Gaza Notes on Cognitive Dissonance, False Liberalism, and Trump’s Proposal

Why is everyone now surprised by Trump’s idea, which they called crazy, to clean up Gaza, buy it off, build a Riviera there, etc.? Why does everyone, especially the opponents of the idea, act as if this is not what should follow from the actions and lack of actions so far? Where has the cognitive ability of the democratic world and Hamas gone?

UNRWA, which is administered by the UN and funded mainly by the West  (e.g., USAID and the European Union), has for decades turned a blind eye to the fact that Hamas has installed its weapons arsenal and military headquarters in the immediate vicinity of schools, mosques and hospitals, or even in these buildings, and has more than once fired its rockets at Israel from near these buildings and properties, which then measure the launching point of the rockets and then launch a retaliatory strike there, destroying the school, the mosque, the hospital. Then, it can be shown on Al-Jazeera. Israel has protested more than once to the UN about these otherwise well-known, well-documented phenomena, as it has highlighted the problem in almost every statement, interview, and communication related to Hamas and/or Gaza, and nothing has ever happened. Now we are surprised that both Trump and Netanyahu, the American political class, especially the Republicans, and almost all of Israel want to put an end to this and turn to radical solutions. Here, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that it was not Israel or the United States that began to include the radical nature in the set of solutions! Hamas, and even before Hamas, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, declared jihads and intifadas, killing dozens of Israeli civilians walking peacefully in the streets.

What did Hamas think would happen?

What results did the Hamas leadership and the people of Gaza expect after October 7? What did they think? They could practically rule out the possibility that Israel would not launch a war in response. They could have ruled out the possibility that on October 8, Israel would hand over the entire country to the surrounding Arab population with its ears and tail tucked in and move somewhere on the other side of the world. The Palestinian leadership could have been sure that this would not happen. Still, even if the Hamas leadership and the people of Gaza had believed this, the question remains: what kind of cognitive abilities do Hamas, which controls Gaza, and the people of Gaza have – or do not have! – Would they have gained nothing from it if they did not realize that?

They killed X number of Jews on October 7; in the war that broke out, they killed X number of Israeli soldiers, and they took X number of Jews and non-Jews hostage – what was the result? What is the result after almost a year and a half of war they unleashed? The question is very natural because when you expose your entire people to the risk that Israel will pass through you, the Israeli army will pass through Gaza, when you expose your entire people to the risk that civilians will die en masse, which is not true as the Western press presents it, far from so many „civilians” died – but more on that later – then the question becomes legitimate: what was the higher goal that would justify, so to speak, pushing your own people into such great destruction?

There is no such goal; they never had such a goal, and it must be stated in black and white that this goal was not defined; that is why they failed to conjure out of it at least a viable, horrible, reprehensible, but still logically viable concept because the Hamas leadership and the majority of the population of Gaza do not have the level of cognitive abilities, the depth that would allow them to plan at least half a year in advance.

I read the opinions of those who are outraged by Trump’s statement, and in the language of such a typical, late European, post-modern, post-multicultural, very stupid, and hypocritical suffocating love – in other words, the opposite of spitting hatred – they say that Israel and the Jews are not equal to Netanyahu, and the Palestinians, the Palestinians in Gaza, are not equal to Hamas.

I would like to respectfully ask how we know that?

This statement is only half true. And it is true because we know this half. We understand that the Jews of Israel are not equal to Netanyahu, and we know this from the fact that even before the war broke out, they protested against Netanyahu with great fervor for years. They voted him out of office, tried to put him on trial, etc. Netanyahu came back to power, and there were still protests against him. A visible part of the Jewish state’s society, I won’t say the majority, but a visible part of the critical mass disagreed with Netanyahu. So, we know that the Jewishness of Israel is not equal to Netanyahu.

The other part of the statement: the Palestinians in Gaza are not equal to Hamas – and how do we know this? How dare we make such bold statements? I understand the ethical imperative behind it, which is a moral imperative valid in Western civilization, and that we do not generalize. We do not generalize to the entire community based on the actions of one, two, or three people. We do not generalize to the whole of people, the entire community, based on the actions of one, two, or three leaders.

Okay.

But that is only in the West!

And not always here!

How do we know that the Palestinians in Gaza are not the same as Hamas?

In Gaza, in Khan Yunis, on the Philadelphia River, in the refugee camps, have we seen anti-Hamas demonstrations anywhere, anytime? No, we didn’t see any!

The last anti-Hamas movement visible abroad was a „political competition” against Fatah. And when Fatah members murdered Hamas members and vice versa, it was part of an election campaign for them, which Hamas won.

But this was not because the anti-Hamas people wanted a normal, democratic Gaza, but because Fatah did not want to give control of the money to Hamas, which really wanted it. And so they played this game. Why didn’t the progressive Western intellectuals, who are now pro-Palestinian, and those who are now outraged by Trump’s idea, revolt when all the welfare measures, plans, and projects financed by the West and/or rich Arab countries in Hamas-controlled Gaza failed?

A glaring example of this is the construction, or rather the failure to construct, the water supply network jointly financed by Qatar and the European Union: the construction of the water supply network, which was a matter of life and death for the population, was left unfinished because Hamas dug up the water pipes that had been laid and used them to manufacture rockets. This process was documented by Hamas, then videotaped and published on its own Telegram channel, so this is not information leaked by Israeli intelligence that we could question based on our beliefs – depending on which side we sympathize with, depending on how anti-Semitic we are. We cannot question it because Hamas itself boasted about it! And we can cite countless, countless such cases from the past 20-30 years in Gaza as a deterrent example!

