Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR.<\/p>\n
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On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters broke through the fence which locks Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip. In doing so they revealed Israel to be a paper tiger. This supposed regional superpower, so skilled at containing and killing dispossessed Palestinian civilians, was unable to stop its enemies from attacking military bases and killing and abducting soldiers.<\/p>\n
If Hamas had ended the operation there, they would have won an undoubted political as well as military victory. No doubt Israel would have responded with force, as disproportionately as it always does, but it would have been somewhat restrained by its western allies and sponsors. The Israeli peace camp (such as it is) might even have been revived. Even now we see Israeli fury directed at Netanyahu\u2019s government that focused on guarding illegal settlers in the West Bank rather than the Gaza border fence. Just by breaking through the fence, Hamas changed the regional equation, showing that normalization between Israel and Arab dictators wouldn\u2019t bring Israel security, that only a settlement with the Palestinians would do that.<\/p>\n
But Hamas did more than break through the fence and strike military targets. It killed hundreds of civilians, including children and the elderly. A group of elderly people waiting at a bus stop was gunned down. Children were tied to their parents and set on fire. Whole families were murdered.<\/p>\n
Hamas perpetrated an appalling and enormous war crime.<\/p>\n
This was immoral, illegal, and stupid. First, it pushed the already hyper-violent Israeli society into a blind rage for revenge. That may have been part of the calculation \u2014 to provoke a response so massive that it would upend the power structures in the region, in the hope that the new structure would turn out to be better for Palestinians. This is the kind of gamble that only a blind-faith pyromaniac could make.<\/p>\n
Maybe the orders were, go in and cause as much damage and pain as you possibly can. Maybe they expected they would have only a few minutes to spend killing before the IDF killed them. In fact, incredibly, they had 48 hours. I have no idea how this happened. If Israel were an Arab dictatorship, I\u2019d say it was because key officers had been bribed or threatened to look the other way. But Israel is not an Arab dictatorship. No doubt in the years to come, books will be written to attempt to explain.<\/p>\n
In the end, Hamas achieved what has been called \u201ccatastrophic success.\u201d It probably hoped to grab a few dozen hostages with which to bargain for Palestinian prisoners (or hostages) held in Israeli prisons. But by taking so many hostages, and by killing so many civilians, it decreased the hostages\u2019 value. Sections of the Israeli establishment seem to have already sacrificed the hostages. Their priority is to destroy the Palestinians, not negotiate.<\/p>\n
What Hamas fighters did was behave like savages. In so doing they gave Israelis and Westerners the perfect reflection of an image that already existed in their minds: the Muslim barbarian, the savage other, the irrational absolute enemy against whom all measures are justified. Because Hamas calls itself an \u201cIslamic Resistance Movement,\u201d the stain spreads to cover Muslims everywhere. (It\u2019s worth repeating that Islamic rules of warfare very specifically forbid the harming of non-combatants.)<\/p>\n
When I called relatives and friends living in Arab countries, I realized that the story they were hearing from Arab media was very different to the story here in the West. There the focus was on Hamas\u2019s assault on the military; here it was on Hamas\u2019s terrorism against women and children. From the very start, the narratives spun in east and west were irreconcilable.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t help that Joe Biden said he\u2019d personally seen and confirmed evidence of beheaded babies, and then a few hours later that the White House retracted his claim. It didn\u2019t help that unverified claims of rape were spread far and wide. Some or all of these atrocities may actually have happened, but a lack of concern for accuracy on all sides has made it difficult to convince anybody of anything they don\u2019t already believe.<\/p>\n
Personally, I don\u2019t see any moral difference between shooting a baby in the head, or beheading a baby, or incinerating a baby with a bomb (and Israel has killed far more Palestinian children in the last few days than the total number of Israelis killed on Oct. 7). What the image of the baby-beheading rapist does, however, is to provide a justification for further genocidal violence.<\/p>\n
