Why pro-Israel Western powers insist on treating Hamas like Daesh

Robbing humanity of your enemies is a part of the American playbook, which Israel has now adopted to define Hamas. As a result, the Israeli state is making efforts to justify its military actions, many of which amount to war crimes, by employing dehumanising language, such as referring to Palestinian resistance groups and their civilian supporters as “human-animals”.

Hamas has been ruling Gaza since 2007 after the resistance group, which has a robust political wing, won elections with a strong mandate. Since Daesh has been known for its “nihilistic” violence and meting out medieval-era punishments such as beheadings and public hangings, the Israeli attempts to portray Hamas in the same light are aimed at getting a license to kill civilians under Hamas rule just like the US-led anti-Daesh coalition killed thousands of civilians during its anti-terror operations across Syria and Iraq.

In Afghanistan, many civilians including children were also killed by American forces and its allies in the name of eradicating Al Qaeda and Daesh terrorists from the war-torn country as well as fighting the Taliban.

“Daesh has become a byword for absolute, unmitigated evil that is removed from any context and not related to a cause that anyone would want to defend,” says Heiko Wimmen, the project director of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon at the International Crisis Group, an American think-tank.

As a result, equating Hamas with Daesh “silences any discussion about the factors and conditions'' which normalised prison-like circumstances for Palestinians, leading to Hamas's October 7 attack, Wimmen tells TRT World.

This identification also serves a perfect political purpose for Israel because any dialogue with a terrorist group like Daesh is ruled out as no one is expected to negotiate with them. This helps the Zionist state justify closing diplomatic avenues with Hamas and simply adopt the methods of brutal violence, which involves attacking civilian areas ruled by the Palestinian group. “You don't negotiate with Daesh, you wipe it from the face of the earth. Period,” says Wimmen.

But in a big contradiction, Israel, even now, negotiates with Hamas with which it has negotiated many times in the past either in the context of ensuring ceasefires to end armed hostilities or arranging financial and medical aid to Gaza, the Palestinian enclave, which has been under a sea, air and land blockade since 2007.

The problem is that not only does Hamas have a thirty-year record that looks nothing like Daesh and has repeatedly negotiated with both Israel and Netanyahu himself, says Ibrahim Moiz, a political analyst on military conflicts and armed groups like the Taliban.

But almost totally disregarding such backdoor talks held in the past, “Israeli propagandists have overshot the mark and internationalised their local propaganda to not only vilify Hamas but dehumanize Palestinians as a whole,” Moiz tells TRT World.

The Hamas-Daesh identification also aims to amplify the outpouring of “international support for Israel even more and discourages criticism of the Israeli conduct of the war and a possible ground invasion,” says Wimmen, the Beirut-based political analyst.

“When we are fighting Daesh, which is ‘unmitigated evil’, then we can't be so queasy, right? And there are precedents (Raqqa, Mosul) where massive violence was used to flush them out, and everybody was fine with that,” recalls Wimmen.

Is Hamas-Daesh identification a bad perception game for Muslims?

The West’s suspicion of every Muslim-dominated group like Hamas having some kind of motivation to conduct terrorist activities might not be a very good idea for the future of humanity as demographic experts estimate that the world’s biggest religion will be Islam by 2075, experts say.

After September 11, George W. Bush came up with a new rhetoric of good versus evil, using the word “crusade” to describe his controversial War on Terror in which the US launched bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to the deaths of more than a million people across the two countries.

Like Bush, after the October 7 attack, leading Western leaders from the US to Europe talked about “act of sheer evil” and “ancient evil”, making many Muslims think that they are referring to Islam. These descriptions emerged after Israeli leaders described Hamas as “human animals” and “enemy of civilisation”.

“Drawing parallels between Hamas and Daesh has gained traction in American political circles, but such comparisons gloss over significant differences between the two,” says Nadia Ahmad, an Orlando-based law professor and a fellow at the Center for Security, Race, and Rights, referring to recent Western identification efforts between Hamas and Daesh.

While all these groups are armed organisations, they have significant differences from their historical roots to regional objectives and overarching ideologies, says Ahmad. But the West under the influence of Israeli propaganda increasingly loses the big picture, seeing almost all Muslims as potential terrorists, according to Ahmad.

“All Muslims and Arabs are painted as terrorists. First, we were Al-Qaeda. Then Daesh. And now Hamas,” Ahmad tells TRT World. Beside indiscriminate accusations against Muslims, Western analysts also acknowledge how the US-led occupations played a critical role in the emergence of some terror groups like Daesh, she says.

David Kilcullen, one of the world's foremost counter-insurgency experts and a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director, who at some point led the US invasion of Iraq against the country’s increasing counterinsurgency, argued that the rise of Daesh is a direct consequence of the US invasion of Iraq.

“We have to recognize that a lot of the problem is of our own making. There would be no Daesh if we hadn’t invaded Iraq,” said Kilcullen, in a March 2016 interview with Channel 4 News.