Are ‘innocent Palestinians’ truly innocent?

It’s about time we wake up and realize: The Palestinians are not who we want them to be.

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How many times have we heard the words “innocent Palestinians” (or some variation of them) since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7th?

To me, it feels like so many people think Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations are just some random entity totally independent and disconnected from everyday Palestinians, who in turn have virtually nothing to do with these Palestinian terrorist organizations.

At the same time, I know that all Palestinians don’t buy what Hamas has been selling — but that’s not the point! The world doesn’t operate in “all or nothing” terms; it operates according to majorities (more than 50-percent) and minorities (less than 50-percent).

What if I told you that the majority of Palestinians have, for decades, subscribed to terrorist organizations as their leadership? (A 2021 poll found that 53-percent of all Palestinians, not just those who live in Gaza, believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.”)¹

And, what if I told you that these Palestinian terrorist organizations are only made possible with the generous (i.e. strategic) financial backing of state sponsors of Islamic terrorism, most recently Iran and Qatar, which use the Palestinians in conducting their own geopolitical business across the Middle East and North Africa?

Here’s another way of framing it for you: Not all, but many, Israelis smoke cigarettes, and enough of them smoke cigarettes to the point where it puts a strain on the national healthcare system, which ultimately affects all Israelis.

This is all to say that the Palestinians as we know them today are seriously endangering whatever goodheartedness exists within the Palestinian cause, as well as Israel and the Jewish People, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and all realistic solutions to it.

This doesn’t mean that Israel should indiscriminately kill civilians in the Palestinian territories, like Palestinian terrorists go about doing things. But if the majority of your people are a direct threat to my legal residence (I’ve lived in Israel since 2013), and if enough of your people are willing to commit or support those who commit utterly barbaric acts of terrorism against my legal residence, then no, you are not innocent. And yes, you are my enemy.

Along with the dozens of countries, United Nations agencies, humanitarian organizations, and philanthropists who have, for decades, funneled billions of dollars to the Gaza Strip. A lot of this money ended up in the hands of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations — making Hamas the third-wealthiest terrorist organization on the planet.

Yet none of these entities seemed to hold the Palestinians accountable for where all this money went, overlooking the horrific conditions that Hamas has created for the so-called “innocent Palestinians” in Gaza. Why, then, are these entities — and, as an extension, the general public — so suddenly caught up in the “innocent Palestinians” story?

Don’t these people know that the population of Gaza voted Hamas into power in 2006, and cheered its violent takeover over Gaza the following year?

Hamas, meanwhile, doesn’t return the favor. It uses (and loses) hundreds of Palestinian children each year digging its tunnels. In addition to taking a big cut of all the goods entering Gaza, Hamas limits their flow to keep the population angry and dependent. To make a point, Hamas blows up the pipes that bring fuel into Gaza and bombs the border crossings through which aid and aid workers pass.

Hamas also uses Palestinians as human shields all the time, not just in times of war. At parades and other political events, you’ll see Hamas’ so-called leaders constantly surrounded by kids, so no one can assassinate them. When Israel, for weeks at a time, warns “innocent Palestinians” to evacuate certain areas in Gaza, Hamas barricades them from leaving or, without the shadow of a doubt, threatens to kill them.

I can only imagine how Hamas terrorists manage these conversations: “If you try to leave this designated war zone, we’ll kill you, but if you stay with us as human shields here, the Jews might kill you — and at least you’ll become a martyr.”

Yet, despite all of the misery Hamas has inflicted on the population of Gaza, it has “remained exceedingly popular among the people,” according to Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “Unlike the corrupt and ‘collaborationist’ Palestinian Authority, Hamas championed the armed struggle against Israel and upheld Islamic law. It took care of the sick and the poor.”²

Meir Ben-Shabbat, a former Israeli National Security Adviser, emboldened this analysis, saying: “In any fair election, Hamas would win by a landslide.”³

With this in mind, Mahmoud Abbas (the president of the Palestinian Authority) is now in the eighteenth year of his four-year term.

