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Is Israel Blaming All Palestinians for Hamas’s Terrorism?

The brutality of war in the tribal Middle East

Photo by Palestinian photographer, on Wikipedia

Is Israel collectively punishing all Palestinians for Hamas’s terrorism?

We could be forgiven for thinking so, based on Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct 7 pogrom in which Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis and took over 200 Israelis captive.

Israel responded by laying siege to Gaza, preventing the flow of essential goods into the area, such as food, water, and fuel, and endangering Gazan hospitals. Meanwhile, Israel levelled much of Gaza with bombs, likely killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

Israel says the blockade and the bombing are part of its plan to invade Gaza and to destroy Hamas. Presumably, then, the idea is to weaken Hamas in a regrettably ham-fisted way, by weakening all the Gaza Strip. Starved of resources, including the fuel to power the generators in their underground tunnel system, Hamas fighters won’t pose as great a threat when they emerge to meet Israel’s ground invasion. Moreover, the bombing might be designed to collapse parts of that tunnel network, again making the invasion easier for Israel.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett tweeted in Hebrew that the siege plan is meant to hold all of Gaza hostage in retaliation for Hamas’s hostage-taking, so that Gazans won’t be freed until the Israeli captives are freed and Hamas is defeated. As translated poorly by Google, Bennett said, in part,

A sustainable political line of defense: until the Israelis do not return home, the Gazans do not return home either. Everyone is going home together: Israeli hostages are returning home to Israel, families from Gaza will return only when Hamas disappears, and the residents of Gaza will also be able to return because the war is over and the danger to their lives has passed.

We’d like to think there’s some such military logic to Israel’s response, even as pundits talk about Israel’s natural right to seek sheer vengeance for the pogrom, comparing the pogrom to the 9/11 terrorist attacks which sent the US on a quixotic crusade against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet even if Israel’s military, the IDF, has a sound strategy that includes the blockade and the bombing as necessary steps to eliminate Hamas, that strategy could be a rationalization for a less conscious motive.

Photo by Al Jazeera English, on Flickr

Israel’s apparent collective punishment of Gaza

This is especially likely since the goal of ending Hamas is indeed quixotic. Even if Israel manages to kill all the Hamas soldiers and to destroy all their weapons in Gaza, Hamas could eventually be reconstituted there, assuming another generation of aggrieved Palestinians will be willing to fight Israel because of Israel’s brutal treatment of them and can call for Iranian arms and training.

One likely unstated Israeli motive, then, is to punish all Gazans for the actions of Hamas, on the assumption that the Palestinians there are at least complicit with that terrorist organization, for having either voted for them in 2006 or for not opposing or removing them anytime afterwards despite Hamas’s explicit goal of violently ending Israel as a Jewish state.

Indeed, according to recent Washington Institute polls, in Gaza “there is widespread popular appeal for competing armed Palestinian factions, including those involved in the attack. Overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas — along with similar percentages of Palestinians in the West Bank (52%) and East Jerusalem (64%).”

Polls like those aren’t so reliable in police states, though, since the people could reasonably fear reprisal from their illiberal government, and the population will have been subject to brainwashing by the state’s monopoly on news sources. Still, Israel might resent that very fear and that twisted view of history since indirectly those weaknesses have supported Hamas and thus threatened Israeli.

Then again, a writer at NY Magazine argues that

Overthrowing a government, even in a pseudo-state like Gaza, is much easier said than done. This is doubly true when the government is a violent organization of religious fanatics. Many Gazans would prefer not to be governed by Hamas militants, but they can’t simply start up a campaign to get rid of them — not without grave risks to their lives, livelihoods, and families. For one thing, they are too busy struggling to survive from day to day. For another, Hamas cements its hold on power through an outsize role in the Gazan economy: It is the only organization that can reliably pay salaries, it maintains a stranglehold on inflows of foreign aid, and it keeps Gaza dependent on Israel for water and electricity by refusing to build infrastructure instead of rockets. If your ability to feed your family depends on Hamas patronage, even if you’d like to stand up to them, why risk it?

All of which may be true as a practical matter. But emotionally, that fear and self-interest still indirectly associate all Gazans with Hamas.

Jocko Willink, the former Navy SEAL team commander points out in his podcast that Israel is losing the propaganda war with Hamas. Israel could have helped evacuate the Gazans to show that it distinguishes between them and the terrorist organization. True, the IDF dropped leaflets to warn that the one million northern Gazans should evacuate the area, but gave them little notice, bombed some border crossings, and some Gazans inevitably couldn’t leave even if they wanted to.

Thus, regardless of what Israeli officials say, it looks like Israel doesn’t distinguish between ordinary Gazans and Hamas.

Photo by Wafa (Q2915969), on Wikipedia

The brutality of war

Are all Gazans to blame for Hamas? Surely not in a legal sense, but legal technicalities have little to do with the brutality of war. Only a mass trance prevents us from chuckling at the talk of “laws of war.” Nothing could be more lawless than the open, organized killing of hundreds or thousands of people. Every single lethal military operation that’s ever been undertaken has been an abomination and a tragedy, and to retain our sanity despite the frequent outbreaks of war in history, we pretend that war is a civilized endeavour since it’s “regulated by laws.”

