Three days of protests by thousands of Palestinians in Gaza punctured the illusion promoted by Hamas and its apologists around the world that the Tehran-backed group defends the national interests of the people there. The just demands and courage of the protesters deserve the support of working people everywhere.
The Nazi-minded group is the biggest obstacle Palestinian workers, fishermen and farmers in Gaza face to being able to advance their own interests, as well as a deadly threat to Jews and Israel’s existence.
Palestinians took to the streets in at least five cities in Gaza March 25-27, chanting slogans against Hamas’ dictatorial rule, including demands to free the Israeli hostages Hamas holds. Some carried banners reading “Stop the war” and “We want to live in peace.” The protests started back up April 2.
At one action, hundreds chanted “[Hamas leader Osama] Hamdan leave Gaza! Hamdan go to Iran!” Working people in Gaza are well aware of the role of the reactionary bourgeois regime in Iran in backing Hamas, its dictatorial rule and their common aim of eliminating Israel and the Jews.
The protests show how the blows Israeli forces have dealt to Hamas have widened space for working people in Gaza.
After the protests Hamas thugs murdered at least six of the leaders and brutalized others, slandering them as Israeli agents, hoping to once again intimidate the people of Gaza into drawing back and staying silent.
One of those murdered by the Hamas death squads was 22-year-old Oday Nasser al-Rabay, a resident of Gaza City. He was kidnapped March 28, tortured for four hours, dragged by a rope around his neck and beaten with clubs and metal rods in front of passersby.
But if Hamas thought this would silence his family, they were mistaken. Al-Rabay’s family led a funeral procession through the streets of Gaza City March 29 chanting “Hamas out,” and made a video denouncing Hamas.
“These unjust criminals who unjustly killed this Muslim must be held accountable,” one of his relatives says in the video.
Debate in Israel
The protests against Hamas have spurred further debate inside Israel over the road forward to preventing more anti-Jewish pogroms like the massacre of 1,200 people Hamas carried out Oct. 7, 2023, and how to defend Israel’s existence as a refuge from Jew-hatred.
Some capitalist politicians in Israel claim “there are no innocents in Gaza” and that most Palestinians there supported the Oct. 7 slaughter of Jews.
But this is a slander, Hamas never had support from the majority of Gazans.
It could only maintain its dictatorial rule by routinely torturing and murdering its opponents, suppressing strikes and restricting women’s rights. With funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Hamas tried to inculcate school children with Jew-hatred and win its supporters to embracing “martyrdom” in order to wipe Israel off the map.
“The protests now erupting are not happening in a vacuum,” well-known Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal wrote in Ynet news March 27. “Many [Gazans] are weary of war, and many never supported Hamas to begin with.”
This “doesn’t mean they’ve become pro-Israel, especially amid Gaza’s widespread devastation,” Eyal said, but “they are willing to take to the rubble-strewn streets to denounce an oppressive, murderous, genocidal regime.”
An article by Seth Frantzman in the Jerusalem Post noted some of the obstacles working people in Gaza face, including the refusal of the most prominent Arab-language media like Al Jazeera to cover the widespread anger and opposition to Hamas. Many Arab governments “fear the street power of protesters more than they fear Hamas,” he said.
The Jordanian government “may back the Palestinian Authority [Hamas’ main rival], but they don’t want protesters in their own country getting any ideas,” he writes. Many governments also “saw the success of the Syrian revolution and how it led to the fall of the Assad regime, and they don’t want to end up like Bashar al-Assad.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saluted the protests. “We have seen something we have never seen before — public protests against Hamas rule in Gaza,” he said. “This shows that our policy is working,” referring to the stepped-up military action aiming to disable Hamas in Gaza.
The willingness of working people in Gaza to fight to get Hamas’ boot off their necks is a positive sign for the class struggles that lie ahead. The need to unify working people in common actions to defend our class interests, and to take on and defeat Jew-hatred and all national oppression will be crucial to working people making progress.
On March 22 tens of thousands in Israel joined protests organized by Netanyahu’s political rivals, demanding he halt the war, negotiate with Hamas and make freeing the remaining hostages the top priority, instead of dismantling Hamas. The editors of liberal bourgeois media like the New York Times and the Washington Post give the impression that these protests have broad support. In reality they reflect the views of a mostly middle-class minority.
Big support in Israel to end Hamas
Working people in Israel overwhelmingly support the renewed offensive. They know that if Hamas is not dismantled, it will reorganize and carry out more and bloodier pogroms in the future.
Under the impact of Hamas’ continuing vows to carry out more massacres of Jews, even some bourgeois liberal Israeli opponents of Netanyahu are beginning to recognize reality.
“Israel’s objective is clear: ensure that Hamas can no longer function as an organized terrorist entity,” says a March 19 editorial by the Jerusalem Post, which has previously been virulently opposed to Netanyahu and his conduct of the war. This requires “a refusal to engage in futile negotiations that only serve to prolong Hamas’ grip on power.”
Stop Tehran having nuclear weapons
At the same time, the Israeli government is preparing steps to eliminate the threat posed by the Iranian regime’s drive to get nuclear weapons. The rulers there repeatedly call for the destruction of the “Zionist entity.” It’s believed that Tehran could manufacture enough weapons-grade fuel for six nuclear weapons in a week if it decides to do so. That would risk a new Holocaust in Israel.
The administration of Donald Trump has imposed new sanctions on Iran, looking to pressure Tehran into talks over its nuclear program.
But sanctions harm working people of all nationalities in Iran, who are the main obstacle to Tehran’s attempts to extend its reactionary influence throughout the region, and are the most important ally of the toilers in Israel. Many working people in Iran see Hamas’ war against the Jews and Tehran’s attacks on their rights as two sides of the same coin.
The Israeli government has made it clear that it will act militarily to prevent Tehran from acquiring even a single nuclear weapon. Ynet news April 1 published a list of the six main nuclear development sites in Iran.