How liberal Zionists spread the “Israel created Hamas” narrative, & used it to undermine the pro-Palestine movement

This is from a book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why the Pro-Palestine Movement Failed to Stop a Holocaust, & How it Can Still Win.”

Whenever somebody who purports to be pro-Palestine takes part in demonizing the resistance, one of the most harmful things this does is help the Zionists in separating Gaza from the West Bank. When the occupier enclosed Gaza—and in turn created an outcome where one area of Palestine would become governed by a different leadership than the other—it aimed to kill the hope for a pro-Palestine united front. Essential to this project is the narrative that there are “good” and “bad” Palestinians, with the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority being the noble side and Gaza’s Hamas being the evil side.

The struggle against this narrative is something only those within the Palestinian community itself can properly carry out, because it’s a cultural debate that’s internal to this community. But every supporter of Palestine can and must combat the larger propaganda around this narrative, in which the forces that are actually resisting the occupation get portrayed as moral equivalents to the oppressors. (Or, more insidiously, as secret tools of the oppressors.)

For the “pro-Palestine, anti-Hamas” actors to effectively influence the movement, certain narratives have first needed to be normalized within left-wing and antiwar discourses. Narratives which depict the resistance as being a controlled opposition for the Netanyahu government, even if those promoting these ideas do so in a way that’s sympathetic to the concept of resistance.

What these arguments do is vilify the resistance as it actually exists, mourning how Palestine supposedly has no authentic forces fighting against the occupation. (Or, more honestly, mourning how Gaza is ruled by forces that want to fight the occupation rather than endlessly trying to compromise with the oppressor.) This narrative has overlap with the idea that “Israel” would be a progressive force which is willing to reach a two-state solution, if only the “extremist” Netanyahu government were replaced; this is because the “Israel created Hamas” narrative is a liberal Zionist argument, propagated in order to sell the idea that “Israel” will become good when Netanyahu is gone. We know it’s a liberal Zionist argument because some of the first people to make this argument—if not the very first people—were occupation officials who’ve positioned themselves as the level-headed progressives within Zionism.

When pro-Palestine commentators try to argue against the genocide’s rationale by depicting Hamas as a creation of “Israel,” someone they often cite is Avner Cohen, a former “Israeli” religious affairs official who directly participated in the colonial management of Gaza. The quote from Cohen that these commentators most commonly use is “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” and the source this statement comes from is a 2009 Wall Street Journal article; one that sought to proliferate a chauvinistic view towards the Palestinian resistance, and rationalize the Zionist aggressions the world had just witnessed.

Written right after the 2008 Zionist assault on Gaza, where over 1000 Palestinians were murdered and over 46,000 homes were destroyed, the article was trying to frame these events in a way that somewhat criticized “Israel” while still depicting Zionism as salvageable. With Netanyahu likely to become the next prime minister, it made sense to present Netanyahu’s faction as representing the “bad” kind of Zionism, the one that was to blame for bringing “extremists” to power in Gaza. That way, the U.S. could implicitly justify the recent war crimes against Gaza as necessary for combating these “extremist” Palestinian forces. Within this narrative, “Israel” had only been trying to clean up the mess made by the “bad” Zionists.

Wrote the Journal about Cohen’s lament over the rise of Hamas, and how this would have consequences for the occupation forces:

Responsible for religious affairs in the [Gaza] region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

The implication of this kind of language is that Hamas is an equivalent to Al Qaeda; that the occupier’s efforts to manage the rise of Hamas are analogous to Washington’s support for Bin Laden and the Mujahideen. This is the conclusion that leftists who know Al Qaeda’s history come to when they absorb these narratives about Hamas; but Hamas does not have the reactionary role of Al Qaeda or ISIS. Once you accept that premise, you’ve already conceded the argument; “Hamas is ISIS” is one of the Zionist entity’s biggest talking points, frequently used by Netanyahu himself. And that so much of the left has accepted this argument makes it all the more effective.

