Friday, October 13, 2023
From Ian:
How Hamas Fooled the Experts
How Hamas Fooled the Experts
For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.Melanie Phillips: The west's moral confusion
This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.
The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.
But that was hardly the whole story, I thought. After all, my hotel offered a comfortable room with stunning views of the Mediterranean. Hamas was eerily invisible in the Strip once you were past their checkpoint on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing, whose Israeli half is an absurdist labyrinth of concrete corridors, sinister loudspeakers, and remote-operated doors. Most Gazans I met had no particular love for the group and just wanted to be left alone. Gaza was hard to beat for sheer surrealism, what with the war damage and the excellent fish restaurants. I experienced the Hamas-era Strip as a weird and tragic expression of a bleak roster of immovable realities.
I now know I suffered from a failure of imagination, both moral and practical. Under Hamas, Gaza wasn’t a place where extremists had resigned themselves to their own strange version of normality. Rather, it was an active launching pad for an insane utopia, for the vision of a purified world the group’s fighters carried out during their atrocious rampage this past weekend.
The expert class labored under similar delusions. “It wasn’t so much a misreading of what was in [Hamas’] hearts as it was the sense that they had accommodated to reality,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, including the period when Hamas won the only Palestinian parliamentary elections in history and took over the Gaza Strip. “They understood they couldn’t destroy Israel, and that their real goal in these 15 years was to take over the West Bank as they had taken over Gaza—to create the maximum amount of violence and terror in the West Bank, and to protect their rule in Gaza. You have to look fairly widely to find someone who didn’t basically accept that view.” Abrams did not exempt himself from this group.
As was all too predictable, the war in Gaza is producing moral confusion in the west as people struggle to reconcile the evidence of unambiguous evil directed at the Jews with the innate liberal resistance to doing what is needed to defeat it.Melanie Phillips: Civilisation’s fifth columnists
People are nodding along sagely to the warnings that Israel must exercise “restraint”. In Monday’s Times of London (£), the former Conservative party leader William Hague argued that Israel must avoid the trap that had been set for it. The Hamas strategy, wrote Hague, was to provoke Israel into such uncontrollable rage at last Saturday’s atrocities that it would start a war so intense it would spread to other fronts and “bring down the ceiling on the whole region”.
As Israel now prepares to direct its bombers against Gaza City, it has warned the city’s 1.1 million residents to evacuate to the south. The UN has called for this order to be rescinded because of the risk of “devastating humanitarian consequences,” transforming “what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation”.
To all of which a few things need to be said.
We don’t need anyone to tell us of the dangers of this war spreading. We don’t need anyone to tell us of the likely hostile reaction from the world if Israel pulverises Gaza. But what exactly would Hague suggest Israel should do? What does he think “restraint” should look like given what Israel is up against? He doesn’t say because, as Gerard Baker asks in today’s Times, what exactly is “restraint” in the face of genocide?
As Baker notes, Israel has learnt bitter lessons in the past from exercising restraint in response to international demands. In all its wars, it has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid taking civilian casualties. It has previously achieved a ratio of combatants to civilians killed lower than any other nation on earth. It got no credit whatever for this from the west. Instead it was defamed, demonised and hounded for “war crimes”. And the result of this past “restraint” was the 1300 (and counting) slaughtered in the Hamas pogrom.
If there was a way to defeat Hamas without a war in which many civilians will unfortunately die, Israel would take it. There isn’t one. Those calling for “restraint” therefore mean Israel must not defeat Hamas, which would sentence yet more Israeli civilians to be murdered.
Yes, the prospects for Gaza’s civilians are frightful. And the death of civilians is always to be regretted. But this is war. In war there are civilian casualties. And what other army warns its enemy civilians, as Israel has done consistently during this (and every) war, to get out of harm’s way before it strikes?
At a synagogue vigil in London on Monday evening for the victims of the Hamas pogrom, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he stood in solidarity with Israel.The Nihilism of Antisemitism
Hamas, he said, “are not militants. They are not freedom fighters. They are terrorists. There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. I stand with Israel”.
