When I was 11, Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, arrived unannounced at the mosque next to my family’s home in Gaza City. It was 2001 and the Islamist terrorist group, which had not yet taken control of Gaza, had turned the el-Yarmouk mosque into a base for proselytizing and propaganda.
My friends and I gathered around as Sheikh Yassin chatted with us about our neighborhood, families and studies, almost as if he were the village elder. Once he went into the mosque, his guards showed off their weapons and boasted to us that Hamas was akin to an exclusive club for the valiant “resistance.” It required obedience to one’s family, religious piety, academic excellence, a spotless reputation and useful skills and talents.
It was a message I heard many times from leaders and members of Hamas: It wanted the best of the Palestinian people to build the foundations for a Palestinian resistance motivated by fundamentalist Islam, with Israel’s annihilation leading to a single nation from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea.
Hamas was driving us to bloodshed as even the Palestinian leadership, under the Palestine Liberation Organization, had decided that armed resistance was futile and had begun building the foundations of a Palestinian state that I saw as a child.
Our family flew on the newly established Palestinian Airlines into the newly created Gaza International Airport, using bright new Palestinian passports. There were Palestinian telecommunication companies, an industrial zone, a newly discovered gas field, the start of a seaport, new infrastructure and a growing financial sector, all hallmarks of a march toward statehood that the Oslo Peace Process, however flawed, had ushered in. Gaza, despite its complicated history, was a beautiful place that meant so much to my family — and it seemed that it was about to get even more promising.
But it was not to be. Four years after I met Sheikh Yassin, Israel pulled all its troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip. Two years later, in 2007, Hamas seized power after winning the first and last free and competitive Palestinian legislative elections the prior year.
Despite its posturing as an elite club, Hamas, from its inception, behaved like a mob of gangsters, brutalizing Palestinian women who violated its fanatic sense of morality, torturing and killing those who were suspected of opposing them and carrying out grisly suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, which weakened the Palestinian Authority and empowered the extremist right in Israel, which seized the opportunity to destroy hopes of a new Palestinian horizon or future.
Now, in the ruins of my once beautiful homeland, we are witnessing the coda of the group’s two decades of horrific rule. By agreeing in principle to a disarmament plan after its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and slaughter of hundreds of civilians led to over two years of Israeli bombardment that killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including much of my family, Hamas is acknowledging what Palestinian leadership knew 30 years ago: that only peace could lead to freedom and armed struggle was a disastrous strategy.
Hamas should have no role in Gaza’s future but, appallingly, so many in the West who consider themselves allies of the Palestinian people still see the group as honorable resistance fighters. Their support for, or failure to denounce, the group only helps perpetuate the degradation of Gaza.
I left the Gaza Strip one month before the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 for a State Department-sponsored high school exchange program in California. Yet as I was about to return in June 2006, Hamas attacked Israel and abducted an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, causing Israel to tighten its restrictions on the movement of people and cargo in and out of Gaza, which have intensified ever since. The closing of Gaza’s borders after the abduction forced me to return to the United States. With Hamas having expressed suspicion of my participation in a U.S. government program, I pursued political asylum.
U.S. officials interviewed me on June 14, 2007, the very day that Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip and ejected the Palestinian Authority, beginning a bloody tenure that set the stage for the Oct. 7 massacre and the destruction of Gaza.
Hamas created a secret police and implemented a terrifying Stasi-style regime of torture and brutality in the strip. Hamas severed Gaza from the West Bank and built a rogue territory sustained by illicit activity, Iranian smuggling, predatory taxation and the theft of humanitarian and development aid that ballooned after its takeover, because it had no interest in governing responsibly or providing for its people.
Hamas turned Gaza into a cautionary tale for Israel of what might happen under Palestinian self-governance. Revulsion at the group’s rockets, tunnels, smuggling and violence empowered Israel’s far right, which used Hamas’s actions to excuse their attack on the two-state solution.
Repeated wars killed thousands of Palestinians and wounded or displaced hundreds of thousands, locking Gaza into a cycle of destruction, reconstruction, resource theft and deeper Hamas entrenchment. Billions of dollars were wasted and the development that I saw emerging as a child was arrested.
This alone should have delegitimized Hamas among Western activists, academics, students, journalists, protesters, politicians and those who claim to be pro-Palestinian. Yet after Hamas carried out the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, triggering the worst catastrophe in modern Palestinian history, I watched with dismay and anger as activists, students, academics, politicians and writers expressed a chilling appreciation for the massacre.
