Picture this. In 2005 Israel does the thing every peacenik had been demanding for years: it packs up every settler, digs up the dead, and hands Gaza to the people who live there. They even leave the high-tech greenhouses that had been producing serious export crops, after American donors paid the departing farmers so the structures wouldn’t be dismantled. The Palestinian Authority is supposed to protect the assets and turn them into jobs. Within days the greenhouses are looted. Irrigation lines, pumps, sheeting—gone. Some of it was pure chaos; some of it was people who didn’t want anything that had once belonged to Jews still standing on their land.

The economic gift to help make them self-sustaining was largely trashed before it could become an industry. The message was clear: better to smash it than let a Jewish-built success story stand.

Then the complaints that the ones rebuilt couldn’t sell vegetables across the borders. Well that’s because the crossings got shut down, because rockets, suicide bombers, and tunnels kept coming. Then you wonder why the fertilizer and replacement parts have a hard time reaching you, and why you can’t produce much. One election later Hamas wins a plurality and then seizes full control by force, throwing rivals off rooftops and never holding another free vote.

And what did they do with the billions in international aid, from your pocket and mine, did it produce a Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean. Nope, Hamas invested that money in a tunnel network designed for terror, rocket factories, and of course stuffing the bank accounts of leadership that lives at the Four Seasons in fucking Qatar.

The senior figures end up in Doha hotels; the rank-and-file get martyrdom posters. That is not a tragic accident of occupation. It is a choice of priorities. The walls and checkpoints that make daily life harder did not appear because Israel woke up one morning feeling mean. They appeared after years of suicide bombings and shootings that killed Israeli civilians on buses, in restaurants, and at nightclubs. When the rockets kept coming after the 2005 withdrawal, the security measures stayed. Blaming the fence for the hostility is like blaming the lock on the door after the burglar has already kicked it in three times. The original Hamas charter is a religious document that treats the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews as a divine duty; it even dusts off the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for atmosphere. The 2017 rewrite softens the tone for Western consumption and floats a temporary 1967 formula, but it still refuses to accept a Jewish state as legitimate and still aims at the whole land. River to the sea wasn’t a slogan they invented last year.

Children grow up with maps that erase Israel, textbooks that glorify “martyrs,” and summer camps that teach the same. When Hamas finally executes the plan it has advertised for decades—1200 people murdered on October 7th, many of them at a music festival, taking hostages, filming the atrocities, after collecting intelligence from the workers the leftists living near the Gaza border allowed in, to better their lives and make some money, well, the intelligence made the killing more efficient and they knew where to go to deprive the Israelis of the weapons needed to defend themselves—Well, large segments of the Palestinian public participated and ran over the border to get their hands bloody. And over 70% of Gaza called the October 7th massacre righteous. That number is even higher in the West Bank, who don’t have to deal with the immediate Israeli blowback.

Support for Hamas drops in Gaza only after Israel strikes back, repeatedly, but it does not collapse into moral revulsion. Celebrations happen. Candy is handed out. The same movement that did it says it will do it again. They wish everyday could be October 7th. Israel’s response has been the opposite of indiscriminate in method even when it has been devastating in effect. It drops leaflets, sends texts, makes phone calls, uses roof-knocking munitions, and opens corridors. It delivers aid into a war zone against an enemy that diverts what it can, and let me ask you, if I am at war with a group, since when is it my job to keep the people trying to kill me well-fed while they do it?

Hamas’s explicit strategy is to maximize its own civilian casualties for the cameras, aka human shields; Israel’s explicit strategy is to destroy the group that just massacred its civilians while trying (imperfectly, under dense urban conditions) to separate fighters from everyone else. That asymmetry is not a media invention. Now the cleanest thought experiment in the whole argument: if Hamas and the other armed groups laid down their weapons, released the hostages, and stopped launching rockets, the shooting would stop. There would be negotiations, reconstruction money, and endless international supervision. If Israel laid down its weapons, the result would not be a kumbaya picnic. The charter, the polls, the October 7 footage, and the public statements all point the same direction: slaughter of the people who just disarmed, followed by the usual claims that the victims had it coming. One side can end the immediate killing by stopping; the other side cannot stop without inviting the next round of the thing it just survived. One side can choose peace tomorrow. The other side’s peace requires the other side’s disappearance. None of this requires pretending every single Gazan is a combatant or that Israel has never made a targeting error. It does require noticing that a movement whose foundational documents, education system, and crowning achievement are the murder of Jewish civilians does not get to demand the world’s sympathy on the grounds that the people it rules are now suffering the consequences of that choice. “Free Palestine” in the version that controls the relevant territory has never meant a state next to Israel; it has meant the end of Israel.

The people yelling for Palestine are brainwashed morons fed TikTok propaganda that couldn’t tell you between which river and which sea, Palestine would be free. The people saying “fuck Palestine” are not having a mysterious moral failure the civilizational arsonists keep diagnosing. No, they are just seeing the world accurately.