Israel must destroy Hamas despite the cost
The grotesque terror atrocities will burden history forever. If Israel doesn’t annihilate Hamas, it will face repeated atrocities of the type we’ve just witnessed.
The Hamas terrorist organisation’s massacre of more than 1300 Israeli civilians, the slaughter of the innocents, is a day of infamy and the greatest mass murder of Jewish civilians since Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust.
Never again. Yet once more.
History, and not just Jewish history, will labour now under the burden of this day. There has been too much blood and death between Israelis and Palestinians, legendary Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin once remarked. But there has never been something in quite this category of moral depravity.
The savagery of the attacks was exceeded in its way by the pornography of performative sadism Hamas engaged in, and the wild support for this from Gaza crowds.
It’s almost unbearable to watch: young women degraded and tortured; old women doused in petrol and set on fire; children murdered in front of their parents; babies killed, their cots covered in blood. One video, with no blood, is nonetheless almost beyond human understanding. A small Jewish boy, aged perhaps six, has been taken back to Gaza. He’s placed in a circle of slightly older Gaza boys encouraged to taunt, harass and humiliate him. The little boy, though he struggles well to preserve his dignity, keeps calling out “mum” . His tormentors are delighted. “Keep calling out for your mum,” they laugh and mock.
There is a triple depravity here. What human being thinks torturing a six-year-old is doing God’s will? And what of corrupting the Gazan children encouraged to torture him? And then uploading the footage so Israelis, and Jews worldwide, will see it.
This is as close as you get to pure human evil, which our naive and foolish therapeutic culture sometimes pretends doesn’t exist. There’s a deep sickness of the spirit in actions such as this.
The Albanese government was slow, confused, mealy-mouthed. It not only lacked moral clarity, in circumstances requiring moral clarity above all else. Albanese and his ministers looked completely out of their depth, as though they lacked the imagination to grasp the gravity and historical importance of what they were dealing with.
The terrorists, it is tragic but unavoidable to say, had significant success. For a night, they even imposed their paradigm on the streets of Sydney. On Monday night, when the Opera House was illuminated in the colours of the Israeli flag as a gesture of human solidarity, Jews were told by the police to stay home for their own safety. The police instead allowed, “facilitated”, a pro-Palestinian march that ended with a mob chanting “F..k the Jews”, “Gas the Jews” and similar slogans of intense, violent racial hatred.
That night, the state authorities in effect told Australian citizens: Jews are not safe in parts of our city, we won’t protect you, hide in your homes, the streets are safe for the extremists.
Next day, NSW Premier Chris Minns, grasped the enormity of what had happened and took control. He apologised to the Jewish community, he declared the chanters of race hatred “will not be allowed to commandeer our streets”.
Minns has looked like the only adult in any Australian Labor government.
If that can happen in Sydney, the wider geo-strategic and global fallout of this Hamas action will be profound.
Who is Hamas and why did it do this?
Although its actions indulged a pornography of twisted sadism, there is a rational strategy at work. Hamas is an offshoot of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, which at its core is Islamist, intolerant and, as a theological position, full of hatred of the West.
It’s worth noting this terrible irony. For 2000 years Jews were subject to obscene anti-Semitism on the basis that they were alien to the West. Now, in Arab anti-Semitism, they are hated because they are representatives of the West.
The same underlying sentiment came from the Greens’ comment that projecting Israeli colours on the Australian parliament was disgraceful because it was “one colonial government supporting another”.
Hamas pursues a particular version of Islamist totalitarianism. Although Sunni, it is heavily influenced by Shia Iran. The Iranian mullahs have always sought leadership over the broad Muslim community internationally, most of whom are Sunni and don’t accept Iranian leadership. The ayatollahs always admired the Muslim Brotherhood and some were personally involved in translating its works into Persian.
Hamas won an election in Gaza on the basis that it was the most effective opponent of Israel and took control in 2009. That was the end of any democracy in Gaza. Many Palestinians who opposed Hamas were murdered. Most Christians – and there was once a flourishing Palestinian Christian community – have fled Gaza.
Hamas is the most extreme of the Palestinian terror groups. It is proscribed under Australian law as a terrorist organisation, as it is in many Western nations.
Its dominance represents the theologising of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The old Palestine Liberation Organisation, while employing terrorism, once championed a secular state.
The Hamas founding documents are full of gross, conspiratorial anti-Semitism and the historic quest to fulfil what it sees as the religious mission of reclaiming all the land of Israel for Islam. From its earliest days, Hamas was a client of Iran. Tom Tugendhat, the impressive British Security Minister, explained the Iranian role in a TV interview: “Iran has effectively built the capability of Hamas, not just to murder Israelis but to brutally enslave Palestinians as pawns in a game of jihad … What the Nazis were doing is exactly what Hamas is doing, they’re spreading a blood libel (against Jews).”
The best regional analysts, such as Israel’s Ehud Yaari, are in no doubt Iran directed the Hamas action, mainly to destroy the prospects of normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and to put other existing Arab-Israel relations under maximum strain.
The Biden administration accuses Iran of being Hamas’s chief supporter and supplier but says it hasn’t seen a smoking gun proving Iran ordered this attack. However, the Biden administration has been involved in a disastrous effort to woo Iran back to a nuclear deal. Washington has stopped enforcing sanctions on Iran and allowed $US6bn ($9.3bn) in frozen Iranian assets to be unfrozen. If Iran is behind this latest attack, that’s intensely embarrassing for Biden.
Of course, Biden has responded with full support for Israel in the wake of the Hamas atrocities.
Yaari, who in 40 years of writing about the Middle East I’ve found to be unerringly accurate in his information and shrewd in his judgments, said in a radio interview the attack was “orchestrated by the Iranians”.
