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Dimitris Almyrantis
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This is an AI question, but for once a good one. Let me try to explain. There are many ways to approach this; some, like “Why do Gazans as a group support Hamas” or “Why did Hamas emerge” become too broad and too historical to be meaningful. I’m not here to try and explain why Hamas is what it is.
Instead, I’ll focus on the practical alternatives: What are the alternatives to Hamas? and Why are they difficult to sustain in the face of Hamas control? There may be “deeper levels” to the question, but I’ll try to keep it simple, and be informative to the best of my limited ability.
The 8-year-old hostage Ela Elyakim, forced to participate in a Hamas terror video after her parents and brother were murdered.
BEFORE WE BEGIN - let me explain a principle of sorts in the clan honor system. Someone does something wrong, they must be killed by their family to wash out the stain. A daughter becomes too wilful, she is suffocated by her mother with a plastic bag. Another daughter falls in love with the wrong person, she is murdered by her brother at his parents’ command. If there is no close relative available, the family finds some other relative to do it.
I remember reading about an honor killing in Khuzestan, one of the poorer provinces of Iran with a large Arab minority. A girl had done something wrong (I think a relationship?), so the family told her older brother to kill her. He murdered her by electrocuting her until she died. Then, he killed himself. But family honor was restored.
Because I come from a similar culture (in Mani in Greece, the honor killing system survived into living memory in my grandfather’s generation), we would have considered the loss of both children a winning trade. Honor is priceless, children are expendable. When the Maniot clans in Greece in the 1960s told a cousin that “your cousin in Athens* is acting badly, go to the city and take care of her” they knew they were sending him to prison to “lose years of his life”, and he accepted this. Honor is irreplaceable. You can always make more sons. This way of thinking about people is hard to get across to some folks, but it’s important to keep in mind.
*yes, even having no close kin and changing cities was not enough. The extended family would hunt you down if at all possible, and put some distant relative to the task. Thankfully, Maniots were almost unique in observing this code [the Kanonas] among Greeks, although it also existed in Albania as the Kanun, the tribal law.
Returning to Arab Khuzestan, an equally important thing to keep in mind is the girl’s* and boy’s feelings as they kill and die. The boy who killed himself (IIRC a teenager, both were <19?) can’t help feeling guilty as he makes his sister die an agonizing death, even though he believes his dad and God want him to. His reaction is natural. What do you think he feels when he is complicit in this? What do you think his parents feel when they order their daughter’s death? (If you ask the parents, they will refuse to talk about it. “It’s for the best,” a mother who has killed her teenaged daughters might say. But even they can’t help being human.)
*the girl is equally relevant: girls have been turned into suicide bombers precisely to “save themselves” in the eyes of the community, dying as martyrs but getting rid of their shame, since they have no life anyway as damaged goods.
Why Alternatives are Difficult - You Are In On It Too
There is a fundamental point to get across to understand how Hamas—and many similar jihadist groups across the MENA—work in controlling people. They work on the principle of collective guilt. They implicate you, they involve you, even if you were never a member.
In the TV show Game of Thrones, Jon Snow (pictured) is murdered by a conspiracy of his own men. This is filmed brilliantly, and sort of in line with how these things were done: yes, the biggest guy gets the jump on him and lands the mortal blow. Jon lies bleeding. The primary killer could just finish him off and leave him.
But then all the conspirators line up and stab him in a row. Even the little kid, Ollie (pictured). Why would conspirators do this? It forms the bond of guilt. No-one can run away and say, “I didn’t do it, I felt remorse and backed away, they murdered him.” Even the last in line has dipped his hands in blood.
Let me give some examples:
Both Hamas in Gaza and their rivals PLO/Fatah in the West Bank enforce and oversee the family honor killings I have mentioned to publicly enforce hatred of “traitors” who allegedly talk to Israel.
A young man (again, we’re talking the 17–23 age range here) is accused of spying for Israel. A mob is organized to drag the accused and his brother out into the public street. While the crowd jeers for the traitor’s blood, his young brother is made to execute him to save his family’s honor. If he refuses, they are both killed on the spot. The body is then mutilated in the general enthusiasm and strung up high where the whole town can see him.
