They are a terrorist attack on Israel, but a terrorist attack on such a scale – and with the implied threat of similar attacks from Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and with the material backing of Iran – that constitutes a genuine existential threat to Israel.
Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong are right to condemn these attacks and assert Israel’s right to defend itself. However, many people in the international community support Israel’s right to defend itself in principle but criticise and hamper Israel when it actually does so. This will be a test of the Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister down the track.
Hamas atrocities provide challenges to civilised governments everywhere. It’s right that the federal parliament, the Sydney Opera House and iconic buildings elsewhere are illuminated with the Israeli flag in solidarity with Israel. Nonetheless, it’s important to discern the extremists’ purposes. Anyone who really wants to understand something of the soul of modern Israel should read A Tale of Love and Darkness, the 2005 memoir of Israeli novelist Amos Oz. It’s incomparably evocative. Oz only once was ever aware of his father weeping. That was when the UN voted for an Israeli state in 1947.
Oz and his father were not close and never emotional. But that night his father told Oz “what some gentile boys did to him in his school at Vilna (present-day Lithuania), and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down on to the paving stones and removed his trousers too in the middle of the playground, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that the Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing”.
There is a reason Oz’s father tells him this: “Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school some day. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. For ever.”
Hamas knows Jewish history. Its attacks are designed to provoke the greatest possible Jewish trauma. The Hamas terrorists who invaded southern Israel indiscriminately killed women, children, old people. But they paid particular attention to humiliating Jewish women and girls.
Two images from the atrocities make the point. In one, the half-naked body of a young German tourist in Israel for a music festival, raped and brutalised before she was killed, is paraded on the back of a Hamas truck, with terrorists continuing to interfere with her body.
In another, a young Israeli woman is pulled from the boot of a Jeep. She is brutally pulled out by her hair. She is barefoot and her trousers are covered in blood. The terrorist, firing his pistol while he’s pulling her hair, her hands bound in tape behind her back, pulls her into the back cabin of a Jeep where she is joined by several Hamas terrorists. This is unspeakable to watch.
The Times of Israel commented: “Hamas seemed to do everything possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vulnerability.”
The newspaper suggests Hamas has miscalculated. A strong and self-confident Israel can tolerate Hamas on its border, a weakened and more vulnerable Israel cannot.
However, Hamas has probably made its calculations with ruthless rationality. It murdered more than 700 Israelis, almost all of them civilians, and took more than 100 hostages. It wants to inflict as much agony on Israel as it can. It’s worth remembering that under Australian law, both Hamas and Hezbollah are designated and proscribed terrorist groups, and it’s illegal for Australians to offer them any material support.
Hamas has always been indifferent to the suffering of its own civilians. When it first came to power, Hamas specialised in throwing Palestinians who politically disagreed with it off the top of buildings. It also used wide and severe punishments for Palestinians who were gay. It’s not troubled by anybody’s human rights, least of all Palestinian human rights.
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has pointed out that Qatar has given Hamas more than $US1bn in aid in the past decade. Much other aid has been given as well. This money could have been used to build schools and hospitals and universities. In the absence of constant terror attacks, Israel would have had every incentive to facilitate economic development in Gaza.
But like all terrorists, Hamas doesn’t want anything to get better. It benefits from things getting worse. The presence of so many civilian Israeli hostages will make Israel’s operations in Gaza excruciating. But clearly Hamas wants Israel to undertake a major ground operation.
The question is: why? It may feel that it can inflict heavy losses on the Israel Defence Forces in the course of such operations. It may also calculate that if it absorbs tremendous Israeli military resources in the south, this will open up an opportunity for the even better equipped Hezbollah to attack Israel in the north.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, both Hamas and Hezbollah are not only supplied and funded by Iran but effectively co-ordinated, and to some extent directed, by Iran.
The Biden administration in the US has warned Hezbollah not to attack. But the Biden administration recently paid Iran $US6bn ($9.4bn) as part of its effort to woo Iran and to get US hostages released.
Biden’s policy towards Iran has been intensely counter-productive. US influence in the Middle East has declined. However, the US has been fast and clear that it will provide every support to Israel. This will be difficult, though, as it’s already at full stretch providing military resources to Ukraine.
Perhaps the gravest failure of the Biden administration, along with all other allied governments, including especially Australia, has been to fail to ramp up the industrial production of ammunition and weapons in the face of the Ukraine war. The Western arsenal has been gravely depleted, while China, Iran and North Korea have not fired a single munition.
Are we in fact on the brink of a third world war? It seems extremely remote but a path to this kind of war is plausible. If Iran and Israel get into a conventional military exchange, and Israel is seriously threatened, there is surely every possibility that US navy and air force resources in the Middle East and the Mediterranean would join the Israelis in military action. Not boots on the ground but naval and air fire. At that point, with the US completely stretched in Ukraine and in the Middle East, Beijing could well decide this is the moment to take Taiwan.
These deadly and gruesome events have completely unpredictable global consequences.
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The gruesome cruelty and inhumanity of the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians horrifies the world. Every civilised human being recoils in disgust. These events almost make you ashamed to be a human being.