Gazans voted for Hamas, so they must bear the consequences.

The suggestion that Palestinians are "responsible" for persecution rooted in a century-long system of Israeli settler colonialism because of their political choices is an open call to justify genocide. Nothing justifies genocide, an international crime prohibited under all circumstances.

Even if you reject the outcome of an election, voters cannot be held responsible for what follows. Collective punishment is immoral and illegal.

This myth is a colonial inversion of reality. It implies that Palestinians are responsible for Israel's genocide because of Hamas's October 7 attack. In doing so, it erases the context in which the attack occurred: that Palestinian life before the 2006 elections was already shaped by decades of settler colonialism and military occupation, and that what followed was the blockade, repeated military assaults, and ultimately genocide. Palestinian resistance did not create this reality. It emerged in response to it.

This myth also shifts responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim by portraying Palestinian resistance, rather than Israeli settler colonialism, as the source of violence. Israeli structural violence predates Hamas and operates regardless of it. Israel alone bears responsibility for choosing genocide as its response.

This claim assumes Palestinians must reject resistance before they are entitled to basic human rights. They do not. Palestinians, like all peoples living under colonial domination and occupation, have the right to resist. Whether they support Hamas as a political party is irrelevant. No political choice or belief deprives anyone of protection against genocide or collective punishment.

Holding Palestinians collectively responsible for having voted for a party that Western powers have criminalized using their own colonial criteria is not a legal or moral argument. It is the logic of empire: your choices are only accepted when they align with colonial interests.

Beyond the racist premise, the claim itself is reductionist. Yes, Hamas won the 2006 elections, but over half of Gaza's population today weren't even born then. There have been no elections since, because Israel has made them impossible: Gaza has been under total siege since 2007, parties and civil society are criminalized, candidates arrested, freedom of movement strangled, voting blocked. Governance under those conditions is impossible.