I think it’s fairly widely known the former “public” leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, made his name as a tough guy by forcing the brother of a suspected “traitor” in Hamas ranks to bury his own brother alive. Think of how the guy felt doing that.
Now, why is this relevant? The crowd is being watched too.
Crowds might take shape around mosques after prayers or groups of jihadist rabble-rousers. Either way, they are a community institution, and like most institutions in rabidly conservative, religious communities, they aren’t strictly voluntary. You don’t really get to leave. You don’t get to choose not to. And hey, maybe you get a thrill from being a killer by association. Everyone likes a spectacle, and hey, “@ssh*les like that deserve what’s coming to them.”
People are social animals. We mimick. We fall in line. Most of us don’t, really-really, have complex consistent philosophies to approve or disapprove of things like Socrates in Platonic dialogue, doubly so if our education is regime-approved. If you are made to stain your hands with blood, however vicariously, and have been raised from birth within this system, it owns you. To really leave you would have to say, “I did wrong.” People don’t do that, not in socially-appreciable numbers.
The famous photograph of a young guy, Abdulaziz Salha, his hands bloody after helping with the hands-on murder of two Jews held in a PLO police station in 2000. He looks very, very young, is all I’m gonna say.
What I’ve always found most fascinating about this photo is not Salha, but the crowd cheering him on, and that is the spirit in which this answer is written.
Let me give another example:
More recently than any of this, I read the outcry of a Gazan woman translated on Memri, about the public killing of her brother trying to get an aid package. He was one of those Gazans who braved the lines of the independent Israeli-American aid organization not condoned by Hamas. Hamas has death squads (Al-Sahm, “Arrows”) to repress dissent, and these sent men to catch and kill them for “treason” for accepting food from Israel. The bodies of those killed this way are posted on social media to terrorize other Gazans [memri@org/reports/palestinian-authority-daily-hamas-preventing-gaza-residents-reaching-aid-distribution]
The interesting part is this: yes, they found the man and the rest of the group going for food packages for their families, lined them up and shot them—non-fatally. Then, they rounded up a group of passers-by from the streets nearby while the victims lay bleeding, and handed them sticks to beat the traitors with. The Hamas members then oversaw the corporal “punishment” as the bleeding-probably-dying were beaten most of the way to death by the crowd.
The woman’s brother expired shortly after the beating.
You are a civilian in that crowd. You didn’t choose to get involved. You do idolize the Hamas fighters, although you probably would have had no qualms about accepting Israeli aid yourself, if you could do so safely. Now you are cracking the bones of an unarmed, bleeding man on the ground. You probably have his blood on your clothes. You are told you are doing the righteous thing a Muslim should do. Do you feel dirty? Yes. Are you implicated? Yes. Do you think you are moral? It doesn’t really matter.
^ women mourning the death of Kim Il-Sung. Did they know him? Are they grieving because they are watched? Are they grieving because in their society it is the righteous thing to do? At which point is it a religious experience, like pilgrims weeping under the statue of the Madonna?
The core point I’m trying to get across is that there are no limits.
People thinking of organized crime in otherwise law-abiding societies may have this vague idea that “mobsters leave you alone if you pay the protection money and don’t get involved.” In places like modern South Italy, this is generally true. Mobsters have to observe a kind of (loose) contract of “if you don’t mess with us and give us our cut, we will let you get on with your lives.”
Groups like Hamas don’t have that. Jihadi organizations work by putting the fear of God (literally) into the wider society, and eliminating entire family lines who show hints of disloyalty with extreme prejudice. You are not meant to merely tolerate them; you must be an enthusiastic believer. Their webs of patronage have a stranglehold on the vital nodes of society, which they use not to support it but to prevent it from ever getting away.
What are the alternatives…?
Any talk of alternatives cannot be comprehensive, but I will attempt to say things that will enrich the reader’s understanding of the area.
