How Israel Made Hamas Inevitable

How Israel dismantled a universal, rights-based liberation movement and replaced it with the adversary it preferred.

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“Talk to whom?” Ghassan Kanafani shot back when a Western interviewer urged “peace talks.” “That’s a conversation between the sword and the neck.” That exchange wasn’t bravado; it was a diagnosis. A colonized people aren’t invited to negotiate their humanity. They are told to surrender it.

I opened my recent stream with Kanafani for a reason. He embodied a secular, revolutionary current that once defined the Palestinian struggle—rooted in anti-colonial thought, international law, and universal human dignity. He believed liberation requires both a pen and a rifle, culture and courage, strategy and solidarity. For that, he was assassinated in Beirut in 1972. When you silence the pen, you narrow the politics. When you narrow the politics, you radicalize the battlefield. That is the story too many refuse to tell.

From resistance literature to car bombs

Kanafani’s generation—writers, organizers, and political cadres—gave Palestinians a language the world could understand: exile, dispossession, apartheid, right of return, self-determination. Their literature and journalism stitched Palestine to Vietnam, Algeria, and South Africa. They anchored the cause in the global struggle against colonialism and apartheid, not in a manufactured “religious war.” This was never “Muslims vs. Jews.” It was colonizer vs. colonized, rights vs. robbery.

Israel understood that language was lethal to its narrative. So it hunted the voices that carried it. After Kanafani came a grim roll call: Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser in 1973; Majed Abu Sharar in 1981; and the beloved cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1987. Writers, editors, organizers—people who could bridge East and West, resistance and dialogue—were car-bombed, shot, disappeared. Each assassination didn’t just end a life; it amputated a register of Palestinian politics that spoke to the world in universal terms. Kill that register and you distort the struggle. Distort the struggle and you deform the adversary you claim to fight.

Manufacturing the enemy you prefer

While secular nationalists were hunted, another current grew—first tolerated, sometimes quietly abetted, by Israel: Muslim Brotherhood charities, mosque-based networks, religious social work. In the 1970s and early 1980s, as leftist cadres were exiled or eliminated, these networks embedded themselves at the neighborhood level. The result wasn’t an accident of history; it was the logic of a vacuum. When you decapitate secular leadership, you empower whoever can still organize on the ground. By the time the First Intifada erupted in 1987, the PLO was exiled, the left was weakened, and Islamists had deep grassroots.

Ask yourself: who benefits when the face of Palestinian resistance shifts from a UN-recognized national movement speaking the language of international law to a besieged Islamist faction that Western media can reduce to “terror”? With the PLO, Israel had to answer Resolution 242, settlements, borders, and the right of return. With Hamas, it could repackage the conflict as a front in a “war on terror,” short-circuiting the legal and moral issues with the oldest trick in propaganda—dehumanize your adversary and declare him non-negotiable. This shift was an Israeli strategic investment.

The politics of fragmentation

The proof sits in the wreckage of the “peace process.” The Fatah-Hamas split after 2006 gave Israeli leaders the soundbite they most wanted: “We have no partner.” Every rocket from Gaza became a pretext to stall, to build, to annex by concrete and checkpoint what diplomacy would have required them to relinquish. The two-state solution was not “killed by extremists on both sides.” It was buried in stages—under settlements, bypass roads, military law, and a blockade that turned Gaza into a laboratory of collective punishment—while a divided Palestinian polity was held up as Exhibit A for perma-occupation.

Let’s be brutally honest: empower the narrative “we face jihadists, not a people with rights,” and you absolve yourself of the obligations that come with occupying another nation’s land. You also trap Palestinians between two impossible demands: disarm under siege, or die resisting it.

Information warfare, or why the masks slipped

If Israel’s story were winning, there would be no need for the Prime Minister to hold PR huddles with influencers and call social media “one of the most important weapons in modern warfare.” States confident in law and legitimacy do not need ring-light brigades. They need compliance with the law. The scramble to massage the message is not a sign of strength; it’s a confession that the images from Gaza have burned through the script.

This is why reviving the “religious war” frame is essential to the project. If the public accepts that this is a clash of faiths instead of a question of rights, then genocide becomes “security,” ethnic cleansing becomes “self-defense,” and the Nakba becomes a footnote. De-politicize the colonized, and you de-legitimize their claims. Replace secular leadership with Hamas—by bullet, by exile, or by structural incentives—and you get the adversary you always wanted: one you can bomb without explaining a single settlement.