But, with the onset of this war, and the devastation it is causing in Gaza, could the Hamas tide be turning?

Prior to the war, a poll conducted recently by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy showed that support for Hamas in Gaza had fallen to 57-percent. That’s right, more than half of Palestinians in Gaza still stand with Hamas. However, a Palestinian survey taken since the war’s outbreak determined that trust in Hamas had plummeted, with nearly 70-percent of Gazans expressing dissatisfaction with their government.

But even Hamas’ decline in popularity could not fully substantiate United States President Joe Biden’s claim that “the vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas.” Perhaps he was referring to the fact that, of the more than two million Gazans, only an estimated 150,000 were actual Hamas members. Then again, it’s quite possible the president and the polls are all fumbling the point — like the West has been doing in the Middle East for decades.

“It’s not what Hamas is,” according to Oren, “but rather what it does. Palestinians may well be disillusioned with Hamas governance, but they remain overwhelmingly approving of terror.”

To this point, the same Washington Institute poll indicated that three-quarters of Gazans support both the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (reportedly funded by Hamas) and the Lion’s Den (a much newer Palestinian terror squad borne out of the West Bank). And, in 2022, the esteemed Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found that 72-percent of Palestinians favored the formation of additional “armed groups” (i.e. terrorist organizations).

“Such statistics are reflexively ascribed to what the world views as Israel’s harsh occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza,” Oren said. “But Palestinian terror against Jews predates the creation of the state by nearly a century, claiming its first fatality, Shlomo Tzorif, killed by a sword-blow to the head in Jerusalem in 1851.”

“Major massacres of Jews took place in Hebron in 1929 and in the Etzion Bloc on the eve of Israel’s independence in 1948,” Oren added. “In both cases, the Palestinians mutilated their victims’ bodies. The same Israelis who consider “innocent Palestinians” oxymoronic would also regard “Palestinian terror” as redundant. Lod, Munich, Ma’alot, Kiryat Shmona, the Coast Road — the list of massacres is relentless.”

The Second Intifada alone claimed the lives of a thousand Israelis, and the suicide bombers of restaurants, buses, and a Passover seder were celebrated as martyrs by the Palestinian public. Israelis will never forget the Palestinians who, after lynching and dismembering two Israeli men who took a wrong turn in Ramallah, held up their gory hands to the cameras.

To add insult to injury, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority continue to pay millions of dollars in stipends to the families of these “martyrs” and salaries to Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. The carnage of October 7th, killing almost as many Israelis as all previous attacks combined, was a shock — but not a surprise. After all, the terrorists were simply doing terrorist things.

What’s shocking is how this terrorism is being justified by the so-called Israeli occupation and blockade. Lacking a bonafide army, apologists claim, the Palestinians have no other means to resist Israel and achieve independence.

“There will continue to be resistance to oppression as long as apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide continue to exist,” Nerdeen Kiswani, co-founder of Within Our Lifetime Palestine, libelously told Piers Morgan. “As long as oppression against the Palestinian people exists, we will continue to resist.”

That might be true if Hamas was a national liberation movement. It is not. As opposed to the mainly secular ideology of the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), Hamas is built on a Jihadist theology along the lines of ISIS, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda.

Common to all these terrorist organizations is the millennial Muslim vision of recreating the medieval caliphate in the Middle East — and then across the world. Hamas differs only in calling for Israel’s destruction as the necessary first step to kickstarting this process.

“O Allah, grant victory to the fighters in Palestine,” Saleh al-Raqab, a professor of religion at Gaza’s Islamic University and former Hamas minister, declared on October 8th. “O Allah, destroy the Jews completely. Paralyze their limbs and freeze the blood in their veins.”

In summer camps, schools, mosques, and madrassas, Palestinians learn to nurture hatred and glorify violence. An example of a fourth-grade Palestinian math problem is: The number of martyrs in the First Intifada was 2,026 martyrs. And the number of martyrs in the Al-Aqsa Intifada was 5,050 martyrs. The number of martyrs in the two intifadas is how many martyrs?

