The Spiral of Violence that Led to Hamas
In the eyes of many outside observers, the cause of Palestinian autonomy and statehood has now been tainted by the gruesome murders and abductions – many of them captured on video – carried out in its name. Paradoxically, if Palestinians are ever to regain the moral high ground, they must hope for the destruction of Hamas.
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Hubris Meets Nemesis in Israel
By ruling out any political process in Palestine and boldly asserting that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s fanatical government made bloodshed inevitable. But that doesn't explain Israel's failure to prevent Hamas from attacking.
TOLEDO – Sooner or later, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s destructive political magic, which has kept him in power for 15 years, was bound to usher in a major tragedy. A year ago, he formed the most radical and incompetent government in Israel’s history. Don’t worry, he assured his critics, I have “two hands firmly on the steering wheel.”
But by ruling out any political process in Palestine and boldly asserting, in his government’s binding guidelines, that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” Netanyahu’s fanatical government made bloodshed inevitable.
Admittedly, blood flowed in Palestine even when peace-seekers such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were in office. But Netanyahu recklessly invited violence by paying his coalition partners any price for their support. He let them grab Palestinian lands, expand illegal settlements, scorn Muslim sensibilities regarding the sacred mosques on the Temple Mount, and promote suicidal delusions about the reconstruction of the biblical Temple in Jerusalem (in itself a recipe for what could be the mother of all Muslim Jihads). Meanwhile, he also sidelined the more moderate Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, effectively beefing up the radical Hamas in Gaza.
According to Netanyahu’s twisted logic, strong Islamist rule in Gaza would be the ultimate argument against a political solution in Palestine. By rewarding the extremists and castigating the moderates, Netanyahu believed that he, unlike the soft leftists, had finally found the solution to the Palestine conflict. The Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with four Arab states (and will probably soon include Saudi Arabia), blinded him to the Palestinian volcano beneath his feet.
But, in the ruthless, barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians in the villages surrounding Gaza, Netanyahu’s hubris met its nemesis in the form of Hamas’s savagery. Fifty years and a day after Egypt and Syria launched their surprise attack in what became known as the Yom Kippur War, Hamas stormed Gaza’s borders with Israel and slaughtered hundreds of defenseless civilians. Scenes of young women raped next to the bodies of their friends were recorded on social networks. About a hundred people – among them whole families, elderly women, and toddlers – have been abducted and taken to Gaza.
Many have expressed surprise that Hamas so easily penetrated Israel’s defenses along the border with Gaza. But there were no such defenses. When Hamas began slaughtering hundreds of defenseless civilians, Israel’s glorious army was mostly deployed elsewhere. Many were assigned to the West Bank to protect religious settlers in clashes (sometimes initiated by the settlers themselves) with local Palestinians, and in festivals around invented holy shrines. For long hours, desperate men and women cried for help, and the strongest army in the Middle East was nowhere to be seen.
The assumption was always that Gaza was not a vital priority. An underground wall of sensors and fortified concrete that Israel has built around the enclave was supposed to block the tunnels through which Hamas tried in the past to penetrate Israeli border villages. It was of no use. Hamas militias simply stormed the fences on the surface.
There was no intelligence about Hamas’s intentions, either. The “startup nation,” whose sophisticated cyber units can detect the movement of a leaf in a tree in an Iranian base in Syria, knew nothing of Hamas’s plans. Israel’s obsession with Iran’s possible nuclear breakout and its internal security services’ focus on the occupied West Bank partly explain this negligence.
The attack by Hamas was not just a tactical surprise, but also a strategic bombshell. This was apparent in the group’s calculated decision not to participate in any of the clashes of the last two years between Israel and Islamic Jihad, another militant group in Gaza. Hamas was creating the impression that it was becoming a government more interested in meeting its people’s material needs than in presumably ineffective armed resistance. And the Israelis believed what they wanted to believe: that subsidies from Qatar and their own gestures would dissuade Hamas from future military adventures.
And now what? Restore deterrence? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? A land invasion is difficult to imagine. The atrocious level of destruction and casualties this would entail is one reason, with the many Israeli hostages now in Gaza providing additional insurance. The risk of Hezbollah opening an additional front from Lebanon in the north is another. Hezbollah’s capabilities dwarf those of Hamas, and a two-front war, with Iran possibly backing Israel’s foes, is an apocalyptic scenario.
This is exactly why US President Joe Biden warned Israel’s enemies “not to exploit the crisis.” To drive home the point, Biden has ordered the US Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean.
But then when has the Israel-Palestine conflict ever responded to Cartesian logic?
