If Western governments and their allies in the Arab world genuinely wanted to address the issue of feeding the hungry Palestinians in Gaza, their approach to the current crisis in the coastal enclave would take a different form from what we are witnessing today.

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer mentioned that the United Kingdom might soon follow the example set by French President Emmanuel Macron to formally recognize a Palestinian State, should Israel not agree to a ceasefire with Hamas and increase aid to Gaza by September.

In response, President Donald Trump dodged.

‘I don’t mind [Starmer] taking a position,’ the president told reporters.

Trump should ‘mind.’

The UK’s potential recognition of a Palestinian state would, in reality, be mostly symbolic. A new nation cannot simply be declared into existence. The creation of a Palestinian state can only be realized through a negotiated two-state solution with Israel—a notion that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many Israelis affected by years of Palestinian terrorism oppose.

But if Hamas – the current authoritarian power in Gaza – were to be destroyed than the dynamics change. Why, then, do Western leaders – repeatedly – throw Hamas a lifeline?

The sad reality is that the enablers of the sufferings of Gazans are not in Jerusalem, but in France, the United Kingdom, the United States and any number of countries where thoughtless empathy – detached from facts, history, and responsibility – has replaced strategic, compassionate thinking.

For decades, the West has played an indispensable role in shielding Hamas from the consequences of its actions – and it does so again by putting the onus on Israel to solve the escalating human tragedy in Gaza.

Whenever Hamas has embedded fighters in hospitals, launched rockets from school yards, or hoarded fuel and food meant for civilians, it has counted on a Pavlovian reaction from the West: pity for Palestinians, blame for Israel.

But who is really to blame when innocent Gazans, deployed by Hamas as human shields, are killed in retaliatory Israeli strikes?

The answer from the West – in one voice – must be: Hamas.

Instead, European nations, France above all others, has shown an almost compulsive need to virtue signal on this issue. Macron’s decision to support recognition of a Palestinian state – at the precise moment Hamas is torturing Israeli hostages underground – is complicity, not diplomacy.

Israel’s Arab neighbors do the same.

Egypt publicly postures as a mediator while quietly coordinating with Hamas. Cairo controls the Rafah border crossing – Gaza’s only outlet to the Arab world. It could open it, allow more aid through, and even offer refuge.

But Egypt, like much of the Arab world, doesn’t want to absorb Palestinian refugees or take responsibility for Gaza. Instead, they heap pressure on Israel and then blame it for the consequences.

The list of enablers goes on: Qatari funds that prop up Hamas salaries, UN agencies that act as de facto welfare arms of Hamas governance, and in the United States, a vocal bloc of lawmakers who parrot Hamas talking points with the same blockheaded certainty that underlies the pro-Hamas encampments on college campuses.

Meanwhile, editorial pages are filled with the sort of moralizing that feeds the eliminationist fantasies of the pro-Hamas protestors to whom the Jewish state is the root of all evil. It is an ugly moment for our civilization, in which narcissistic posturing has blended with classic antisemitism to generate plenty of heat, but no light.

But it’s not too late to change course by helping Palestinians and not Hamas.

Imagine if those same Western leaders – as well as legislators, diplomats, Arab foreign ministries and the various organs of the United Nations – reacted differently to the images of Palestinian suffering.

Instead of issuing blanket condemnations of Israel for fighting a war imposed upon it by the Hamas mass atrocities of October 7, 2023, they could help shape the parameters that will bring the bloodshed to an end.

They could recognize that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is a crisis of food distribution, not supply. Rather than damning Israel, the international community should work with the Israelis to ensure that food gets to those who need it – particularly poorer families languishing in the lower ranks of the patronage network which Hamas operates in Gaza.

That means circumventing the present delivery system that has been ruthlessly exploited by Hamas. Doing so would bring relief to tens of thousands of Palestinians and reassure them that they have a reliable food supply.

And there’s more.

World leaders could demand the immediate and unconditional release of the 50 remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to still be alive, striking at the main source of leverage that Hamas has enjoyed throughout this war.

They could state clearly that there will be no reconstruction program for Gaza while Hamas stays in power.

All this would accelerate the removal of Hamas – the only party to this conflict that actually wants the Gazan population to starve, thereby allowing it to cling to power.

After all, a Gaza without Hamas is an outcome Macron and Starmer say they desire.

A Palestinian state must be conditioned on the dismantling of Hamas and the solemn, irreversible recognition by the Palestinian leadership of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.

For his part, President Donald Trump and other American leaders must call out these Western accomplices in the machinery of Palestinian misery – and speak these four words: Hamas has no future.

Trump should make clear that the path to peace requires the dismantlement of Hamas. Until that happens, there will be only more war, more children in rubble, and more crocodile tears from those who helped cause the destruction.

Hamas survives on Western weakness. If the world wants the suffering in Gaza to end, nothing less than a total inversion of the narrative is necessary: no statehood without recognition of Israel, no aid without disarmament, no more lies about who is to blame.

It’s time the free world stopped giving Hamas what it wants.

Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Ben Cohen is a senior analyst and directs FDD’s rapid response outreach.