Mari Cohen
Jewish |Currents / April 1, 2025
Political analyst Muhammad Shehada discusses the cynical exploitation of Gazans’ demonstrations, and Israel’s investment in keeping Hamas in power.
Last week, amid continuous bombing and evacuation orders, a few thousand Palestinians took to the streets in the northern Gaza Strip to protest against Israel’s intensified attacks and, specifically, against Hamas’s governance. Some children held handmade signs saying, in Arabic, “The children of Palestine want to live,” while other protestors chanted “Hamas get out!” Quickly, pro-Israel media outlets and advocacy organizations that have rarely spoken of Israel’s devastation of Gaza over the past 17 months were sending out updates on the protests: The online newspaper Jewish Insider led its daily newsletter with “All eyes on Gaza’s anti-Hamas protests,” while a PR firm that usually sends news blasts about campus antisemitism offered to connect journalists with two Gazan participants in the protests. “Palestinians Brave Death to Denounce Hamas,” was the headline from The Focus Project, an email newsletter that sends out pro-Israel talking points, which castigated Western pro-Palestine activists for not foregrounding the protests. To make sense of the protests and why they’ve been so quickly metabolized by pro-Israel advocates, I turned to Muhammad Shehada, a Gazan writer and political analyst who is currently a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. We spoke on Friday about the despair motivating people in Gaza to take to the streets, why Israel is actually invested in keeping Hamas in power, and how a brutal military bombardment and occupation crushes activism for democracy in Gaza. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mari Cohen: Can you describe the protests in Gaza against Hamas?
Muhammad Shehada: The protests started organically and spontaneously, the result of pure desperation. When the Israeli military told people in Beit Lahia to evacuate yet again, their first instinct was to yell and protest. People gathered with improvised signs saying, “We want the war to stop. We want to live. Stop killing our children.” Then it took a turn: Some started asking for Hamas to step down from government and end its rule over Gaza. Those protestors made it clear that they did not oppose the idea of Palestinian armed resistance, but did oppose Hamas staying in the government—which Israel has used as the perfect pretext for maintaining the blockade, and continuing the killing. People believe that if Hamas were to make that concession, it might help end the war and end the blockade.
The problem is that Israel is blocking [this path]. Israel is not allowing the Palestinian Authority to come back to Gaza to form a national unity government. [Ed. note: Hamas pushed the Fatah-led PA out of Gaza in 2007.] It’s been clearly vetoed by Netanyahu in press conferences: He has said, “I will not allow Gaza to become a Hamas-stan or a Fatah-stan.” So by an Israeli decision, the PA is not allowed to function in Gaza in any shape or form. It’s the same with the Egyptian proposal to have Gaza run by a technocratic independent administrative committee: Israel sabotages it by preventing the actual committee from being on the ground, and by systematically assassinating political leaders in Gaza who would allow a peaceful transition of power. Hamas is a mixed bag of hardliners, moderates, and pragmatists. If you go after all the moderates and the pragmatists—the ones who are running the government—you’re left with the hardliners, making the handover of authority less smooth. So Israel has been working to prevent Hamas from climbing down the tree—they want them to stay up there.
MC: Why is Israel working to oppose Hamas stepping down, despite stating that getting Hamas out of Gaza is their goal? And why would they be opposed to the Palestinian Authority taking over in Gaza, if the PA has been so amenable to collaborating with the Israeli occupation in the West Bank?
MS: It goes back to Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza was made to sabotage the peace process so that there would be no talk of Palestinian statehood. As Dov Weisglass, a senior political advisor to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said at the time, “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.” How? By setting Gaza up to fail. For Sharon, pulling out of Gaza put the “burden of proof” on Palestinians to show that they could build a perfect Dubai on the Mediterranean, despite Israel’s blockade and constant bombardment, and that they can take Hamas down. So that was the Israeli rationale—create a test that Palestinians could never pass and then use Gaza as a cautionary tale to say, “If we withdraw from the West Bank, it will become like Gaza—run by terrorists and extremists.” That rationale is still at play today. Their other rationale is the complete separation between Gaza and the West Bank. Netanyahu was asked in 2019 why he hadn’t destroyed Hamas in Gaza and he explained that if they destroy Hamas, that means they have to give Gaza to Mahmoud Abbas—Abu Mazen—of the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu said, “I won’t give it to Abu Mazen,” because when they are in charge of the entire territory, that gives them legitimacy to demand a state.
MC: Despite his opposition to actually seeing Hamas go, Netanyahu has praised the protests, saying on March 26th on the Knesset floor that the demonstrations show “that our policy is working.” What’s behind Netanyahu’s endorsement of the protests?