At virtually the same time he was making his morally uncompromising statement, a mob of around 1,000 people demonstrated outside Israel’s embassy in London chanting the war cry for the annihilation of Israel: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They were waving Palestinian flags, setting off fireworks and banging drums.
Similar demonstrations were held elsewhere. In Newcastle, a demonstrator called Ahmed held aloft a green flare and declared: “Let there be bloodshed for now. Hamas is a freedom movement. … Israel is an apartheid state”. Dana Abuqamar, president of Manchester Friends of Palestine, said she was “full of pride and joy” at the butchery.
This chilling glorification of the Hamas attack was repeated in demonstrations in America and Australia. Placards waved in New York City’s Times Square justified the rape and murder of women and the beheading of children as “resistance by any means necessary”.
In Australia, a mostly Muslim mob chanted “Gas the Jew,” “f*** the Jews” and “f*** Israel” on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.
In Britain, America and Australia, people who were still trying to digest the appalling barbarism of the Hamas pogrom were horrified by this eruption of support within their midst for savages who had burned people alive, raped women and murdered children in front of their parents.
It’s necessary to understand just what was happening at these demonstrations. They weren’t just protests against Israel or supporting the Palestinians. They were frenzies of bloodlust.
The scale and barbarism of the slaughter in southern Israel produced in these demonstrators a jubilant excitement that more Jews would now be killed and Israel would be exterminated.
These shocking scenes, and the horrified and uncomprehending reaction they provoked, illustrated what so many westerners have always failed to grasp about Islamic suicide bombings: that they are inspired not by despair but by exultation.
When Israel is attacked, you often hear people say of “the crisis in the Middle East” that it has been going on for decades. But Jews know better than that. It’s been going on for thousands of years.
What is happening in Israel today is not about “settlements” or “disputed territories.” It is not about “occupation.” There are no Israeli settlements in Gaza, and Israel long ago ceded that land to the Palestinian Authority. Nor is it about the blockades or Israeli control over Gaza’s borders. Gaza also has a border with Egypt, which the Egyptians have kept sealed since 2006. But you never hear of Hamas terrorists targeting Egypt.
What happened last week, when terrorists blazed into Israel, deliberately murdering hundreds of citizens, including women, children, and the aged, kidnapping scores of people, raping, torturing, and tormenting Jews, is not about geopolitics. It’s about hatred toward the Jews and what Judaism represents: the rock-solid moral foundation of Western culture.
Every year on Passover, we Jews read a passage from our festival prayer book, the Haggadah: “In every generation, they rise against us to annihilate us. The Holy One, blessed be He, however, saves us from their hand.”
Indeed, the earliest archaeological evidence of Israel’s existence (other than the Bible) is the Merneptah Stele, which includes the line: “Israel is laid waste—its seed is no more.”
Whether it’s the Holocaust, the Russian pogroms that preceded that event, the forced exiles, the Inquisition, the Egyptian enslavement, or the attacks of Amalek on helpless Jews in the desert, the children of Abraham have been the targets of hate and violence since the beginning of recorded history.
How can it be that God’s chosen people, “a light onto the nations,” are so reviled and attacked? It’s not in spite of, but because the Jews are a light onto the nations.
It is precisely because the Jews advanced a moral system that doesn’t tolerate murder, theft, rape, or mistreatment of the weak, and demands we care for other human beings, that other peoples have tried to wipe them out. The spree of killing and rape committed by Hamas is, among other things, a cry for freedom from a Jewish moral system that forbids such things.
Hitler himself was reported to have said (the authenticity of the quote has been questioned, but it aptly captures what’s behind antisemitism): “Conscience is a Jewish invention; it is a blemish like circumcision.” He added that he was “freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality …”
The Hamas terrorists may claim that they are committing murder in the name of God, but, in fact, they do so because, like the Fuehrer, they hate the limits He has placed on human beings through the Torah, through the example of the Jewish people. In so doing, they follow in the path of Pharaoh, Amalek, the Romans, the Nazis—all people who sought Jewish destruction but are now themselves remnants of history.