In the ancient world genocide (massacres), gendercide, or the enslavement of survivors were the norms in war because of the realization that even if some foreign civilians technically weren’t taking up arms as soldiers, they could be expected to seek revenge once their army had been wiped out and they’d been left defenseless. Conflicts were tribal since most folks couldn’t afford to be kings of private castles. There weren’t the resources to support the financial independence of a middle class, so you depended on the collective for your survival. Consequently, you’d think not in terms of “individuals” but of tribes or races.

You see this, for instance, in the biblical fantasies of Jewish slaughters that were supposed to have cleared a path to a Jewish homeland. In 1 Sam. 15:2–3 ‘the Lord Almighty says: “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”’

The Lord then regrets having made Saul king because Saul doesn’t obey that commandment for total destruction to the letter, but spares the king “and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs — everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely” (15:9).

Whether any of this is historical is doubtful, but the point is that ancient tribes likely had to think in such absolute terms if they came into conflict.

Could modern Israel be reverting to that ancient mindset by implicitly equating all Palestinians with Hamas? Is the IDF dealing harshly with the entire Gaza Strip because Israelis resent Palestinians’ associations with that terrorist organization?

Certainly, Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks in biblical terms to justify Israel’s war with Hamas:

Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas. I tell them [world leaders] that our war against Hamas is also their war. Our war against Hamas is a test for all of humanity. It is a fight between the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas axis of evil and the forces of freedom and progress.

Light will defeat darkness…

With shared forces, with deep faith in the justice of our cause and in the eternity of Israel, we will realize the prophecy of Isaiah 60:18: “Violence shall no more be heard in your land, desolation nor destruction within your borders; but you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.”

In other speeches, Netanyahu even cites the Amalekites passage to justify Israel’s war with Hamas, leaving the impression of absolutist, racist, and even genocidal thinking: “If they could, they would murder all of us. Then the intentions and the enemy were the same. But today, against the enemy, with the ancient command ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’ ringing in our ears, today we are uniting forces in order to ensure the eternity of Israel.”

And again, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. 1 Samuel 15:3 ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’…There are moments in which a nation faces two possibilities: to do or die. We now face that test and I have no doubt how it will end: We will be the victors. We will do and we will be the victors.”

Now, many Arabs are just as prone to demonizing Israeli Jews, and to casting their hatred in Islamic terms. Anti-Judaism has been rampant in most of the Middle East since WWII, due largely to Nazi propaganda and to resentment of the Western creation of that foreign superpower in the middle of the Arab world, a state that most Muslim countries still don’t recognize.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said at the UN that Hamas is only a “Palestinian liberation movement,” not a terrorist organization, and is justly resisting the war crimes of Israeli’s occupation of Palestinian lands, out of “self-defense.” Thus, Israel deserves all the blame for the conflict, and Iran ignores the Oct 7 pogrom in explaining and assessing Israel’s war with Hamas.

Never mind that Israel stopped occupying Gaza in 2005, and that international law would condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians just as much as it condemns Israel’s settlements on Palestinian territory.

The deeper problem with Iran’s assessment is that in referring to the occupation as the pogrom’s historical context, Iran’s acting in bad faith. Israel didn’t seize Palestinian territory because Israel was greedy for land or because Israeli Jews held all Palestinians in contempt.

No, the land was seized as part of the outcome of a war started by Israel’s Arab neighbours that didn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Israel faced that existential threat from the moment that country announced its independence in 1948, and the threat has never ceased. That threat is why Israel had to turn itself into a brutal military superpower, to secure its existence despite the entire Muslim world’s decades of opposition to the existence of any Jewish state in the Middle East.

The initial lack of sympathy in the Arab-Israeli conflict was demonstrated by the Arabs who rejected both UN proposals that would have made Israel a homeland for Jews and Palestinians, and who rejected them even directly after the Nazi holocaust had killed six million Jews. That context is surely also relevant to Israel’s subsequent occupations and military retaliations.

It’s easy to sympathize with progressive who abhor Israel’s callous treatment of Palestinians and that country’s contributions to the failure of the peace process. Children are killed in Gaza as “collateral damage,” families are torn apart, homes are destroyed.

But who can stop the Israeli government and the IDF? Not even American officials dare question Israel’s right of vengeance against Hamas, after the Oct 7 pogrom. The US could hardly do so without condemning its devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. Likewise, which Palestinian civilian could have stood up to Hamas to prevent the terrorist attacks against Israel?

The savageries occur on both sides because we typically drop our moral pretentions when our lives are endangered. We can signal our virtue with hollow talk of “international law” or of “disproportionate” military responses, but this shows a failure of vision. War is the kind of unholy outrage that’s nevertheless revelatory. We’re capable of the evils of terrorism and of war because our species is anomalous.

Let’s not pretend the strange animals that turned themselves into people, in the Stone Age, can be so easily tamed with cheap, woke rhetoric.

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Israel
Palestine
Politics
War
History
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