MS: Netanyahu is trying to shame the Israeli opposition with this talking point: that if you give Gazans food and water, they will be too comfortable to protest Hamas—we need to starve them until they rise up. That was the whole rationale behind the blockade in 2006. Ehud Olmert, the prime minister at the time, explained that this was a form of economic warfare to suffocate Gazans until they rise up against Hamas and topple them. I remember those days very clearly. I was a child at the time, and we didn’t have any food whatsoever, except for basic herbs that grow naturally in Gaza—thyme, za’atar, and dukkah, which is made of parched wheat flour and some other spices and chili. There was nothing in Gaza, until after Operation Cast Lead [in the winter of 2008–2009]: Israel calculated the bare minimum of calories needed for human survival and then allowed [roughly] half of that into Gaza. It didn’t work. People didn’t topple Hamas. And it’s not going to work this time. But this talking point is very convenient for Netanyahu to maintain a forever war.
What Israel is doing is setting up Gazans to fail by giving them an impossible task. Israel has failed to topple Hamas over 17 months of unprecedented warfare—Gaza has been bombed significantly more than Dresden, Berlin, or London [during World War II], and even more than Mosul—and now it expects Gazans to do that for them by taking to the streets. Usually demonstrations achieve their goals by disrupting the normalcy of life: shutting down the economy, shutting down government functions, making it impossible for government leaders and politicians to leave their homes. But Israel has already done all of this in Gaza. There is no life to disrupt in the first place—there’s no economy, there’s no government. The demonstrations’ potential to topple Hamas is negligible, and Israel knows this. Israel plans to blame them for that failure, by insisting that the war will continue until Gazans topple Hamas.
MC: And is that also why the pro-Israel media network is so enthusiastic about the protests?
MS: Certain actors on the right are saying, “Look, people in Gaza agree with Israel that Hamas is the problem. It’s not Israel that’s to blame”—but this is in order to distract from the ongoing carnage. So on Thursday, for example, Israel killed 41 civilians in Gaza within 24 hours. But all of the media attention was on the demonstrations. Before October 7th, there were some mainstream media outlets that were interested in Palestinian voices, after the George Floyd uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement. CNN, for example, was keen to platform more Palestinian voices. But then October 7th comes, and all those media outlets deplatformed Palestinians for the following 17 months. They didn’t want to take the risk of a Palestinian saying the wrong thing on air. But now, with the protests happening in Gaza, my phone won’t stop ringing. I keep getting messages and invites: CNN, the BBC—suddenly there is interest in the Palestinian perspective, but under the condition that you come and condemn Hamas, and help them with their theatrics of distracting from the genocide.
MC: How has Netanyahu’s references to the protests, as well as the widespread media attention they have garnered, affected the protests themselves?
MS: Of course, even though Israel supports these demonstrations, they’re not forcing people to take to the streets. It’s people’s genuine grievances that are pushing them to risk their lives under continued Israeli airstrikes in order to make their voices heard. But by instrumentalizing the protests, Israel is actively sabotaging their potential. So when [Israel] announces, “Gazans, go and take to the street against Hamas, or you will lose your land, your homes and your lives,” people will be discouraged from going, because this discredits the protests. If you show up, you will be regarded as an Israeli collaborator. What also restricts people’s ability to participate is the basic genuine fear for your life. If you show up for these protests, you’re exposed, you’re in the street, you would have to walk through indiscriminate, arbitrary airstrikes to reach the demonstration.
If there was a genuine Israeli interest in getting Hamas to leave the government, Israel would simply say, “Okay, we will give these protests a chance. We will suspend the airstrikes and military operations and let Gazans handle each other.” But that’s not happening because there’s no interest in that in Israel; it’s only for PR. When Gazans take to the street, Israel immediately tells the world, “Look, it’s Hamas that’s the problem; it’s not us. Forget about the genocide.” And when Gazans don’t take to the streets, Israel will say, “All Gazans are Hamas. It’s not us that’s the problem; it’s them. Forget about the genocide.” So there’s no winning.
MC: How would a renewed, lasting ceasefire change political possibilities in Gaza?
MS: Over the course of 20 years, I lived through ten Israeli military operations. And I’ve seen the same dynamic over and over: When the war starts, it creates a “rally around the flag” effect where inward-looking, domestic debates are suspended. People are in survival mode: You’re under airstrikes, your home is gone, half of your family is dead. When people are in that environment, there’s no capacity to discuss whether Hamas should go or not and what would be the best form of grassroots organizing. As soon as there’s a ceasefire, then there’s more room for criticism of Hamas, more room for people to speak out. That’s the time for accountability, to ask, “Why did you do October 7th, and how did you run the war after?”—a moment of reckoning.
Part of why Hamas has popular legitimacy in Gaza at the moment is because it can tell Gazans that there is no other entity that is challenging or willing to challenge the Israeli military’s permanent presence in Gaza. Who will ask Israel to leave Gaza if Hamas is destroyed? Would it be Trump or the European Union or Arab countries? Hamas runs an autocratic government, but that government takes its legitimacy from Israel’s occupation.
MC: What’s your response to people who lift up the anti-Hamas protests while still supporting the bombardment?
MS: These are people who spent the last 17 months questioning the death toll, questioning the suffering, questioning if people are actually starving in Gaza. And now, as soon as people take to the streets against Hamas, suddenly the starvation is genuine, the pain is genuine, the suffering is real. They have no shame whatsoever. It’s pure chutzpah.
Mari Cohen is the associate editor of Jewish Currents
