The Hard Truth

Hamas is playing a dangerous game with Gazan lives – The Washington Post.

The hard truth is: yes. Just like the Assad regime in Syria, and Arab leaders in general, the calculus of Hamas leaders when it comes to the conduct of war and peace is rather different than what we are publicly told. Their ultimate mandate is not to protect their civilian population and build the state, but to protect their rule and increase their power, even at the cost of incurring heavy civilian casualties and destroying the state. If they can still retain control at the end, that’s victory enough for them.

Just consider the recent report by UNRWA on the use of its UN chartered schools in Gaza to hide some of Hamas’ Iran-supplied rockets, knowing fully well that Israel would not hesitate to target such civilian structures. 

Just as the Assad regime uses the claims of seeking to protect confessional minorities and safeguard the secular character of the state to justify its brutality and total disregard for the basic rights of all Syrians, including those it is purportedly trying to protect, so does Hamas use Palestinian civilians, their homes and their institutions, to hide their utterly useless “assets.” 

Indeed, in the minds of our self-appointed rulers, we are nothing but fodder – fodder for their wars, mundane and holy, for their peace, which in practice amounts to nothing more than a quiet and less publicized war, for their greed, always as unquenchable as their arid souls, for their ideologies, forever empty and stale, and for their sense of manhood, perennially battered and subdued. They speak of the liberation of the Land of Milk and Honey, but their real aspiration is to transform their countries into a Land of MILFs and Bunnies to act as their private harems and serve as ultimate proofs of their sick virility. That’s why their rule has always been nothing but a continuous act of wanton rape. 

Isn’t it about time we acknowledged that? After all, acknowledging the truth about our leaders does not constitute a defense of Israel. We are simply caught between a rock and a hard place. We have long seen and spoken of the rock, it’s about time we saw and acknowledged the existence of that hard place, that terrible place from which the demons that keep stabbing us in the back as we try to build a decent life for ourselves and our children continue to surface.