Hasan Piker has caused a bunch of outrage by saying that he thinks Hamas is 1,000 times better than Israel. He said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel” every time. Is Hasan Piker right about Hamas? I want to talk about it.
So, I think a lot of people are making the mistake of just writing Hasan Piker off because some of the things he says are so surprising, so shocking, so outrageous. A lot of people think it’s good enough to just call him names and hope he goes away. I think that’s a big mistake.
Hasan Piker has a massive audience. He’s emerging as one of the major voices of his generation. And I think it’s important that those of us who disagree with him take the time to address his claim. His claim is pretty simple. It’s that the Israelis have been so brutal to the Palestinians, have treated them so badly and have prosecuted the war in Gaza with such violence – that pretty much anything Hamas does pales in comparison. Anything that Hamas does is essentially justified. That’s his basic claim.
I think that claim has a lot of appeal for people. It is true that the Palestinians have suffered grievously over these many decades. I’ve been to the West Bank. I’ve seen it myself. I was in Gaza before Hamas took over. I have seen the conditions of the Palestinian people, and they have been treated badly. Many people felt that the Gaza war was prosecuted too aggressively. And that’s why I think his critique and his comments resonate with a lot of people.
But I do see it very differently than Hasan Piker. And my position doesn’t come out of a position of not knowing anything about oppression. It doesn’t come out of a lack of knowledge about liberation struggles. In fact, the opposite.
For a big chunk of my life, I was a street-level activist on the left side of Pluto. Why? Because of the pain of my people. I understood the brutality we suffered during our enslavement and during the vicious violent colonial conquest of Africa. And frankly I saw the pain we still suffer in prisons, in jails and in housing projects. Based on my own indignation at the mistreatment of my people, I understand why some people say “anything you do to defend your people is completely justified when they have been mistreated.”
But I was lucky enough to meet people who were older than me in the struggle. I met people who had been in the Black Panther Party, people who had been in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, people who had been in the African National Congress in South Africa. I met people who had to make the actual choice of whether to pick up the gun – and if they picked up the gun, how to use it.
And those people humbled me. They taught me things that I think are not being shared anymore with the next generation.
One thing they taught me was – in the choice between nonviolence and violence – there are legitimate times to be nonviolent. But there are also times to take up arms. Yes, we have a beautiful nonviolent tradition in the black community led by people like Dr. King, Ella Jo Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and Bayard Rustin. When these people got to heaven – Gandhi himself probably bowed. These are giants of nonviolence. That is an honorable tradition in my community.
But there are people in my community who did pick up the gun. The Black Panther Party did. Malcolm X said we have the right to do it. And many of our leaders in Africa engaged in armed struggle.
BUT when they did it, they had moral principles they refused to walk away from. The choice wasn’t just between violence or nonviolence. It was between principled armed struggle (which focuses on soldiers and military targets) and TERRORISM (which deliberately targets civilians).
Look at Nelson Mandela with the ANC in South Africa, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Samora Machel in Mozambique and Agostinho Neto in Angola. They engaged in armed struggle, and their opponents called them terrorists. But they were not targeting civilians; to the contrary, they worked hard to minimize civilian casualties. They had the opportunity to kill a lot of white colonial family members – women, children and babies. There were a lot of white civilians living in their countries who were easy targets.
But African freedom fighters chose not to kill those people. They chose instead to focus their guns only on soldiers, only on infrastructure. Why? They did not want to become what they were fighting.
In other words: even in an armed struggle, there are rules. Even in an armed struggle, there are principles. And the principles are – no women, no children, no rapes, no kidnapping. These are moral principles that any liberation struggle must uphold.
There is a way to judge an organization and decide if it is worthy of your support. You ask two questions. First, you ask: “What are the ends of the organization? What are their goals?” And then you ask: “What are their means? How are they getting there?”
In my tradition, the ends have to be more freedom, more dignity and more democracy for more people. Those are the principles of freedom fighting organizations in our community that we stand with and we uphold.
Hamas is not that kind of organization. Hamas is not fighting for more freedom for Palestinians. It’s actually fighting for less. This is an organization that wants a theocracy, not a democracy. They want Islamic fundamentalism. In other words, they want to rule their people based on Islamo-fascist principles. There is nothing wrong with them being Muslims or following basic teachings of Islam. But Islamism goes far beyond that – seeking theocracy, domination, no rights for people.
So Hamas is not a “freedom fighting” organization. It is actually a “freedom TAKING” organization. I don’t support that.
Number two – their means. It’s not that Hamas is not nonviolent; it’s that they are terrorists. Hasan Piker says that Hamas killed a lot of people on October 7th. But since then, Israel has killed many more Palestinians than Hamas has ever killed. Well, he’s right, but not for lack of trying on Hamas’s part. Hamas has spent the past 10 years firing rockets at innocent Israeli men, women, children, babies, hospitals, schools and nurseries. The only reason those rockets have not murdered tens of thousands of Israelis is because of the Iron Dome. The United States has funded a missile defense system to keep Hamas from being able to murder people.
Hamas is deliberately going after innocent civilians. Of course, you could say – “Well, hold on a second. Israel has at times seemed to be targeting or harming innocent Palestinians.” That is something that a lot of people have objected to. But in my tradition, you never let your opponent’s morality dictate your own. You do not let your opponent’s tactics dictate your own – because you don’t want to become what you’re fighting. You don’t want to accidentally begin to mirror the very things you abhor in your opponent.
In referencing anti-colonial struggles, I do not mean to suggest that Israel is a colonial power. Both peoples have a legitimate historical claim to that land. In a classic colonial situation, that’s not true. Israelis, Palestinians, Jews and Arabs all have a right to be in the Holy Land. What I’m saying is that even if this were an anti-colonial struggle and even if armed self-defense were justified, terrorism is not. Attacking innocent women, children, babies is not justified ever. That’s my point.
And so there is a moral standard that Amílcar Cabral held himself to in fighting against the Portuguese – who were brutal, who were horrible, who were using napalm against black women. They were cutting black women open and pulling out the fetuses. The Portuguese did horrific things to Africans. But when Amílcar Cabral engaged in armed struggle to free his people, he refused to do any of that to Portuguese women and children. Amílcar Cabral’s refusal to stoop to those sorts of tactics ultimately won the Portuguese people over to the side of the African freedom fighters in the 1970s.
I think most people can agree on three things: (1) a secure homelands for both peoples, (2) no hate and (3) protect the babies. I think that’s pretty straightforward. You want Jewish people and Palestinians to have secure homelands. You don’t want hatred against Israelis, Palestinians, Muslims, or Jews. And you don’t want civilians being put in harm’s way – either directly on purpose by Hamas or indirectly in a reckless way by Bibi Netanyahu. I think most people – if you just sat down and talked about it for more than 15 minutes – would agree on most of that.
In world affairs, there is a way to use nonviolence – and even sometimes armed struggle. But it must be in pursuit of good ends using moral means. Hamas fails both tests.
That’s why Hamas is not a thousand times better than Israel. That’s why Hamas should be rejected by people who want freedom for the Palestinian people, freedom for the Israelis, and freedom for humanity.
