Hamas, Netanyahu and their bloodied dove of peace

October 7 is a day that will “live in infamy”. Until that day last month, it was inconceivable that Roosevelt’s words after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour could again ring true.

I was transported back to that other October day – October 6, 1973 – day one of the Yom Kippur War. It was the other time in living memory that an attack on Israelis shook Jews around the world to their core as we feared for our present and our future. Fifty years and a day later, the cruel ironies of 1973 had rung forward in time to 2023.

An explosion following an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Thursday. Credit: AP Photo/Leo Correa

What a ghastly war. It started in utter barbarism by Hamas. I cannot accept that this mass murder of innocent families and young lives should be depicted as an act of resistance, no matter how much I support a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

And while I love Israel as the Jewish homeland, I despise Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. I condemn the brutality of the extremist Israeli settlers and the denial of Palestinian freedom.

However, Israel has the lawful right to use military force to defend its citizens against Hamas. The world has largely responded to this increasing ferocity between Israel and Hamas by blaming Israel, accusing it of war and humanitarian crimes while largely ignoring that it has been Hamas that has violated the neutrality of apartment blocks, mosques and hospitals for its operations. As far back as 2007, the US Public Broadcasting Service reported that Hamas had built a command centre under the al-Shifa Hospital. In 2010, The Washington Post reported the use of civilian installations by Hamas.

But I believe that we, as Jews, are in danger of seriously compromising our basic humanity in our rush to defend Israel’s right to self-defence. In the aftermath of the naked inhumanity of October 7, the sense of outrage among Jews has overpowered so many of us. We have forgotten that Gaza’s civilian population has itself been a hostage of Hamas. In the face of Palestinian civilian deaths, some have simply turned their backs, others have covered their eyes and ears, while others have evaded the moral reality.

Acknowledging that Palestinian civilian deaths have been caused by – yes, caused by – the Israel Defence Forces’ attacks on Hamas is not an admission of moral equivalence between the IDF and Hamas. It is an acknowledgment of the tragedy of this war (and all wars) in which we know that innocent people are killed. It is an acknowledgment of the humanity of Palestinians. Indeed, such an acknowledgment would be the real face of defeat for Hamas.

But there are other villains who bear responsibility for this cycle of Gaza conflicts. Hamas has been in power since 2007. Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for almost all that time, since 2009.

Netanyahu has been the architect of Israeli policy on Hamas and Gaza, including the blockade of Gaza, and has been the guiding hand of IDF responses to Hamas. His philosophy has been twofold. First, talk loud and act tough but only as far as minimising Israeli, and certainly not Palestinian, casualties. Second, weaken the Palestinians by playing divide-and-rule between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas – and weaken the more moderate PA and its president Mahmoud Abbas.

In recent years, Netanyahu has even permitted funding to flow to Hamas from Qatar. His failure in October 2023 was not merely a dereliction of duty by taking his eye off the ball. That is just a classic blame-shifting exercise. Netanyahu’s failings leading to October 7 are far more insidious and destructive.

From the earliest days of 2023, following his election win and return to office as PM, Netanyahu glimpsed a possible way out of his “crime-minister” problems. It was his decision to bring into his government Bezalel Smotrich (finance minister) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security minister), two extremist nationalists and advocates of the occupation. Netanyahu had no problem with either of these wannabe tinpot dictators in his cabinet, with their denunciation of non-Orthodox Jews and attacks on any Israelis who dare to criticise the government.

To stay in the prime ministerial chair, Netanyahu was more than happy to reinvent Israel as an illiberal democracy in the image of Erdogan’s Turkey or Orban’s Hungary.

Netanyahu is on borrowed time. How long can he evade his day of reckoning with the Israeli people? For months this year there have been huge demonstrations against his plans to neuter Israel’s Supreme Court. He has also loosened the restraints on extremist West Bank settlers in their attacks on Palestinians. Netanyahu has brought Israel to a previously unknown and dark place. Israel’s democracy is now under threat.

How can Netanyahu blame everyone else when he encouraged Hamas to seriously contemplate its October 7 atrocity? He deliberately divided Israel and set Jews on other Jews. He unleashed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich on the country and settlers on Palestinians. As for Hamas, all it has to do now is retreat to its bunkers and tunnels and watch the people of Gaza be killed by Netanyahu’s revenge in his effort to portray himself as a strong leader at the helm of the ship of state.

In the meantime, we watch as Israel’s normalisation with Saudi Arabia and a Palestinian state pass by and out of sight. Hamas’ terror is its smouldering memorial.

Or perhaps, instead, we could call to mind that, in the years after that bleak October of 1973, there came an enduring peace with Egypt and Jordan. In place of the bloodied dove, perhaps the phoenix of a Palestinian state could rise from the ashes. Could October 7 and the deaths of all the innocents, in a similarly perverse manner, be the precursor of a different reality for Israelis and Palestinians?

Irving Wallach is a Sydney barrister. He is a former executive member of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and a past president of the New Israel Fund Australia.

A longer version of this article first appeared at Plus61JMedia.