'Fugees, Fervour and Falsehoods Oh My!
Addressing some common myths (and some truths) resurrected since the beginning of the Gaza War
On October 7 the relative calm in the Middle East was disrupted by the unprecedented success of Hamas fighters bursting through the Gaza-Israel fence and the resultant killing of 1400 Israelis triggering the Israel-Hamas War. Since then pundits across the political spectrum have chimed in to answer the question "how have we got here?" Is it more true as Palestine supporters say that this was but a reaction to 75 years of occupation and brutality, or was it as Israel supporters say just the latest of murderous moves by terrorists who want to destroy any effort at peace on the way to abolishing Israel? These are broadly speaking the two opposing poles of a debate that incorporates many nuanced ones in the middle and beyond them at the extremes. However, in the arsenal of rhetoric held by each side are certain narratives based on misinterpreting or twisting aspects of the historical record. The people cited as sources here are not necessarily the original person to say them, but have been cited commonly by those that believe them.
Myth: Israel created or "helped" to create Hamas.
Source: US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) floor statement from 2009 in Congress (CSPAN).
Fact: It always pains me to hear things like this said by a person like Dr. Paul, one of the people I credit with forming my perspectives on both fiscal policy and war and peace. However, his statement here was a gross exaggeration based on a rhetorical point. Israel did not "create" Hamas. Rather, they are said to have produced the environment in the West Bank and Gaza where Muslim activists unsympathetic to the conventional secular Palestinian terror groups formed together to create a jihadist alternative. So how did that start?
In 2014 the Washington Post's Ishaan Tharoor wrote a summary of the history, calling it "How Israel helped create Hamas". He did not allege that Israel's government or military literally schemed up this new Islamist organization along with the name, charter, and mission. It is important to note what came before Hamas since its rise occurred after an era where non-Islamic terror groups were preeminent. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza after their capture in 1967 faced a new reality without their former rulers in Egypt and Jordan. Israel cracked down on the standard Palestinian guerrilla groups like Fatah and the newer Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Many of the groups had Marxist-Leninist orientations like the PFLP, while others like the Arab Liberation Front were basically sponsored militias of Arab regimes like Iraq or Syria. In more conservative circles throughout the Sunni Muslim world secular political trends like Pan-Arabism and socialism were seen as corrupting influences on Islamic societies, even if Muslims agreed regarding the need to defeat Israel. It did not help that in some cases leaders of these regimes hailed from heterodox religious traditions, like Hafez al-Assad of Syria who was Alawite Muslim or that some Palestinian faction leaders like the founders of the PFLP and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine were not Muslim at all. The NATO bloc's allies in the Middle East, conservative Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, tended to have more strict approaches to Islam, and while they weren't friendly toward Israel were generally seen as less of a threat than their Soviet backed rivals.
In the early 1970s the Muslim preacher Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic teacher, began to organize in Gaza, focusing at first on social and charity work and in 1979 registered under Israeli law as a charity called Mujama al-Islamiyya. Eventually Sheikh Yassin, having gained a significant following through his Friday sermons, gave his blessing for some Brotherhood activists to begin collecting arms in preparation for an Islamic insurgency, which led to his first arrest in 1984. At this point "Hamas" was not a group as such, but Israel would often encourage divisions between Yassin's organizers and Fatah's. In 1987 with the eruption of the Intifada (uprising), the first widespread act of resistance by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since their capture, posters began to appear in the streets of Gaza cities from the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawamma al-Islamiyya, or in its Arabic acronym Hamas which means "zealotry" or "fervour"). The group had been formed with the encouragement of Brotherhood factions in other Muslim nations. Islamic terrorism had also seen upsurges in other countries like Lebanon and Egypt thanks to the Iranian Revolution. Jihadist moles within Egypt's army assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 two years after he signed a peace treaty with Israel. In 1983 three bombings of barracks and an embassy in Beirut killed hundreds of French and American peacekeepers and staff. One advantage that Hamas had over its secular rivals Fatah and the PFLP was that its leadership was present within the struggle under Israeli occupation, as opposed to the leaders of the other factions like Yasser Arafat who were living in relative safety in Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab states. When Arafat signed the Oslo Accords and assumed control of the new Palestinian Authority many Palestinians expressed resentment that a person who had spent most of his life abroad, sometimes enjoying luxury under the protection of allies, was now assuming control and dictating life for those that had stayed behind and lived under Israeli rule.
