The Less Than Compelling “Hamas Wasn’t Elected Because of the Whole Palestinians Hate Jews Thing” Argument

Through AK Sommer, we find the latest iteration of the “no need to worry – Hamas wasn’t elected because they’re terrorists” argument. The motives of those who make this argument would be suspicious under any circumstances: why, given the choice between erring toward or against advocating a climate in which Israel is safe taking risks for peace, would one take a political position in favor of concessions just right now? Such suspicions are aggravated because the arguments for why the Hamas victory was anything but a result of Palestinian support for terrorism are just so bad. It’s not a matter of weighing evidence on both sides – it’s a matter of outright ignoring counter-arguments that don’t have rejoinders.

This “everything is ok” meme has been made in two ways. One way, tried out by centrists very early, is that Hamas won not because of popular support but because of electoral complications. That argument was mostly abandoned when the results came back and demonstrated that Hamas had actually won a plurality of national votes. The other way, linked to above, is that Hamas won because people were lodging a protest vote against Fatah incompetence.

Now, it’s impossible to know with complete certainty what’s in another person’s mind – which is why analysts are so much safer making up Palestinian motives than asserting that Hamas didn’t “actually” win the election. But there are two ways of guessing about other people’s motives – we can either make reasonable assumptions or we can just go ahead and ask them. Regarding what’s reasonable – if there’s one thing we know about Hamas’s public image, it’s that they stand for the eradication of Israel through genocidal violence. It’s in their charter, it’s in their speeches – it is their public persona. To imagine that a Palestinian voter wouldn’t have that image in the forefront of his mind strains credulity.

And when pollsters just out-right ask Palestinians what they think of violent confrontation, they get the same answer: an overwhelmingly number of Palestinians support violence – as if we needed polls to tell us that about a society in which people are not afraid of censure when they dress up their 2 year olds as suicide bombers.

So you have a party that stands for terrorism and a population that supports terrorism – and yet for some analysts it seems more reasonable that Hamas was elected for something having nothing to do with terrorism. It’s not unfair to ask what would drive people to ignore the most readily available and seemingly obvious explanation in search of deeper, contrary motivations. Why jump through the mental hoops necessary to believe that Hamas was elected for any reason other than their support for violence? To do so requires ignoring a lot of evidence on one side and making some very tenuous claims on the other side – and so it’s fair to ask what someone thinks they’re going to accomplish by going through all that work.

Incidentally, Jerusalem is administered by Israel and has plenty of schools and hospitals. And yet the Arabs there also overwhelmingly voted for Hamas. But maybe, if we all try really hard, we can find a way to convince ourselves that the Palestinian public favors peace or that Hamas will moderate – even though the Palestinian public actually favors violence, and even though Hamas rode that platform successfully to victory.