At a rally the day after the Hamas attack, organized and attended by people who became key supporters of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the “resistance” and “Intifada” were cheered. A day later, student groups announced that they stood “in full solidarity with Palestinian resistance” and that they hold “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Activists began referring to the Oct. 7 massacre by what Hamas called it, the Al-Aqsa Flood. The influential leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned for Mayor Mamdani, the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats, has normalized Hamas and praised other terrorist groups, even while he coyly denied supporting terror.
The resistance narrative became a matter of solidarity with social justice groups and marginalized communities, with Hamas as a symbol of liberation. As a result, a poll in April found that 40 percent or more of Americans between 18 and 34 said they supported Hamas over Israel.
When, in conversations, I urged activists, protesters and university students to pair cease-fire demands with calls for Hamas to release Israeli hostages, I was told this centered Zionist narratives. When I would beg them to pressure Hamas to surrender for Gaza’s sake, I was insulted and told resistance would continue indefinitely regardless of the cost.
While many play verbal gymnastics to mask support for Hamas, or resist calls to denounce them, the rhetoric makes that support clear. Efforts by university administrators, the media or members of the public to push back against this devolution by pro-Palestinian activists were met with cries of censorship. Despite this obfuscation, the boundary between solidarity with the Palestinian people and endorsement of their Palestinian oppressors dissolved.
As the horrors continued, the people of Gaza made it clearer, despite repression from Hamas, that they were disgusted with the group and wanted it out. There were several rounds of anti-Hamas protests during the war calling for the group to stop the disaster it began, to leave Gaza and release the hostages. Opposition to Hamas’s torture, extremism and failed governance has been strong and present for years. There were mass protests against the group in 2023 before Oct. 7, and in 2019 and 2017, sometimes under the banner of “We want to live.” Hamas brutally suppressed those demonstrations.
The people of Gaza clearly did not matter to those claiming to champion Palestinian lives. Two months ago, 44 percent of American Muslims surveyed by Pew Research said they had a favorable view of Hamas, a number I believe understates the true level of support among Arab and Muslim diaspora communities. I cannot enter a mainstream Arab, Muslim or Palestinian American space and critique Hamas meaningfully without facing backlash or outright hostility.
Hamas is now facing a humiliating defeat. Despite Israeli rejection of the initial phased disarmament framework, Hamas acquiesced to the Board of Peace’s demands. All the devastation was for nothing. Large segments of the pro-Palestinian community and Western left bet on a losing horse and embraced a rotten resistance narrative now invalidated by Hamas itself.
The last thing Palestinians need is more denial from the left. The Palestinian national project has a rare chance to evolve toward nation-building, peace and coexistence alongside a Jewish Israel that is not about to be exterminated. Chants of “from the river to sea” and the like are destructive conceits.
Gaza has no future as long as Hamas holds two million Palestinians hostage to its nihilistic agenda.
The sentiments of those who resist the group are consistent: Hamas plunged Gaza and its people into an abyss that will require generations to rise from.
Gaza is propped up by an unsustainable mix of U.N. agencies, sprawling nongovernmental organizations, a merchant-run private sector and the remnants of Hamas’s administrative and security networks. A transition can begin only if Hamas implements the disarmament plan it has already accepted in principle, without waiting for Israel to accede, and signals genuine willingness to relinquish control of the strip. Dismantling the terror infrastructure Hamas built over two decades, with billions of dollars, will be difficult, but this war must be Gaza’s last.
Unfortunately, nearly a year has passed without the necessary training of a new Gaza police force that, paired with an international security mission, would be essential to implementing disarmament and maintaining order. The technocratic committee of Palestinian professionals and nonpartisans that the Board of Peace set up after last October’s cease-fire to guide the transition to permanent governance — an excellent idea — has not been empowered to assume responsibilities.
In the next decade, Gaza should become the pride of the Palestinian people and the crown jewel of Palestinian national identity. Gaza must become a model of effective Palestinian self-governance, strengthening confidence among allies and Israel that Palestinian aspirations center on freedom and prosperity, rather than Israel’s destruction.
To achieve this, Gaza needs to be reimagined so it is no longer sustained by an NGO complex or a refugee framework. Gaza will need deep deradicalization across schools, mosques, media and public language to cultivate and produce builders and creators.
Once security issues are credibly addressed and Gaza is placed on a new path, Israel would no longer have the justification it has used for decades to restrict the free movement of people and trade and to treat Gaza as an occupied nation. U.S. and international pressure could push Israel to change its approach to Gaza.
A Palestinian miracle on the Mediterranean is within reach if Gaza rejects Islamism, Jihadism, Hamas and stale nationalist notions, all of which have left it devastated.
Will those in the West who express support for Palestinians finally abandon their sloganeering about “resistance”? Effective pro-Palestinian advocacy can speak out against Israeli actions without the futile pursuit of Israel’s destruction.
Some people want to make a point; others want to make a difference. The path forward demands the latter.
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