Hamas Terrorism Isn’t 'Self-Defense' Against 'Occupiers'

Paul Driessen Jan 05, 2024 

Council on American Islamic Relations Los Angeles executive director Hussam Ayloush recently defended Hamas’s barbaric slaughter of 1,200 Jewish, Thai, Filipino, Bedouin, and other men, women, and children. He claimed Israel is “an occupier” that “does not have the right to defend itself.” Only Palestinians have “a right of self-defense,” he said and condemned Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza.

His assertions reflect language in the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas Charters. Israel is “imperialist, colonialist, racist, anti-human,” even “fascist,” “colonizers,” they declare. The “Zionist entity” “occupies” Palestinian lands and denies Palestinians their “right to return” to their homes. The charters call for the “liberation of Palestine” through “resistance,” “armed struggle,” and “self-defense.”

Mobs of students, faculty, and fellow travelers flaunt their ignorance of historic and modern reality by echoing these claims, justifying the October 7 massacres, calling for a “global intifada” (uprising), and demanding the eradication of Israel and its non-Muslim inhabitants “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.

You have to wonder: How does a group of people achieve permanent “refugee” or “colonized victim” status with a “right of return” that no others have had? What constitutes a “legitimate right” of “resistance” or “self-defense”? 

Particularly across the Europe-Asia-Middle-East mega-continent, human history has been a saga of settlement, invasion, victory or defeat, continuation or disintegration, expansion or dispersion. Those who lost wars were annihilated, lost title to their land, accepted subservient status (dhimmi in Muslim countries), emigrated, melded into the victorious civilization, or otherwise adjusted.

Over their six-thousand-year history, including since arriving in “the Promised Land” that is now Israel over 3,600 years ago, Jews have played all these roles. They defeated the Amorites, Canaanites, Philistines, and Jebusites, created the Kingdom of Israel, fell to Assyrians and Babylonians, lived under Persian and Greek rule, established the Hasmonean dynasty, and were slaughtered, enslaved, and dispersed by the Romans in 70-133 AD (CE).

However, they did not entirely disappear from the Promised Land. Indeed, Muhammed’s Muslim empire hired Jews as administrators after the Arab army arrived in 636. Jewish fortunes ebbed and flowed under Christian, Mongol, and 500-year Ottoman Turkish rule.

Anti-Semitism and pogroms brought Western European and Russian Jews to their ancestral land in the late 1800s. Theodore Herzl’s Zionism increased the purchase of agricultural and other land. Turkey’s loss to the Allies in WWI transferred ownership and control of the area from the Ottoman Turks to Britain.

The Roman term Palestine had applied to the region for two millennia, but there was never a Palestinian state or empire. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries emerged as independent nations from British-French-Russian rule over the Ottoman Empire before, during, and after WWII – but no Palestinian nation. Palestinian ancestors were always citizens or subjects of ruling empires.

Jewish immigration and land purchases from local and absentee Arab landlords increased significantly between the world wars. The Holocaust and the end of World War II brought surging Jewish immigration ... and more conflicts. Land ownership in the pre-1947 British Mandate area that is now Israel was roughly 15% Arab, 9% Jewish, and 76% public/Mandate land.

1948, despite Arab states’ opposition, the United Nations made Israel's nationhood a reality. Local Arabs and five Arab countries declared war on the fledgling state. Some 700,000 Arabs fled, emigrated, or were persuaded to leave Israel “temporarily” under hollow promises of victory over the Zionists. After the ’48 war, some 850,000 Jews were displaced, banned, or banished (Hamas charter language) from Muslim countries across North Africa to the Middle East and Afghanistan; most of them settled in Israel.

The 1967 and 1973 wars between Arab countries and Israel also ended in Israeli victory and expansion. Two intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005) brought many deaths on both sides but no gains for Palestinians. The war in Gaza has been far more destructive.

Wars have consequences – now and throughout history. Assertions in charters or speeches do not change that, nor do they convey an “inalienable right” of return, even under some imagined “basic principles of human rights and international law” (Hamas Charter, Article 12). If a new Palestinian nation is created and recognized, there will be a right of return to that new nation – but not to Israel.