A commander in one of the infantry brigades said that residents of northern Gaza had stated during interrogation that Hamas had paid them not to leave their homes (Gili Cohen, “Haaretz”, 22.07). No reason to think he made this up. It’s possible that some residents – it’s not clear if and where they are still under detention or whether they were released after questioning only to flee to another unsafe location – told him what he later reported. Their words provide another perspective to repeated claims made by the shapers of conceptions and policies in Israel’s security establishment: It is usually stated that Hamas, through threats and scare tactics, forced hundreds of thousands of residents in endangered areas not to evacuate their homes. Now it turns out that the stick was accompanied by a carrot – money offered by Hamas. (The officer did not reveal how much and to how many people).

I personally know several extended families that refused to evacuate Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya when ordered to do so by the IDF. If there were any threats made, they did not reach these families, and if any money passed hands, it didn’t come to them. Did it occur to the commander that people told the interrogators what they wanted to hear so as not to be viewed as Hamas supporters, so that things would go easier for them in their interrogation? Detention, especially after days of being terrorized under incessant Israeli bombardment, is not a natural setting for a friendly chat, particularly when the detainer is also the one who carried out the bombardment.

Even if they were telling the truth, the families I know did not evacuate since it is hard to leave a home one has built with savings collected over many years. They didn’t leave since the IDF is the enemy, and it’s not easy to obey an enemy who has already displaced you, your parents or your grandparents on previous occasions. People could not begin to imagine the destruction that Israel was willing and intending to wreak, despite their earlier experiences. They didn’t leave immediatly since no place in the Gaza Strip is safe today.

Israeli claims the Palestinians who did not leave their homes before they were bombed are to be blamed, and that it is exempted of responsibility to their death, sound logical to most Israelis. However, an academic scholar close to Hamas told Haaretz that the problem with those shaping concepts and policies in Israel’s security establishment, and with analysts using their briefings for their analysis, is that they view moves by Hamas and Palestinian public conduct according to their own logic, not the logic of those they are analyzing. This is their original mistake, he says.

The logic of Israel’s security establishment was and is that very soon people will become fed up with Hamas, which has only brought about the destruction of entire neighborhoods and the deaths of hundreds. Security officials who constantly bombard the media with their analysis are part of a system that is designed to control and discipline the Palestinians in their status as occupied people. Thus, they find it hard to see that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (and not just there) view the destruction and death as something Israel has done by choice, as an occupier. According to them this was not Hamas’s choice. Thus, the growing disgust is with Israel, not Hamas.

The Ramallah municipality has erected a house of mourning and placed near it some 200 coffins. Each one is draped with the Palestinian flag, carrying the name and age of a Palestinian killed in Gaza. On Wednesday, several hundred people carried these coffins to the UN compound in Ramallah. They silenced the UN representative who tried to say a few words and condemned the speech made by UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon and the position taken by the European Union, which views Hamas as the aggressor and Israel as the one under attack. The disgust expressed there was aimed at Israel, not Hamas.

The logic of policy shapers always analyzes Hamas’s situation in a regional context: It is weak following the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the closing of the Rafah tunnels; it is weak due to the souring of relations with Hezbollah and Iran, etc. The regional weakness is true. Egypt’s hostility to the Islamic movement is immense. However, Hamas, although part of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, wants to prove that it is a national Palestinian movement which is leading the way to liberation, as well as wishing to shape Palestinian society according to its religious ideals. Hamas has lost Egypt, but over the last two weeks it has ceased to be the illegitimate cousin of the official Palestinian national movement (the PLO).

Also on Wednesday, there was a meeting in al-Bireh of veteran Fatah activists who are not close to the circles of President Mahmoud Abbas. The speakers criticized themselves, the Fatah movement and its leader, for their belated realization of the obvious, that the bombed and dead residents of Gaza are part and parcel of the Palestinian people, and that striking them is a blow to all Palestinians. They expressed respect for Hamas’ fighting capabilities but criticized themselves for not taking more seriously a resolution passed by the sixth convention of their movement, which called for strengthening the non-armed popular struggle.

Participants criticized themselves since over the last two weeks they went missing, not taking part in demonstrations across the West Bank. (In clashes with the army, two demonstrators were killed last week, before Thursday's huge demonstrations whose toll was another young man killed and around two hundreds injured by Israeli fire, one of the in critical condition.) It was noted that due to popular pressure, Abbas changed his tone in his recent speech. They spoke with their own logic, not that of the Israeli establishment. “We were wrong to consider Hamas our primary enemy for so many years. We do have disagreements with Hamas, but our enemy is the occupation.”