Hamas\u2019s attacks against civilians cannot be justified, but they can and must be contextualized. Israel and the West choose to believe that Hamas started the war on Oct. 7. They tell us that when Hamas kills civilians it does so simply because it\u2019s evil, and that when Israel kills civilians in greater numbers, and besieges and occupies them, it also does so simply because Hamas is evil.<\/p>\n
Most of the young men who committed atrocities in southern Israel were children when in 2008\/9, 2012 and 2014, Israel committed atrocities against civilians in Gaza. It\u2019s really no surprise that men who grew up seeing babies dismembered by Israeli bombs fail to distinguish between Israeli soldiers and civilians. And this conflict goes back much further than Hamas taking control in Gaza and Israel\u2019s siege of the Strip. It goes back at least to 1948, when Palestinians were driven off 78% of their land and into refugee camps. (In 1967, the remaining 22% was occupied by Israel). Two thirds of people in Gaza descend from refugees driven from their farms and villages in what\u2019s now southern Israel. It\u2019s really no surprise when the people in refugee camps don\u2019t accept the \u201cright to security\u201d of those living on their grandparents\u2019 stolen land. This requires a solution.<\/p>\n
For at least a decade and a half, Israel and the world\u2019s powers have believed the status quo was sustainable. The status quo involves the steady settlement and theft of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, the endless siege of Gaza, the constant murder of civilians in all these areas, and a regime of apartheid. This is the context, and it is not in the least sustainable.<\/p>\n
When in 2018 Palestinians organized their Great March of Return<\/a>, and unarmed men and women moved toward the fence between Gaza and Israel, Israel shot hundreds dead. When Palestinians and their supporters promote boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel \u2014 a non-violent means of protest \u2014 they are smeared as anti-semites. None of this excuses terrorism against civilians, but it makes it unsurprising.<\/p>\n In much of the west, liberal universal values immediately vanished on Oct. 7, showing very clearly the racism that lies below.<\/p>\n Even as top Israeli officials declared their focus in Gaza would be on \u201cdamage, not accuracy<\/a>,\u201d even as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as \u201chuman animals<\/a>\u201d; even as they handed out more weapons to settlers on the West Bank, the US, the UK, Canada, France, and Germany stated and reiterated that Israel \u2014 an occupying and apartheid state<\/a> committing crimes against humanity \u2014 had an absolute right to \u201cdefend itself.\u201d Not only did Britain\u2019s extreme right government throw international law out of the window, but the opposition Labour Party did too. Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, and David Lammy stated that Israel \u201chad the right\u201d to cut off water and electricity to civilians in Gaza.<\/p>\n For those who remember Labour propagandizing for the Assad\/Russian\/Iranian genocide of Syrians, this level of racism is no surprise. Unfortunately, many British Muslims are discovering it only now.<\/p>\n In France and Germany, there have been efforts to criminalize expressions of support for Palestinian rights. Germany is a particularly bad case. Anti-genocide demonstrations have been violently suppressed, awards ceremonies for prize-winning Palestinian writers have been withdrawn<\/a>, candles lit to remember the dead have been stamped on, intimidatory crowds of police have been deployed in areas with Arab populations, Chancellor Scholz has spoken of the need to deport refugees, and a woman was arrested for holding a sign which read, \u201cAs a Jew and an Israeli, I oppose genocide in Gaza.\u201d Most German political parties and media as well as most of society appear to be affected by this hysteria. The most repulsive aspect is its presentation as anti-anti-semitism<\/em> (my emphasis) \u2014 as if Germany could wipe away its guilt for the Holocaust by supporting the slaughter of Palestinians. Of course, the opposite is true. Germany\u2019s Holocaust made the destruction of Palestine inevitable. Therefore, Germany owes enormous reparations to the Palestinian people.<\/p>\n In the US and the UK, sections of the media cast Palestinians as Nazis. This is another appalling decontextualization \u2014 the Jews of Europe didn\u2019t keep the Germans in refugee camps for 75 years before the Holocaust. The Nazis were not dispossessed and oppressed by a \u201cJewish state.\u201d The Nazis were not the powerless lashing out, they were the supremely powerful calmly and carefully channeling the powerless into death camps.