What is notable about Hamas’s statements—although unsurprising to long-term observers of the region—is that they failed to express gratitude to Putin for championing the cause of an independent Palestinian state. This omission has a simple explanation: an independent Palestinian state next to Israel is not, in fact, Hamas’s goal. Rather, Hamas is driven by the genocidal goal of destroying Israel and its Jews, and establishing a Palestinian state in its place—the real meaning of the slogan frequently chanted on American college campuses and at anti-Israel demonstrations elsewhere: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Terrorism Instead of a Two-State Solution
Hamas’s actions on October 7 conveyed this point starkly. When Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the enclave was supposed to be a test run for a future independent Palestinian state living at peace with its Jewish neighbor. Hopes ran high that it would become something of a Dubai on the Mediterranean: tourists would flock to its beaches, and commerce would flow through a new deep-sea port. But a year later, Gazans elected Hamas, which imposed a ruthless totalitarian regime on it.
Over the next eighteen years, Hamas’s leaders enriched themselves from the hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid intended for civilian projects and used the cash to build military tunnels, acquire weapons, and turn Gaza into a launching pad for terror. Anyone who thought that Hamas had grown more pragmatic in recent years need only consider that the October 7 attack destroyed the very agricultural communities that used to employ some of the
17,000 Gazan workers who annually benefited from Israel’s special work permit program, earning on average six times what they could in Gaza. Clearly, Gazans will not work in Israel in the foreseeable future.
Nor has the Palestinian Authority, headed by Russia’s good friend Mahmoud Abbas (who
defended his PhD dissertation equating Zionism with Nazism at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies in 1982), shown more interest in an independent Palestinian state coexisting next to the Jewish state. Abbas famously
rejected an Israeli proposal that would have given Palestinians 94 percent of the West Bank territory. As Einat Wilf, the left-wing Israeli commentator on Palestinian issues and co-author of the bestselling
The War of Return,
put it, “Had [the Palestinian] cause been limited [to] goals like ‘ending the occupation,’ or ‘removing settlements’ or ‘creating an independent state,’ they would have fulfilled it long ago. But their cause has always been and remains to ensure that the Jews have no state in any part of the land,” leading them to miss one opportunity after another.
www.wilsoncenter.org