We learned from Clausewitz that war is supposed to make sense in the context of a political objective. Hamas’s current war has such objectives: securing its hegemony in the Palestinian national movement, freeing its men from Israeli prisons by trading hostages for them, and preventing Palestine’s plight from being forsaken by the “Arab brethren” in their rush to normalize relations with the Jewish state. For Netanyahu’s government, however, this is a purely reactive war with no political objective beyond that of reaching a pause until the next round of hostilities.
A country that did not hold accountable its leaders for an outcome like what has played out in the horrific scenes around Gaza would lose its claim to being a genuine democracy. But Netanyahu’s machine of poisonous political disinformation is already at work disseminating a conspiracy theory according to which leftist army officers were responsible for the negligence that led to this dirty war. No one should be surprised that Netanyahu would resort to the infamous “stab in the back” narrative – a conspiracy theory also peddled by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. How else could the inciter-in-chief explain his criminal negligence?
When the fighting ends, negotiations for an exchange of hostages and prisoners are inevitable. Possibly, the clearly ineffective blockade on Gaza should be lifted. In any case, a different question will remain: whether the barbarity that the Hamas militias displayed in the killing fields around Gaza is the right path to Palestinian redemption. Their moment of supposed glory will live in infamy for many years to come.
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What Will Follow Hamas’s War?
Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the realization that Israel was not impregnable put the country on the road to peace with Egypt. The greatest tragedy of the current war will be the inability to do the same with the Palestinians.
WASHINGTON, DC – The multi-pronged operation that Hamas launched against Israel one day after the anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War is eerily similar to that conflict. Daring and unexpected, both attacks caught Israel by surprise and dealt lethal blows to the country’s sense of invincibility. It remains to be seen if, as in 1973, the Hamas attack will lead to a tectonic shift in Israeli politics and the country’s relationship with the Palestinians.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria surprised Israel, penetrating deep into its territory. In the conflict’s early days, the situation was so dire that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan recommended employing nuclear weapons. The Agranat commission, which was later tasked with investigating the war, coined the term conceptziyya to capture the intelligence services’ hubris. Israeli military intelligence held the conceptziyya that the country’s overwhelming firepower would deter the Arabs from attacking. Specifically, it was believed that Egypt would refrain from striking until it possessed sufficient air power to hit targets deep within Israel and silence its air force.
Today, these organizations have clung to a conceptziyya that Israel’s overwhelming power would deter Hamas from initiating a new war. Their political masters, led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, concluded that periodic Palestinian eruptions of violence were a manageable nuisance while imagining the occupied would accept endless occupation.
The Hamas operation demonstrates the fallaciousness of that approach. It is now clear beyond any doubt that an entity that consistently calls for Israel’s destruction and which abducts Israeli civilians cannot continue to exist on Israel’s border.
After the Agranat commission released its initial findings in 1974, Prime Minister Golda Meir and Dayan resigned. Meir bowed out graciously while Dayan rebuffed calls to do so because the commission had not recommended it.
Netanyahu is sure to mimic Dayan’s attitude, but he now undoubtedly faces an ignominious denouement to his 40-year political career. While Netanyahu’s harsh and unbending rhetoric won him supporters at home and abroad, it never matched reality, and the Hamas operation’s occurrence on his watch has instantly turned him into a paper tiger. He promised his policies would subdue the Palestinians, only to see them unleash the worst attack in Israel’s history. He vowed that economic packages would placate the Palestinians, only to find their attachment to their land stronger than any appeal to their purse. His strategy never extended beyond allowing the military a free hand in the Palestinian territories.
Netanyahu proved that long ago. In his first 11 years in power, he bristled at the pressure Democratic administrations in the United States applied and claimed that the conflict could be resolved under the tutelage of a Republican president. But during Donald Trump’s administration, Netanyahu pocketed American concessions, such as the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem, without offering the Palestinians any tangible benefits.
While Netanyahu’s defenestration will be a slow burn, that of his subordinates will ensue in the weeks following a lull in the violence. The Agranat commission recommended the termination of only a handful of officers, mostly in the intelligence branch. The soul-searching brought about by this war will extend deeper into the army and spread to include the senior echelons of the internal security service.
Hamas may find itself facing a similar reckoning. Israel’s security establishment often speaks of destroying “the terrorist infrastructure.” The attack will provide it the opportunity to do so.
A large-scale Israeli ground invasion is certain, and a long-term occupation likely. Though Hamas leaders will relocate to underground bunkers, it is doubtful they will find secure shelter.
Hamas and other Islamist organizations situate themselves within the framework of Muslim history. But a gaze toward the New World is more fitting. In 1996, the Peruvian Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement took hundreds of hostages at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima. The spectacular attack captured the world’s attention. A subsequent military raid freed the hostages while dealing the organization a death blow from which it never recovered.
