The Point of Hamas' "Narrative"

Hamas has released a slickly produced document providing a belated "narrative" of what happened on October 7. I link to it for reference, even though it's sickening reading for anyone with the slightest sense of justice or empathy for Israelis. 

It's quite obvious that this is written for a particular western audience and that Hamas knows how to write for that audience; it echoes many of the apologias one hears from its foreign sympathizers seeking to excuse its atrocities. Some of these are inserted in almost on reflex -- for example, in a section asserting that only military sites were targeted, the authors write that "the Palestinian fighters were keen to avoid harming civilians despite the fact that the resistance does not possess precise weapons." The lack of "precise weapons" is a line typically used in reference to Hamas' use of indiscriminate rocket fire, but it obviously has no bearing on the sort of close-quarters, ground operation that occurred on October 7 (Hamas' machine guns and grenades are more or less as "precise" as anyone else's machine guns and grenades; "imprecision" was not the problem here). But that follows from the overall tenor of the piece, which is to align Hamas' narrative with the way its most credulous apologists speak about Hamas -- to further bind these groups together as "all on the same side."

That said, for the most part this document should be read as an official extension of the 10/7 denialism that the Washington Post reported on the other day: that 10/7 essentially "didn't happen" (the targets were military, any civilians killed were either targeted accidentally or were actually murdered by Israelis, reports of atrocities like rape are propagandist fabrications, and so on).

What's the point of a document like this? There are several:

First, it is piggybacking on the aforementioned denialist movement that was from the get-go primed to accept any possible narrative of Israeli perfidy. This tendency exists on a continuum, but even "soft-core denialists" who are primarily invested in viewing some of the more heart-wrenching charges (mass rapes, slaughtered infants) as exaggerated or fictious will treat Hamas' document as moving the Overton Window further. Certainly, the useful idiots who promote this sort of view didn't need Hamas to give them this document, but they will be encouraged by it and will hungrily consume it and use it to fuel further excretions.

Second, it is attempting to rewrite history. Everyone and their mother has congratulated themselves for the "realization" that Hamas' goal on 10/7 was to commit an attack of sufficient brutality so as to compel a bruising Israeli response that would wreck Israel's reputation and bolster the profile of the Palestinian cause. Having succeeded in generating such a response, it only makes sense to try and erase the initial provocation. If October 7 essentially "didn't happen", then everything that happened after October 7 is simply random unmitigated acts of Israeli aggression -- no longer "backlash", now just "lash".

Third, it is a form of "I know you are but what am I" trolling. At various points, the document characterizes Hamas' operation as an "arrest" mission ("Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 ... sought to arrest the enemy’s soldiers"). Here I actually don't think the goal is directly to rewrite history, because (though lord knows where this optimism comes from) I don't think even Hamas' most credulous dupes could possibly believe October 7 was actually an arrest operation. Rather, here the very absurdism is the point -- the goal is not to make anyone believe something as absurd as October 7 being an attempt at effectuating arrests, it's to make people associate claims about effectuating arrests with absurdist propaganda.

We're all familiar with the Sartre line about how antisemites "like to play with discourse" while aware of the "absurdity" of their arguments. and that's what we're seeing here. Israel does engage in genuine arrest operations on a regular basis. By "genuine", I don't mean that these operations are not or cannot be abusive, legally dubious, violent, unethical, etc.. But that doesn't mean the label of "arrest" operation is an absurd one; it's an accurate characterization of the operation (even if it is an abusive arrest, a legally dubious arrest, a violent arrest, and so on). Hamas' goal, though, is to render that word something absurd; the sort of thing we all know is just a euphemism for lawless authoritarian abuse. Think of a term like "re-education" -- when we hear a government say that a given political dissident was "re-educated", we go beyond viewing it with a skeptical eye ("was this an abusive form of education?"). We don't view it literally at all -- we understand that "re-education" is just a term authoritarians use to bowdlerize taking dissidents into a warehouse and beating them until they recant. "Re-education" isn't (sometimes, often, even always) "done abusively", "re-education" isn't done at all. The goal here is to make "arrest" be treated similarly -- an absurd term that Israel and Hamas use in obviously non-literal fashion to describe periodically raiding the territory of the other and killing people in it.

And finally, we should not overlook that this document is a means for Hamas to retraumatize its victims. There is power and sadistic pleasure in not just inflicting hurt, but also then being able to stand impassively (or -- perhaps even better -- with the most subtle of smirks) and declare that nothing actually happened, that the victim is making it all up. That, alone, would suffice as a motivator -- a psychological insult on top of injury. The forced photographs of captives "smiling" -- cited in the document as proof of Hamas' gentle hands -- are of course part of this play; a means through which victims are coerced into serving as testifiers against themselves.

A Palestinian friend of mine, responding to the article about increased 10/7 denialism, reposted comments by former Palestinian Israeli MK who observed that Palestinians are "not good people that only do good things." "Victims of the occupation aren't good people, they're victims. They are not righteous, they have a just cause." The cause of ending the occupation is just, but this does not mean that all persons under occupation -- or even all those who purport to act under the banner of "ending occupation" -- behave righteously (any more than the justness of the cause of Jewish self-determination means that all those who act under that banner behavior righteously). It is no adjunct to opposing the occupation that one must believe Hamas incapable of the horrific acts of violence and sadism that the evidence overwhelmingly documents occurred exactly as alleged, and to spread Hamas' lies on this front is not "solidarity" but sadism. The fellow travelers here -- for example, Mondoweiss, which was highlighted for the particularly vicious denial of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas fighters -- should be called exactly what they are.