The creation of Hamas represented a genuinely revolutionary break from the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had taken a weak stance towards the occupation but ended up producing a real national liberation force. This force, Hamas, then entered a coalition with many different armed resistance factions that were not Islamist; for example, the communist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which participated in Al Aqsa Flood. This disproves the narrative that Hamas is an enemy of the left, as the empire’s propaganda has encouraged leftists to believe; to characterize Hamas as a reactionary Zionist tool is to oppose all of the leftists and communists who ally with it.

The only way you could coherently oppose Hamas is if you were coming at it from the anti-communist, anti-Palestinian, War on Terror worldview; which is obviously what the Journal was seeking to promote with this article, but if you’re a leftist the empire prefers that you still hate Hamas. The purpose of this kind of propaganda is not just to defend Zionism, but to manipulate the left in particular, keeping Palestine supporters hostile towards the resistance.

The Journal’s framing of the origins of Hamas has since been copied by much of the “progressive” or “alternative” media, because this is a framing that lets somebody oppose “Israel” and the resistance at the same time. It was certainly useful for Medhi Hasan, the ostensibly pro-Palestine pundit who’s been able to keep the legacy media’s favor by promoting key imperialist narratives.

Hasan is one of the figures most responsible for popularizing the “Israel created Hamas” argument in modern discourse, with Hasan having quoted Avner Cohen in a 2018 piece for The Intercept where this idea was the main message. When Hasan has promoted the “Assad gas attack” narratives, and advocated for voting Blue during the Biden administration’s facilitation of the Gaza genocide, his emphasis on this argument about Hamas makes perfect sense. It’s an argument that a pro-Palestinian commentator reaches for when they want to still be compatible with the imperialist media machine, so the most opportunistic and liberal types of “pro-Palestine” voices have gravitated towards it.

No matter how aggressively Mehdi Hasan denounces the genocide or debates against Zionists, his promotion of that framing enables those who seek to normalize the occupation, and to make Zionism appear compatible with a “free” Palestine. When Hasan endorses Democrats, this of course also has that effect; but the more effective psyop he propagates is the one about Hamas being a tool for “Israel,” because this is a psyop that’s successfully swayed many people who otherwise reject imperialist narratives.

It’s a common talking point within the more online elements of pro-Palestine discourse; and this isn’t just because it’s been boosted by our ruling class, but also because it has the appearance of being a profoundly radical argument. It seemingly blows apart the entire Zionist worldview, exposing the fraudulence of the idea that “Israel” is here to fight terrorism. But what happens when you affirm the narrative that those fighting against the occupation are “terrorists?” When you forsake a real analysis of anti-colonial resistance and national liberation, for the sake of trying to argue with the colonizers on their own terms?

What happens is that much of the pro-Palestine base stays disconnected from the actual, material power struggle that’s taking place. Which helps the NGO-tied, pro-normalization elements take control of the movement. Among these elements is J Street, the liberal Zionist Political Action Committee that backs Sanders and other social democrats. Though left-wing orgs in general are increasingly being targeted, J Street will stay part of the establishment; I personally expect it to gain a larger role in the Democratic Party as time goes on. This is because J Street acts as an instrumental vehicle for promoting the ideology of the Palestinian elites who collaborate with the occupier.

It’s an ideology that’s anti-communist, anti-Iran, aligned with the Syrian “revolution,” hostile towards the resistance, and in favor of normalization. Its adherents can wish for the genocide to end, but they’re fundamentally guided by beliefs which assist the Zionist project. And they receive support from the highest levels of the imperialist power structure.

