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Archive for October, 2023

The Israel-Hamas war

Posted in Israel-Palestine on October 21, 2023| 6 Comments »

[update below]

Friends have been noting over the past weeks that AWAV has gone silent, for three months now, and asked me what’s up. Answer: nothing in particular. I’ve intended to write on all sorts of topics, in fact—particularly on the worrisome political situation in the United States, where I spent some six weeks this summer (Midwest, NC)—but didn’t seize the moment when I felt inspired. But if there was a time to bring AWAV out of hibernation, it is now, with the stunning turn of events in Israel-Palestine, which most of us—me certainly—have been riveted to over the past two weeks (for AWAV posts on the 2012, 2014, and 2021 Gaza wars—there were 15—go here and here; see this one as well from last May).

On Saturday afternoon, October 7th, when the enormity of what was underway in the towns and villages along Israel’s border with Gaza had dawned on the world, I sent my random thoughts to Claire Berlinski, at her request, which she posted on her fine Substack site, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, in its ongoing, first-rate coverage of the war (trigger warning: it does have a slight political skew, which may disturb sensitive persons with their own skewed view of the conflict). My hot take comments are not too interesting two weeks after the fact, though I have so far been right about most things, one being this:

Hamas and the Gazawis are going to get the holy shit kicked out of them—the IDF will turn Hamas into hummus (quote from a friend)—but Hamas does not care, as it cares about its own people about as much as Vladimir Putin cares about his. The Israelis will kill thousands of civilians, thereby being credibly accused of war crimes in the court of global public opinion. A PR disaster for Israel.

Not a bold or original prediction on my part admittedly. It went without saying that the IDF’s response to Hamas would go well beyond a “mowing the lawn” operation, or even an invoking of the Dahiya doctrine. Thomas Friedman, in his October 14th NYT column, “Why Israel is acting this way,” tersely asserted that in Gaza, “Israel will apply Hama Rules.”

America’s most prominent journalistic authority on the Middle East of the past four decades, suggesting that Israel—a country he knows and loves—will wage war with the same regard for civilians as the Ba’athist regime in Syria…

Not to equate the powers-that-be in Jerusalem with those in Damascus—present and past; the latter really are far worse—but the fury of the IDF’s carpet bombing plus the sanguinary outbursts of angry politicians, military people, and ordinary citizens lends credence to Friedman’s prediction.

(Credit: Le Monde)

When Hamas planned its October 7th operation, it knew full well that Israel would react in the way that it has, that the Israelis would feel they had no choice. Given the scale of the massacre on October 7th, it was inconceivable that Israel would not strike back at Hamas with unprecedented violence, with a fury that would inevitably cause suffering for the entire population of Gaza. Hamas was ready and willing to see this happen, to sacrifice countless thousands of its subjects in its long game to eradicate the state of Israel and extinguish Israeli society. Hamas was ready to see the mass of its population suffer because… it’s Hamas: the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—a totalitarian Islamist movement inspired at its inception by interwar European fascism and Nazism—and with a terrorist militia.

Hamas and the Lebanese Hizbullah are the most redoubtable enemies Israel has ever faced. They are far greater threats to Israel than the Egyptian and Syrian armies ever were (Iran is a crucial actor here, which is another matter). What Hamas did on October 7th—the sophistication of the operation—was simply incredible—and all the more so in view of the unbelievable incompetence of the Israeli army and intelligence services on that day. Again, the Israelis—humiliated, shocked, traumatized, and enraged—were obviously going to respond not by “mowing the lawn” but with massive force à la Hama.

Hamas, which has had this all worked out, has set a trap for Israel, that the Israelis are inexorably walking straight into. And so far, Hamas looks to be winning. There are alternative courses of action the Israelis could pursue to avoid catastrophe, for themselves and the people of Gaza, e.g. here and here, but this would require cooler heads in Jerusalem making the decisions. And there are no cool heads in Israel right now. France Inter’s geopolitical commentator, Pierre Haski, observed on Thursday that “The most incredible thing about this week’s sequence of events is that the horror of the October 7 terrorist attacks is already fading.”

This may be the case in much of the world—insofar as there was focus at all on the victims of October 7th—but the horror has certainly not faded in Israel. And it never will. Ever. Pour mémoire, some 1,400 Jews were massacred by Hamas gunmen on October 7th (and the number is sure to rise), As any minimally informed person has heard by now, more Jews were murdered on October 7th than on any single day since the Holocaust. Maurading Hamas gunmen—recalling the Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania and Ukraine circa 1941—murdered every last Jew they came across (who they did not kidnap). One can only imagine what would have happened if thousands of Hamas gunmen had stormed and overwhelmed Israeli defenses on the northern end of the Strip, thereby entering Ashdod and Ashkelon—cities with a combined population of 400,000—in the early hours of the morning—and with an open route to Tel Aviv.

