Bloodshed in Gaza on Hamas’ Hands
Would Israeli Defense Forces be conducting air raids in Gaza and amassing ground troops for an imminent invasion had Hamas not attacked Israel, while committing a Nazi-style Pogrom, last Saturday?
As if things could not possibly get any worse, we learned as more details emerged from Hamas’ cowardly and infamous slaughter that the beloved and precious Supernova Festival attendees and many southern Israelis in Jewish farm collectives waited several hours for Israeli security forces to rescue them. Much like Uvalde. How could this have happened?
On the one hand, Hamas leadership consciously misled the Israelis into believing they were turning away from terrorism. As a result, most of the IDF forces formerly positioned near Gaza were redeployed to the West Bank. The Israelis, up until last Saturday, had zero motivation or intention to desire any conflict whatsoever in Gaza. A conflict in Gaza was the last thing anybody in Israel wanted. Before October 7, the Israeli government had two or three main concerns:
1) Securing a ruling coalition in the midst of a contentious and destabilizing domestic situation, regarding the judiciary
2) Securing an agreement with the Saudi rulers in Riyadh
3) Appeasing rightist settlers in the West Bank.
The only group Netanyahu may’ve considered bombing before October 7 was the Israeli opposition.
While it is also true that several credible reports claim Cairo warned Tel Aviv days in advance of the attacks, Hamas leadership audaciously bragged that they worked hard to cynically and sinisterly deceive the Israelis, and the world. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the surprise attack, I had begun worrying and wondering why things were suspiciously quiet on the Gaza Strip. It all makes sense now.
There would be no Israeli air-offensive nor ground-mobilization had Hamas not attacked Israel, while committing a Nazi-style Pogrom, last Saturday. And even though as communists and workers we do not place our hopes on the Israeli capitalist state, we should also not fail to recognize and acknowledge that there’s every difference in the world between Hamas and the IDF:
Hamas aims to maximize civilian deaths; the IDF aims to minimize them. Hamas catches defenseless civilians off guard in order to strip them of any safe haven; the IDF gives Palestinians advance notice that they may take refuge. The Israeli government created bomb shelters for civilian protection; Hamas converted these shelters into slaughterhouses. Hamas organizes death squads and kidnaps vulnerable populations for leverage; the IDF does not.
Worst of all, Hamas urges and threatens Gaza residents to not leave danger zones. Hamas, a cult of death, aims to not only maximize Israeli civilian deaths but Palestinian deaths as well. They hope and count on Israeli overreactions to their provocations, to propagandistically and demagogically amplify Palestinian casualties.
The Israeli government is in the unenviable position of having to simultaneously defend itself and deal with civilians Hamas intentionally uses as human shields, a war crime. And yet as the late author Martin Amis once said of Israel and the Jews, in refutation to George Steiner who’d said Jewish people drew their nationalism from supposedly German ideals of blood and soil, in a 2007 discussion regarding antisemitism and the author Saul Below, hosted by the Jewish Chronicle, Amis said:
“[Jews] became nationalistic because they alone, amongst the peoples of the earth, had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth. This right is still clearly not granted them, not even in the ‘liberal’ West. At the same time Jews are called upon, and call upon themselves, to be more just and more moral than others.”