One example of this is when the European Commission provided ample backing for the creation of the Two State Solution Coalition in April 2018. States the Geneva Accord website about what the Coalition and its partnered NGOs seek to do:

The Palestinian and Israeli Geneva Initiative NGOs (the Palestinian Peace Coalition and H.L. Education for Peace) educate and campaign, both locally and internationally, that it is in the best interest of both peoples to negotiate directly in order to reach a realistic, dignified, and sustainable two-state solution in which both peoples can build a brighter future, as is embodied in the model Geneva Accord model. The GI and our activities are designed to reinstill in the Israeli and Palestinian peoples the hope that it is possible to reach an agreement that will serve their respective national and personal interests and aspirations. We are committed to exposing each side’s public to the message of the other – despite the physical and psychological barriers.

The Palestinian Peace Coalition/Geneva Initiative has direct ties to J Street; in its 2024 Leadership and Friends Spring Assembly, J Street featured the PPC’s Director General Nidal Foqaha as one of the event’s speakers. According to the narrative that J Street-aligned politicians are pushing, the European Commission and these NGOs represent the “peaceful” alternative to the “extremist” path that Hamas and the resistance are on. But the irony is Hamas also takes the position that a two-state solution is what needs to happen; it just does so in a way that’s compatible with the true and full liberation of Palestine, unlike liberal Zionists do when they advocate for the two-state solution.

The “peaceful” side in this debate does not even offer a realistic path towards compromise, because in order to get that compromise, the resistance will need to win. The occupier rendered two states impractical when it seized key parts of Palestinian land, turning the West Bank into an archipelago of isolated Palestinian territories. Moreover, any version of a Palestinian state that the occupier willingly agrees to will be one where the Palestinians don’t have the ability to defend themselves, and therefore are not sovereign; that was the kind of “Palestinian state” the occupier proposed in the 1995 Oslo negotiations, which were the only time when there’s been any serious diplomatic breakthrough towards getting Palestine statehood.

For Palestine to gain a state, the occupier will need to be made weak enough that it can no longer hold the leverage to prevent that state from being established. Which requires that the resistance win.

Why has the resistance made a two-state solution its goal, when “from the river to the sea” is the only way that all Palestinians can ever become free from persecution? Because realistically, the Zionist entity won’t disappear all at once; there will need to be an incremental dismantling of the ethno-state. There will need to be a change in demographics, where enough of the colonizers leave for the Palestinians in “Israel” to no longer exist under the whims of a deeply supremacist-minded Jewish majority. With an empowered Palestine, one that’s come to have a state of its own, many of these supremacists will not stay in “Israel” in the long term; they’ll largely leave, like the settlers in Rhodesia did after the indigenous people subdued them.

The 20th century’s history of anti-colonial struggle provides Palestinians with the solution to their own land’s settler-colonial problem; this history shows that when an indigenous people have triumphed, a crucial percentage of the colonizers will go away of their own accord, rendering settler-colonialism untenable. That’s the logical outcome of what a two-state solution will produce when it’s actually put into practice: a scenario where the Palestinians can rebuild their civilizational strength, making colonizer society too crippled to carry on.

When liberal or “labor” Zionists say they want a two-state solution, they’re coming from a place where they seriously believe that “Israel” can be redeemed, and made into an equal society. That’s at least the rationale behind the “two-state solution” talking point when liberal Zionist spokespeople use it; functionally, it’s a way to funnel Palestine supporters into an endeavor that’s a dead end for their cause. Any version of “pro-Palestine” politics that opposes the resistance can only set back the project for liberation. All practical manifestations of this kind of politics are ones that have ruling class backing, and that seek not to help Palestinians fight the occupation but to have Palestinians appease it. This is what the EU-backed NGOs are doing when they work to “expose” Palestinians to messages from liberal Zionists.

This is not what the bulk of the pro-Palestine movement’s base wants. Among the majority of Americans who are against the genocide, there is a massive current that outright supports the resistance; an April 2024 Harvard CAPS-Harris survey found that among 18 to 24-year-olds, over 40 percent of respondents supported Hamas over “Israel,” and this proportion has no doubt grown since then. The mass will is there to build a united front in solidarity with the resistance. And such an organizational force can be built, but we will first need to navigate around the traps the NGOs have set for our movement.

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