"Pro-Hamas" Is not Hyperbole

Why are activists so reluctant to distance themselves from Hamas? It's so weird! We may never know.

Shadi Hamid

had a lamentation:

His wording is muddled and confusing, but as best as I can tell, he seems to be making two distinct but related points:¹

1. It’s bad to falsely label someone as pro-Hamas just because they’re pro-Palestinian

2. Labeling someone as pro-Hamas is, on its own, explicitly anti-Palestinian

I’ll agree with Shadi: lying about people is bad! The very few pro-Palestinian activists who have clearly denounced Hamas deserve every praise and adulation — though such clarity has been extremely rare.

Shadi’s second point is interesting (although it appears to be a reversal from an earlier position). There’s an adjacent/broader point about how horrendously destructive Palestinian militancy has been to the material wellbeing of Palestinian people, and I can’t agree enough. The history of the Palestinian cause has been one of one of repeated and spectacular losses. And that’s not a surprise when so much of it has been comprised of futile, useless, and horrendously vicious terrorist attacks against civilians. As I’ve said before:

What exactly is the objective and how does murdering Olympic athletes, or bombing a discotheque, or bombing a pizzeria, or murdering bus passengers, or sniping a baby in a stroller get anyone closer to it? The rockets Hamas regularly launches against Israel are slap-dash affairs, jury-rigged from water pipes and common materials. There’s no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. Their only practical purpose is to sow psychological trauma on a civilian population, which is as cogent of a definition for terrorism you could get. I don’t believe I’ve encountered anyone directly defending the strategic merits of indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks, or music festival mass shootings.

Even if you give fuck-all about Jewish lives, terrorist debauchery not only has not advanced Palestinian wellbeing, but it actively undermines it. The substantive consequences of the Second Intifada — all those thousands of deluded idiots who hyped themselves up into detonating themselves or going on stabbing sprees — has been nothing more than an entrenched security barrier, and the political death of the Israeli left-wing.

When Hamas goes as far as literally digging up their own municipal plumbing infrastructure in order to inshallah kill a Jew or two with a jury-rigged rocket, there is absolutely no confusion about what they truly prioritize in life. It’s not Israeli wellbeing obviously, but it sure as fuck is not Palestinian wellbeing either.

So yes, I agree with Shadi that being pro-Hamas (or any other terrorist variant) is anti-Palestinian. And yet, when Shadi writes about pro-Hamas activist Mahmoud Khalil² he somehow finds the evidence wanting:

But it pales in comparison to the ongoing effort to, effectively, de-person and deport the pro-Palestine activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, which has deeper and more profound implications on our most cherished rights….There isn’t really an argument beyond the fact that he is supposedly “pro-Hamas.” The catch, though, is that several days later not a single person or media outlet has been able to come up with any evidence that Khalil ever praised or "supported" Hamas. Yet a student's name has been permanently tarnished and his very freedom taken away. Here we are.

Are horse blinders back in fashion or something?

Let’s start with the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which actually is a coalition of more than 120 student organizations. This is not just a lone fringe organization. CUAD has not at all been shy about their views, and they conveniently maintain a Substack where they very proudly advertise how much they adore Yahya Sinwar:

Sinwar later became the architect of two of the greatest moments of Palestinian resistance in the past decade: 2018's Great March of Return and last year's Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. He understood, maybe better than anyone else, that there was a time and a necessity for all forms of resistance.

And:

Though he was of course committed to the collective liberation that undergirds the Palestinian struggle, he also understood, beautifully, the role that the individual must play in that liberation. As members of the collective pursuit of Palestinian freedom, each of us should look to him as a clear illustration of what it means to devote a full lifetime to the intifada. Yahya Sinwar became the 'self-made individual' that he wrote about. It's now the time for us to reflect on how we can make ourselves more like him.

It goes on and on. CUAD is also who issued and then retracted an apology on behalf of a student who was suspended for saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” In their retraction, they also doubled down on their calls for violence:

So we can conclusively state that the 120+ groups that are part of this coalition are pro-Hamas, right? Maybe it’s true that not every CUAD coalition member personally endorses every CUAD position (maybe!), and yet it remains reasonable to infer silence as tacit approval, especially when the silence concerns issues central to the putative advocacy.

Whether or not Khalil was a formal “member” is an irrelevant question, because these 120+ campus groups do not necessarily care to keep membership rolls. What we know for sure is that Khalil was heavily involved in campus protests, either as a formal negotiator for CUAD, or holding a bullhorn while others passed out flyers purportedly from the “Hamas Media Office.”

