Mick Hartley

From John Aziz in the Free Press (via Jerry Coyne):

But even cornered and diminished, the Islamist movement that started this disastrous war remains as determined as ever to cling to power. Within a day of the ceasefire taking effect, Hamas’s internal security forces were staging public executions. Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel were dragged out and shot or hanged from lampposts in Gaza City’s main squares. There were no trials, no evidence, not even a pretense of due process—just a crude display of terror meant to remind everyone who was still in charge. Soon after, Hamas gunmen turned their weapons on powerful clan militias that had filled the vacuum during the war, sparking running battles in Shuja’iyya, Sabra, and beyond.

Peace is a process that takes hard efforts, and not something that will simply magically appear from an agreement. But it will never arrive at all if the world allows Hamas to regroup under the cover of a ceasefire and continue on the path of jihad.

These actions exposed a critical truth: Hamas never viewed the Trump deal as a real step toward peace or coexistence, because that is just not how their framework for understanding the world works. Peace is not their aspiration. For their purposes, the ceasefire is a temporary reprieve: a chance to regroup, rearm, and prepare for the next round of fighting, which could start in five days, five years, or 50 years. In Islamist political thought there’s a word for it—hudna—a temporary truce with non-Muslim adversaries that can be discarded as soon as the balance of power shifts. Then the time for jihad against the Jews and other non-Muslims will arrive again.

Exactly. Hamas will never give up power voluntarily. Their fight isn’t driven by the usual territorial concerns – anti-imperialist, as their western apologists claim. This is about jihad. About Islam.