Connecting the Dots: Hamas, Israel and Genocide — There are No Good Guys
I’m only writing this out because I have not seen it anywhere else. This is how tragedies happen. This one I lay at Netanyahu’s feet.
Netanyahu knew something was coming from Gaza. Egyptian intelligence had been warning their counterparts in Israel for six months or more. The Egyptian Defense Minister even tried to gain an audience with Netanyahu but was rebuffed. Perhaps Netanyahu and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) thought they had Gaza so locked down, monitoring cell phones and internet traffic that they thought nothing was happening. Hamas was using radio, which Israel had abandoned monitoring, and couriers for communications.
My theory is that Netanyahu knew something was coming and was going to use it to his advantage. Netanyahu’s right wing supporters are the Zionist “settlers” on the West Bank, without whose support, he is facing prison for corruption. The Zionist vision of Eretz Israel, a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, requires the ejection and dispossession of all remaining Palestinians still living on the West Bank. Under Netanyahu’s regime, this dispossession and ejection, this ethnic cleansing, has been proceeding apace. Open hostilities with Gaza would give cover to escalate the dispossessions.
Netanyahu had moved seasoned IDF troops to the West Bank to protect the “setters” as they burned ancient olive groves and expropriated Palestinians’ homes, leaving a scattering of green, unseasoned troops to guard the Gaza border.
Additionally, the kibbutzim living in close proximity to that part of the Gaza border were liberals, young idealists whose interests leaned toward psychedelic ecstasy, not violent religious fervor, and they were certainly not Netanyahu voters. Minor losses to those Israelis would be an acceptable cost to Netanyahu if it united Israel behind him. The world has seen many other instances of creating provocation for justifiable response.
My read is that Netanyahu thought he could use a Hamas incursion to unify Israel behind his leadership, justify more ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and another episode of “mowing the lawn” as the IDF euphemizes the periodic bombings of Palestinians in Gaza. I think Netanyahu radically underestimated the strength and savagery of Hamas’ fighters’ incursion when it happened.
For Hamas’ part, the argument over whether Hamas represents Gaza is moot at this point. Gaza has been an open-air concentration camp for 20 years, with Israel controlling everything including electricity and water. A whole generation of Gazans have grown up in multigenerational trauma, with the story of the Naqba, the Palestinian trail of tears as 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed of their homes at gunpoint in 1948 given as the reason for their imprisonment. Fertile ground for budding jihadis with nothing to lose.
Hamas has always been committed to the elimination of Israel. The reproachments between Israel and Arab states, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, among others, represented an existential threat to Hamas’ antisemitic goal. Disastrous defeat in the 1967 War demonstrated that a frontal military campaign would not budge Israel. Hamas’ only recourse was to draw Israel into such an indefensible position that Israel would become a pariah nation on the world stage.
The weakness Hamas saw was Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine of disproportionate force and casualties. Previous hostilities between Gaza and Israel had taken on an almost ten-to-one casualty ratio, where Israel’s “lawn mowing” wouldn’t end until the IDF had inflicted ten Palestinian casualties for every Israeli casualty. If Hamas could inflict massive casualties on Israel, in the most evil and heinous fashion, perhaps it could provoke Israel in retaliation to engage in such genocide that the world would be unable to turn away.
Tragically, Hamas’ strategy worked. The October 6 Hamas incursion, fueled according to the IDF at least in part by Captagon, a combination of theophylline and amphetamine, was nothing less than a 21st Century pogrom, an indiscriminate and savage slaughter of innocents. The under trained and unprepared IDF units collapsed in the initial attack, and it took the IDF over a day to send in reinforcements, routing the invaders. The IDF reported that captured Hamas fighters admitted that, contrary to the doctrines of Islam, their orders included the targeting and killing of children including infants.
Predictably, Netanyahu and the IDF have done their part in return, killing over 8,000 Gazans, over 3,000 of them children, and leveling whole communities to rubble in one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Since October 6, Israeli “settlers” have killed over 200 hundred Palestinians on the West Bank and dispossessed and evicted untold numbers more, with impunity backed by the IDF.
Major demonstrations around the world demand a cease fire, including several hundred American Jews occupying the Capital Rotunda in Washington DC in t-shirts saying, “Not in my name”. Netanyahu and the IDF are intransigent. They seem to think they can eradicate Hamas. At least that is their operative justification for inflicting massive Palestinian civilian casualties.
At this point, there is no endgame foreseen. Egypt is concerned that Israel will simply cleanse Gaza of human life, driving the survivors into the Sinai desert. President Biden is hemorrhaging support from the left as he refuses to call for a ceasefire while American made ordinance rains down on Gazan civilians.
I have no answers, but I think it is imperative that people step out of the thrall of taking sides, take a break from the horrors splayed across social media, and recognize this as the latest episode in a 3,000 year old heritage of tragedy, fueled by entitlement and dispossession, trauma and rage. Both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to secure homes and homelands, and the right to live in peace. How that comes about depends on the rest of the world stepping beyond “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc.” Revenge and retribution have never led to peace.
