This feels a lot like the American reaction after 9/11 where a great crime was committed but less violent options were rejected by hardliners who wanted to overcompensate for having missed the threat after having made “we will protect you” a major campaign point, and likely also seeing an opportunity for something they could not do following the normal political process. In this case it seems all the more tragic because there’s no natural separation due to distance, and it’s hard to see this not resulting in more tragedies for decades with so much fresh blood to avenge.
According to international observers the elections in Gaza that Hamas won in 2007 were democratic and fair:
The National Democratic Institute (NDI) in partnership with The Carter Center reported "a professional and impartial performance of election officials".[33] The European Union delegation reported "there was nothing which would indicate that the final result was not the outcome chosen by the voters".[34] A CRS Report for Congress on the 2006 elections concluded: "The election was overseen by 17,268 domestic observers, complemented by 900 credentialed international monitors. ... The Bush Administration accepted the outcome of the Palestinian legislative elections and praised the PA for holding free and fair elections. ... The conduct of the election was widely considered to be free and fair."[45]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
Indeed, the entity that did its best to obstruct the democratic protest was Israel:
In the lead-up to the elections, on 26 September 2005 Israel launched a campaign of arrests against PLC members. 450 members of Hamas were detained, mostly those involved in the 2006 PLC elections. The majority of them were kept in administrative detention for different periods.[23] In the election period, 15 PLC members were captured and held as prisoners.[24]
During the elections, the Israeli authorities banned the candidates from holding election campaigns inside Jerusalem. Rallies and public meetings were prohibited. The Jerusalem identity cards of some PLC members were also revoked.[25] The Carter Center, which monitored the elections, criticised the detentions of persons who "are guilty of nothing more than winning a parliamentary seat in an open and honest election".[26]
Israeli obstruction during the election resulted in estimated 123,000 voters in East Jerusalem being prevented from registering until ten days before the elections, creating a number of logistical problems shortly before the election day. The checkpoints of Israel also continued to pose serious obstacles to all Palestiniain parties during the electoral campaign as well as on voting day itself. It was also noted that Palestinian refugees in exile and 9,000 prisoners remained ineligible to vote.[27]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
The only problem with the elections was that the Palestinians elected the wrong party. The US, that great champion of liberal democracy around the world, did its utmost best to correct the result: they sponsored, armed and trained a Fatah faction to stage a coup; which backfired and left Hamas in control of Gaza.
The report said that instead of driving its enemies out of power, the US-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. David Wurmser, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief Middle East adviser a month after the Hamas takeover, said he believed that Hamas had no intention of taking over the Gaza Strip until Fatah forced its hand. "It looks to me that what happened wasn't so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was preempted before it could happen," he was quoted as saying. Wurmser said that the Bush administration engaged in a "dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] with victory." Wurmser said he was especially galled by the Bush administration's hypocrisy. "There is a stunning disconnect between the president's call for Middle East democracy and this policy," he said. "It directly contradicts it.".[69]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
Wikipedia has an extensive timeline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_conflict#2...
And there is no reason to "go digging" and look for "stories". You can read the wikipedia article I quote above, about the US-backed Fatah coup and follow the sources, which are entirely public and mainstream. One of them is actual Vanity Fair.
US post-election impediments
Just before the January 2006 elections, and after witnessing Hamas' gains in municipal polls, the House of Representatives passed H.Res. 575 (December 16, 2005), asserting that terrorist groups, like Hamas, should not be permitted to participate in Palestinian elections until such organizations "recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, cease incitement, condemn terrorism, and permanently disarm and dismantle their terrorist infrastructure."[63] The Palestinian Authority chose to ignore this external decision: "the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas has favored an unconditional acceptance of Hamas's electoral participation, believing that it could co-opt Hamas within the Palestinian political fold".[64]
The New York Times reported in February 2006 that "The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again. The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election."[65]
Just how much further matters would be taken was revealed in April 2008. Tom Segev (in Ha'aretz) reported:
a "confidential document, a 'talking points' memo,[66] was left by the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, Jake Walles, on the desk of Mahmoud Abbas . … According to the paper left behind … he wanted to pressure Abu Mazen to take action that would annul the outcome of the elections that had catapulted Hamas to power. … When nothing happened, Walles … warned the Palestinian president that the time had come to act. Instead, Abu Mazen launched negotiations with Hamas on the establishment of a unity government. … At this point the Americans moved to "Plan B." That was a plan to eliminate Hamas by force. In fact, it was to be a deliberately fomented civil war Fatah was supposed to win, with U.S. help."[67]
There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah's resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as Abbas's national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. ... Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as "a good, solid leader." In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as "our guy."
