Hamas, the Colonial Occupier

Many of Hamas’s transgressions are well understood. Hamas is a major terrorist organization. It is animated by a death cult of killing its enemies and martyring its adherents for a trip to paradise. It lives and breathes antisemitism. It is dedicated to an eliminationist, if not a total exterminationist, program against Israel and Jews. On October 7th, its willing executioners perpetrated a gruesome, gleeful and proto-genocidal mass murderous assault on Jewish adults, children and babies. Hamas and its members reveled in the cruelty and murderousness toward their Jewish victims. Hamas violates international law in a host of ways—using hospitals and schools and mosques as weapons depots or as operational headquarters. Systematically and on a wide scale, Hamas commits war crimes, not as a by-the-way, but as a core strategic aspect of its never-ending war against Israel and Jews.

But what is not recognized about Hamas is that it is, in its essence, a colonial occupier. If we take self-determination of a country’s populace, with free and fair democratic elections, as a right and a good in itself, and as a necessary means for citizens’ control over their government’s composition and, ultimately governing policy, then we should reconceptualize Hamas (and many other countries’ regimes) as colonialists, and its undemocratic government and its officials and followers as colonial occupiers.

Let us say that an outside power takes over a hypothetical country called Democracy. It dismantles democratic institutions, curtails freedom of expression and the media, criminalizes homosexuality, and establishes a highly repressive dictatorship of the gun. It exploits the country’s resources for its own gain and to the immiseration of the country’s peoples. And it uses their homes, places of worship, hospitals, and schools as staging grounds for attacking a neighboring country.

The attack brings, in predictable return-fire, large-scale death and destruction to the hypothetical country’s people and property. This is a foreseeable and, on the part of the outside colonizer, even a desired consequence, because it calculates that the death and destruction will elicit widespread international sympathy and support.

Most observers and pundits and ordinary people would immediately deem this outside power as an illegitimate colonialist occupier: It has conquered a country, done away with self-determination, systematically stolen scarce resources, and used extreme violence to kill and endanger many of the country’s people.

Why, when we substitute for the outside power, an inside power that seized control of the government and the country, say sixteen years ago, and enacts the same policies of exploitation, endangerment, repression and of use of civilians as human shields, so that thousands upon thousands of them needlessly die or suffer grievous wounds and watch helplessly as their homes and neighborhoods get pulverized—why do we not recognize this inside power as also a colonial regime, only one that practices internal rather than external colonialization?

It is not just semantics to recognize that Hamas’s control of Gaza, its pattern of repression and exploitation of Gaza’s resources, and the widespread extreme hardship, death and destruction it has willfully brought to Gaza’s more than two million denizens is an instance of colonialization. In politics and social life, the language we use to describe a phenomenon reveals or obscures its features and, therefore, its nature. It shapes the judgments we render about it, and our reactions to it. The political left in the United States and Europe, and people of all political affiliations in many developing countries, hold colonialism to be perhaps the single most evocative rallying cry against injustice in the world, and certainly in international affairs. Why has the left, in particular, not been able to see Hamas for the colonializing power that it is? And why has the left (and for that matter, the center and the right) all along, not been calling and demonstrating for resistance to Hamas’s long-existing predations against Gazans—most of whom before October 7 rejected Hamas and its colonial rule—as well as its mass exterminationist regime against Israelis and Jews?

Why has the left, in particular, not been able to see Hamas for the colonializing power that it is?

Describing Hamas as a mere terrorist organization, or a dictatorship, or an autocratic regime—even though each of these characterizations is correct—fails to capture the multidimensional nature of Hamas’s violation of human rights on political, economic, social, foreign policy and domestic policy grounds. It fails to convey Hamas’s thoroughgoing illegitimacy as the authoritarian ruler of Gaza, and as an actor in the international arena according to international law. Let’s call Hamas what it is: a colonializing occupier of Gaza, dedicated to imperial expansion, animated by a cult of death, and no matter how Israel conducts itself, seeking to establish a colonialist imperium denuded of Jews “from the river to the sea,” through terrorist and eliminationist, or what is typically called genocidal, means.

The whole world of right-thinking people should unite in seeking to free Gaza and its Palestinians of Hamas, this mass murderous, and immiserating colonializing power that, with its war-criminal policies, has, in this latest conflict that it has initiated, butchered more than 1,200 Israelis and, so far, according to its own body-count, led to the deaths of more than 12,000 Palestinians.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the author of “Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity,” and of “The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism.” He can be contacted at danny@goldhagen.com.