<\/p>\n Next, these western states called to intensify sanctions on Iran for its indirect link to Hamas. In the current war, the US and the UK sent warships to the Mediterranean to deter Iran and its militias from escalation against Israel. As Iran and its militias poured into Syria after 2012 to save Assad from a popular revolution, and then destroyed Syrian cities, murdered tens of thousands of Syrians, and expelled millions more, the Obama administration negotiated a nuclear and sanctions relief deal with Iran. The EU, meanwhile, continued to lobby for better relations with Iran through the Trump years. We must presume that the discrepancy in responses to Iran is because Western leaders consider Israelis to be real actual people, while Syrians, like Palestinians, are not.<\/p>\n To say the west has double standards is to put it far too mildly. The west is so racist that it is unaware of it, and therefore it is unaware of how blatantly obvious its racism is to people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and further afield. Westerners were surprised that half of the world didn\u2019t join in the condemnation of Russia\u2019s illegal invasion of Ukraine. They shouldn\u2019t be. The world can see that the West appeased Russia while it was killing Syrians, then suddenly became concerned when Europeans became the target. And that the West is enraged when Israeli civilians are killed, but sends weapons and money to facilitate the slaughter of Palestinian civilians.<\/p>\n Russia and China \u2014 genocidal states both \u2014 are winning huge propaganda victories simply by not supporting genocide in Palestine.<\/p>\n One of many reasons why the Arabs become more riled over this issue than others is the strange chronological duality of the slaughter. On the one hand, Palestinians have been oppressed and murdered continuously over 75 years. On the other hand, when a massacre is underway, huge numbers are killed in very short spaces of time. Well over 4,000 Palestinians have been murdered in the last two weeks<\/a>. The intensity of the killing matches even Assad\u2019s modus operandi.<\/p>\n The only realistic Israeli war aim seems to be to annihilate thousands of Palestinians, and to drive hundreds of thousands into Egypt. There may also be an attempt to drive Palestinians from the West Bank into Jordan. Certainly dozens of Palestinians are currently being murdered in the West Bank, where Hamas has no military power. But a new mass expulsion of Palestinians will further undermine Israel\u2019s security, and may also undermine Arab states which currently have peace deals with Israel. Israel can destroy and kill, but it can\u2019t ultimately win \u2014 not this way.<\/p>\n Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a death spiral, unable to break out of it. In one important sense this isn\u2019t their fault \u2014 both are victims of history stuck in this loop. This is why we need calm, grown-up leadership from the rest of the world to help sort it out. But there are no grown-ups. Those at a distance at no great risk of dying \u2014 the Americans, Germans and Iranians, for instance \u2014 are fanning the flames for their own cultural and political reasons. And so it spirals.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe the Iranian regime wants to fight this war. Its priority is its own survival. I don\u2019t believe Israel wants to fight a war on more than one front. And I don\u2019t believe the US wants to escalate against Iran. Nevertheless, a new Nakba, or the complete destruction of Hamas, could be a red line for Iran\u2019s militia system in the Arab world, which stretches from Lebanon to Yemen via Syria and Iraq. Standing by while thousands of Palestinians are killed will reveal the emptiness of Iran\u2019s warlike propaganda. Stepping in, on the other hand, could improve Iran\u2019s standing among Arabs deeply suspicious of its regional reach, not least for its role in the expulsion of millions of Sunni Arabs from Syria. So this could escalate much further at any moment, and with global ramifications. The US is already taking ammunition designated for those resisting occupation in Ukraine and giving it to those enforcing occupation in Palestine. If Iran becomes involved, Russia and China will use the opportunity.<\/p>\n The war is also escalating in communities globally. Instances of antisemitism and Islamophobia are spiking. A Palestinian child has been murdered in Chicago. Jewish schoolchildren have been spat on and insulted. And we\u2019re just at the start of it. As the war develops, we are all responsible for ensuring that innocent Jews and Muslims in our communities are protected and respected. And we are all responsible for doing what we can to oppose and stop the killing.<\/p>\nThe Western Response<\/h4>\n
Escalation<\/h4>\n