic aggression”. 6/11
“It allows us to believe something is wrong with “them” but not with us. And, paradoxically, it exposes an unwillingness to take terrorists seriously, reducing them to “crazy” or “irrational”.” 7/11
“The good news is that evil, however banal, can be fought. Hamas does not equal the Palestinian people. To believe that would be to accept Hamas’s claims at face value. Palestinians have diverse and often conflicting perspectives, and they have agency.” 8/11
“As powerful as they are, the United States and Israel have agency, too. Millions of Palestinians can and must be incentivized away from violence. They once believed in a two-state solution, and for good reason: They could see progress, however halting, in their own live.” 9/11
“Right now, a growing number of Palestinians see revolutionary violence as the best way to achieve that goal — and they’re probably wrong about this. When the fighting stops, the US, Israel and the international community must give Palestinians reasons to think otherwise.” 10/11
“A nonviolent path to an independent 🇵🇸 state must be made unmistakably clear. If such a path doesn’t appear, then defeat of Hamas on the battlefield will be a Pyrrhic victory. Because its ideas — & its belief in the power of violence — will remain, perhaps more alive than ever.”
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