“We differ in everything… except our disagreement.”
Before Gaza exploded into war, it had already exploded under a reality we tried to live with for eighteen years. That summer was not merely a coup; it was a moment when truth was killed in the name of truth, a tragic spectacle of morality devouring itself. Since then, we have lived in worlds of alternative facts: a world in which the weapon of resistance was turned into a weapon against legitimacy; a world where the social contract was replaced by a contract of exclusive ownership; a world that flees from confronting itself to hide behind masks of heroism and purity. The world was not only harsh toward us—we were harsher toward ourselves. Gaza, which they wanted to turn into a laboratory for the legitimacy of weapons, became a laboratory for the legitimacy of siege. From battle to battle, all the way to the “mother of battles,” which did not come by mere coincidence but as a time bomb whose countdown began eighteen years ago—everything we had swept under the rug burst forth to slap us with a bitter truth. We have become a mere detail in the calculations of the powerful. Whoever fails to invest in the unity of his forces becomes an easy investment for those who know how to manage his divisions—an object lesson for all who would learn—atop all this rubble of people and stone alike.
On the twenty-fifth of last month, before the end of a year drawing to a close, Hamas released— in Arabic and English—its second political document, titled Our Narrative: “Al-Aqsa Flood—Two Years of Steadfastness and the Will of Liberation.” Thirty-five pages across eight chapters—enough to classify it as a political manifesto, suitable as an internal mobilization pamphlet for its third-tier base and below. A careful reading reveals astonishing contradictions and leaps over facts on the ground, for several reasons. First, the document stresses the criminal nature of the enemy as an inherent constant, yet it does not answer the reader: did the leaders of the “Flood” know this nature in advance, or was it discovered later? If they knew, that is a catastrophe; if they did not, the catastrophe is far greater. Second, citing the enemy’s sabotage of the Oslo Accords as one of the reasons for the Flood borders on bitter irony. When a movement that has opposed Oslo from day one, spared no effort to undermine it, and even colluded—objectively—with Israeli right-wing governments to sabotage it, then, thirty years later, presents Oslo as a cause for the Flood, it is an insult to simple minds. Third, the document lists twenty “achievements” of the Flood, all confined to psychological and moral theories that are unmeasurable, while obscuring every measurable catastrophe on the ground. This is nothing short of falsifying facts—manufacturing victories that have no place in the language of reality. Imagine ignoring that more than half of Gaza has been reoccupied; that the number of prisoners released through exchange deals has been exceeded several times over by those rearrested, enduring conditions of brutality unprecedented in the history of Israeli prisons; more than seventy thousand dead, ten thousand missing, and one hundred seventy thousand wounded—over ten thousand of whom, at a minimum, now live with permanent disabilities; thousands of widows and orphans in need of care; cities destroyed, infrastructure and the fixed assets of civil society reduced to dust; half of Gaza’s population living in tattered tents—no one on the planet has failed to see their suffering. None of this freed a captive or stopped a drowning; yet it is all relegated solely to the enemy’s criminality, without the slightest assumption of responsibility—an apex of moral irresponsibility in its ugliest form. Fourth, a pressing question: where do we Palestinians stand today regarding our major causes after two years of a Flood launched to halt violations against Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, settlement expansion, and the prisoners’ issue? Where does the entire “Axis of Resistance” that adopted these slogans now stand? The inescapable truth is that all these issues are in their worst condition in the history of the Palestinian cause.
It did not stop there. On Monday the twenty-ninth of last month, the movement presented a new spokesperson for its military wing, who announced the deaths of five of its leaders and conveyed pointed messages, hours before a meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. First: that the military wing slated for dismantlement under Trump’s plan has been reconstituted—in other words, that the provisions under which the war was halted are mere illusions. Second: the use of the word “rifles” in the opening reference to weapons signals that there is no weaponry to be confiscated—meaning Netanyahu’s condition of disarmament before entering the second phase is rejected outright. Nor did it end there: an organized campaign of leaks followed, about internal elections affecting the Shura Council, and even the leaking of Ali al-Amoudi’s name as a successor to Yahya Sinwar in Gaza’s leadership.
The response was swift. In his recent visit, Netanyahu succeeded in tying entry into the second phase to Hamas’s disarmament, pushing Donald Trump to threaten Hamas with dire consequences should it fail to comply—warning that it would face fifty-six countries bent on its destruction; that is, that an “international stabilization force” would be tasked with forcibly disarming Hamas—knowing full well that no one would do so except Israel. Do these statements admit any other interpretation than that a new round of war is knocking once again on Gaza’s doors, led by the prime minister of war (Benjamin Netanyahu), whom Donald Trump lavishly praised, saying that without his courageous leadership there would be no Israel?
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