Author and human rights advocate Raheel Raza spoke with Gaza-born American writer and peace advocate Ahmad Fouad Khatib in a June 28 online briefing presented by HR Canada Charitable Organization. (screenshot)
A Gaza-born American writer and peace advocate told a Canadian audience that Hamas has been a “net disaster” for Palestinians and that much of the Western pro-Palestinian movement has become detached from the needs of the people it claims to defend.
Ahmad Fouad Khatib, who was raised in Gaza and now lives in Washington, DC, said genuine advocacy for Palestinians must combine criticism of Israeli policies with an honest examination of Hamas, Palestinian political failures and an international aid system that has sustained Gaza without helping it develop accountable institutions.
Khatib spoke in a June 28 online briefing presented by HR Canada Charitable Organization, which carries out research and public education activities to combat antisemitism and anti-Jewish discrimination. HR Canada was founded in 2019, and is a separate legal entity from HonestReporting Canada, which operates as an independent, grassroots organization promoting fairness and accuracy in Canadian media coverage of Israel, the Middle East, and issues related to and affecting Canadian Jews. The discussion was moderated by author and human rights advocate Raheel Raza. It examined Hamas, Palestinian political culture, Western activism, antisemitism and the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Khatib said the central challenge facing Gaza is not simply reconstruction after the current conflict, but the creation of a political and economic future in which Hamas no longer controls the territory or its people.
“Hamas is mainly now holding two million Gazans hostage,” he said.
Khatib argued that Hamas’s remaining military infrastructure no longer represents the same immediate threat to Israel that it once did, but it continues to prevent meaningful recovery in Gaza. International donors, Arab governments and European states, he said, will be reluctant to invest seriously in rebuilding while Hamas retains its weapons, tunnels and political control.
Gaza, Khatib said, should not merely be rebuilt as it existed before the war. It must be “reimagined.”
“If we don’t solve Gaza, there’s no peace,” he said. “If Gaza doesn’t become a role model for effective Palestinian self-governance, if we don’t de-radicalize, if we don’t rejuvenate and reinvigorate Gaza to show what the West Bank can and should look like under Palestinian leadership, there’s no two-state solution.”
Khatib’s criticism of Hamas is rooted in both personal experience and profound loss. He said 34 members of his immediate and extended family have been killed in the war and both of his childhood homes have been destroyed. One of his brothers remains in Gaza and works with a major British medical and humanitarian organization.
He described conditions in the territory as catastrophic. Large portions of the population have been displaced, many people are living in tents or crowded into the homes of others, and residents face shortages of clean water, sanitation, privacy, education and medical care.
“No one is thriving, no one is healing, no one is recovering, no one is moving forward,” he said.
Khatib nevertheless rejected the contention that acknowledging Palestinian suffering requires silence about Hamas. Oct. 7, he said, was a choice, not an unavoidable response to Israeli policy. He argued that Hamas has repeatedly diverted Palestinian resources, undermined opportunities for state-building and used violence in ways that predictably brought further devastation upon Gaza.
“Any way you slice and dice Hamas, it has been a net disaster for the Palestinian people,” he said.
Khatib left Gaza in July 2005, about a month before Israel removed its settlements and military presence from inside the territory under the disengagement plan of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon. Khatib was 15 and traveled to the United States through a US State Department exchange program intended to build connections between Americans and young people from Muslim-majority countries after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
He lived with a host mother in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended an American high school. When he attempted to return to Gaza in 2006, Hamas’s abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit contributed to border closures that left him stranded in Egypt for three months.
With assistance from American human rights activists, including Jewish supporters and a Holocaust survivor, he returned to the United States and applied for political asylum. His asylum interview took place on the day Hamas completed its violent takeover of Gaza.
Khatib said he grew up in a devout Muslim family and was exposed early to the terror organization’s efforts to shape Gaza’s religious and social culture. As a child, he attended part of a summer camp that he later recognized as being dominated by Hamas activists. Even then, he said, he was repelled by its propaganda. He argued that Hamas did not simply promote a political program. It reshaped language and social expectations, making resistance an unquestionable virtue while turning peace into a synonym for cowardice, surrender or betrayal.