The international community will give Israel a wide berth to do the same to Hamas. The usual outcry of concern for civilian casualties will be muted, just as it was during Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah. But Western governments can be most effective by using their clout to pressure Qatar and Turkey to expel Hamas officials, close their offices, and ban fundraising.
Whether the attack will close a chapter in Israeli history is the most important question. Ultimately, the 1973 war, together with the revelation in 1977 that Meir’s successor’s wife held an illegal foreign bank account, broke Labor’s 29-year grip on power.
Today, Israeli clarions are trumpeting vengeance. When they fall silent, introspection will follow. Israelis will question the conceptziyya that they can reap the benefits of a Western nation-state while being inured to the hardships their neighbors seek to inflict on them.
But a revival of the Israeli left and a rejuvenation of the peace process are unlikely. Since the Palestinians rejected Israel’s peace plan in 2000, the left has been in the doldrums. Today, Labor has plummeted from the peak of power to one of the smallest factions in the Israeli Knesset.
In 1973, the realization that Israel was not impregnable put the country on the road to peace with Egypt. The greatest tragedy of the current war will be the inability to do the same with the Palestinians.
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An Israeli Dilemma
While there must be a military component to Israel’s response to its security challenge, there is no solely military answer. A diplomatic component will need to be introduced into the equation, including a credible Israeli plan for bringing about a viable Palestinian state.
NEW YORK – The history of Israel has often been a history of conflict. A partial list includes the 1948 Arab-Israeli War that followed Israel’s birth; the Israeli-British-French attempt in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal and topple Egypt’s Arab nationalist leader; the 1967 Six-Day War; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. There are also the two Palestinian intifadas and numerous smaller conflicts.
To this list must now be added Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel. Thousands of short-range rockets were launched from Hamas-controlled Gaza against towns and cities in western Israel. Hundreds if not thousands of Hamas fighters crossed into Israel by breaking through defensive barriers, flying over them, or sailing around them.
The human toll of these attacks is enormous and growing. More than 900 Israelis have lost their lives. Several thousand have been injured. Some two hundred Israelis attending a concert were killed in cold blood. Nearly the same number have been abducted. It was terror – the intentional harming of innocents by a non-state actor – on a large scale.
It was also a colossal Israeli intelligence failure. The most likely explanation for Israel’s being caught unprepared is less a lack of warning than a lack of attention. As was the case in 1973, complacency and an under-estimation of the adversary can be dangerous.
It was a defensive failure as well. Deterrence broke down. Expensive physical barriers were overrun. Israeli military readiness and troop levels were woefully inadequate, possibly because attention had shifted to protecting settlers in the occupied West Bank. There will surely be official inquiries and independent investigations.
Why Hamas attacked remains a subject of debate. The most likely explanation is that Hamas wanted to demonstrate that it alone – not the Palestinian Authority that rules the West Bank and not Arab governments – is able and willing to protect and promote Palestinian interests.
The timing of the assault is another matter. It is possible that the date was chosen to coincide with the last successful surprise attack against Israel, carried out by Egypt and Syria 50 years ago almost to the day. But the planning and training for the attack took place over months, which suggests a strategic purpose not tied to a specific event. The timing may have been motivated by a desire to disrupt the growing momentum in negotiations to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, an outcome strongly opposed by Iran, the principal backer of Hamas. Hamas may also have sought to take advantage of Israeli political divisions. Or all of the above.
The Hamas attackers took hostages back to Gaza for two reasons: to limit Israel’s freedom of action lest those individuals be placed at even greater risk, and to exchange them for Hamas operatives held in Israeli jails.
Israel now faces an acute dilemma. It wants to deal a decisive blow to Hamas, both to weaken the organization militarily and to discourage future attacks and Iranian support for them. And it wants to accomplish this without bringing Hezbollah, which has some 150,000 rockets in Lebanon that could reach much of Israel, directly into the conflict. It also does not want the war to expand to the West Bank. Restoring meaningful deterrence without widening the war will be difficult.
There is the additional consideration that Israel’s military options are limited. The hostages are one reason. In addition, occupying – or, more precisely, re-occupying – Gaza would be a nightmare. There are few, if any, military undertakings more difficult than urban warfare, and Gaza is one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world. Many Israeli soldiers would lose their lives or be captured in such an operation.
Massive attacks from the air, designed to avoid the need for a ground invasion, would inevitably kill or injure a significant number of innocent inhabitants of Gaza, thereby decreasing international sympathy and support for Israel. Efforts to shut off Gaza’s supplies of food, water, fuel, and electricity also would be counterproductive. Regional and international pressure for a cease-fire would surely mount.