I imagine there’s a word in Arabic and Hebrew for bloodbath on a Biblical scale. Or just the beginning of genocide.

This interview with Yuval Noah Hariri is worth ten minutes of one’s time.

One detail about the martyred communities along the “Gaza envelope” that I wasn’t aware of is that most of them are populated by secular Jews, who disproportionately belong to Israel’s lingering peace camp (likewise with the participants at the rave party). Here are some of the faces that have appeared on my Facebook and Twitter/X feeds, this first one posted by several leftist academics, including the gauchiste, anti-Zionist political scientist Neve Gordon, mourning his brilliant former student (who, one learns, received his doctorate from the University of Washington and was a rising star in the field of Israel studies, as well as anti-occupation militant).

Translation: “Eyal Waldman, Israeli high-tech tycoon, founder and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, stunned the tech industry and the whole Arab world by creating R&D centers five years ago, first in the West Bank and then two years ago in the Gaza sector, hiring hundreds of Palestinian developers. He said then: ‘Today we have 25 employees in Gaza. There are talented and smart people out there, economically it pays off. We have good staff, within one hour zone, with high motivation, availability and opportunities. And I think it’s very important for the two nations to come together. People used to be afraid of each other and didn’t talk. But the positive thing is created when people begin to work together and see how tensions decrease and cooperation work. This is good for all sides.’ And on October 7, 2023, Hamas killed his daughter Danielle. It happened near Kibbutz Reim, less than a mile from where her father opened the most innovative factory in Gaza.”

[UPDATE: The above Facebook post and photo having been removed, here is an article by Ian Neubauer published November 25, 2023, on the Al Jazeera website, “‘Bulletproof’: The brief, beautiful life of Danielle Waldman. Danielle was just 24 when she and her partner, Noam Shay, were brutally killed by Hamas at Supernova Festival.”]

[UPDATE: It turns out that Vivian Silver was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7.]

Joel Beinin, of Stanford University, is a well-known historian of the Middle East and a longtime anti-Zionist.

[UPDATE: Joel Beinin’s niece, Liat Beinin Atzili, was released from captivity on November 29. Her husband, Aviv Atzili, was killed at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7.]

And the rave party.

They were at the rave party.

Translation: “Amongst all the difficult news we heard yesterday is the shocking loss of Shlomi Matias and his wife, Shahar. They were killed together in the criminal attack. Shlomi was a friend and partner, who led the musical side of the protests for democracy in Beer Sheva. Creative, committed and kind hearted. May their memory be blessed and blessed forever!”

Le Monde dated October 18 has a full-page interview with Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz of the EHESS in Paris, in which she says that “for Israeli society, Hamas has become the Nazi,” explaining “that the terrorist attack on October 7 has engaged both sides in a ‘full-scale war,’ and will irrevocably change Israelis’ perception of Palestinians.” As Le Monde has translated the interview for its English edition and Illouz says it better than I can, here are some key passages:

It’s hard to find the right words to describe this unprecedented event. Terrorist attacks on this scale have never been seen before, in any country. There have been massacres, of course, but not a terrorist attack whose number of victims in proportion to the population is much greater than that of September 11. It was the equivalent of 10,000 people in France massacred in a few hours. I would venture to add that there were a series of unprecedented variations of horror: waking up on a holiday to the sound of machine-gun fire with an enemy infiltrating your home, the weak becoming the strong, the strong becoming the weak, the army we’ve been waiting for not coming, terrorists killing babies, decapitating people, killing children in front of their parents, and parents in front of children, kidnapping old people, children, men, women, recording and broadcasting massacres on social media, all this has no precedent. There has been an increase of horror techniques.

It has been the biggest shock in post-Holocaust Jewish history. The whole ontological reality of Israel has been called into question. The Nazis were trying to hide atrocities, not broadcast them. Death itself has become a propaganda motif. There has been a regime shift in atrocity. This is why the war has become total and existential. Israel appears strong, but this strength is underpinned by an existential fear that has become radicalized. For an Israeli, the possibility of genocide never seems far away. (…)

In equating Hamas with the Nazis, Godwin’s Law does not apply. Hamas’ view of the Jews is genocidal. I invite anyone who does not agree to explain why.

The horror and fear are on such a scale that the whole of society has rallied around one objective: to restore a sense of security to its citizens. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War also came as a shock, and there were 2,800 deaths, but these included zero civilians. In the present situation, the division between civilians and soldiers has been erased. This is not only characteristic of terrorism but also because states such as Iran act as terrorist organizations. (…)

N.B. The armed Palestinian movement never really distinguished between Israeli soldiers and civilians, contending that the latter are reservists and minors are future soldiers.

