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We Must All Condemn Hamas
(Evening Standard-UK) Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib - An increasing number of Gazans are openly and publicly condemning Hamas' actions and blaming the group for their misery. Hamas has engaged in several futile and utterly useless armed conflicts against Israel and turned Gaza into a citadel from which it dragged its people along a "resistance" project, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties and lasting scars and traumas. Dozens of Gazan Facebook accounts detest Hamas' lack of consideration for the well-being of its people, while others ridicule the group's mouthpieces and those who inflate the capabilities of "resistance" groups and understate the horrendous losses being endured by civilians. In video after video, we see Gazans blame Hamas for their misery, publicly decry its actions, and accuse its fighters of operating among civilians and contributing to their deaths. Most of my family members are living in Gaza. The overall mood among the population is characterized by exhaustion and an unprecedented desire for a fundamentally different future. Palestinians in Gaza want a life without Hamas and its violence, narrow ideology, and cultish glorification of death or "martyrdom." It also shouldn't be that difficult to condemn Hamas' brutal killing and kidnapping of Israeli women, children, and innocent civilians who were sleeping in their homes. The Palestinian people deserve capable leaders and parties, not an exclusionary death cult that has spent the past 30 years sabotaging an imperfect yet viable peace process. Normalizing the condemnation of Hamas is a moral, political, and strategic imperative to advance the pursuit of Palestinian rights, freedom, and self-determination. The writer is an American who grew up in Gaza.