Khalil’s wife said the claims that her husband supports Hamas are “ridiculous” and “disgusting”. Ok, if this is all one giant misunderstanding, why doesn’t Khalil clear things up? He issued a meandering letter from jail peppered with many irrelevant asides, and not once does he say a damn thing about the government’s central allegation against him. And if it is indeed so “ridiculous” and “disgusting” to be falsely tarred as a Hamas simp, why did he spend so many months rolling around in the dirt? The only reasonable conclusion is that his wife is lying, now that the consequences outweigh the benefits.

I mean, come on! We never summon up this level of skepticism in any other context. If I tagged along with the KKK to their rallies and acted as their negotiator, no one would believe I was just there for the costumes. When you advocate for a group, you’re presumed to endorse its positions unless you say otherwise.

The secondary concern is that the burden shouldn’t be on outsiders to sanitize other people’s narratives. There is no universe where I would ever confuse Palestinian activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib as pro-Hamas, because he has repeatedly and emphatically made his position crystal clear that Hamas is bad for Palestinians. And yet this clarity is apparently far too elusive for some.

There was an interesting exchange between Ethan Klein and Sam Seder, two Jews with very different positions on Israel/Palestine (the stammering is verbatim):

Ethan: How do you feel about Hamas?

Sam: I I mean, I uh I feel that Hamas...people can perceive it as a uh a liberation uh uh organization Uh we call them terrorists in this country. We called—

Ethan: What do you think about them Sam?

Sam: Uh, listen. I think there are parts I would imagine of Hamas that have done good for uh the people in Gaza and I think they have done uh bad things.

This is such a tired joke. Very obviously, so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists have been and remain very comfortable either openly cheering on Hamas’s homicidality like deranged fans stomping on the bleachers, or at minimum generously throwing them a bone about all the supposed “good things” they have done. My default assumption now is that “pro-Palestinian” is playing cover for pro-Hamas, unless evidence suggests otherwise. Don’t blame me for acknowledging the association activists worked so hard on creating!

[Edit 5/30/25: The dynamic I’m describing goes deeper and is much more concerning than what perusing polling data would tell you. Depending on the denominator you use, “as few as” 9% of all Americans, or as high as 48% of Americans aged 18 to 24 are willing to admit to supporting Hamas. These are startling numbers on their own but further sharpened by the inevitable social desirability bias discouraging honesty on questions about bona fide terrorist groups.

I have no doubt that millions hold earnest pro-Palestinian positions, but as Shadi has stated, supporting Hamas means you are anti-Palestinian. The disturbing question remains as to how the pro-Palestinian movement could be either hijacked by or — at best — remain comfortably adjacent to its very antithesis. From the perspective of both optics and objectives, unambiguously disavowing terrorist supporters among its ranks should be the most urgent goal of the pro-Palestinian movement. Neither ignorance nor laziness can explain the paucity of effort on this front.]

Hamas has been the governing authority of Gaza for over 18 years, and their only legacy is instigating a war that resulted in the pulverization of tens of thousands of their own constituents. Hamas has demonstrably worked really hard at trying to kill as many Jews as possible, showcasing the same unrelenting motivation that heroin junkies have for stripping copper wire out of construction sites. And what the fuck do they have to show for it?

Are you tired of winning yet?

For Hamas boosters, this is an acceptable trade-off. Palestinian lives don’t fucking matter — those anonymous brown people are just bit-players in a diorama to gawk at from a distance, with the headlining spectacle being Jewish massacres. Why be so cagey about this? Is it still too gauche to admit?

If you believe I am strawmanning or weakmanning the so-called “pro-Palestinian” side, ask yourself why it’s such a trivial exercise to do so. What I previously wrote about weakmanning remains relevant:

Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.

By definition, a genuinely pro-Palestinian movement would oppose anything that harms Palestinians, which inevitably means advocating against Hamas. If you consistently refuse to take such a basic elementary step in your advocacy, what the fuck do you actually stand for?

The cosplay is unconvincing. Save us the headache, save yourself the effort, and just be honest about your true motivations. What are you afraid of?

1. Shadi also makes a very bizarre parallel, mapping Israel:Jews onto Pro-Hamas:Pro-Palestine. Uh, what? I have no idea what axis of comparison he’s using here. What exactly does it mean to distinguish a specific country from the ethnicity/religion it’s strongly affiliated with? Are we talking about the country as a whole or its government? Are we talking about Israeli Jewish citizens specifically or Jews across the entire world? It’s so confusing.

2. This is not the point of this post nor will I dwell on it, but I’m one of those unicorns who is actually in favor of open borders immigration. Combined with my free speech maximalism is why I absolutely do not support Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation.