The one tool Hamas have

Every once in a while, a ‘Palestinian’ ‘leader’ will do something really radical and tell the truth. It’s a very different thing, because, to paraphrase Mary McCarthy, “Every word they utter is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” But sometimes the truth is so in-you-face obvious that it cannot be denied.

‘We have to reconsider our tools’: Terror chief Zubeidi laments that all Palestinian strategies have failed

by Nava Freiberg | Tuesday, August 12, 2025 | 3:00 PM Jerusalem time

In an interview with The New York Times, Zakaria Zubeidi – a well-known Palestinian terrorist freed by Israel this year after being arrested for organizing dozens of attacks during the Second Intifada while heading the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Jenin – laments the futility of Palestinian attempts to achieve a sovereign state.

Naturally, while The Times of Israel correctly described Mr Zubeidi as a terrorist, The New York Times would only say, “To Israelis, Mr. Zubeidi was a terrorist.”

“We [the Palestinians] have to reconsider our tools,” Zubeidi, who was released in exchange for hostages kidnapped by Hamas in a January ceasefire deal with the terror group, tells the newspaper in his first major interview since his release.

“We founded a theater, and we tried cultural resistance — what did that do?” he continues, referring to a theater program he recently co-founded in Jenin. “We tried the rifle, we tried shooting. There’s no solution,” he says. According to the paper, Zubeidi feels that “none of it had helped forge a Palestinian state [and] it may never do so.”

Mr Zubeidi isn’t the only terrorist — we always use the correct names and descriptions for people — who has figured out that the terrorists “have to reconsider (their) tools,” because Hamas have used the one tool that they do have that has worked: seizing hostages. It worked in 2011, when Israel Defense Force soldier Gilad Shalit, captured in 2006, was exchanged for 1,027 Hamas prisoners, one of which was Yayha Sinwar who helped plan and lead the October 7^th Hamas attack and massacre. Mr Zubeidi is free today only because Hamas released some of the hostages in exchange for hundreds of imprisoned terrorists.

Further down:

Upon witnessing, after his release, Israel’s strikes on Gaza during the current war, as well as the aftermath of Israeli raids in the West Bank, Zubeidi assesses that “on every front, Palestinian strategies seem to be failing,” according to the paper. Zubeidi’s son was also among five Palestinian gunmen killed in an Israeli strike on the West Bank last year.

Zubeidi claims that “there is no peaceful solution and there is no military solution” for Palestinians, “because the Israelis don’t want to give us anything.”

“It’s impossible to uproot us from here,” he continues, “and we don’t have any tools to uproot them.”

Right now, Israel is trying to “uproot” the Palestinians from Gaza, as should have been done at the end of the 1967 war. Will it work?

I am reminded of what happened to the Jews in Europe after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took over the German government, but before the war in Europe broke out. The Nazis, through various ‘legal’ actions and occasional outright terrorism, tried to get the Jews to emigrate from Germany, to just get out of the country, and some did.

But far more stayed. They had their homes and their families and their jobs and their businesses in Germany, and no one really believed that the good Germans would actually try to kill them all. Author Herman Wouk called it “the will not to believe” in his book War and Remembrance, and the extermination camps had not, at that time been established, so who could believe it? The Israeli policy from the 1960s, to encourage the ‘Palestinians’ to emigrate by making their lives miserable, didn’t work. Some few did emigrate, into Lebanon and Jordan, and all they did there was cause more trouble and strife.

The only thing that will ever drive either the Israelis or the ‘Palestinians’ out will be military force. The Arabs have tried that against the Jews, several times, and have always failed. The Israelis have not yet tried it, though turning Gaza into a complete wasteland might be considered such an attempt, but the IDF have not yet simply rounded up all of them and kicked them out.

I will note here that the one easy manner of egress from Gaza, the border with Egypt, remains closed, because the Egyptians don’t want the ‘Palestinians’ any more than anyone else. The New York Times reported, in early 2024, that Egypt was clearing the area near the border with Gaza and building even more security structures, to keep the ‘Palestinians’ out.

Trading 1,027 prisoners for a single captured soldier proved to be folly for the Israelis back in 2011, and the trading of current ‘Palestinian’ prisoners for some of the hostages will turn out exactly the same. Hamas know full well what Mr Zubeidi knows, but didn’t admit: the kidnapping of innocent Israelis is their sole tool which has worked. As harsh as it sounds, Israel could have rendered that tool useless by declaring all 251 of the hostages seized to be unfortunate casualties, and concentrated their war efforts on simply destroying Hamas, without any regard to the lives of the hostages.