Does Washington have collective amnesia, or is it just President Biden? It may be affecting to hear him, in a much-lauded televised address three days after the Hamas terror attacks on Israel, recall his meeting with Golda Meir on the eve of the Yom Kippur War. Yet what the president seems to have forgotten — or did his speechwriters willfully overlook it? — is that a majority of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip put Hamas in power. And it wasn’t all that long ago. 

And it was given cover by Mr. Biden’s point man on Iran, Robert Malley. He is now suspended, pending an investigation, but in January 2006 Hamas won the Palestinian general election, giving the terrorist group a majority in the Palestinians’ legislative council. Two months later, Mr. Malley penned a piece for the New York Review of Books in which he stated that the terrorist group “ran on a platform of good government and earned the respect of voters.”

In little more than a year, the purge began in earnest, with individuals Hamas didn’t like being thrown from rooftops. This is how, in June 2007, one  father of six described the purge under way as Hamas went after its political opponents: “Snipers on rooftops killing people. Bodies mutilated and dumped in the streets in very humiliating ways. Houses bombarded and civilians killed.”

That’s how Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah, the Palestinian faction with headquarters at Ramallah, not Gaza.  That it did so violently did not mean the organization, whose guiding objective is the destruction of the state of Israel, did not have the popular support of the Arab street, as the Levantine lingo goes. Of course it did. No one can remember any serious attempts to topple Hamas. There weren’t any. 

So, when President Biden made a pointed reference, at the annual dinner for the Human Rights Campaign at Washington on Saturday  night, to “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” and to “innocent Palestinian families and the vast majority that have nothing to do with Hamas,” one has to wonder: What was he thinking? Or was possibly someone else doing the thinking for him? 

Mr. Biden is correct that Palestinian families have been used by Hamas as “human shields,” but does that get most of the two million Palestinians who live in Gaza off the hook? Or get Mr. Biden off the hook? What does he have to say about the fact that his point man on Iran is the author of that panegyric on Hamas as it came to power in Gaza? The president has still not addressed why Mr. Malley has been suspended from his duties. 

One wonders whether Mr. Biden ever read, or is even vaguely familiar with, “The Power of the Powerless,” by the late president of the former Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel. No need to get into the nuances of that epic essay here, because the essence is in the title. There is always an avenue, somewhere, that leads away from oppression — in the Gazans’ case, it’s just that nobody chose to take it. 

Hamas championed their cause — self-induced victimhood fueled by a pathological hatred for Israel. The instrumentalization of that hate translated into terrorist attacks against Israel and four wars that Israel fought with Hamas since 2008. Can anyone be so naive as to believe that Palestinian families had nothing to do with any of those attacks or any of those wars?

Where is the collective outrage from the Palestinians of Gaza over the crimes perpetrated in their name? Where is the condemnation? Is there any at all? Worse, there have been cheers. No wonder Israel is gearing up for a possible  ground offensive to dismantle the Hamas terror infrastructure in the northern section of the Strip. An American president is retailing the old canard that there are two morally equivalent sides in this calamity. There are not.