Forever the victim: Even if Hamas is defeated, Palestinians will blame external powers – comment

The anti-Israel response to the IDF rescue of four hostages on Saturday suggests that haters of Israel will learn nothing from the eventual defeat of Hamas in Gaza. It seems they will engage in conspiracy theories and victimhood narratives rather than advocating for peace with the Jewish State.

The end goal for anti-Israel factions has long been the abolition of the Israeli state and the establishment of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.” Despite the failure of Arab legions to destroy Israel over the past 75 years, mainstream anti-Israel contingents have never faltered from this ultimate goal, be it expressed through the veneer of a demand for a Palestinian right of return or the framing of complete “decolonization.”

While protesters post-October 7 have called for an immediate “permanent ceasefire” in Gaza, they do not use the word peace, explaining through common chants that there is “no peace on stolen land,” and “we don’t want two-state, we want 48.”

The blame game

The unfettered pursuit of Israel’s elimination is informed by intricate conspiracy theories to explain the failure of the tired armed approach. Usually, anti-Israel activists blame outside powers for interfering in wars and conflicts. Thus, if Israel hadn’t been helped by Britain, the French, or the Americans, surely Israel would have been defeated in all the previous wars.

Each time, victory had been within reach, yet stolen away.

These theories about how Palestinians and Arab actors were cheated out of victory are coupled with narratives of victimhood to not only explain yet another defeat, but to justify the righteous fury that fuels the desire for nothing less than maximal demands. Poor, unorganized, Arabs who welcomed Jews as guests were unable to defend themselves against proto-Israelis armed by the British. In 1967, Israelis only won the Six-Day War because they were flying French jets and caught Egypt by surprise.

Foreign intervention

THE CAPTURE of Israelis as hostages has represented one of the greatest victories of the anti-Israel movement in years. Yet, an Israeli military success in the rescue of four hostages cannot be explained or accepted in the framework of a pending Hamas victory. According to the anti-Israel narrative, the IDF is composed of poorly trained killers who are only good at shooting unarmed children. Once again, the only explanation for Hamas’s failure is foreign intervention.

Soon after the rescue of Shlomi Ziv, Andrey Kozlov, Almog Meir Jan, and Noa Argamani, Palestinian and anti-Israel pundits began to spread the theory not only that US special forces had aided in the operation, but the American humanitarian pier was used as a launching pad for the military forces. Once again, Western actors have deceived Arab peoples, this time by promising aid deliveries through the floating pier, only to use it to steal their prizes.

THE UNFAIRNESS of this underhanded move is reinforced by claims that the IDF and US special forces conducted a massacre, slaughtering more than 270 Gazans and injuring 400 more – which is supposed to be taken as fact despite the refutation of other such massacres.

The IDF’s brutal success not only took the lives of dozens of Palestinians, but, according to Hamas, more hostages were supposedly killed in the operation than rescued. To further cement the unfairness and victim narrative, anti-Israel activists claimed that the hostages were IDF soldiers, terrorists, and Nazis, making them legitimate prisoners of war.

Anti-Israel actors like UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, who had referenced the involvement of foreign troops, sowed a story in which Israel in its unfairness could have played according to Hamas’s rules and secured the freedom of more hostages through a ceasefire deal – but preferred to engage in mass murder instead.

The narratives produced by pro-Palestinian activists in the wake of the Nuseirat hostage rescue indicate that despite the massive material and human cost of the war started by Hamas, the war as a whole will also be seen as a Hamas victory stolen by foreign powers who preyed on Palestinian vulnerability.

A near victory

In 2023 and 2024 anti-Israel activists believed that victory against Israel had never been closer. In the hours after the October 7 massacre, anti-Israel activists took to social media to proclaim that the attack would be celebrated as a future Palestinian national holiday, signifying the supposed weakness and crumbling of Zionism.

At the May 24 Detroit People’s Conference for Palestine, speakers bragged how Hamas was supposedly humiliating the IDF on the battlefield, transforming Gaza into “the graveyard of the Merkava tank, the Namer troop carrier, the D9 bulldozer, and the occupation.” The infamous chant “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” has been regularly altered to “from the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free.”

WHEN HAMAS loses the war, and the full cost of the war is appreciated, anti-Israel activists will once again explain the discrepancy between their propaganda and the loss on the battlefield by appealing to the tired theory of foreigners rigging the outcome. Since the beginning of the war, anti-Israel operatives in the West have laser-focused on the complicity of the US and other countries by arming Israel.

They have pushed for arms embargoes and boycotts because they believe that if they disconnect the US from Israel, then Palestinians will finally be able to achieve the victory that has been repeatedly stolen from them. The Israeli war machine being unable to conduct its campaign without US support has been a regular refrain at protests and in speeches at the Detroit conference. Israel is an illegitimate, settler-colonial state, therefore its people couldn’t possibly have the will to match Hamas freedom fighters without US aid.

Everyone and everything but Palestinian intransigence will be to blame for the inevitable defeat of Hamas. Lost in stories of foreign powers or Israeli brutality taking advantage of Palestinian vulnerability, there will be no reflection on how Hamas shouldn’t have slaughtered and raped its way through southern Israel, or shouldn’t have taken hostages, or ignored the opportunity available every day for eight months to surrender and release its captives.

The path of compromise, of peace, of accepting that there is no Palestinian future in which Israel does not exist alongside them, will never be considered, nor will be the consequences to be found on the path of violence be considered. Their suffering in the wake of a war Hamas began is not a consequence of its action, but one more bout of unfair victimization inflicted on them by Israel and the US – and so they will continue to endure them.

Hamas supporters will forever hold onto the fleeting moment of October 7, and, as always, promise themselves that next time victory will be theirs, if only it wasn’t for those meddling kids in the White House.

JPost