Hamasphobia and its Role in Justifying the Genocide
Photo courtesy of Save the Children
In my previous article Why Sri Lankans and Muslims Cannot Be Antisemitic I detailed why Sri Lankans or Muslims can’t be antisemitic. This article examines how Hamasphobia is being constructed both globally and locally to deny Palestinians their right to self-determination, fuel anti-Palestinian racism and justify the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Moreover, pro-Zionist groups advocating for this genocide have deliberately targeted Muslims in Sri Lanka for their stance on Palestine. Against this backdrop, it becomes essential to engage in a discussion about Hamas and broader Palestinian resistance movements.
Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry’s report said, “it is clear” that Israel has the “intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria outlined in the Genocide Convention.” This decision aligns with the International Court of Justice, which ruled in July 2024 that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Israel’s actions “show incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies a plausible claim of genocidal acts.” In July 2025, two leading Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, also reported findings concluding that Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Likewise, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, in a resolution supported by 86% of its voting members, affirmed that the events in Gaza constitute genocide. Furthermore, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross have also declared what is happening in Gaza as genocide. It is a unanimous declaration: Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
What is a genocide?
In the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II notes that genocide means anyof the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
With an estimated death toll exceeding 60,000 and what experts describe as an Israel-engineered stage five famine (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, IPC Report), Gaza has transformed from a concentration camp to a death camp. Scholars of Zionism and settler colonialism have maintained that the survival of the Israeli state depends on the ongoing removal of the indigenous Palestinian population, whether through direct violence, forced displacement or the destruction of the conditions required for their existence. From this vantage point, the current genocide in Gaza represents the logical outcome of a system structured to secure territory for European Jewish settlers by excluding Palestinians. Thus, the events currently unfolding are not unexpected; rather, they are rooted in the historical, ideological and structural foundations of Israel’s settler-colonial framework.
Zionism: ideology of genocide and ethnic cleansing
Zionism serves as the ideological foundation of Israel’s national settler-colonial project. Like other settler-colonial endeavors, this ideology is built upon the fundamental principle of displacing and eliminating the indigenous population. In this context, settler colonialism embodies what scholars like Patrick Wolfe characterize as a logic of elimination – an inherent drive toward the physical, cultural or political erasure of the original inhabitants of the land. Put simply, a settler colony can only be established through processes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. This logic is not exclusive to Zionism but aligns with both historical and present day examples, including those of the US, Canada and Australia. Across these cases, the core dynamic remains the same: settlers seek to appropriate indigeneity to lands that are not originally theirs, creating narratives of belonging that erase and replace the existing populations.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, analyzing Zionist settler colonialism, notes that French settlers in Algeria also claimed an “atavist and emotional link to the Algerian soil” no less profound than that professed by early Zionists. Likewise, European colonies were often presented as for the benefit of the local people, a cynical assurance echoed by Zionist settlers in Palestine. Lorenzo Veracini explains that unlike other forms of colonialism, which exploit people and resources while remaining tied to a metropole, settler colonialism seeks to permanently displace indigenous peoples and establish settlers as the rightful inhabitants. In other words, it eliminates the existing polity through genocide and/or ethnic cleansing and replaces it with a foreign population.
In many settler colonies, settlers depicted themselves as the new natives, often asserting spiritual, agricultural or civilizational ties to the land. In Australia, British settlers frequently framed their presence as part of a Christian spiritual mission, portraying their migration as divinely ordained. They also invoked the doctrine of terra nullius – the legal fiction that the continent was empty land – to justify their occupation as spiritually and providentially preordained. Over time, settlers increasingly identified as native-born Australians despite their European origins, reinforcing this constructed sense of belonging. As Veracini notes, such narratives were crucial, as settlers needed to create stories of spiritual, cultural or natural connection to legitimize their political project of establishing themselves as rightful inheritors of the land. This settler-colonial logic similarly underpins Zionism in its colonization of Palestine.
Pappé argues that Zionism should be understood as a form of national settler colonialism, combining the features of a religious-nationalist movement with the ideological and political framework of colonialism. He critiques Zionism as a movement without “a clear mother country” but “traveled across the world to realize a vision of return to an ancient homeland as if it were a national movement, yet in practice had to dispossess others and thus effectively became a colonialist enterprise”. One of the Russian Zionist leaders, Ze’ev (then Vladimir) Jabotinsky, who played a key role in the colonization of Palestine, wrote in 1923, “Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’ […] Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”
The initial phase of this process was the 1948 Nakba, during which over 780,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their lands and became permanent refugees in neighboring countries, as Israel denied them the right to return. Ethnic cleansing – the systematic and coercive removal of a particular ethnic or religious group from a territory, often justified by the belief that the targeted group is undesirable – was central to this process. It constitutes a fundamental element in establishing a racialized land, the type envisioned by both Hitler and Zionist leaders. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, acknowledged this reality, stating, “Were I an Arab, I would rebel even more vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule”. He also admitted, “It is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion”. This intention was made even more explicit by Jabotinsky, who declared, “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force’’. Similarly, Theodor Herzl, another Zionist leader, wrote, “Without colonization, Zionism is nothing but a castle in the air”.