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America's behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
Some sources call the scheme "Iran-contra 2.0," recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.'s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.[68]
The report said that instead of driving its enemies out of power, the US-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. David Wurmser, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief Middle East adviser a month after the Hamas takeover, said he believed that Hamas had no intention of taking over the Gaza Strip until Fatah forced its hand. "It looks to me that what happened wasn't so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was preempted before it could happen," he was quoted as saying. Wurmser said that the Bush administration engaged in a "dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] with victory." Wurmser said he was especially galled by the Bush administration's hypocrisy. "There is a stunning disconnect between the president's call for Middle East democracy and this policy," he said. "It directly contradicts it.".[69]
The 2008 exposé by Vanity Fair (of plans to reverse the democratic 2006 PA parliamentary elections) confirmed a CF Report of January 2007, over a year earlier, by Alistair Crooke:
Deputy National Security Advisor, Elliott Abrams ... has had it about for some months now that the U.S. is not only not interested in dealing with Hamas, it is working to ensure its failure. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas elections, last January, Abrams greeted a group of Palestinian businessmen in his White House office with talk of a "hard coup" against the newly-elected Hamas government — the violent overthrow of their leadership with arms supplied by the United States. While the businessmen were shocked, Abrams was adamant — the U.S. had to support Fatah with guns, ammunition and training, so that they could fight Hamas for control of the Palestinian government.
Over the last twelve months, the United States has supplied guns, ammunition and training to Palestinian Fatah activists to take on Hamas in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank. A large number of Fatah activists have been trained and "graduated" from two camps — one in Ramallah and one in Jericho. The supplies of rifles and ammunition, which started as a mere trickle, has now become a torrent (Haaretz reports the U.S. has designated an astounding $86.4 million for Abu Mazen's security detail), and while the program has gone largely without notice in the American press, it is openly talked about and commented on in the Arab media.
Of course, in public, Secretary Rice appears contrite and concerned with "the growing lawlessness" among Palestinians, while failing to mention that such lawlessness is exactly what the Abrams plan was designed to create."[70]
In 2016 a 2006 audio tape emerged that contains an interview by Eli Chomsky of the Jewish Press with Hillary Clinton. Clinton opined that pushing for elections "in the Palestinian territories ... was a big mistake", adding "(a)nd if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win."[72]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
Also: we all have access to Wikipedia. You don't have to copy and paste whole articles here.
>> There was a 7-day civil war in Gaza, which Hamas technically started (if that matters to you), back in 2007;
No. Fatah started it. The US funded, armed and trained a Fatah faction to stage a coup against Hamas. The coup backfired and Hamas kicked Fatah out of Gaza.
To be perfectly clear: Fatah and Hamas are different, rival organisations. The 2007 Gaza War was started by Fatah, not Hamas.
Again: it's on wikipedia.
>> (one of the reasons Fatah and Hamas got into it was that Hamas replaced all of the PA's governing institutions --- the courts, the school systems, etc --- with Hamas-designed alternatives),
Yes, because they won the election. So they replaced the public officials with their own. Are you suggesting there is something sinister in that?
Also:
1. Most of the current population wasn't born then.
2. Voting for the political wing of a violent group isn't the same as supporting violence. Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, are the biggest party in Northern Ireland almost 30 years since the cease fire.
Palestinian poll shows a rise in Hamas support and close to 90% wanting US-backed Abbas to resign
Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.
(...)
