“Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah, as progressive, left-wing social movements, and part of a global left, is extremely important.” “Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the violation of their rights for nationalist, religious or sectarian reasons.” Same ideas, same authors? Not quite since the first is by Judith Butler, woke philosopher author of Gender troublewhile the second comes… from Hamas.
At the end of January, a document entitled “our narrative [sur] Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” was broadcast by the Hamas press office. It defends, in essence, the legitimacy of the October 7 attack which left 1,200 dead in Israel. To the point of daring to assert, at contempt for reality, that “if” civilians were targeted, it happened “accidentally”, because not harming civilians, women and children is a “religious and moral obligation”.
The booklet, sixteen pages long, is full of statements of the same style. Just as we have heard from certain Western activists that the October 7 attack was an act of “resistance”, Hamas justifies a “defensive act” having targeted Israeli “military” sites within the framework of of “the fight against the Israeli occupation”. “Has a nation been liberated from occupation without struggle, resistance or sacrifice?” also questions the group, in the same spirit as the Students for Justice in Palestine association at George Washington University, for which “decolonization is not a metaphor”. And Hamas calls, for its part, to “maintain popular pressure” and a “global boycott of the Israeli occupation and those who support it” – as do, again in the West, certain activists calling to boycott Israel and everything that contributes to its economy.
This disturbing resemblance owes nothing to chance. “Hamas is attentive to what is being said in the West since the attack on October 7. In the success of the slogans ‘from the river to the sea’ in American universities in particular and the speeches of certain NGOs or left-wing associations ‘decolonialists’, the group sees an opportunity to rebuild its image in the West,” explains Gabriel Weimann, professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel and author of a book titled Terrorism in Cyberspace.
Foot calls
Every communications professional knows: to convey a message to a specific audience, nothing is more effective than adopting their “codes”. Codes that Hamas knows, in reality, very well. The majority of its founders have completed higher education. The current No. 2, Moussa Abou Marzouk, obtained, for his part, a master’s degree from the University of Colorado and a Phd [doctorat] in Industrial Engineering from Louisiana Tech University. “Not to mention that the group works with opinion specialists, and in any case has relays, such as the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera, capable of surveying public opinion. Hamas knows that it has every interest in “address the left-wing fringe of Western opinion, part of which is favorable to it”, adds Palestinian political analyst Khalil Sayegh.
The document thus multiplies the appeals to those who “defend freedom, justice and human dignity”, to “free peoples of the whole world of all religions, ethnicities and origins, who gather in all the capitals and cities of the world to express their rejection of Israeli crimes and massacres and to demonstrate their support for the rights of the Palestinian people and their just cause.”
“Those who are already convinced of the merits of Hamas’ action are not the main target of this document, specifies Gabriel Weimann. They have already chosen that “decolonization” and “resistance” take precedence over everything else, even if it means dealing with the paradoxes that this implies, for example in terms of racism or respect for minorities.” The priority target of the message would be what the specialist describes as the “silent majority”, those who have no clear-cut opinion, little or poorly informed, and whose opinion depends greatly on the resonance that the arguments put forward in the document can have with it. The professor thus describes “an anti-violence, inclusive and victimizing rhetoric, surfing on the natural empathy towards the Palestinian people to present himself as their savior. Miles from the one he intends, on his Telegram channels, to its Israeli audience to instill fear, or to its Arab audience.
To justify the assertion that it would be in conflict with the “Zionist project” and not “the Jews”, the group claims, for example, to have “clearly marked [son] rejection of what the Jews were confronted with by Nazi Germany”. A sort of Godwin point, which consists of disqualifying the opponent’s argument (here, accusations of anti-Semitism) by mentioning Hitler or Nazism. Always in a compassionate register, the group does not hesitate to summon the Al-Jazeera news channel, which “declared in a documentary that in one month of Israeli aggression on Gaza, the daily average of Palestinian children killed in Gaza was 136, while the average number of children killed in Ukraine – during the Russo-Ukrainian war – was one per day.
Hamas, in its attempt at normalization with the West, even goes so far as to devote an entire chapter to the demand for a transparent international investigation into the “crimes committed by Israel in occupied Palestine.” However, as Khalil Sayegh points out, “Hamas has always marked its rejection of international law and related institutions.”
“This document is fantastic”
Obviously, these arrangements with reality do not seem prohibitive. On his Twitter account, the American lawyer and professor specializing in human rights Dan Kovalik published a video upon the release of the document in which he summarized the content of the text which, according to him, “receives, of course, no attention in the mainstream Western press. Among the elements that caught the professor’s attention, “Hamas makes it clear that its problem is the Israeli occupation […] and not the Jewish people”. The proof: “They recognize the existence and the terrible nature of the Holocaust”. Dan Kovalik again cites Hamas’s denials concerning the rapes, the targeted civilians, and the demand for an international investigation. “This is a very important document, which must be examined and taken into account, which allows us to paint a more complete picture of October 7 and what we are currently seeing in Gaza,” he concludes .
“Hamas has always had its eyes on the West”
Some go further. TikTok this time. “Personally, I think the document is fantastic. In a very direct, rigorous and accessible way, they lay out a lot of what many of us said about October 7. Their targets were primarily military personnel […] they reference sources we’ve all used, like Mondoweiss and Al-Jazeera, as well as other articles in Western media that debunk the 40 babies myth [il mime un égorgement]says at a frantic pace Paul Nabil, an American-Syrian influencer in a video posted on his TikTok account (105,000 subscribers), which is no longer available. He concludes that “it has nothing to do with being against Jews, religion, race or ethnicity, but rather it is about resistance to occupation by the ‘entity [sioniste].”
Long-standing strategy
This document is just the tip of the iceberg. “This is a recent development, in the context of the resurgence of the conflict [israélo-palestinien] since October 7, but Hamas has always had its eyes focused on the West”, explains Khalil Sayegh. An interview, published in 2021 by the media Vice, recently resurfaced on social networks. Facing the camera, Yahya Sinwar, one of the heads of the Hamas political bureau, was already banking on the Western frame of reference, arguing that “the same type of racism that killed George Floyd is used [par Israël] against the Palestinians”. The group already lent itself to the exercise thirty years ago, as shown analysis published by George Washington University in October, produced by Lorenzo Vidino and entitled “The Hamas Network in America: A Short History”.
October 1993, in Philadelphia, a few weeks after the signing of the Oslo Accords. The FBI wiretapped a hotel room where several senior Hamas officials, some of whom were based in the United States, were gathered. The debates focus in particular on how to generate support for Hamas among American Muslims, but not only. “[Il s’agit de] deceive, camouflage, pretend that you are leaving while you are walking in that direction” or even “let’s not raise a big Islamic flag and let’s not make a barbaric speech”, suggests one of them. But is it still necessary for Hamas to hide its agenda, at a time when some are knowingly normalizing the violence of October 7?
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