Yaari further said that in the months leading up to the attack: “General Ismail Khan, the head of (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard) Quds force, almost every fortnight was in Beirut and Damascus talking to the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.” The Wall Street Journal detailed meetings at which Iranian officials gave the final go-ahead for Hamas.
Hamas, of course, had its own objectives. It, too, wanted to disrupt the Saudi-Israel entente. It’s easy to see several Hamas aims advanced by these gruesome attacks.
First, the Palestinian issue comes back to the heart of global politics. Second, Hamas can present itself as the only Palestinian movement that can strike blows at Israel. Third, it destroys absolutely any chance of peace – though such chances were slim anyway – and Hamas doesn’t want peace. It would enjoy total victory but in the meantime it revels in violence, conflict and death.
In its own terms, Hamas understands the dynamics of Israeli society and politics. Part of the reason for making these attacks so barbaric was to try to demoralise Israel, and certainly to cause suffering among Israelis and Jews. But a more realistic and proximate ambition is to provoke Israel into a major ground offensive in Gaza.
Hamas took perhaps 150 hostages. It will kill some of them but it also believes these hostages serve two purposes: to further extend its gruesome torture of Israel, and to provide extra leverage over the Israeli government.
What happens next?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly outlined five objectives for Israel: regain control of all the territory in Israel’s south; undertake an unprecedented offensive against Hamas; secure Israel’s other hostile fronts, especially the northern border with Lebanon; preserve international support for Israel; regenerate internal Israeli unity.
Israel has called out more than 300,000 army reservists and has massed more than 100,000 on the border with Gaza. It will likely move into Gaza from the north and the east. It has formed a national unity government. The Israeli opposition parties demonstrated genuine patriotism in joining this government. Netanyahu’s overreach in trying to reform the Supreme Court, and the unsavoury nature of two of the figures in his coalition, meant he had steadily lost popularity and the opposition steadily gained. Going into government together blurs the political distinction.
Senior Israeli ministers have said they are determined to destroy Hamas. This will require a ground invasion of Gaza, which will be bloody, costly and terrible. Israel never seeks civilian casualties but inevitably civilians will be gravely affected. Hamas has always been happy to cause suffering for its own people. With the billions of aid dollars that have gone to Gaza, a prosperous society could have been built. In the absence of violence, Israel would have had every interest in fostering Palestinian economic development.
Instead Hamas has constantly engineered conflicts that result in suffering of its own people.
A ground operation in Gaza will be extraordinarily difficult and costly for the Israel Defence Forces. Here we come up against the Israeli version of what will be a critical theme in all Western democracies in coming decades, as it was during the Cold War. How does a liberal society defend itself against forces, internal or external, that would use its liberalism against it, that would exploit the inevitable gaps and weaknesses of liberalism or that simply holds liberalism in complete contempt, as Hamas does?
For all of the threats Israel has faced, the IDF is not exactly what its international image sometimes suggests. Israel’s air force is hi-tech, extremely sophisticated militarily and very effective. Fighter pilots, whether full time in the air force or reservists, are highly trained specialists. Israel’s special forces are as effective as any in the world. But most of Israel’s army is a reserve force. This has strengths and weaknesses. The compulsory military service, except for ultra-Orthodox, brings Israelis together.
This is important because although Israel is a Jewish state, it also contains within itself the entire diversity of the Jewish universe, from ultra-liberal to ultra-religious, from radical to conservative, with Jews with family backgrounds from central European, to American or British or Russian or Middle Eastern and North African.
Israel works very hard to be as normal a society as it can be, notwithstanding the security constraints. That means most of its soldiers are not soldiers most of the time. They’ve had a couple of years in the army as young people, but after that they’ve been bank tellers and shop assistants, architects and accountants, chefs and school teachers. For most of their lives their military service consists of odd weekends and a couple of months a year.
They are competent and brave, but not necessarily ultra well trained or equipped. They haven’t drilled particular manoeuvres over and over again.
When they go into Gaza, seeking to engage and destroy Hamas forces and Hamas leadership, they will be confronting fighters who are fanatics. Allied troops in Afghanistan at times found they were confronting enemy soldiers pumped up on methamphetamines. Hamas, which very much wants this conflict, surely has been preparing for it for years.
The IDF will face booby traps, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers, snipers, and they will do so in a dense urban environment in which the general population hates them and where they haven’t been physically present for years.
Yet if Israel doesn’t destroy Hamas, it will face repeated atrocities of the type we’ve just witnessed. Other enemies on its other borders will follow suit. As it is, Iran may well plan to attack in the north with Hezbollah, to attack from the West Bank with Islamic Jihad, even to get the Houthi rebels it sponsors in Yemen to fire missiles at Israel’s southern port of Eilat. It’s possible Iran, which the international regulatory agencies believe has now accumulated enough highly enriched uranium for its first nuclear weapon, may enter the fight militarily itself. In part it’s to be able to respond to that scenario that the US has placed an aircraft carrier group in the Mediterranean.
It’s more likely, though, that Iran will reap what it sees as the benefits of war by proxy, where it can direct its clients without paying a direct price for their actions.
Some observers conclude the recent events demonstrate that Israel must quickly concede a Palestinian state.
But three Israeli prime ministers have offered a Palestinian state on all of Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, compensating territory from Israel proper and a capital in east Jerusalem. Each time such offers have been met with terrorism. No Palestinian leader could guarantee an end to terrorism and any Palestinian leader who made such a peace would be killed by Hamas-style extremists. Hamas itself has no interest in such an agreement.
Even the chant so popular with undergraduate Western supporters of Palestine “from the river to the sea” literally means the extermination of Israel.
There is no alternative, it seems, to a prolonged conflict in Gaza. As it goes on, Israel will lose some international support.
But Israel appears determined to pay whatever price is required to ensure its survival.
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