The fact that the global post-colonialist left refused to condemn the massacres will have repercussions on the Israeli left. After the Intifada in 2000, which left 1,000 Israelis dead, the left collapsed because so many people had come to the conclusion that the Palestinians didn’t want peace. It’s going to be more dramatic today. One of the things that will disappear is the idea of a binational state for both populations, which became fashionable over the last decade.

Comment: The idea of a binational state has always been a marginal one, adhered to by Jewish far-leftists (minuscule in number) and Palestinian citizens of Israel (who have a singular relationship with the state of Israel). Palestinians have otherwise never accepted the binational idea, as this posits that Jews are a nation, not merely a religious community, and with an equal claim to Palestine. Jewish nationhood is Zionism, which Palestinians, regardless of their political family (nationalist, Islamist, Marxist), have vehemently rejected. Palestinians will never accept the legitimacy of Zionism—and Israeli Jews will never renounce Zionism. For Palestinians, Palestine—from the river to the sea—is Arab and with Islam as the official religion (as is the case with the Palestinian Authority), with Jewish and Christian minorities recognized solely as confessional groups. Period.

[T]he right, which led us into this disaster because of the security doctrine it defended: The idea that relations with the Palestinians could be managed indefinitely as a low-intensity military conflict is a failure. Netanyahu and his allies wanted to use Hamas against the Palestinian Authority to make the creation of two states impossible; they failed to see that the blockade of Gaza would create an explosive situation, and let people think that Hamas was a bunch of pathetic people easily controlled by money from Qatar. (…)

[M]any Israelis believe that Palestinian civilians and their leaders share a radical hatred of Jews. All the more so as images of the bloodied bodies of young Israeli girls paraded through the streets of Gaza in the midst of excited crowds appear incriminating to civilians. These images make it difficult to distinguish between the people of Gaza and their leaders. We see a population united with Hamas in its hatred of Israelis and Jews. Israelis’ perception of Palestinians in Gaza is very different from that of Iranians, where it’s much easier to distinguish between the ayatollahs’ regime and a civilian population in insurrection. With Hamas, the distinction becomes blurred. (…)

This war is different: It’s an enemy that wants to obliterate Israel and its population. It is a full-scale war. Israelis think of this war in the following terms: It will be us or them. When one side officially declares that its goal is to wipe you off the face of the earth, it becomes difficult to think of proportionality. I would add, however, that the IDF’s aim is to eradicate Hamas and Hamas alone. Will they achieve this without affecting civilians on a massive scale? Probably not, and I deeply regret this.

What was once seen as a century-old military or colonial conflict is now interpreted through the lens of anti-Semitism. There is a shift from the political to the racial and religious. For Israeli society, the genocidal anti-Semitism that inhabited the lands of Europe has migrated to Islamism. Until now, the Palestinians, in the eyes of the Israelis, were not the Nazis. I think that changed after the terrorist attacks: Hamas has become the Nazi. There’s a risk that, through a contamination effect, the Israelis will see all the Palestinians in Gaza in the same way. Would Europe have compromised with the Nazis? Churchill decided to bomb Dresden, even though Germany had already lost. I’m not saying that Hamas is a Nazi. I’m aware of the historical and ideological differences. But that’s how it will be seen from now on. (…)

A categorical assertion: October 7th was the worst day in the history of the Arab-Zionist/Israeli conflict. Ever. Since its origins in the 19th century. This for the reasons specified by Eva Illouz and more: of 14 million Jews and Arabs, evenly divided, living in a land the size of Vermont or Normandy, hating, fearing, and distrusting the other more than ever, with no desire to coexist in the same space but unable to separate. I pronounced the Israel-Palestine conflict to be insoluble years ago but now it is definitive: there is no hope whatever. Except that the conflict can no longer be managed (from the Israeli standpoint) in the way that it has been. And the implication of the rest of the region, notably Iran and its clients, in the conflct, i..e, in a war, cannot be excluded. An apocalypse is not out of the question.

As I concluded my random thoughts of two weeks ago, this will not end well, for anyone. There are no best case scenarios, only least worst ones. And even then. But whatever one’s sympathies in this conflict, there can be no dispute over what Hamas did on October 7th—and for which it must pay the maximum price.

There will be more. À suivre.

UPDATE: Adam Shatz, who is well-known to AWAV readers and with whom I have been in daily communication, has a lengthy article (5,400 words) on the war in Gaza posted October 19 in the LRB (of which he is US editor), “Vengeful pathologies.”

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