Free Gaza From Its Own Tyrants First

Opinion|Free Gaza From Its Own Tyrants First

The world should remember the name of Odai Al-Rubai. The 22-year-old Palestinian man joined protests in Gaza last week to demand an end to 18 years of Hamas’s violent misrule in the territory. Demonstrators could be heard shouting, “Out, out, Hamas get out,” and “Hamas are terrorists,” while displaying banners saying “Hamas does not represent us.” In retaliation, Al-Rubai’s family says, he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by members of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades. Then his body was dumped in front of the family home.

Did the “Free Palestine” protesters of Columbia, U.C.L.A. and other campuses gather to pause for a moment of silence for Al-Rubai? And was there an additional prayer for the recovery of Hussam al-Majdalawi, another dissident whose views reportedly got him kidnapped by Hamas, shot in the legs and left in a square as an example to others?

Last week’s protests are not the first time Gazans have tried to rise against Hamas: There were also major protests in 2019 that were bloodily suppressed yet went almost unreported in Western media. Some of us have been writing about the plight of Palestinians under their own rulers for decades — the struggle of Palestinian journalists to write freely; the tragedy of gay Palestinians seeking to live freely — only to be met with a collective yawn.

For too many, including those who call themselves “pro-Palestinian,” Palestinian misery seems to matter only when the blame can be pinned on Israel.

The difference now is that Hamas may no longer be able to deploy its full apparatus of repression, at least not while it must spend much of its time hiding underground from Israeli strikes. Those attacks are both the impetus and the means by which Gazans are demanding their freedom: impetus, because a growing number of Palestinians in the territory recognize that there will be no end to wars with Israel so long as Hamas continues to drag them into those wars; means, because it’s only on account of Israeli attacks on Hamas that the protesters stand a chance of overthrowing that tyrannical regime.

And what a tyranny it has been. Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacres and Hamas’s leader in Gaza until he was killed last year, rose through the ranks by killing other Palestinians he suspected of disloyalty. Once in power, he set up a Stasi-like network of domestic surveillance and torture chambers. Sinwar also described the thousands of civilian Gazans killed in the conflict as “necessary sacrifices” to his cause. Images of muscled Hamas fighters at hostage-handover ceremonies are further evidence that the group’s leaders divert food aid to themselves at the expense of hungry Palestinians.