The consequences, he said, extended beyond Gaza. Hamas attacks during the Oslo peace process and later from Gaza contributed to the rightward movement of Israeli politics and strengthened Israeli politicians who argued that Palestinian independence would create an additional security threat, he said.
Khatib characterized Israel’s 2005 withdrawal as a missed opportunity for Palestinians to demonstrate that Gaza could succeed without a permanent Israeli military presence. Instead, Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election and seized exclusive control the following year.
Gaza received vast international humanitarian assistance over the next two decades, he said, but Hamas was able to govern without assuming normal responsibility for public services because the United Nations, foreign donors and humanitarian organizations took on much of the burden of caring for the population. This produced what Khatib called a perverse incentive system: Hamas could prioritize weapons and warfare while outsiders repeatedly paid to repair the damage after each conflict.
He criticized Western activists who reduce Palestinian advocacy to opposition to Israel and refuse to acknowledge Palestinian agency. A credible pro-Palestinian framework, he said, must define a positive political objective rather than rely on demands to destroy or dismantle Israel. Calls to eliminate the “Zionist entity,” he argued, are not policy proposals and offer Israelis no reason to engage.
“Destroying Israel is not a goal,” he said. “That’s rhetoric. That’s hate.”
Authentic Palestinian advocacy should promote governance, economic opportunity, institution-building and political renewal, he said. It must also recognize that approximately nine million Israelis regard the country as their home and are not going to disappear.
Khatib said there is little organized space in the Palestinian diaspora for people who support Palestinian rights while rejecting Hamas and seeking engagement with mainstream Israelis and Zionists. Palestinians who question dominant activist narratives may face social exclusion, accusations of betrayal and pressure from their families or communities. He said people frequently contact him privately to express support for his arguments but are afraid to state similar views publicly.
Criticism of Hamas, he added, remains taboo in parts of Arab, Muslim and Palestinian diaspora life. Since Oct. 7, he has seen some people move from a reluctance to condemn Hamas to open support for the organization.
“This is not a fringe position,” he said.
Khatib has also experienced hostility from pro-Palestinian activists at universities. Although he opposes West Bank settlements, supports Palestinian freedom and has condemned Israeli conduct in Gaza, he said activists have branded him a traitor because he also criticizes Hamas and supports dialogue with Zionists.
At one campus appearance, protesters followed him toward his vehicle and he required a police escort. At another, demonstrators depicted him as having been bought by Israel, using dollar signs in a manner he considered both anti-Palestinian and antisemitic.
The assumption that an independent-minded Palestinian must have been paid by Jews or Israel, he said, denies Palestinians intellectual diversity while reproducing traditional conspiracy theories about Jewish money and control.
Khatib said antizionism can, in theory, be distinguished from antisemitism as an intellectual position. In contemporary practice, however, it frequently serves as a shield for hostility toward Jews.
He drew a distinction between criticizing Israeli policies and demanding Israel’s elimination. Opposition to violent settlers or to statements by far-right Israeli ministers, he said, is legitimate political discourse. Holding Jewish communities abroad collectively responsible for Israeli actions is not.
He cited attacks on synagogues and Israeli diplomatic personnel, as well as rhetoric that treats such violence as an understandable consequence of events in the Middle East.
“That is antisemitic,” he said. “That is double standard. That is normalizing violence against Jewish communities because somehow what happened overseas, over there, 10,000 miles away, needs to come to our shores.”
Despite the obstacles, Khatib ended with a measure of optimism. He believes many Palestinians, freed from social pressure and fear of reprisal, would prefer peace, coexistence and economic security.
“The individual is smart, the group is dumb,” he said. “One-on-one, if left to their own devices, most Palestinians would choose peace.”
He said Gaza, the source of the Oct. 7 attacks and repeated regional conflict, could eventually become the place where a new political direction begins.
“I fully believe that Gaza can, and inshallah [God willing] will, be ground zero for the beginning of the end of the conflict and for true peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”