Before establishing Israel under the Balfour Declaration in Palestine, European powers considered several alternative locations as potential solutions to what they termed the Jewish Question in Europe. Among the sites discussed was Sri Lanka. Argentina was another possibility where the Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) in the late 19th century, leading to the settlement of thousands of Jews in agricultural colonies. The British also contemplated Cyprus as a potential site for Jewish settlement.
Hamas: a resistance and liberation movement
The UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (1974) affirmed the right of self-determination, freedom and independence for all “peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination” and affirmed the “right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support”. Resolution 37/43 (1982) reaffirmed the “inalienable right” of the Palestinian people “and all peoples under foreign and colonial domination” to self-determination. It also reaffirms the legitimacy of “the struggle of peoples for […] liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” So the right to armed resistance is a UN-guaranteed right for an occupied people.
The label “terrorist” has often been broadly applied by colonizing powers to those they colonize. The African National Congress (ANC) was designated a terrorist organization by the governments of South Africa, the US and the UK in 1960. Nelson Mandela, one of the ANC’s leaders, was labeled a terrorist, arrested in 1962 and imprisoned for 27 years. Despite receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, the US maintained Mandela on its terrorist watch list until 2008. This reflects a common practice among the US, UK, France and many European powers to proscribe groups opposing Western imperialism as terrorist organizations. The US regarded Che Guevara as an insurgent whose actions were often framed as terrorism with officials characterizing him as a dangerous revolutionary who needed to be eliminated.
The British colonial administration in Sri Lanka executed the leaders of the Uva-Wellassa Rebellion (1817–1818), Keppetipola Disawe and Madugalle Disawa, branding them as traitors – a label closely paralleling contemporary terrorist terminology. During this uprising, the British imposed collective punishment through mass executions and the burning of villages, resulting in the deaths of thousands. Numerous unnamed rebels were labeled terrorists and executed without trial. In the 1848 Matale Rebellion, its leader Puran Appu was condemned as a terrorist for orchestrating violent attacks against British-controlled institutions. He was captured and executed by firing squad in the same year. Gongalegoda Banda, another leader of the Matale Rebellion, was arrested, flogged and exiled to Malacca. Sangiliyan, the last king of the Jaffna Kingdom who resisted Portuguese rule, was beheaded in 1617. Veerapandiya Kattabomman, a Tamil king from Tamil Nadu, fought against the British East India Company by refusing to pay taxes and was hanged in 1799. Pandara Vanniyan, a chieftain from the Vanni, resisted both Dutch and British colonial powers and died in battle against the British in 1803. These figures are now celebrated in Sri Lanka as freedom fighters and national heroes.
If anti-colonial resistance is recognized and accepted worldwide, then why is Palestinian resistance not afforded the same legitimacy?
Hamasphobia
Hamas is one of the most deliberately misunderstood and maligned resistance movements in the world. This perception is shaped more by Zionist propaganda, including that disseminated in Sri Lanka, than by objective evidence, as particular narratives have been strategically crafted to serve Zionist interests. The UK designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 2021, a decision that has since been legally challenged by a group of lawyers. Professor Jeroen Gunning submitted written evidence to the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs for The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in February 2025, arguing that, “One of the conditions of the Quartet was that Hamas recognise not just Israel’s sovereignty but its right to exist. Although Hamas has accepted the principle of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, it has refused to recognise the state of Israel – let alone its right to exist – and continues to insist on the Palestinians’ right of return to historic Palestine. Non-recognition of the sovereignty of the coloniser over part of their homeland has been a feature of other anti-colonial movements. Ireland refused to recognise the Union of Northern Ireland and Great Britain (or more precisely, that this Union was “the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate”) until 1998, when, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, it “drop[ped] its territorial claim on Northern Ireland and instead define the Irish nation in terms of people rather than land”. Even now, its recognition of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland is conditional, “for as long as that has the consent of a majority of its population”. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the signatories of the Māori version of the Treaty of Waitangi – te Tiriti o Waitangi – only granted “kawanatanga” (the right of governance) over tribal lands to the British Crown, not sovereignty; the Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975 to deal with claims of restitution concerning lands and resources taken illegally by the Crown, ruling that the Māori had indeed not ceded sovereignty. Some have discussed the Tribunal as a form of (re)granting Māori sovereignty. Thus, recognition of a coloniser’s sovereignty over (part of) a people’s historic homeland is, and should be treated as, separate from the question of violence – a distinction which the terrorism label blurs.”
Hamas represents a multiplicity of voices with different political dispositions in Palestinian resistance. Palestine resistance isn’t a monolithic movement. It is on this basis that Abdul Jawad Omar says, “This ignorance of Palestinian politics is almost willful. It harbors a secret hostility to resistance – especially armed resistance – but claims to oppose Hamas on entirely different, perhaps ideological, grounds”. The Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (paraplegic), was a refugee from the village of al-Jura near the town currently known as Ashkelon in Israel, which he had fled in the 1948 Nakba. He was a teacher and an imam. Under his leadership, Hamas was established in 1987, almost 39 years after the colonization of Palestine by the Zionists. Many considered this formation as “linking in [a long] chain of the struggle against the Zionist occupation”.