Military Rule
Most Arab regimes deal with jihadism by collective, overwhelming force. The problem with this is it doesn’t really create the kind of society that responds to anything other than force. Let me give a simple, modern example:
The Sudan is currently facing a brutal civil war between the military regime of al-Burhan, and the primarily Bedouin militias of Hemeti, the so-called RSF. The RSF were the forces who committed the Fur genocide in recent years on behalf of Burhan’s predecessor, and are known for their extremely brutal treatment of submitted populations. They’re not jihadists (most bona fide jihadists are with Burhan), but close enough for government work.
Anyone with common sense wouldn’t support the RSF, upjumped bandits with a long career of ethnic cleansing, “murdering all the men and raping all the women”. The military of the regime is, despite its serious problems, basically people doing their jobs.
And yet, historically, the RSF was simply the part of the armed forces tasked with doing the ugly stuff regular soldiers might balk at. Al-Burhan himself gave the orders for the RSF to destroy the democratic government; he’s only fighting them now because Hemeti became too ambitious. Historically, the military regime Burhan represents was exactly the establishment that created the RSF to genocide minority areas and raid their own country’s periphery.
People know this, but Burhan has the guns and a monster to point to—”them or me?”—after using the same monster he’s now fighting to eliminate the democratic opposition. Which makes him a bulwark of stability, but the kind of regime he represents created the problem he’s fighting.
Sudan is in some ways an atypical case in that Burhan’s coalition includes the Islamists, but in essence it’s the pattern you will see around the Arab world. Islamists and the secular militaries fighting them suckle from the same teat.
Tribal Eldership
^ a joint gathering of Arab and Kurdish tribal elders in Hasakah, Syriah, in Sep. 2023, who acting as local leaders of the SDF, dismissed Abu Khawla, the SDF’s military commander in Deir-ez-Zor, for growing “too familiar” with ISIL and its trafficking operations. [npasyria@com/en/103824/]
Generally, tribal institutions play a fairly benevolent and stabilizing role, where they are allowed a say. The degree to which the West Bank Palestinians have not slipped into Muslim Brotherhood networks is in large part because the PLO relies on clans to corral their young men and not let them be poached into Hamas, PIJ, and copycat groups (often built around football teams… sports are jihadists’ prime recruiting pool, as are hooligans for neo-Nazis. President Erdogan of Turkey was a football coach before he went into politics, wink-wink).
Older family men over forty, while not necessarily social visionaries, are generally sane enough to realize the jihadists’ modus operandi of setting their own country on fire, riding on cars, stealing women and waving guns while hoping for an apocalyptic war is not ideal.
The problem is that tribes are weak and, by nature, look to their physical security over fixing anything. Extended families are fundamentally “un-militarized”: in a society like Gaza, where as I have pointed out there are no limits of decency or stability which jihadists will not break to force people to comply, it is difficult for resisting families to organize against them.
Israeli democracy
Israeli Arabs (2.1 million inclusive of Christians and Druze; 21% of Israel population, of which Muslims are 1.8 million or 18%) are a demographic anomaly in the modern Middle East in a specific way people mostly don’t talk about.
Israel is the only country in the former Ottoman empire in which the Ottoman demographic balance of Christians to Muslims within the Arabic-speaking population itself has been preserved; Christians are a stable 7% of the Israeli Arab population in 2025, virtually the same they were in 1946 (<8%). By comparison, in the historically Arab-controlled West Bank, the Christian population is down to almost nothing (~ 1%), even though the West Bank hosts the Christian Holy Places and had a larger Christian population (>10%) in Ottoman times.
Christians aren’t any more “breedy” in Israel than they are elsewhere, so it’s not a question of fertility rate. Everywhere else, the Christian population has been under constant, everyday pressure from terror attacks and massacres, coming in waves as the Muslim majority gets angry over this or that.
I think this is worth comparing to the (ill-calibrated) Hamas claims that, if they murder some Jews in sporadic attacks, the Jews will just leave because they can’t live with the daily stress of Muslim violence. This is just the general doctrine adopted by the jihadi networks to apply pressure to minorities in claimed “Muslim countries”: as, generation after generation, the Copts in Egypt or the Maronites in Lebanon see their children murdered in the streets and the government does nothing to stop it, they have incentive to emigrate to the West or to Russia. Which they do little by little, rapidly shrinking their demographic footprint in Egypt and Lebanon (in Lebanon, only after the 1970s civil war).