Nowhere is there evidence that Israel armed, organized, or otherwise participated in the creation of Hamas. Rather when commentators state that Israel "created" Hamas it is a turn of phrase; Israel's actions may have caused the formation of Hamas, it does not mean they deliberately conjured this group out of nothing. Even Norman Finkelstein, no friend of Israel, pushed back on this characterization of events: "It is factually correct what Ron Paul said that Israel encouraged [Hamas] in various ways for example by not exerting as much repression on Hamas as it did on the PLO back in those years in order to create a counterweight to the PLO." The notion that Israel "created" Hamas is generally popular among those that see Israel as the great string puller while Palestinians are backward helpless victims with no will or agency.
Myth: If the Arab states care so much about Palestinian refugees, why don't they accept them in their borders and give them citizenship?
Source: Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley and others.
Fact: Some did in the past and came to regret it. The operating excuse being used by Arab leaders today is that they are suspicious that Israel would turn around and use it as a permanent ethnic cleansing of Gaza. But let's assume that is true, it still would not explain why they do not accept refugees who are in a spiraling humanitarian crisis. Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf also refused to accept Syrian refugees during their civil war. No one said anything about "ethnic cleansing at the time". Many of these refugees joined the mass migration into Europe and the West. As an aside, a policy paper was leaked from Israel's Ministry of Intelligence that lays down the preferential option of Gazan refugees migrating to the Sinai Peninsula and then the West. The fact that this idea is being floated shows that within Israel's corridors of power there are those that are either detached from reality or simply do not care about how they affect their country's reputation.
Jordan
So what did happen when Arab states took in refugees in 1948 and 1967? Of the states bordering Israel, only one (Jordan) offered the Arab Palestinians full citizenship, whereas Egypt, Syria and Lebanon all held them in nominally temporary refugee camps in the hopes that soon enough their homeland would be liberated and they would all return. The objective of restoring what was lost in 1948 is the central tenet of Palestinian identity, symbolized by the keys worn by refugees and their descendents, even if those keys in many cases are not real or belong to homes that haven't been there for years. The resentment that these refugees felt was extended to any Arab leader who so much as hinted they were willing to negotiate with Israel. In 1951 a Palestinian assassin murdered King Abdullah I of Jordan in Jerusalem. He was said to be undertaking secret negotiations with Israel's government at the time.
Watch former Virginia state senator Nick Freitas explain the unfortunate track records of Palestine refugees and why Arab states are now rejecting them
The leader who turned the cause of Palestinian liberation into the central goal of the Arab world was Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser who was the charismatic leader of the Pan-Arab movement and an opponent of conservative monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Under his rule (1954-70) Arab support for Palestinian cross-border insurgents known as the fedayun became a top priority, along with other initiatives like a ballistic missile program to lay waste to Israel. During this period formal Palestinian armed groups like Fatah began to organize, but remained dependent on Egypt and fellow Arab League sponsors. That would change in 1967, for as the Arab states recovered from their humiliation in the Six Day War, many Palestinian nationalists like George Habash that had been Pan-Arabists despaired of having their salvation delivered through conventional military campaigns. This was the turning point where terrorism changed from being mostly cross-border raids into international spectacles that often involved third countries that had little to do with the conflict. Airplane hijackings, until then committed usually by disturbed individuals or people attempting to defect from one nation to another, suddenly became the favoured tool of Palestinian terrorists and others who soon mimicked them. This would not have been possible were it not for the rise of training camps and bases for the terror groups in Jordan and Lebanon creating what in effect were parallel states. By 1970 Palestinian gunmen were manning checkpoints on Jordanian roads and harassing civilians while openly plotting the eventual overthrow of King Hussein I, who had been present during his grandfather Abdullah's assassination and whose cousin Faisal I of Iraq had been brutally murdered in a 1958 military coup. On September 10, 1970 the PFLP pulled off the hijacking of four aircraft to Dawson's Field, an isolated airstrip in Jordan, and paraded the hostages before the media for one week before blowing up the aircraft. This spectacle had two results: It made the Arab-Israeli conflict a global problem in a way that had direct material