There are moments in our lives when we learn something that allows us to truly understand why the world is the way it is and why events happen. One such moment occurred for me years ago when I worked in the archive room of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.
In the course of my work digitizing the archive’s documents so they could be available online, I came across what for me was an astounding speech by former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Egyptian soldiers during the peace process of the late 1970s. In this speech, Sadat expressed his wish that no more Egyptian soldiers be hurt, let alone killed, fighting against Israel.
Upon reading this speech, I understood how Sadat could make peace with Israel. Whatever his faults, whatever responsibility he held for launching the Yom Kippur War, attacking the Jewish State on the holiest day in Judaism and causing thousands of needless deaths, whatever geo-political motivations he had for ending the state of war with Israel, such as getting Egypt out from under the thumb of the Soviet Union, here was the leader of the largest Arab state in the Middle East, the leader greatest enemy Israel faced in the first 30 years of its existence, telling his soldiers that their well-being mattered more to him than the hate of Israel and the Jewish people.
Imagine that, a leader who put the well-being of his people first. That is the kind of leader who makes peace and learns to accept and work with the only democracy in the Middle East. That is the kind of leader the Palestinian Arabs have been lacking for over a century, and the exact opposite of how Hamas behaves towards the close to two million people it rules over in Gaza.
The suffering of civilians and children in Gaza during the current war is tragic. But the only way things will ever get better for the people of Gaza if for Hamas to be removed from power and eliminated as a viable entity in the coastal enclave.
Hamas has kept Gaza poor while its leaders live in the lap of luxury. It has stolen billions in humanitarian aid meant to build infrastructure and provide food, medicine, and a decent life to the people it rules over, all to enrich its leaders and build its war machine.
Hamas has released videos boasting of its digging up of water pipes to use to build more rockets. It has used thousands of tons of cement donated by the international community to rebuild areas destroyed in the conflicts it started with Israel in order to build vast networks of terror tunnels both into Israel and under the feet of Gaza’s civilians.
On Sunday, UNRWA, the UN organization dedicated to the descendants of the Arab refugees of Israel’s War of Independence, reported that Hamas had stolen fuel and medical equipment meant for the people of Gaza from the agency’s compound in Gaza City. Even in the current war, Hamas continues to steal from its people.
Hamas is notorious for its use of human shields. The terrorist organization has placed its headquarters underneath a hospital, stored rockets inside schools and explosives inside mosques, fired thousands of rockets from residential areas, and built miles of tunnels for military purposes directly underneath civilian buildings. One famous video shows a Hamas terrorist grabbing a toddler and running across the street while carrying the child so that the IDF would not shoot at him.
Following the IDF’s warning that residents of northern Gaza and Gaza City should evacuate to the south for their own safety during this war, Hamas demanded that civilians stay and deliberately put themselves in mortal danger. It has gone so far as to physically block roads with trucks to prevent civilians from leaving what is soon to be a battlefield, and according to the IDF, to stage an explosion in the middle of a convoy of civilians fleeing south, deliberately murdering 70 of its own people for propaganda purposes. Many Gazans have been killed by misfired rockets that fell inside Gaza instead of reaching their targets in Israel. These deaths have never prompted Hamas to reconsider for a second its policy of firing rockets at Israeli population centers.
These are monsters who not only delight in the massacre of Jewish children, but actively seek the deaths of their own people and will kill Gazans themselves if Israel doesn’t oblige them.
For the last two years, Hamas has pretended to give a damn about the people of Gaza if for no other reason than to stabilize its rule. It stayed out of the previous round of fighting between Israel and Islamic Jihad as imports into Gaza rose above the level they were before the partial blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt in 2007 and as 20,000 Gazans received work permits to enter Israel on a daily basis.
But it was all a lie. A facade.
The sad truth is that Hamas never gave a damn about the people of Gaza. The only purpose of any act which improved the lives of Gaza’s residents was to lull Israel and the West into a false sense of security. And when they had served their purpose, Hamas was all too eager to destroy any benefit Gazans have seen in recent years in order to murder as many Jewish civilians as possible.
As senior Hamas official Ali Baraka told Russia Today TV the day after Hamas committed the worst massacre against Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas had been secretly planning the invasion of southern Israel for two years while pretending to be interested in actually governing Gaza.
Former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh summed up the organization’s worldview in a single sentence: “We love death like our enemies love life.”
Hamas is a death cult bent on the genocide of the Jewish people, and it does not care how many Palestinian Arabs have to die or how much they have to suffer in order to kill Jews. They will gladly sacrifice ten children in Gaza in order to kill a single Jewish child. They have no regard whatsoever for the lives of their own people except as tools to be used against people. They teach their children to seek death in the course of murdering Jews rather than to seek life.
This is why, no matter how much the current suffering of Gazan civilians may touch the hearts of Israelis and Westerners who do know the value of human life, the only way to truly help the people of Gaza is to get rid of Hamas.
Gaza cannot be helped until it is freed from this death cult. Gaza cannot be helped as long as it is ruled by those who steal humanitarian aid to use for war and killing. Gaza cannot be helped as long as it is under the boot of those who would sacrifice countless lives and ruin any chance Gazans have for a decent life for the chance to murder Jews.
Gaza, and the rest of the Palestinian Arabs under the rule of the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria, need leaders they have never had before, leaders like Anwar Sadat who care about the well-being of their people more than they hate Jews and love death. Until such leaders emerge, no peace will be possible, and the people of Gaza will continue to suffer regardless of what Israel does.
Gary Willigis a news writer at Arutz Sheva.