What’s with those hostage-release certificates and Hamas’s forced thank-you letters to your torturers? Does Hamas really think the world is that stupid? Alas, it seems to be: confusing innocent people kidnapped for being Jewish – or near Jews – with terrorists convicted of heinous crimes.
The ex-hostages suffered from sheer bigotry; the Palestinians committed crimes and received well-deserved punishment.
Sixteen months ago, Hamas terrorists led other Palestinians in swarming Israel. Kidnapping 253, they treated people as brutalized piñatas, dehumanized sex slaves, human shields, and objectified trading cards.
Now, after nearly 500 agonizing days, Hamas imposes “goody bags” as they leave. Along with certificates marking their capture and liberation, these sicko sacks included photos of the victims snapped while in Hamas’s human-made hell.
The perversity is epic. It’s like Nazis giving concentration camp survivors vouchers for return trips – or grieving relatives getting two-for-one coupons from murderers. Yet, Hamas’s insanity exposes the grim reality behind our drugged-up hostages’ forced smiles. It provides a moral clarity many people abandon when discussing Palestinians.
Hamas updated the Soviet “Potemkin Village” approach. In that vast prison camp, the Soviet Union, Communists showed visitors a few happy places – evoking the fake pasteboard villages Grigory Potemkin supposedly erected for Catherine the Great to see as she sailed past impoverished areas in 1783.
A “certificate” is “a document containing a certified statement, especially as to the truth of something.” These Potemkin “certificates” certify the truth of something – Hamas’s evil.
Many who too easily demonize fellow citizens like President Donald Trump and his 77,284,118 voters resist calling Israel’s enemies “evil.” Characteristically, The New Republic recently called Trump “stupid and evil.” Yet weeks after October 7, a Washington Post columnist warned, “Reducing Hamas’s terrorism to a problem of ‘evil’ is a mistake.”
Shadi Hamid called using the word evil “a cop-out. 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’ adversaries. They usually aren’t.”
While politically correct, this analysis is topsy-turvy. October 7, 2023 happened because Israel – bullied by the world’s conceptzia too – treated evil Hamas terrorists, including Yahya Sinwar, as pragmatists. Western leaders didn’t take Hamas “seriously” enough.
Moreover, the defining misconception fueling and derailing the Oslo “Peace” Process, the Gaza Disengagement, and today’s mass pressure against Israel assumes our adversaries are rational and want what Westerners want.
Calling anti-Israel, Jew-hating terrorists or Iranian Revolutionary Guards “evil” doesn’t make Israel or its leaders perfect. But rational policymakers must contrast October 7’s initiators, enablers, and extenders with this embattled democracy defending itself and Western liberal values.
The invaluable Institute for National Security Studies Real Time Tracker quantifies the evil: Since October 7, amid 27,000 rocket attacks and 6,828 Palestinian terrorist attacks journalists keep ignoring in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, Israeli civilians have scrambled to safety 32,629 times.
Freed hostages describe the venom of supposedly innocent Gazans. Roni Krivoy, a 25-year-old sound engineer kidnapped from the Supernova music festival, escaped his captors for four days, until, his aunt later reported, “The Gazans caught him and returned him to the hands of the terrorists.”
There is no anti-Nazi-style “resistance” in Gaza countering Hamas or championing democratic values. Nor are there many prominent Palestinians denouncing Jew-hatred. And the world should stop blaming Israel’s self-defense for causing the hatred – festering for decades and predating this war, it includes many spoiled, antisemitic, anti-Western Palestinian goons on campus.
Paradoxically, only by recognizing that moral gap will there ever be any progress with the Palestinians. Kumbaya idealists discounting the mass Palestinian addiction to “River to the Sea” No-Jewish-State extermination-ism keep making the same mistakes. They refuse to see that Israel’s withdrawal from territory – twice – spurred Palestinian dictatorship, terrorism, and demands for more land.
Negotiators ignoring Palestinian anti-Western Jew-hatred are diplomatic flat-earthers. They ignore jihadi cries demanding Israel’s annihilation; this is not Zionist propagandists’ imagination but mainstream Palestinian discourse. They swallow the Palestinians’ foundational lie – defining themselves as forever victims while dodging responsibility for their mass, historic resistance to Israel’s existence.
They’re the only displaced people who pass on refugee status from generation to generation. Now, even though they claim to yearn for their homes in Israel proper when Trump speculates about moving them elsewhere, suddenly Gaza becomes their ancestral land they can never leave.
Fresh strategies to combat at Palestinian extremism
Realistic assessments of Palestinian extremism will end this tired, sterile, failed two-state solutionism, and yield fresh strategies. First, Israel must keep pounding the Axis of Evil, especially Iran and Palestinian terrorism. Second, it must build out the Abraham Accords, welcoming the Saudis to expand the Axis of Accommodation with Israel and emphasizing that Israelis don’t hate Arabs, only Arabs who hate Israel, while depriving the jihadis of political oxygen and armaments.
Third, encourage the international community, led by the Arab world, to find Gazans who mock Hamas’s posturing and understand the destruction Hamas wrought. They’re not stupid, like Western dupes. Many Palestinians blame Hamas for losing Palestinian territory for the first time since 1967, namely the buffer zone the ceasefire agreement allows Israel. Ultimately, only anti-Hamas clans and leaders will succeed in rebuilding Gaza.
Finally, shift from “two states for two peoples” – which keeps pressuring Israel to cede more territory – to “two democracies for two peoples.” That formula asks: how will Palestinians break their decades-long addiction to terrorism, negationism, and dictatorship, and start evolving toward a different culture, society, and politics, one focused more on building a Palestinian tomorrow than killing Jews today?
Until Palestinians shift, embracing Palestinianism will still mean embracing anti-Zionist, antisemitic jihadism.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, was just published.