There is also the question of the operation’s strategic objective. Hamas cannot be eliminated, because it represents an ideology as much as an organization. Efforts to destroy it risk building support for it. What comes to mind is the famous question posed by then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who wondered whether US drone strikes on suspected terrorists, which at times killed innocents, were effective. His question – “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?” – remains worth asking.
All of which is to say that while there must be a military component to Israel’s response to its security challenge, including reconstituting Israel’s ability to defend itself from attacks and targeted strikes on terrorists in Gaza, there is no solely military answer. A diplomatic element will need to be introduced into the equation, including a credible Israeli plan for bringing about a viable Palestinian state.
There is an American saying that you cannot beat something with nothing. Rewarding those Palestinians willing to reject violence and reach an accommodation with Israel is still the best way to marginalize Hamas.
PRINCETON – Hamas’s brazen and vicious attacks within Israel have rightly drawn condemnation from around the world. If this is a war, as both sides agree it is, then Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians counts as a major war crime.
But the brutality demonstrated by Hamas did not emerge in a vacuum. The lesson of what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza is that violence breeds more violence.
The last real chance of avoiding the tragic conflict being waged between Israel and Hamas was destroyed by a single killing: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The assassin was not a Palestinian militant, but an Israeli extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords, by which Rabin sought a “land for peace” deal that was anathema to Israeli radicals, for whom Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land is non-negotiable.
Rabin’s assassination occurred at the end of a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 Israelis, hopeful of an end to hostilities between Israel and Palestinians. At the time, that hope seemed realistic.
The great beneficiaries of the assassination were Israeli nationalists, above all Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party. Netanyahu had rejected the Oslo Accords, because they required Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967. In a protest against the Accords, and against Rabin, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession, complete with a coffin and hangman’s noose.
In the years after Rabin’s murder, and particularly following the failure to reach a settlement at Camp David in 2000, right-wing extremists gained power in Israel, and the prospect of achieving a viable Palestinian state in the occupied territories all but disappeared. At the same time, the failure of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah movement to deliver Palestinian statehood strengthened the Islamist Hamas, which, along with other Palestinian militant organizations, bases its legitimacy on killing Israelis (as well as accused collaborators with Israel).
With Hamas extending its influence (and exporting its violence) from Gaza, which it has controlled since 2007, to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority is nominally in charge, a growing number of Israelis supported the repressive measures Netanyahu promised. And with the hapless PA unable to halt relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the cycle of extremism and violence continued.
Netanyahu now leads the most fanatically nationalist government in Israel’s history, a government that includes Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose responsibilities include administration of a large part of the occupied West Bank. Smotrich has repeatedly incited violence against Palestinians.
In February, after a Palestinian shot dead two Israeli settlers, hundreds of Israelis rampaged through Huwara, a nearby Palestinian village, in scenes reminiscent of Cossack pogroms against Jewish settlements in Russia more than a century earlier. The Israelis set fire to Huwara, leaving one villager dead and others injured. And, like the Russian police when a pogrom was underway, Israeli forces in the area did not intervene to protect the residents or arrest the perpetrators.
None of this excuses the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists who killed more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them defenseless civilians, including women and children. Horrific videos show Hamas gunmen shooting, in cold blood, young people at a music festival. As a proportion of the population, this attack killed ten times as many people as al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
When Hamas attacks Israeli civilians, it knows that this will lead to Israeli counterattacks in Gaza that are bound to kill and injure many civilians. Hamas locates its military sites in residential areas, hoping that this tactic will restrain Israeli attacks, or at least lessen international support for Israel.
Hamas reportedly holds roughly 150 hostages, and has said that it will kill one every time Israel bombs a Gazan home without warning. Hamas leaders surely remember that in 2011, Netanyahu, as prime minister, was willing to free over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Against that background, they may believe that Israel will not be prepared to sacrifice the lives of the hostages in order to achieve its military objectives.
If that is what the leaders of Hamas believe, they may find that they have made a mistake. Whether Israel can eliminate Hamas as a military force remains to be seen, but it is clear that in the battle to achieve that objective, Israel will have to be prepared to lose many lives, probably of both soldiers and hostages.
How far Israel will go with its declared intention to deny electricity, fuel, food, and water to the two million citizens of Gaza, many of them children, is hard to know. What is certain is that Hamas’s brutal crimes do not entitle Israel to starve children.
In the eyes of many outside observers, the cause of Palestinian autonomy and statehood has long held the moral high ground. Now that cause has been stained by the gruesome murders and abductions – many of them captured on video – carried out in its name. Paradoxically, if Palestinians are ever to regain the moral high ground, they must hope for the destruction of Hamas. As long as Hamas can claim to represent them, the evil it has perpetrated will taint their cause.