Excerpt, Bret Stephens, the New York Times (Opinion)
//(But) there’s an equally important dimension to Palestinian politics that is purely domestic. When Abbas was elected in 2005, it was for a four-year term. He is now in the 20th year of his four-year term. When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, it didn’t just defeat its political rivals in Fatah. It overthrew the Palestinian Authority entirely in #Gaza after a brief civil war and followed it up with a killing, torture and terror spree that eliminated all political opposition.
Perhaps the absence of Palestinian #democracy shouldn’t come as a shock. The regime established by #Hamas isn’t merely autocratic. It’s more like the old East Germany, complete with its version of the Stasi, which spied on, blackmailed and abused its citizens.
“Hamas leaders, despite claiming to represent the people of Gaza, would not tolerate even a whiff of dissent,” The Times’s Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman reported on Monday. “#Security officials trailed journalists and people they suspected of immoral behaviour. Agents got criticism removed from social media and discussed ways to defame political adversaries. Political protests were viewed as threats to be undermined.”
Even this doesn’t quite capture the extent of Hamas’s cruelty. Consider its treatment of gay Palestinians — a point worth emphasising since “Queers for Palestine” is a sign sometimes seen at anti-Israel marches.
Would an independent Palestinian state, living alongside Israel, improve its internal governance? Not if #Hamas took control — which it almost certainly would if it isn’t utterly defeated in the current war.
We know something about what Hamas intends thanks to the concluding statement of a conference that it held in 2021 about its plans for “liberated” Gaza. Any Jew considered a “fighter” “must be killed”; Jews who flee could either “be left alone” or “prosecuted”; peaceful individuals could either be “integrated or given time to leave.” Finally, “educated Jews” with valuable skills “should not be allowed to leave.”
In other words, what the campus protesters happily envisage as a utopian, post-Zionist “state for all of its citizens” would under Hamas be one in which Jews were killed, exiled, prosecuted, integrated into an Islamist state or pressed into the servitude of a Levantine version of Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle. Those same protesters might rejoin that they don’t want a future to be led by Hamas — but that only raises the question of why they do nothing to oppose it.//
#geopolitics
#autocracy
#absolutism
#fundamentalism
