A RAY OF HOPE

DEFEATING HAMAS IS NOT AN END, BUT A BEGINNING. HEALING THE PALESTINIAN MIND IS THE LONG-RANGE KEY TO PEACE. THIS WEEK’S PROTESTS ARE CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM.

Waving the white flag.

It is a sign of the stranglehold Hamas has on the people of Gaza that it has taken 17 months of horrific war for the first signs of uprising by Palestinians against those who launched and perpetuate this conflict.

For three days, residents of Gaza have protested against their repressive Hamas regime. Their messages are not consistent. Some are outright calling to release the hostages. Others are waving white flags. Some are calling, more generally, for peace. Whatever the messages, they are the first serious sign of internal disenchantment after 17 months of war.

As Herb Keinon wrote in the Jerusalem Post today, do not mistake these protests for imminent regime collapse. I don’t think anyone assumes that a few hundred or, optimistically, a few thousand protestors marching would bring Hamas to its knees. But these protests are massively significant for a different reason.

The conundrum of the current conflict and what might possibly happen in the “after” times pivots less on the rebuilding of Gaza’s infrastructure than on the rebuilding of the Palestinian mind.

Yes, I know that sounds Orwellian or otherwise creepy. But Gaza is in ruins today only partly because Hamas started a war on October 7 and refused to end it, which they could have done every day since, by releasing the hostages and surrendering.

But that overt violence and destruction is more symptom than cause. Gaza is in ruins today because of this war, yes, but the war itself is a result of three or four generations of genocidal, Jew-hating indoctrination. Astonishingly, there are still lugnuts in the West who do not acknowledge this as the core reality of this conflict and the fulcrum upon which, if peace is ever to come, this is how.

(Read my post on Palestinian incitement, which is the reason this conflict continues and will continue for years or decades to come. And also this one: About how, in one of the most sexually repressive societies on earth, the creepy old men of the terrorist movements are promising 72 virgins to encourage horny dudes to blow themselves up. Young Palestinians are literally dying to get laid.)

Rebuilding Gaza from rubble will be the easy part. Creating a Palestinian populace that overcomes the programming they have undergone since 1948 (at the latest) that the only good Jew is a dead Jew is the barrier to long-term coexistence.

People who are looking for easy, quick answers to this conflict are delusional. It could take a couple of years to rebuild Gaza. Inculcating in its people the idea that Jews are neighbours, not legitimate targets for beheading and immolation, will take longer.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if Palestinians began teaching their kids peace today, we might realize it in a generation or two.

The first step would be to eradicate and replace the entire Palestinian education system — which is funded through the UN by Canadian, American and other democratic countries’ tax dollars — and teaches that the three R’s are rage, rampage and rebellion.

But the protests we have seen in Gaza this week are the most encouraging thing we have seen out of that enclave in 17 months — or 10 years, or maybe ever. It suggests that there is a group, however small, that recognizes the root of the problem. Hamas is the reason for this war and all the devastation. Some Palestinians are not only willing to acknowledge this, but are putting their lives on the line to speak it out loud.

After the Second World War, a process of “denazification” took place in Germany. It is always an imperfect science to try to change the minds of millions of people — indeed the very process can be used by tyrants for the worst ends, as the Nazis, Hamas and other totalitarian forces have shown.

But peace will come between Israelis and Palestinians only after a process of deradicalization has taken place among Palestinians (or, at least, has begun). And, remember, as imperfect as denazification was after 1945, Germans had been under the Nazi bootheel for a dozen years. Palestinians have been fed a constant diet of self-abnegating, genocidal hatred since 1948. That is three or four generations of Jew-hatred coming at them from every source — popular culture, religion, government, mother’s milk, news, weather and sports. It has been an all-encompassing brainwashing. It has been so total one might ponder whether it might have epigenetically affected successive generations to literally make them antisemitic in their DNA.

It has been noted that, even under the totalitarian, all-controlling Nazi regime, there were individuals and groups, even entire villages, who helped save Jews. There has not been a single report of a Palestinian in Gaza offering assistance or empathy to an Israeli hostage. Is this a sign of the total control Hamas has over the populace? Is it a sign that the people of Gaza think the hostage-taking is a good idea? It may be a combination of both. But until this week, no signs of so much as a whisper of dissent had emerged from that benighted place.

That’s what makes the protests in Gaza this week so profound. There may be a realization that this conflict — and eventual peace — depends on Palestinians because, as I have written, Israel is not the problem.

We cannot address what is happening in Gaza without comparing it with what is happening here in the West, among so called “pro-Palestinian” activists.

Those who shriek “Free Palestine” as they drive by vigils for the hostages are, of course, having the opposite of the effect they think they are (as I have droned on about here and here).

As Keinon pointed out, Palestinian-American blogger from Gaza and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, observed the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of overseas “allies.”

When he saw a rally in DC yesterday, Alkhatib thought, “[W]ow, maybe they are out here to support the hundreds of thousands [sic] of Gazans who have been demonstrating against Hamas and demanding the end of the terror group’s rule. Instead, these demonstrators were repeating the same old tired slogans and made no mention or reference to Gazans who are putting their lives on the line. The tone-deafness of the protesters was astonishing, almost as if they were deliberately trying to obfuscate what was happening in Gaza.”

Alkhatib put a fine point on the nature of the “pro-Palestine” movement in the West. He said it is “one that only cares about Palestinian lives when they fit a narrow anti-Israel agenda and apply selective outrage but never toward an Islamist fascist terrorist organization that destroyed the Palestinian national project and harmed the Palestinian people.”

There are, of course, cynical takes on all this. Here’s one. There are common sense and reasonable reservations in this video.

“This is basic self-interest,” says this commentator. The people of Gaza want peace now because they are losing. If they were winning, they wouldn’t be rising up against Hamas.

Well, OK. But I’m not sure that negates the significance. We can debate that in the comments below.

But several of the people I spoke with on my recent trip to Israel (I promise my pieces from that visit are coming soon!) insist that most Palestinians, like most Israelis, just want a quiet life. In some cases, I pushed back. I suggested that, sure, some want a quiet life — after Israel has been eliminated.

I am as capable of cynicism as the next Zionist. The protests in Gaza this week, though, created a fissure of hopefulness in my cynicism.

I don’t think they are going to bring down Hamas.

But bringing down Hamas was never going to be the happy ending to this. The end of Hamas will (hopefully) be the beginning of a new era when Palestinians begin on a path to coexistence. That will take a wholesale reconfiguring of the entire worldview that three or four generations of Palestinians have been raised with. That is, honestly, a far greater challenge than eliminating Hamas.

The marching Gazans this week suggest that transformation, in a small way, has begun. It is a ray of hope. A tiny one. But a ray nonetheless.

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