Hamas is an easy scapegoat for those who deny the rights of Palestinians. As Omar points out, it is an “Islamist political group that both centers a politics of defiance and pushes a social agenda that seeks to reconstitute the Palestinian subject”. But as it is seen in Sri Lanka and the global Zionist movements, what is opposed is the resistance that Hamas chose to pursue, which is political and militant in nature. Furthermore, Hamas, a group of Palestinians who refused to be humiliated by their colonizers, has refused to quietly die under colonial occupation. As understood by Franz Fanon, when the colonized revolt, it’s not for a particular culture or religious group, in this case, the Jews, but they “simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe” under colonial conditions.
The pro-Palestine liberal left also holds the idea that colonization of Palestine can be overthrown by marching on the streets of countries in the periphery. While it signals worldwide support, it has little real impact in Palestine. Within this liberal framing, Palestinian resistance, particularly armed resistance led by groups such as Hamas, is often demonized or dismissed. Demonizing is the ability to feel sympathy with the victims. This dismissal is rarely objective; it is shaped, in part or whole, by latent anti-Islamic sentiment and anti-Muslim racism, which render Islamist movements as inherently illegitimate regardless of their rootedness within the Palestinian society. These liberal postures effectively provide a backdoor for the displacement of Palestinian political subjectivity: for Palestinians to be recognized as legitimately struggling for freedom, their modes of resistance are expected to conform not to their own historical and political needs, but to the ideological comfort zones of liberal movements abroad. These dynamic highlights a deeper contradiction in liberal-left solidarity. While affirming Palestinian rights in the abstract, it simultaneously polices the boundaries of acceptable forms of resistance, reproducing a colonial logic in which the legitimacy of indigenous struggle is judged not on its own terms but on its ability to meet external criteria.
It all started in 1948
A settler in the context of a settler colony is not an immigrant or citizen but a member of a social formation whose presence is tied to the colonial project of establishing permanent political, economic and cultural control over land already inhabited by an indigenous population. In other words, a settler in a settler colony is a person who relocates to an already inhabited land not to coexist under the authority of its indigenous peoples but to replace them and establish a new sovereign order that erases or subordinates the indigenous presence. Therefore, the population in Israel is not innocent citizens. Furthermore, Israel has mandatory military conscription, meaning the vast majority of Jewish Israelis undergo systematic military training as combatants, creating a social formation in which the civilian-military distinction is deeply blurred. In this sense, much of the settler population constitutes a latent military reserve (combatants) able to be mobilized or to self-mobilize in times of conflict.
Jewish settlers are not only trained in military tactics but are also often armed, further removing them from the category of citizens. The normalization of weapon ownership, coupled with this military conditioning, effectively turns portions of the settler community in the occupied territories into an armed civilian apparatus of the occupation, further entrenching the violent systems of control and displacement characteristic of settler colonialism in Palestine.
Gaza is an occupied territory. The definition of occupation, as articulated in the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention, applies when a territory is placed under the effective control or authority of a hostile army. Importantly, occupation does not grant or transfer sovereignty to the occupying power; rather, it imposes obligations to protect the civilian population under its control. Under international law, an occupying power does not possess the legal right to claim self-defense within the territory it occupies. The October 7 Hamas operation was carried out in the Gaza envelope, which is an armed, militarized settlement next to Gaza. The Gaza envelope refers to the band of Israeli communities located within about seven kilometers of the Gaza Strip. These communities are not neutral villages in the conventional sense. They are rather settlements that are heavily securitized and often described as part of the militarized frontier. Many settlers in the Gaza envelope are armed with military grade weapons distributed by the Israeli state. During the October 7 operation, 695 settlers and 373 soldiers were killed. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the Israeli military implemented the Hannibal directive, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of settlers within the total casualties. Initial fabricated claims of beheaded babies and rapes by Hamas fighters during the operation were later denied by Israeli authorities themselves. Yet human rights organizations report systemic sexual violence by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against Palestinians, including documented cases of gang rape captured on video. When the perpetrators were arrested, a majority of Israeli society expressed support for them, nearly igniting a civil conflict demanding their release. One of the convicts later publicly appeared on television and was hailed as a hero by segments of Israeli society.
Conclusion
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, wrote that “killing a European” symbolizing the colonizer means “killing two birds with one stone: eliminating in one act both the oppressor and the oppressed, leaving one person dead and the other free”. Fanon argues that decolonization is inherently violent because colonialism itself is a fundamentally violent system of oppression. Palestinian resistance movements arise as a response to Israel’s settler colonialism with the intensity of resistance often mirroring the severity of oppression. Hamas is a result and a product of Israel’s over a hundred years of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, mass rape, apartheid and genocide. Therefore, using Hamas to justify genocide (or settler-colonialism) is like using the Nat Turner rebellion to justify slavery or the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to justify the Holocaust. Supporting Palestinian rights without recognizing their right to resist is ultimately meaningless. Free Palestine.
