Echoes

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib—a Palestinian-American analyst who grew up in Gaza—has published a furious response to newly revealed documents attributed to Yahya Sinwar. He calls Hamas a “genocidal cult” that sacrificed Gaza’s population for an international propaganda strategy.

I understand his anger.

The document in question was seemingly handwritten by Sinwar on August 24, 2022, more than a year before the October 7 attacks. It was recovered in Gaza by the Israeli military and subsequently published by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

According to the document, Sinwar envisioned sending as many as 10,000 fighters across the border. They would breach the barrier at 25 different locations, seize junctions, attack military bases and enter more than 200 Israeli communities.

Residents would be expelled or taken hostage.

This was a plan for an enormous invasion of southern Israel.

Sinwar also considered how Israel might respond.

He was apparently uncertain about whether Iran and Hezbollah would enter the war. But he was certain that Israel would retaliate with overwhelming force.

He wrote that Israel would use every weapon available to it. He contemplated the possibility that Israel might use an atomic bomb against Gaza.

Nevertheless, Sinwar described the proposed attack as a “battle of life or death” and continued planning it.

This is an extraordinary detail.

Sinwar understood that the attack would provoke an enormous war.

He knew that Gaza was a small, densely populated territory facing one of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East. He knew that Hamas could not protect Gaza’s civilians from the consequences of the war it was initiating.

Indeed, in reality, they did not even try. There were no attempts by Hamas to build bomb shelters for Palestinian civilians. There were no attempts to secure Palestinian civilians alternative supplies of water, fuel, electricity in advance of the attacks, either. There was no plan to evacuate Palestinians away from the war.

Sinwar chose to attack anyway, without real preparation for the civilian toll.

(the rest of this essay is paywalled, but this section alone was worth sharing.)

It's Hamas:

no seriously its so ridiculous.

in the name of being "progressive"* they have decided to fall back on rape apologia, colorism, xenophobia, eugenics, misogyny, racism, and straight up nazism. jews cant live here because of their skin tone. these people are no longer indigenous because they are white passing. this colonial empire that still has an active slave trade is actually super awesome. this person disagrees with me so i will call them racial slurs.

In 1861, the men who built the Confederacy were not coy about what it was for.

Mississippi's secession declaration says it in the second sentence:

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world"

The Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens, told a Savannah crowd the new government's cornerstone rested "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man"

They were painfully explicit, saying exactly what the Confederacy was for.

Then they lost, and within a generation they revised history to replace the true cause with a lie.

They hadn't fought for slavery, said the lie. Their cause now had always been a noble defense of states' rights.

This is the Lost Cause narrative - a myth built to launder defeat into honor and shame into pride.

The Lost Cause fraud was built on three steps:

Step one: Hide the founding cause

The real cause was slavery, but they pretended it had been about "states' rights," an abstraction nobody had to be ashamed of.

Step two: Delete agency

The side that chose a war and lost it becomes the side exclusively suffered as victims. The Confederacy that fired on Fort Sumter becomes a gallant underdog crushed by Northern aggression. Confederate decisions are edited out of remembering while grievances are amplified.

Step three: Make it sacred

The story stopped being seen as history with facts and instead became a religion with saints (Lee as Christian knight), relics (monuments), and martyrs.

Once a claim is holy, any evidence against it can be dismissed without thinking as desecration. By making the facts unsayable, history is erased instead of being grappled with.

The biggest giveaway is self-revision. Stephens, who gave the Cornerstone Speech, spent his later years falsely claiming he'd been misquoted.

But the Confederacy and its descendants aren't the only ones who have used these three steps. Let's look at the Lost Cause of the Levant.

Step one: Hide the founding cause

In 1937 the Peel Commission proposed partition, but the Arab Higher Committee rejected it.

In 1947 the UN proposed it again as Resolution 181; the Jewish Agency accepted, the Arab League rejected and went to war.

The founding cause was the refusal of any Jewish sovereignty, which the Arab Higher Committee stated as plainly in 1947 as the Confederacy stated slavery as their cause in 1861.

In the popular telling, that maximalist rejection is gone, replaced by the revisionist framing of occupation, settler colonialism, and resistance.

Step two: Delete agency

The dominant telling of the Nakba frames it as a crime against a blameless, helpless native population that was set upon by racist European invaders out to seize their land.

The attack on Israel by the armies of five Arab states disappears, and with it the fact that they launched it to destroy the Jewish state in its first days, and lost.

This keeps happening down the timeline. The rejection at Camp David, the Second Intifada's campaign of suicide bombings, the rockets after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, October 7....each is absurdly described as something done to Palestinians instead of choices made by Palestinians.

The displacement followed from a choice, the same way Sherman's march followed from secession.

They amplify the consequence, delete the decision, and make themselves exclusively powerless, blameless victims who can only have things done to them.

Step three: Make it sacred

"From the river to the sea" is a creed, not a policy position.

Once the Nakba becomes a sacred origin, pointing to 1937 or 1947 no longer reads as discussing historical facts. It reads as an attack on a holy truth - and any discussion is rejected as heresy.

Same mechanism, different liturgy.

It also has the same giveaway of self-revision.

In 2008, Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas roughly 94 percent of the West Bank with land swaps, a corridor to Gaza, and a shared Jerusalem. Abbas refused it, and later admitted as much on Israeli television: "I rejected it out of hand".

An offer was made and a state was refused. The narrative now told pretends neither happened and that Israel hasn't repeatedly offered enormous concessions of land in exchange for peace.

The parallel is sharpest at the foundation.

The Confederacy built on slavery and said so out loud, the cornerstone of the whole edifice.

The cause that rhymes with it rests on its own bedrock, just as openly stated when anyone bothers to read it.

No Jewish state between the river and the sea. The end of Jewish sovereignty by whatever means it takes. In plain terms, this has meant the slaughter of Jews from 1937 to October 7.

The Confederate Lost Cause held for a century because the grief was sincere, myths are comforting, and nobody wants to believe their cause chose its own catastrophe over an objectively dehumanizing position against a specific ethnicity.

The Levant version survives for the same reason.