On the latest “deals” and recycled deceptions

The newest “plan” that ties ceasefire and prisoner exchanges to staged Israeli withdrawals, foreign “stabilization forces,” technocratic committees, and a Board of Peace chaired by the U.S. president and his favorite ex-UK Prime Minister is a choreography. It demands the total demilitarization of the besieged, the rehabilitation of ruins under international management, and some distant “political horizon” if all goes well—Inshallah. Meanwhile, the party that flattened neighborhoods is tasked with judging “compliance.” Who writes these scripts? carpet-bombers or comedians?

Notice the recurring clause in these spectacles: if Palestinians “reject” the offer, Israel will “finish the job.” Heads I win, tails you die. And when such “plans” are announced publicly before being seriously presented to the forces that control the ground, it means Trump and Netanyahu are interested in narrative gaming, not peacemaking. Set the expectation of a deal, guarantee it’s unacceptable or unworkable, and then blame “terrorists” for forcing you—alas!—to resume the massacre you never paused in good faith. We have seen this play before. We remember how it ends.

“Why not just stop fighting?”

Western hosts love that line. “Why not stop the death and misery?” As if Palestinians haven’t been dying and miserable for generations of encampment, dispossession, and erasure—even of their very name. “They’re better off alive than dead,” we are told. Better off alive where? In cages? Under rubble? In statelessness without horizon? Decades of refugee life—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza—do not make saints; they make human beings who want their homes back. When you wake to find your village gone and your nation reduced to checkpoints, you do not become a “moderate” by magic. You either accept annihilation slowly, or you resist it poorly. The choice is that cruel. Kanafani’s point remains: people fight for something, and they stop fighting for something. Tell us what that “something” is—precisely—and we can talk. Until then, don’t call surrender “peace.”

The moral inversion

The Zionist movement has always needed two things at once: to project victimhood and to practice supremacy. It cries for “dialogue” while expanding settlements; it invokes “security” while demolishing homes; it pleads “self-defense” while policing an indigenous population by air. The secular Palestinian movement complicated this inversion because it spoke a language that pierced propaganda. That is why it had to be erased. Replace it with an Islamist current and the inversion becomes easier to sell: a “Judeo-Christian alliance” defending “civilization” against “terror.” Post-9/11, the marketing writes itself.

But propaganda cannot build legitimacy forever. Even among states that enable Israel, officials know what they’re seeing. You can feel the nervous energy in the “influencer summits,” the frantic lobbying, the manufactured consent. You can also feel the blowback—the isolation, the pariah status among people, if not yet their governments. No amount of hashtag alchemy will change the fact that Gaza made the mask slip for millions.

“Netanyahu’s war”? No—policy by consensus, pace by the prime minister

Reducing Gaza to “Netanyahu’s war” is a cop-out, a way to launder a decades-long program of dispossession through the personality of one man. The difference between leaders has been tempo, not direction. Some prefer the slow violence of bureaucratic strangulation; others the shock doctrine of open-air genocide. The objective—erase Palestine as a political subject—remains constant. Netanyahu merely accelerated the timetable and, in doing so, exposed the project for what it is.

What was destroyed and what must be rebuilt

This is the core of my argument: Israel did not only “fight terrorists.” It killed the Palestinian liberation movement as a secular, internationalist force and thus empowered the rise of Islamist currents like Hamas. It did so by assassinating intellectuals and organizers; by exiling leadership and sabotaging institutions; by tolerating and sometimes encouraging religious networks as counterweights; by splitting the polity and then citing the split as proof of “no partner.” In the process, it changed the story from a colonized nation claiming its rights to a besieged enclave hurling rockets—an image tailored for Western fear and compliant media. That is how you bury a two-state solution while pretending to chase it. That is how you normalize a one-state reality of apartheid while blaming the victims for not being more “reasonable.”

Rebuilding means reversing that perverse incentive structure. It means reviving the secular, rights-based register: ending settlements, lifting the siege, freeing prisoners, restoring political rights, and anchoring everything in international law. It means refusing the trap that says Palestinians must first become disarmed, de-politicized, and grateful before they may speak of a state. No, dignity is not the prize at the end of obedience; it is the condition for any durable peace.

A final word to the journalists who still ask “why not talk?”

Talk about what? To stop the pain? For whom? If you want Palestinians to stop fighting, then give them something to stop for: an end to occupation, a path home, equal rights in the land where they were born. Until then, petitions for “calm” are nothing but requests that the neck stop straining against the sword. Kanafani taught that decades ago. The fact that we must repeat it today is not a failure of memory. It is a measure of how methodically the secular Palestinian voice was silenced, and how urgently it must be heard again.

Postscript: Some will ask whether this analysis “excuses” Hamas. It doesn’t. It explains the conditions that produced it—conditions engineered by an occupying power that preferred an enemy it could demonize to a nation it would have to recognize. If you are serious about peace, start there.

—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.