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Bryan's avatar

Hamas is also de jure the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority. They won the last elections, however long ago those were.

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Theodric's avatar

Yes that’s true. It’s much harder to claim “Palestinians just want peace and human rights” when they overwhelmingly support a group that engages in open warfare against Israel and fundamentally believes in eliminating it as a nation.

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Bryan's avatar

To play devil's advocate on behalf of the idiots who believe it, it's almost been more than a decade since Hamas won that election, so it's *possible* that Hamas would not be elected today.

I mean, they would, because the party running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Fatah, is so corrupt and so reliant on Israeli security cooperation to stay in power, that they (Fatah) would almost certainly be wiped out in new elections, mostly to Hamas' benefit.

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Theodric's avatar

Polling does seem to indicate that Gazans are kinda fed up with Hamas too, but more because of their own corruption, lack of elections, etc than due to a fundamental disagreement with their goals.

I saw a set of polls from mid 2022 that indicated that a strong majority of Gazans believe that long term Palestine should be the entire “river to the sea” area (i.e. no more Israel) but short term there views were at least somewhat more pragmatic.

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TwKaR's avatar

They did win the election in Gaza. I believe Mahmoud Abbas actually dissolved the parliament and elections haven't been held since.

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