Ever since Hamas invaded Israel, massacred 1,200 of its citizens and kidnapped 240 as hostages, there has been an effort to distance the Gazan population from the terrorist group. In most cases it has been well-intentioned, reflecting a desire that western populations do not associate the rape, torture and mass murder of Jews seen on 7 October with the residents of a territory that is 98 per cent Muslim. Since 9/11, political, civil, journalistic and security elites have made delinking Islam and Islamist violence a priority in their initial responses to terrorism. This has been the case particularly in countries with a sizeable or highly visible Muslim population that could become a target for reprisals and racism.

While this seems sensible as a means of preventing attacks on innocent Muslims in the West, separating Gaza from Hamas in a political sense is not easy. One of the difficulties encountered is Palestinian public opinion. A poll of 668 people by the Ramallah-based polling company Awrad suggests that 75 per cent of those living in Gaza and the West Bank supported Hamas’s attack on Israel, with 59 per cent supporting it ‘extremely’ and 16 per cent ‘somewhat’. In the West Bank, where three-fifths of Palestinians live, support was as high as 83 per cent while in Gaza itself a more modest 64 per cent said they backed ‘the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th’. Some 76 per cent had a positive view of Hamas, though this is more common in the West Bank (88 per cent) than in Gaza (60 per cent). Some 99 per cent had a negative view of Israel, of which 97 per cent is ‘very negative’. The polling, which included on-the-ground interviews in southern Gaza, also shows 75 per cent endorsing ‘a Palestinian state from the river to the sea’. Only 17 per cent supported a two-state solution.

There has been some suggestion that Israel’s military operation risks radicalising Palestinians and pushing them towards Hamas. It’s scarcely possible to make Palestinians more anti-Israel than they are already. In polling conducted one month before the 7 October attacks by another Ramallah-based company, some 1,270 Palestinians were asked to name their preferred method of breaking the deadlock with Israel. Support for ‘armed struggle’ came out 29 points ahead of ‘peaceful popular resistance’ and 33 points ahead of negotiations. The same poll found 64 per cent of Gazans saying they would vote for senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh over incumbent Mahmoud Abbas in hypothetical presidential elections. (Palestinian presidential elections are very hypothetical; the last one was held 18 years ago.)

This makes uncomfortable reading for western liberals, many of whom apply a double standard to the conflict. Examples of Israeli extremism, support for racist political parties, and settler violence define the country’s political and moral character, but Palestinian extremism, anti-Semitic laws and violence against Israelis are merely outgrowths of conflict and occupation. While beliefs and actions that are fringe in Israel are said to represent the mainstream, beliefs and actions that are mainstream in Palestinian society are said to represent only the fringe.

Hence the efforts to cast Hamas as an alien interloper into Gazan society, when the terror group won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections with an overall majority. (Jimmy Carter, who headed up a team of monitors, described the election as ‘orderly and peaceful’ as well as ‘honest, fair, and safe’.) Hence the downplaying of the Martyrs’ Fund, the Palestinian programme that pays stipends to terrorists and their families if they are imprisoned or killed in the course of carrying out attacks against Israelis. Hence the overlooking of the Palestinian custom of handing out sweets to children to celebrate terrorist attacks against Israel.

Palestinian society, culture, institutions and attitudes need fundamental reform before there can be any hope for peace

Hence the pretence in western capitals that while Hamas may be extremists, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, which runs the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, are ‘moderates’. These moderates were most recently seen issuing a statement suggesting Israel, rather than Hamas, was behind the Supernova music festival massacre that killed 360 people. (The Palestinian Authority later deleted the statement from its website.) In September, Abbas gave a speech in which he said the Nazis killed the Jews not because they were Jews but because they were money-lenders. This should have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Abbas, whose doctoral thesis claims that Zionists collaborated with Hitler in the Final Solution.

None of this is to deny the distinction between Hamas terrorists and the civilian population of Gaza when it comes to the laws of war. The former are legitimate targets, the latter are not. Nor is it to suggest we should regard the deaths of non-combatant Palestinians as any less of a tragedy. It is merely to state facts and to illustrate how western elites’ determination to sanitise Palestinian society and its attitudes gives western populations a distorted picture of the conflict and the prospects for peace. Removing Hamas is not enough; Palestinian society, culture, institutions and attitudes need fundamental reform before there can be any hope for peace.

The Palestinians’ self-appointed spokespersons in the West don’t like to hear any of this. They have their mythos in which Israelis are the evil ogres, Palestinians the righteous victims and they the knights in shining UN resolutions. The very progressives, activists and academics who lecture the rest of us about speaking over ‘people of colour’ and denying their agency do exactly that with the Palestinians, whose words must be rewritten for their own good and whose actions are always conditioned by the actions of others. Western progressives are too busy giving Palestinians their solidarity to treat them like human beings.