Despite this, we did not hear Western voices protesting, they did not demand the imposition of sanctions, and we did not hear that Hamas would be punished in a meaningful way that would hurt it and hurt it so much that it would stop its actions in this direction. To this day, we do not know how the hell so many weapons got into Gaza.

There was only Hamas in Gaza.

Only?

Hamas and even the UN, the UNWRA of the UN. How did so many weapons get into Gaza? Shouldn’t someone ask the UN what they were doing at that time? How could this happen in front of their eyes? Based on all this, we have to ask the question: what kind of cognitive abilities and what kind of sense of responsibility do the current actors in Middle Eastern politics have, or more precisely, do not have, what kind of people have been leading these institutions, and what did the Western political class, which calls itself democratic, progressive, etc., do that it now takes to heart and hypocritically rolls its eyes when Trump announces that he is going to buy Gaza by the pound and then evict the Palestinians from there?

My question to these people would be: what the hell did you expect?!

What made you think that Israel would tolerate this for another 80-100 years? After October 7, which is considered the greatest blow since the Holocaust, if that comparison is even an exaggeration, the Hamas pogrom of October 7 undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the history of terrorist attacks. And yet, what did you think that anyone from Washington or Tel Aviv would negotiate with a Hamas that did this, with a UN that passively supported it?

Do you really believe, you think, you believe that just because a progressive intellectual acts in the name of some Western or global institution (European Union, USAID, UN) or because he holds some state position (Prime Minister or President), that anything will change? Don’t you see, don’t you see that the crisis is not that the problem exists, but that the institutions that were created decades ago to solve the problem have ceased to exist, and they have ceased to exist because the esteemed citizens of the West have sent common sense to freedom in the name of progress?

So this is going to end by force, it is going to end by force because Hamas has resorted to violence and has left Israel with no choice but to ask itself the question: do we want this to happen again or not? We don’t, they don’t! Since all previous attempts have failed [rich Arab states, the UN, the European Union, moronic American presidents, Obama, Biden], they have no choice but to take a radical approach to answering the question and to direct their own actions in this direction.

The stupidity is that those who are now criticizing Trump because they feel sorry for the Palestinians would create the biggest problem for the Palestinians if they blocked Trump’s plan. In that case, within ten years, there will be no Palestinians left in Gaza because Israel will kill them all. It will expel them, it will kill them – because Hamas has no other choice!

Let me present another side of the story to better understand Hamas’s lack of cognitive ability. Hamas was hoping that the entire Arab world would rise up against Israel when they saw what Tel Aviv was doing in Gaza, and that a total intifada, a jihad, would begin, and that Israel would be wiped off the face of the earth – Hamas’ internationalization and pan-Arabization brought with it the very logical step that Hezbollah also began to rocket Israel – Israel was thus forced into a two-front war, and as a result:

• as a result, the radical response outlined above became even more inflammatory.
• as it turned out, Lebanon had long before violated the agreements that ended the 2006 Lebanon war by prohibiting it from storing weapons and missiles near the Israeli border. This agreement was supposed to be enforced by UN peacekeepers. They couldn’t implement it!

 

We are back to the UN and the Western European states that sent UN soldiers here. And Hamas (and then Hezbollah) has effectively exposed the imperfections of the UN, the hypocrisy and cowardice of the Western European states, and forced President Trump, who inherited this war, to also resort to radical responses, at least responses that bypass Western institutions, because the inaction, corruption, indifference, anti-Semitism, and progressivism of Western institutions have contributed to the gravity of the current situation.

I’m not saying that this was the cause of its emergence because there are other historical threads to it, but the fact that this situation became so severe, that Hezbollah and Hamas were able to grow so strong, that Hezbollah was able to screw up UN supervision and Hamas was able to evade UNRWA’s presence in Gaza for decades (unless UNRWA was part of Hamas’s plans!) made the emergence of radical responses inevitable. It’s logical – and anyone with cognitive abilities can assess all this in time.

To return to the thesis that „Netanyahu is not equal to the Jews and the Palestinians are not equal to Hamas,” we don’t know that!

But we do know that a huge part of the Palestinians, a part that can be seen from the moon, worships Hamas; they worship spitting on the body of the Israeli girl kidnapped from the Nova Festival, they celebrate, the crowds go wild in the streets when they see what Hamas did in Israel, in the kibbutzim, and at the Nova Festival. Yes, there are Palestinians and Arabs who condemn Hamas – they typically live in Israel. They live in Israel because they fled there from their own people, often from Gaza; they did all this because they wanted a good life for themselves – they wanted to be doctors and engineers and not live on the Western aid that comes to Gaza and that Hamas distributes for money.

Western democracy has become institutionalized and thus faceless, and today, only forms without original content remain, and the resulting void has been filled by people who take action. Trump’s proposal is therefore just as inhumane, just as condemnable as the decades of Western disregard promoted and supported by leftist, progressive governments; the false liberalism built on taboos, evasion of responsibility, and stupid pseudo-nativity – Trump’s proposal is not action, but reaction, not the origin of the problem, but its result!

– Örsh –

(Nethuszár)