Israeli Christians don’t exhibit this phenomenon for the same reason Israeli Jews don’t: simply put, they live in a state with a zero-tolerance policy for terror attacks, that actively hunts down terrorists when attacks do happen (in Egypt or Lebanon, it’s more like “don’t make the terrorists angry… let them have their way a little, OK?”).
The problem this model has for Gaza, of course, is two-fold:
Israeli Muslims are a minority among much larger populations, and controllable in a way the compact two million in Gaza simply aren’t.
Israel received its Muslims much earlier, when they were culturally closer to the relatively sane and balanced Ottoman peasantry, instead of the strange mix the Islamic world has become in the age of pan-Arabism and global jihad.
Israel is a functioning democracy with Muslims in it; it is not a Muslim-run democracy.
Arab democracy
Tunisia—a N. African country of 12 million—was, arguably, the biggest hope the Arab Spring would produce a functioning republic. It was (and I’d say remains) maybe the most secular and tolerant society in the Arab world.
The problem was, it didn’t happen. Although the former dictator left without bloodshed, the local wing of the Muslim Brotherhood—Ennahda, also influenced by the Iranian brand of theocracy—started having its way by publicly assassinating prominent members of the left-wing opposition to terrorize its enemies, and having its mass of supporters loudly shout down any opposition with the threat of violence. The country was on the cusp of Islamic government when the secular lawyer acting as president, Kais Saied, suspended parliament and has ruled in a state of emergency since 2019.
The situation in Tunisia affords a good look at the failure of international Western institutions to support democracy in the Muslim world. A brief search on Google right now brings out all the HRW and UN-adjacent places tut-tut-tutting Kais Saied for “suspending the democratic process” against the “largest party”.
The first Google result to bring up meaningful commentary is a glorified-social-media post on Medium by a Tunisian journalist that says the obvious—quoting some of the words he uses—“…the ‘Islamic way’… mosques became platforms for spreading ideological narratives … terrorist attack … the Islamic party’s militants … assassination of opposition figures… decades of fear and frustration…” [medium@com/@karim2k/ennahda-the-root-cause-of-tunisias-misery-and-the-rise-of-fear-that-shaped-kais-saied-64e18cc0906e]
These keywords literally don’t appear in any of the UN, HRW, etc. official articles and institutional explanations written by career bureaucrats that I can find on Google. It’s hard not to draw the links with the consistent blind eye turned to Hamas. And like in Israel, this nonsense is used to justify sanctions against Tunisia’s current government for being “undemocratic.”
…what alternatives do Palestinians have?
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage... If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.
—the Buddha as quoted in the Pali Canon, Yammakavagga 1.1–20
I have said it before and I’ll say it again: the Palestinian nationalist and “pro-Palestinian” movements abroad have utterly failed the people they’re supposed to represent, by becoming willing stooges of Islamic totalitarianism. You can’t have a healthy political space without meaningful commitment to democracy.
Why this is so is an open question and ultimately irrelevant. The Buddha said, “a man has been shot with a poisoned arrow and is suffering. Does he stop to consider what kind of bow he was shot with? If the arrow shaft is oak or oleander, and if it is tipped with a sharp point of iron or bone?”
No, he has the arrow pulled out to save his life.
The core issue—the submission to Islamic authoritarianism—can be pulled out if people involved in the issue are willing. People outside the WB and Gaza have the resources and education to form a democratic discourse that would render Hamas and Fatah irrelevant, and more than that push the Palestinian national discourse away from the yoke of ultra-conservatism.
To the degree this isn’t even a real commitment for anybody—even an Arab-American academic like Edward Said accepted an honorary seat in the governing council of the PLO—nothing will be done. You can’t be talking of Palestinians in Gaza seeking alternatives to Hamas when Palestinians in New York write apologia for it.