Overall, 88% want Abbas to resign, up by 10 percentage points from three months ago. In the West Bank, 92% called for the resignation of the octogenarian who has presided over an administration widely seen as corrupt, autocratic and ineffective.
At the same time, 44% in the West Bank said they supported Hamas, up from just 12% in September. In Gaza, the militants enjoyed 42% support, up slightly from 38% three months ago.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion...
But, just to be perfectly clear lest there be some misunderstanding: Palestinians may support whomever they want and whatever they want, that does not justify their endless slaughter and apparent ethnic cleansing by Israel. That is in the same way that the almost universal support of the far right by the Israeli public does not justify terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.
This kind of conversation is always about morality, as well as other considerations. The killing of women and children and unarmed men will always elicit moral outrage, as well it should. In a context as inhumane and cruel as the brutal occupation of the Palestinian lands by Israel there is very little safe moral ground that any side can occupy. Hamas are the democratically elected government of Gaza, they are the legitimate resistance against the occupation and at the same time they are the perpetrators of shocking atrocities against Israeli civilians. The Israeli government is democratically elected and enjoys the support of a majority of the Israeli population and the current "war" has the full support of the majority of the Israeli public. The only unassailable moral stance remains to respect the facts on the ground, discuss them as one understands them, and not try to twist them for political reasons. My thoughts anyway.
To make it plain: so what if Palestinians support Hamas? Massacring a defenseless civilian population is never justified.
Can't you just say "You're right, the whole of Palestine population did not, in fact, elect Hamas" -- and leave it at that?
Instead of bringing up all these other topics?
They elected Hamas
Hamas won a narrow plurality in the 2006 legislative elections. That government dissolved entirely in 2007 after a military conflict between Hamas and Fatah.
So since 2007, Hamas has not been "elected". In any case it's main function since then has been as an instrument of Israeli policy. In Bibi's own words, just a few years ago: "Anyone who wants to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas."
So if you are unhappy with Hamas still being around, you know who to direct your concerns at.
Hamas is a creation of Israel
So I think we can wrap up here.
As I'm sure you're aware, this notion that Hamas is (or was, before the IDF demolished it) a puppet for Netanyahu has a lot of currency in online spaces. I don't see you making that argument! But it's worth calling it out. It is fine --- maybe even... dare I say it... good? --- if we say things that we agree on aloud.
‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas
As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
What a guy, that Bibi. He's so cute and smart, you just want to pinch his cheek and ruffle his hair. He funded Hamas to encourage them to fight the PA so they would not work together to create a Palestinian state. What an amazingly bright plan! Sending millions to Hamas? I mean what could ever possibly go wrong?
But hopefully more bombing will fix this soon! Insallah!?
Um, not really. Hamas did. And their radical brethren who assassinated Yitzhak.
It did end up extremely bad for everyone involved.
(I don't want to downplay the anti-Oslo sentiment [0], especially that Oslo I-II got signed despite the attacks previously.
Also it's hard to say how well the PLO represented the people, but it's sure that they were more accepted than Hamas. After all Arafat got elected in 1996 despite participating in the peace process.
It seems fairly clear that the peace process was a very unfortunate Schelling point for extremists on both sides, and their tireless cooperation successfully pushed the region away from peace and prosperity.
And, it's also important to note that it's perfectly possible that Arafat was simply deceitful, and the PLO wanted to get some breathing space to gather an army, blablabla. Sure. And that would/could have lead to ... exactly here anyway. Or maybe it would be even worse! Those are all legitimate concerns that have to be addressed, but very few things can simply make the basic issues irrelevant, and as long as people are there they will inevitably bear the burden of living with those unaddressed issues.)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_views_on_the_pea...
Giving concessions to the population and offering them an equitable stake in society would go a long way to dissipating support for armed resistance.
It's not a conflict on the same scale but you can look to the resolution of conflict in Northern Ireland for parallels. Denying people their basic chances in life and doing so with the threat of violence it's never going to win people to your side.
At some point you either have to talk to them or kill them all. The situation now is only creating martyrs and enough trauma to fuel the next generation of the cycle.