consequences for westerners who now feared for their safety when travelling, and it exhausted the last bit of Hussein's patience. One week later the King ordered a full scale military operation to root out the terror training camps and bases and restore his full authority, beginning the events known as Black September. It was at tremendous risk, since rival Arab nations like Syria rebuked him and threatened to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians, but after ten months he prevailed and most of the Palestinian groups scaled down their presence in Jordan, migrating instead to Lebanon. But they would not hear the last of them. In revenge Palestinian terror groups pooled together to form the Black September Organization. One of its first acts was the 1971 assassination in Cairo of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi el-Tel. If you were Abdullah II of Jordan, struggling to maintain power, how would it help you to accept more Palestinians, a people who killed his great-grandfather and attempted to kill his father.
Lebanon
Unlike in Jordan, Palestinians residing in Lebanon did not have full citizenship and were barred from certain professions. Unlike Jordan where the monarchy is the dominant social institution, Lebanon is a state divided along sectarian lines. The granting of citizenship to Palestinians, who are majority Sunni Muslims would have upset the balance between the Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. In 1958, as neighbouring Syria joined Egypt to form the United Arab Republic, Lebanon's mostly Sunni pan-Arabist movements attempted to compel Lebanon to join the new union. Because the prime minister is required to be a Sunni Muslim and the president a Maronite Christian, the country's government was in a constitutional crisis and spiraling towards a civil war that was only evaded by the deployment of US Marines. After mediation a tenuous peace prevailed, until the late 1960s as the Palestinian armed groups began to build up their presence along Lebanon's southern border. In 1969, Nasser brokered an agreement between them and the Lebanese military to exclude the 16 Palestinian camps covered by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from the authority of Lebanese security services. The PLO now ruled a state within Lebanon. Over the next 17 years much of the focus of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was concentrated on violence that occurred outside of Israel and territories it controlled. Examples included the Munich Olympic massacre (1972), the seizure of the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan that led to the murder of US Ambassador Cleo Noel and two other diplomatic hostages, and the assassination of US Ambassador Francis Meloy and his economic counselor Robert Waring in Beirut in 1976. After Black September the terrorist infrastructure only became stronger in Lebanon and the majority of armed groups set up their headquarters there, continuing to launch cross border raids against Israel and hijack international passenger aircraft.
Like Jordan before it, Lebanon was now caught in the crossfire when Israel would attack Palestinian targets in Lebanon.On the night of April 9-10, 1973 Israel retaliated for the Munich massacre and killed three suspected senior figures of the Black September Organization, however among the dead were an innocent neighbour and three Lebanese police officers that responded to the raid. Two years later Lebanon erupted into civil war between the PLO factions and left-wing Lebanese allies on one side and mainly Christian Maronite militias on the other. The violence of this conflict was just as if not more gory as today's with both sides committing horrific massacres in Palestinian camps (Karantina and Tel el-Za'atar) and Christian towns (Damour, Chekka). As Lebanon is a patchwork of diverse ethnic and religious minorities, it became a proxy conflict with numerous regional players like Syria, Israel, Iraq and Iran taking part. In 1982 Israel invaded in response to Palestinian rocket fire, towards its northern towns in what was called "Operation Peace for the Galilee". This coincided with the election of Bachir Gemayel, a pro-American candidate for president who also had clandestine ties to Israel and was rumoured to be planning to sign a peace treaty with it. On August 23 Gemayel was killed in a terrorist bombing before he could take office. His loyalists reacted by massacring hundreds of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps while Israeli forces looked the other way. It was later determined that Syria had a central role in his killing. The 1980s also saw the rise of Hizbullah (or Hezbollah), an Iran-aligned Shiite terror group that would bomb US and French peacekeepers and the US embassy in 1983 and 1984. Even after the official end of the civil war in 1989 officially disarmed all Lebanese militias, Hizbullah remained the exception and it has continued its own campaigns against Israel since then with sporadic attacks and offensives. Lebanon continues to be a haven for Palestinian armed groups to this day, and in 2007 one such group Fatah al-Islam mounted an insurgency that was put down by Hizbullah and other Syrian-aligned forces.
