The journalist Matti Friedman, a veteran of the Associated Press, explains how Hamas has learned how to turn its wars with Israel into bloody public-relations stunts, duly reported by a pliant international press as instances of Israeli perfidy vs. Palestinian innocence. Part of the media’s problem, writes Friedman, stems from the cozy relationship between journalists and “non-governmental organizations”:

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.) Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in eastern Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. . . .

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies . . . but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western Zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.

There is another reason, I think, that the anti-Hamas demonstrations are gaining momentum, and that is the IDF’s decision to target both Hamas military commanders and members of the civilian government. By picking off the latter, it is undermining Hamas’s ability to govern, and showing that it is serious not just about achieving battlefield successes, but about ending Hamas rule in Gaza. Alas, many in the West still cling to the idea, propagated in the press for decades, that Hamas and similar groups have military and political “wings” that are entirely separate. Khaled Abu Toameh comments:

President Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said last week that he does not rule out the possibility that the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas could be politically active in the Gaza Strip after it disarms. . . . This assumption, of course, is untrue and misleading.

There is no difference between a Hamas political leader and a military commander. They all share the same extremist ideology, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and calls for destroying it through jihad.

Put differently, it’s not just the means employed by Hamas (terrorism, mass murder, rape, kidnapping) that are evil, but the ends as well. And that brings us back to why undermining it politically—whether done by the IDF or by Palestinian protesters—is necessary:

Hamas’s political leaders are aware that they will not be able to play any role in the Gaza Strip without the presence of their armed wing. The military wing of Hamas is crucial for the survival of the group’s political leadership. The political leaders need the military wing to control the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, as they have been doing since their violent coup there in 2007.