Hamas is the perennial bogeyman of discussions on Israel-Palestine, consistently portrayed as a terrorist organization, and the barrier to peace in the ongoing conflict. This claim is at best hypocritical and at worst false. While Hamas may aptly be called a terrorist organization, if they are one, Israel and the U.S. government are equally as violent and less justified.

Those that claim Hamas is a terrorist organization point to Hamas’s use of violence against Israel and its citizens, including sponsoring suicide bombings, launching rockets into Israel, and calling for the end of Israel as a state. Some of these claims are highly dubious: for instance, while Hamas’ initial charter called for the end to the state of Israel, this charter has long since been replaced. In practice, Hamas’ official stance, according to their leader, is one of coexistence with Israel.

However, Hamas has engaged in violence, sometimes horrific and unjustified. But any violence Hamas has engaged in is a drop in a pool compared to the terror and violence that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the U.S. military has engaged in over the years. Israel has, according to the consensus of non-partisan human rights organizations, intentionally targeted and murdered civilians and children, tortured non-convicted prisoners, systemically oppressed Palestinians through forced resettlement and the building of illegal settlements, destroyed hospitals, schools and people’s homes, funded paramilitary groups such as the Ugandan putschists who installed Idi Amin, and murdered journalists, most recently U.S. citizen Abu Akleh. Israel has even attacked western civilian targets, bombing U.S and British Civilian centers and falsely blaming the Muslim Brotherhood, such as in the Lavon affair in 1954, and sinking the USS Liberty in 1967, which Israel claimed was an accident, but many American officials close to the incident dispute.

The terror and violence the IDF and Israel have been subjecting Palestinians to over the years is indisputably worse than any violence committed by Hamas against Israel. The numbers do not lie: Israel is responsible for the deaths of far more Palestinian civilians than Hamas is of Israeli civilians. ‘Terrorist’ is ultimately a political designation levied against groups who oppose people in power. In any objective, ethical sense Hamas are less properly called terrorists than the IDF or its primary supporter, the United States.

Not only is the IDF objectively far more aptly called a ‘terrorist organization’ than Hamas, but any violence that Hamas commits against Israel is far more ethically justified than violence the IDF commits against Hamas. Violence by an illegally occupying, apartheid force is ethically incomparable to resistance by the oppressed people. If I steal your land, deport your family members and treat those that remain as second-class citizens, control your access to food, water, and shelter, and regularly murder your compatriots your violent response to me still may not be warranted, but as the resistor you are far more justified in your violence than I am.

As an example, the violent resistance measures taken by the African National Congress against apartheid South Africa may not have been ethically justifiable, but that action was certainly more ethically justifiable than violence committed by apartheid South Africa against black South Africans. Additionally, Hamas has a primitive military, relying on crude homemade missiles because they do not have access to high-precision, advanced military-grade weaponry like the IDF. Thus, Hamas has far less ability to carefully target Israeli military locations and has no choice but to engage in more imprecise, Guerilla warfare. On the other hand, Israel has access to the most advanced military on the planet, and yet still chooses to intentionally target and murder civilians instead of focusing on military targets (despite their claims the contrary, which have consistently been refuted by every major human rights organization).

A final important point about Hamas is that they are a direct outgrowth of Israel’s hegemony for the past century. Hamas was only founded in 1989, precisely as a result of the oppression the Palestinian people had been suffering for decades. It is inevitable that violent resistance groups will prop up when people are subjected to constant human rights abuses, especially when non-violent resistance fails. Focusing on Hamas in discussions of Israel-Palestine is like focusing on people breaking windows during BLM riots: we should be concerned about the larger pattern of injustice that motivates violent resistance, not the violence committed by the oppressed.

When Hamas comes up in discussions of Israel-Palestine it is often intended as a distraction to point to in the face of valid criticism of Israel. Instead of focusing on the real problem, which is decades of systematic apartheid and oppression, these issues are obscured by pointing to a scary bogeyman, conjuring up images of stereotypical terrorists. But this appeal is an illusion that feeds on the ignorance of Americans to the actual issues: the real bogeyman is our own government, and the reality that they support a state which is engaged in the systemic oppression of a people. ■

—Anonymous