Why don’t Gazans rise up and oust Hamas? Dismantling a deeply dishonest claim

Palestinians covering the grave of a group of victims of Israeli airstrikes in Khan Yunis on 20 March 2025

Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 20 March 2025:

On Tuesday [18 March 2025], Israel returned to a punishing campaign of airstrikes in Gaza that has killed as many as 700 people. It promised that this is just the beginning, and demanded that Hamas simply release the hostages. Deals be damned.

But on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz found a different audience for these demands. “To the residents of Gaza,” he said in a video statement, “return the hostages and banish Hamas – the alternative is complete destruction and ruin. Residents of Gaza, this is the last warning.” He promised that if the people of Gaza deliver the hostages and dispatch Hamas, Israel will reward them by opening “other options – including leaving for other places in the world for those who wish [to go]. The alternative is complete destruction and ruin.”

Katz’s request for Gazans to oust Hamas has a long history. The notion that Gaza’s people should have risen up is ubiquitous in Israel. Days after the October 7 Hamas attack, President Isaac Herzog – the country’s ceremonial head of state, a consensus figurehead who is supposed to stand above politics – said: “It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not – not aware, not involved. … They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime.”

The “failure of Gazans to rebel” is a key component of the argument that there are “no innocents in Gaza,” which has become practically a rallying cry in Israel, of voices on the streets and studios and elected representatives.

The idea that Gazans could have ousted Hamas over the years is one of the most fraudulent themes in a war flooded with lies, and one that must be laid to waste.

So easy to oust a regime

First, while occasionally leaders step aside under public pressure, the examples of failures are manifold. Just this week, Turkish authorities summarily arrested Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, as Recep Tayyip Erdogan seeks to nip any serious opposition presidential candidate in the bud. Before the protests grew to number thousands, a reporter told the BBC that the protests were still small because “you have to be brave to protest in Turkey these days.” Police break up protests and arrest people, she explained, closing roads and metros. Sounds scary – and Hamas isn’t half as nice as that.

Nevertheless, crowds have turned out to protest the arrest. Like the 2013 uprising in Turkey, it’s a safe bet that Erdogan will still be there when they’re gone. Ask the Iranians in the Women, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, or the Green Movement of 2009-2010, about how easy it is to oust a regime. Ask Arabs who rose up against authoritarian regimes all around the Middle East, kicked some out and mostly got resurgent authoritarian regimes instead.

Serbia’s people, meanwhile, have risen up to face their increasingly authoritarian President Aleksandar Vucic. Sparked by a train station roof collapse last fall that killed 15 people, the accident became a symbol of rampant corruption and cronyism that Serbs saw all around them. Student-led citizens demonstrated so vigorously that the prime minister announced his resignation in January. Empowered, they kept going and staged an extraordinary protest last week, with hundreds of thousands on the street despite the government’s tight grip on its people. The government has now resigned, but Vucic is still there. He might call elections, but he also tends to win them.

Bring the examples home. Tens of thousands of Israelis flooded Israel’s cities over the last few days, wild with anger at the government for abandoning hostages and everything else: corruption, destroying the traces of democracy, auto-impunity from all accountability. Last September, hundreds of thousands turned out. The protests have been nearly unbroken, save for the first few weeks of the war, since January 2023 – it’s an extraordinary mobilization by all counts.

Yet the government has steadfastly refused the most sweeping, unifying demand in Israel: to retrieve all of its own citizens from hellish captivity in Gaza in return for a cease-fire. Mass uprisings couldn’t stop the judicial overhaul – moving at Mach speed these days – or get a state commission of inquiry either. And the final failure: Two years of a sustained, mass, people-led protest have failed to remove the Netanyahu government from power.

But Israelis insist that of all the people in the world who have failed to dislodge a disastrous, corrupt, authoritarian or oppressive leader, one heroic people alone could have done it: Palestinians in Gaza.

Yes, Gazans, a deprived, trapped, battered people for 16 years prior to October 7, with parts of their cities and infrastructure ground to a pulp with every fresh war, four times over since 2008 prior to 2023, with 45 percent unemployment on the eve of October 7, and a brutal authoritarian theocratic regime lording over them, two actually – these are the people who Israelis believe could have done what few before or after have managed. What Israeli demonstrators, rich by comparison, well-fed, usually employed, educated and seasoned demonstrators, couldn’t do.

But have Gazans even tried to fight Hamas, the ornery will ask? Well, they do have to decide whether to fight Israel’s occupation or Hamas, but actually yes. One of the biggest anti-Hamas demonstrations in recent memory was held in July 2023, just months before the attack.

‘But they voted for Hamas’

It should be said that proponents of the “no innocents” argument have additional examples. Palestinians, after all, voted for Hamas in 2006. This point is useless: Palestinian elections were held in 2006 – the youngest voter would have been born in 1988. That means Gazans under 35 in 2023 never chose Hamas, or anyone. In 2022, half of all Gazans were under 18. While the full data isn’t readily available, in 2021, approximately 64 percent of Gazans were under 25. End of conversation.

A more serious accusation involves accomplices: putative civilians who either participated spontaneously on October 7, attended the sick ceremonies Hamas staged to release the hostages, or even held some of the hostages in family homes. This is certainly an awful truth. But in Israel, 24 percent want to go back to full-fledged fighting in Gaza. From Israel’s adult population, that would be approximately 1.68 million; if we count another 26 percent who want to push Gazans into exile in the same Institute for National Security Studies survey, that’s an additional 1.8 million.

Yes, there may be thousands of Gazan civilians who have thought or done evil things – that’s how it is. Even God agreed to spare Sodom for just 10 righteous people; apparently the people of the book aren’t interested.

But it gets weirder.

As every Israeli now knows, Netanyahu presided over the Qatar-cash scheme to help prop up Hamas in Gaza. The plan rested on a gamble (commonly known as “intelligence assessments”) that Hamas was deterred, and that money would buy quiescence.

But all the attention to the Qatar scheme misses the bigger picture: Netanyahu benefited from the fragmentation of Palestinian leadership (and society), which was key to the disintegration of the Palestinian national project. In other words, having Hamas around was convenient. Ergo, Netanyahu probably didn’t want to topple Hamas at all.

In late 2016, his then-defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, pushed to conduct an offensive, surprise operation against Hamas; in a succinct memo, he outlined seven levels of increasing military pressure to force disarmament. People like me might have opposed an offensive action – but the fact that Netanyahu didn’t do it surely springs from different motivations. It was always better for Netanyahu to argue that half of Palestinians were run by theocratic terrorists and the other half run by secular nationalist terror supporters (this is translation of Netanyahu’s “Hamas-stan and Fatah-stan” quip), and as such were too divided to be partners for a peace process.

In sum, the Israeli leader did not want to topple Hamas, but he expected the people of Gaza to do so. What would have happened had they tried? Especially in recent years, flush with Qatari cash, plenty of arms and de facto power, Hamas would have stamped such efforts out easily. And Netanyahu would not have been sorry.

But enough of counterfactuals. Just think of the present. Israel finally decided to topple Hamas, after it was far too late for 1,200 victims and 251 hostages. One of the best armies in the world, the recipient of unprecedented foreign aid from the most powerful country in the world, took a shot at removing Hamas.

It’s been 17 months and we’re still waiting. Katz asking Gazans to oust Hamas and release hostages is nothing more than an excuse to destroy them all, acknowledgment of his government’s own failures – as if anyone needed reminding.

This article is reproduced in its entirety