A seventh-grade Palestinian physics problem, based on Newton’s Second Law of Motion, asks: During the first Palestinian uprising, youths used slingshots to confront the soldiers of the Zionist occupation and defend themselves from treacherous bullets. What’s the relationship between the elongation of the slingshots, the rubber, and the tensile strength affecting it?

“I killed 10 Jews with my own hands!” one of the terrorists, phoning his parents from a freshly ravaged kibbutz, exulted. But enthusiasm for the slaughter of October 7th is far from confined to Gaza. With few exceptions, Arab leaders refrained from denouncing the mass killing of Jews, while condemning any Israeli military response.

Even in a country (Egypt) that has peace with Israel, antisemitism is officially promoted. According to the al-Akhbar newspaper in Lebanon, 80-percent of the country’s population supported the Palestinian attack. Saudi Arabia only recently started removing antisemitic and anti-Israel material from textbooks as it considered the process of normalizing relations with the Jewish state.

But antisemitism and anti-Israel are not problems exclusively relegated to the Middle East and North Africa. The countless thousands protesting against Israel in cities and on college campuses around the world make little-to-no distinction between Hamas and the Palestinians. They also make little-to-no effort to conceal their actual intentions with chants like “Gas the Jews!” and other flagrantly Jew-hating demonstrations.

It would be no surprise that Palestinians are relishing in much of the world’s distaste for Israel, Jews, and Judaism. Heck, it’s been a month since the Palestinian attacks on Israel, and we still haven’t seen one Palestinian intellectual write an op-ed expressing deep shame that acts of the greatest cruelty in human history were carried out in the name of “Free Palestine.”

While it might be true that the Palestinian Authority represents more moderate Palestinians, there hasn’t been much outcry and heartfelt denunciations coming out of the Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank).

Instead, we keep seeing and hearing knee-jerk responses to so many questions about the Palestinians — responses that only make excuses for them and remove even the most basic expectations and responsibilities from any Palestinian, anywhere.

Don’t you find it bizarre how many adults around the world seem to care more about Palestinian children than Palestinian adults seem to care about their own?

And in what world is the idea of “innocent children” acceptable to use as manipulation and gaslighting against condemnations of terrorism and antisemitism?

How is it that Palestinians broke a ceasefire on October 7th when they attacked Israel in the most sadistic, barbaric ways the modern world has ever seen, yet now they want a ceasefire? Is that the kind of world we aspire to create?

And how is it that Palestinians took American hostages, British hostages, French hostages, Thai hostages, Russian hostages — and people are marching, not in support of the hostages, but in support of the hostage-takers?

Does it make any sense that the same people who now seem so concerned that Gaza will be occupied by Israel, are also saying that Gaza has been occupied by Israel?

Why is it that Palestinians are relentlessly and indiscriminately firing rockets at Israel — more than 8,000 since the start of this war — yet Israel appears to be the only side garnering accusations of war crimes?

Don’t you find it strange that there haven’t been any elections in Gaza or the West Bank for years, even though Hamas (in Gaza) and the Palestinian Authority (in the West Bank) were supposedly elected in democratic elections?

And how is it possible that more than 1,000 Jews were massacred by Palestinians on October 7th, more than 100 others taken hostage, and it’s Jews around the world who are feeling unsafe?

You see, so many of us want the Palestinians to be these tender, loving people who share our values of human dignity, “live and let live,” safeguarding children, and a long list of liberties and rights most of us have never lived without.

And I get it: The notion that all seven billion humans on Earth are equal is a nice idea, but being equal doesn’t make us all the same. And this is where so many of us get the “innocent Palestinians” story completely wrong.

In other words, there is a drastic disconnect between what so many people think the Palestinian cause is, and what Palestinians think the Palestinian cause is.

It’s about time we wake up and realize: The Palestinians are not who we want them to be.

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1. “Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas.” Associated Press.

2. Oren, Michael. “Why the Body Cams?” Clarity with Michael Oren.

3. Oren, Michael. “Why the Body Cams?” Clarity with Michael Oren.