208 - Colossal Carnage and Brutal Mayhem: Putin and Khamenei Profit, Not Hamas

Israel's Retaliation

            More than 2,300 killed and 7,000 wounded and maimed, on both sides, with more losses to come. Perhaps as many as 150 hostages taken by despicable Hamas, some already sacrificed. This week’s attack on Jews for being Jews is the most destructive since the Holocaust. These events, as well as Israel’s retaliation against Hamas and its devastating bombardment of the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants testify to the complete breakdown of the stable world order that the victors in World War II, and in the Cold War against Soviet Communism, once assumed had been accomplished so that humankind could live mostly in peace.

            Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has started that breakdown; Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel reinforces a sense of collapse. Putin, alas, cannot but benefit from the mayhem in Israel. He is a winner, when so many others are harmed losers. (Putin has refrained, too, from offering condolences to Israel; even China did.)

Whether or not the West does so consciously, Hamas’ terrorizing invasion will inevitably shift attention away from the stalemated but still deadly crisis in Ukraine, give Putin and the Russian military more running room, and compel Washington, Brussels, and all of Europe to expend considerable diplomatic and military strategic thought and new funding both to support Israel in its time of acute need and to attempt to broker a lasting response to Hamas’ underhand assault on nearby defenseless civilians.

Another winner is Khamenei’s Iran. There is every suspicion that Iran, Hamas’ major backer, primed Hamas to attack Israel.  One authority says that Iranian security officials “gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday.” Iran has funded and supplied weapons to Hamas for years.

Iran gains if Hamas’ assault and Israel’s inevitably punitive response leads to the postponement or cancellation of the extended Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia was allegedly poised to recognize Israel after all these years and exchange ambassadors, with Washington helping the Saudis establish nuclear power facilities. The U.S. was also going to guarantee Riyadh’s security against Iran.  But the Saudis will now find it difficult to shake hands with Israel in the wake of Israel’s coming wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure, not to mention the total siege of the territory that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu promised and his military has already imposed.

Iran also gains prestige from the mayhem that Hamas has initiated. It, and Hamas, appear more consequential to their own supporters and accordingly consequential within the tumult of the Middle East.  Khamenei is also in league with Putin. Both are essentially free riders on the Hamas-created carnage.

Iran and Hamas may also have thought that doing deadly deeds against Israel would demonstrate to the rest of Palestine and to the outside Arab world that Hamas, not the weak and compromised Mahmoud Abbas regime in the West Bank, was the true safeguard of Palestinian statehood against Israel. Indeed, the Abbas government in the West Bank (there have been no elections since 2005 and 2006) is derided by most Palestinians. The leaders of Hamas, which only runs the Gaza Strip but has long wanted to dominate the remainder of Palestine (the West Bank), may have deluded themselves into thinking that a lightning strike on unsuspecting Israel would result in a transfer of support from Abbas to themselves. That could still happen, if anything is left of Hamas after Israel’s Defense Force fully sunders Gaza.  But it is more likely that Hamas (and Iran) have vastly overplayed their hands.

There is little doubt, as of this morning, that Israel has regained control of its afflicted border areas and is managing to defend the rest of the country against missiles shot from Gaza by Hamas and the much smaller and even more radical Palestine Islamic Jihad legion. If Hezbollah opens up a second front in northern Israel, from Lebanon, Israel will have a widened war on its hands, and much more carnage could occur. But with American ships and aircraft now stationed off Tel Aviv, that may not happen even through the Iranians have already fired missiles from Syria into Israel.

Netanyahu and his Likud coalition in the Israeli Knesset initially appeared to benefit; Israel at war needs strong leadership. Yesterday, too, Netanyahu brought his key opposition rivals, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, into the cabinet. The formation of such an emergency government means that Netanyahu may feel that he can pay less attention to the extreme right-wingers and bomb-throwers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, relying henceforth on broader national support.

Hamas presumably attacked this week because of the perceived political disarray in Israel and the many months of civil society protest against the attempt to reduce the authority of the (more liberal) supreme court. According to Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, “When Hamas began slaughtering hundreds of defenceless 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.” 

Hamas could and will claim that it attacked callously because Israel was injuring Palestine calamitously by permitting new settlements in and on Palestinian land, pushing out Arabs and Arab-run villages from many sectors of the West Bank. And there is indisputable truth in those accusations. Until yesterday, Netanyahu was beholden to Sephardic fanatics who sought essentially to extirpate Palestinians from all of ancient Judea. The goal of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and their mostly ultra-Orthodox followers is and was to oust Palestinians from all of their ancient lands from the Mediterranean Sea to the Sea of Galilee.

By linking his political fortunes, and his attempt to avoid prosecution for corruption, to the extreme Israeli right, Netanyahu and his administration took their eyes off perils in Gaza. The invasion from Gaza was an even greater intelligence failure than the start of the Yom Kippur war. Those are not my conclusions but those of commentators in Israel, including the editors of Ha’aretz, the leading newspaper.  A former minister of defense demanded that Netanyahu resign. A leading political columnist and a long-time backer of Netanyahu said that he could not “escape blame for a systematic failure” and for the long-time policy of tolerating Hamas’ autocratic rule over Gazans.  The prime minister’s biographer said that “the thing he always feared most has happened – he fell asleep on the job and failed to maintain Israel’s security. It is his nightmare come true.” The lack of success on military fronts has always resulted in regime change in Israel.

Those who try to rationalize Hamas’ inflicted horror will point to all of the injustices done to Palestinians since 1948, since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and more dramatically in the last decade.  The Oslo Accords have been breached over and over.  Palestinian rights and freedoms have been abused.  As Ben-Ami yesterday commented caustically: “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.” 

The idea of a two-state solution has definitively been trashed by the Israeli right-wing. Yet, no matter what Hamas might have thought, its vicious assault and its taking and mistreating of hostages will in no way benefit the Palestinian cause. If anything, it has eliminated any remaining support in the West for a Palestinian homeland or safeguarding Palestine from Israeli ambitions.

Trying to hold on to his political fortunes, Netanyahu will orchestrate a massive killing of leaders and members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. The aim will be to extinguish Hamas. Civilians in Gaza, already with nowhere to turn and no easy way to escape, will be collateral damage. Already, nearly 500,000 Gazans have lost their homes and are displaced. But Israel will lose its moral center if its rightful and understandable rage gives way to unspeakable wholesale massacres. A better way, especially if Hamas has any remaining sense, is for Israel to hold off a march on Gaza in exchange for all of the hostages, unharmed.

Hamas is counting on an Israeli overreaction in order to trigger sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and for Hamas and Iran, and to force the Arab world to shun (not welcome) Israel.  President Biden correctly called out the absolute, “unadulterated” sheer evil of what Hamas has done. Now he needs to try to rein in Israel’s retaliation (Thomas Friedman calls it “tough love”) so that the battle becomes one of a democratic Western nation against an Iranian-motivated fascist theocracy, not simply that of an enraged regime bent on revenge. Last night Biden, addressing the Israeli situation, seemed to be leaning in that careful direction.

  Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad need to be extinguished, but Israelis and Palestinians deserve an opportunity under a post-Netanyahu government to come together with the support of the Arab Middle East. That last can only happen if Israel responds intelligently, not viciously, in Gaza.