A popular myth about Gaza is that in control is a radical jihadist terrorist group called Hamas that suppresses a moderate citizenry who must not be blamed for Hamas terrorism. This myth is wishful thinking by those who want to limit responsibility for terrorist extremism to a small group and to exonerate the majority of Gazans, so as to undermine Israel even in the face of attack.
The truth is that the citizenry of Gaza elected Hamas as their leaders and rulers. Palestinian opinion surveys in Dec. 2023 have found that the majority of Gazans strongly supported Hamas, and were enthusiastic about the Hamas invasion of Israel and its atrocities against Israelis. In any future election, Gazans favored Hamas heavily against any rival, while Palestinians of Judea and Samaria favor Hamas even more heavily. By Feb. 2025, support for Hamas had fallen both in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, perhaps due to Hamas military defeats and the destruction in Gaza.
Gazans are raised in their families, schools, and religious services with a unified message: Muslims are God’s children and Jews are enemies of God. Gazans are taught that for God’s will to be done, Muslims will have to kill the Jews. Gazans believe that their sacred duty is to kill Jews and to cleanse the region of Jews altogether. This is integral to Gazan culture and Palestinian culture more generally. Hamas has enshrined this objective in its founding charter, where it promises to kill all Jews in the world.
Even given this general commitment toward attacking Jews, Palestinian objections to Israel are also more specific, and fall into three categories. First, because Islam is the true faith, Muslims must be superior to all other people. While infidels may be killed, enslaved, kidnapped or pay, or released, according to the preference of the Muslims involved, “people of the book,” Jews and Christians, must be offered an official, formal status of inferiority, dhimma, and pay a tax, jizya, to keep their lives. Israeli Jews neither accept an inferior status nor pay the tax, and thus are disobedient to Islam, violating its requirements.
Second, Islamic law states that any land once under the control of Muslims belongs to Muslims in perpetuity. Thus the Holy Land, conquered by Muslim armies in the seventh century, must belong to Muslims forever. Israel, a Jewish state dominated by Jews, violates this Islamic principle. Just as Muslims vow to reconquer Al-Andalus (southern Spain and Portugal) because they believe it rightfully belongs to them, the Palestinians vow to retake the territory controlled by Israel for the same reason.
Third, Arabs, descended from Bedouin, see themselves as warriors. Historically Arabs were successful warriors, who, by wielding the sword, beginning in the seventh century conquered half the world, forming one of the largest empires ever. But in recent centuries, they have fallen victim to the military technology and prowess of the West. As if to add insult to injury, Jews, the most despised inferiors in the Muslim would, formed their own independent country and repeatedly defeated invading Arab armies and terrorists. This shameful weakness, being defeated by Jews, should not be allowed to stand. Only one thing would cleanse the honor of the Arabs: defeating the Jews.
The religious motivation for war against the Jews is not secret or hidden; it is made clear in the name of the military organizations attacking Israel: HAMAS is the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement; Palestinian Islamic Jihad means Islamic holy war; and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade is named after the main Muslim holy mosque in Jerusalem. For the Gazans and for all Palestinians, the war against Israel and the Jews is a religious war. As Khaled Abu Toameh says, “the October 7 massacre is just another phase of the Islamists' Jihad (holy war) against Israel.”
The Palestinian enemies of Israel are intelligent, and they know that to gain support from the non-Muslim world, they must use an idiom that has currency and is respected in the West, in Africa, and beyond. They claim that Gaza is “occupied” by Israel, although the Israeli government and all Israeli occupants of Gaza left in 2005, leaving the territory entirely under the control of the Gazans. A new “Singapore on the Mediterranean” was promised. Instead, what resulted was a “North Korea on the Mediterranean.” The vast sums of aid money that poured in from Europe, the Middle East, and the USA(!), and the water and electricity supplied by Israel were devoted not to development and welfare, but to terrorist weapons and infrastructure.
It is for foreign ears that the Palestinians protest against Israeli “settler colonialism,” although the Islamic empire was one of the greatest colonialists in history. They claim that “their land” was stolen, although land for Jews was all purchased from Palestinian landowners or won in defensive wars against Arab invasions. They speak against “apartheid,” counterfactually drawing a parallel with segregated South Africa. These are the things they speak of in European and other languages; but, for the home audience, in Arabic, in schools, the media, and religious sermons, the religious reasons for the conflict are emphasized.
Palestinians claim that they have been deprived of a state of their own, although they have turned down at least a half dozen credible offers. They speak of their indigenous roots, although the name Palestine was imposed by the Romans to erase Jewish names, and until the second half of the twentieth century, it was Jews who were called “Palestinians.” There has never been a Palestinian state, ever. The idea of Palestinians as a distinct Arab people was invented by the Soviet KGB and adopted by certain Arab terrorists. Since then, the Palestinians have refused any state along side the Jewish state. A state of their own is not their goal; it is the destruction of Israel that they want.
Palestinians are not daunted by the risk of holy war against Israel. Those Muslims who fall in combat for Islam are regarded as martyrs for the faith. As such, they go directly to heaven, and are rewarded with seventy-two virgins. (This is especially attractive to virile young men who have no sexual access to females in traditional Palestinian society.) Dying fighting Jews is not a punishment for Palestinians, but a benefit. Many Palestinian mothers wish for martyrdom for their sons, and even their daughters.
The significance of these facts is that peace between the Palestinians and Israelis is highly unlikely. The religious objectives of the Palestinians are not easily open to compromise. Imaginary solutions such as “land for peace” and “the two-state solution” have proven to be and will continue to be dead ends. It has long been a cliché in Israel that there are no “peace partners” among the Palestinians. Israelis have slowly come to accept that they face the unwelcome necessity of “kill or be killed.”
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