Kuwait
This Persian Gulf emirate was not a frontline belligerent in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and approximately 357,000 Palestinians called Kuwait home in 1990 when Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces invaded the Persian Gulf emirate and vowed to annex it. Unlike in Jordan and Lebanon, armed groups did not form in Kuwait. So when Yasser Arafat decided in response to support Saddam's invasion it backfired tremendously on them, resulting in the expulsion of most of the resident Palestinians after Kuwait was liberated in 1991. It is but one example of Palestinian leaders acting against the long term interests of their people.
It is a convenient statement of critics, particular on the pro-Israel side, that Arab nations do not accept their Palestinian brethren. But given the disastrous results of the ones that did, can anyone blame them?
Myth: The world has "turned its back" on the Palestinians.
Source: Various commentators: (Toledo Blade, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye).
Fact: No one has enjoyed more support from such an eclectic mix of manipulators, useful idiots and fellow travellers throughout its history than Palestine. It is truly the evergreen cause on college campuses alone. The problem is not that the world will not help the Palestinians or uphold human rights, but rather that so many see a way to use it to their benefit. I don't know of a different struggle that was supported by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, and Syria, all of them famous for how much human rights mattered to them. Hamas officials even buried the hatchet with the Assad regime in Syria in 2022 even after it had completely destroyed the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus where Palestinian refugees in Syria had joined Islamist rebels during the civil war. As of 2018 refugees were permitted to return to the camps subject to government approval, but few had done so because it had been almost completely demolished (Source: UNRWA). But Bashar al-Assad was only following in the footsteps of his father and predecessor, President Hafez al-Assad. In the 1980s Assad fomented a division within the PLO in an attempt to seize control of it, sponsoring a rival to Yasser Arafat named Said al-Muragha (Abu Musa) called Fatah al-Intifada which embarked on a brutal three year battle for control of the Palestinians in Lebanon known as the "War of the Camps". This is the type of "help" that Palestinians have been getting from other nations, and yet no one calls them illegitimate because they are not Israel.
On the other hand there are other Muslim causes that have been forgotten by most of the world, including these "friends" of Palestine: Chechnya - which was brutally suppressed and seized back by Iran's ally Russia in the early 2000s, Kashmir - which is largely a proxy of Pakistan used to erode the power of its enemy India, and Xinjiang - whose Uyghur Muslim inhabitants are completely disenfranchised. If you're waiting for a Students for Justice in Chechnya chapter to open on your college campus, hopefully you're not holding your breath.
Besides the states and international bodies that have come out in support of the Palestinians (or opposition to Israel) there are numerous academics, writers, artists, musicians and other culture makers from Elvis Costello to Brian Eno who have expressed their views fulsomely. Those that say that this criticism of Zionism comes at a price are not paying attention. In Eno's case this has not compromised his career since signing a pro-BDS letter in 2006, and in fact it signalled his becoming more politically influential thereafter. The Marxist film actress Vanessa Redgrave, who in 1977 narrated a documentary called The Palestinian that called attention to the cause won an Oscar (for Julia) in spite of pressure by pro-Israel opponents, and in 2021 received a damehood from Queen Elizabeth II. In academia the American Studies Association and numerous similar bodies have active boycotts of Israel that constrain cooperation with colleagues and peers there. The issue with the Palestinian cause isn't that the world has forgotten them, it is that they will not be satisfied until everyone is forced to take a side against Israel.