Some Notes on the Anti-Hamas Protests Reported in the Monopoly Media

Jacob Montag

Over the past week, the mainstream press in the United States has produced a flurry of coverage regarding a recent series of popular anti-war demonstrations in the Gaza Strip. In faithful service to U.S. imperialism, the demonstrations have been portrayed as primarily an expression of political opposition to Hamas, the leading resistance force in the Palestinian armed resistance.

This deceptive framing has been used by everyone from the New York Times, to the Israeli media, and to the opportunist Jacobin Magazine to promote the narrative that those who wage war against Israel do so against the wishes of the Palestinian people. According to the media monopolists, most Palestinians want those waging armed struggle against the Zionist occupation forces to capitulate and to provide free range to the likes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to implement their plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.

To get to the truth of the matter, we must start from the facts. According to the Palestine Chronicle, the anti-war demonstrations in Gaza unfolded in the following two stages:

• On Tuesday, March 25, the demonstrations began spontaneously in small numbers in limited areas, primarily in the city of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. Most of the demonstrators carried signs calling for an end to the war, with no mention of Hamas or the Palestinian armed resistance. A small group of a few dozen men were videotaped on the outskirts of one of these demonstrations chanting anti-Hamas slogans. Specifically, they were chanting “Shia! Shia! Ya Shia!”, a sectarian slogan intended to paint Hamas as proxies of Iran.
  
• After this first series of demonstrations broke the headlines, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called on the people of Gaza to expand the protests and rise up to overthrow Hamas, saying it was “the only way to stop the war.” Katz was joined by the comprador Palestinian Authority in issuing this call. On the next day, there were several demonstrations throughout the Gaza Strip with slightly larger numbers. While there was a greater presence of anti-Hamas slogans and agitation during this stage, there were also several demonstrations held concurrently that condemned the anti-Hamas elements.

Regarding the first stage of the demonstrations, what stands out is the use of the aforementioned slogan: “Shia! Shia! Ya Shia!”. In the years leading up to the Al-Aqsa Flood counteroffensive in October 2023, there were several popular demonstrations held to protest the Hamas-led government of the Gaza Strip sparked by a range of issues such as corruption, economic mismanagement, unemployment, etc. Many of those protests were notably much larger than the most recent round of demonstrations. Throughout all of those demonstrations, this slogan was scarcely raised by the participants. The last time it was in widespread use in the context of Palestinian politics was during the 2006-07 Fatah-Hamas conflict, throughout which Fatah, the party that heads the Palestinian Authority, raised the slogan to inflame sectarian tensions and to portray Hamas as Iranian proxies.

The Fatah-Hamas conflict was initiated by the victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. With their legislative majority, Hamas sought to form a unity government under its leadership, an offer which Fatah refused to accept. As a result of the Hamas-led government’s refusal to cease armed struggle against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. and European imperialists likewise refused to recognize it and imposed economic sanctions on it. In January 2007, the Bush administration worked with Israeli intelligence and Fatah leadership to orchestrate a coup against the Hamas government in Gaza. As Vanity Fair reported in 2008: “President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza.”

One of the individuals present at the anti-Hamas contingent during the first stage of the demonstrations was identified by Israeli media as Hisham Birawi, a known associate of the aforementioned Fatah leader Muhammad Dahlan. After the U.S.-backed forces he commanded were defeated by the Palestinian armed resistance in 2007, Dahlan was expelled from Gaza and later settled in the United Arab Emirates. He remains closely connected with U.S. imperialism, reportedly playing a role in the negotiations surrounding the Abraham Accords according to Foreign Policy. While we cannot know the individual motivations of all those involved in this initial anti-Hamas contingent, the influence of Fatah, and by extension Israel and U.S. imperialism, was clearly a factor in its organization.

Regarding the second stage of the demonstrations, what stands out is how they were preceded by Defense Minister Katz’s thinly-veiled blackmail addressed to the people of Gaza. Also of note is Netanyahu’s statement that the emergence of these protests “shows that our policy is working.” Unable to defeat the Palestinian armed resistance militarily, the Israeli occupation forces have resorted to a strategy defined by indiscriminate and systematic violence against the civilian population of Gaza.

The logic behind this strategy is simple. The reason the relatively lightly-armed Qassam Brigades and its allies are able to win victories against the Israeli occupation forces despite the latter’s overwhelming military superiority is the popular support for their armed struggle. Whereas the U.S. imperialists and the occupation forces can only rely on the support of a small group of traitors among the Palestinians—namely Fatah and the Palestinian Authority—the Palestinian armed resistance, as with anti-imperialist forces elsewhere, relies on the support of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population in its struggle against the occupation. Their popular support allows Palestinian militants to consistently outmaneuver the Israeli occupation forces, moving as fish in the sea of the masses, concentrating forces to attack the enemy when it is exposed, and dispersing forces to evade the enemy when it pursues.

Because of this, the counter-insurgency efforts of Israel and U.S. imperialism focus on separating the militants from the masses, on weakening the morale of the masses, imposing upon them daily bloodshed, starvation, massacres, and terror to foster desperation and generate political will for capitulation. U.S. imperialism is constantly pursuing a strategy of divide and conquer, seeking to turn the Palestinians against one another to prevent them from uniting to drive the Zionist invaders out.

Despite the efforts of U.S. imperialists, the Israeli occupation forces, and the Fatah collaborators, even the monopoly media is forced to admit that these demonstrations were small. The Palestinian armed resistance continues to retain the support of the Palestinian masses in its armed struggle against the occupation. They succeeded in throwing back the Israeli occupation forces with the conquest of the January ceasefire and they will inevitably succeed in doing so once again as they resume their armed confrontations.

Photo: Celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas in Gaza, 2012.

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