Hamas’s Insurgency and Israel’s Vengeance

Vinay Lal

It is now forty-eight hours since Hamas initiated a multi-pronged attack on the state of Israel, creating shock waves around the world and sending the Jewish state into mourning and rage. Israel’s politicians and generals are seething with the desire for revenge, and some are calling for the utter annihilation of Hamas and the abject and complete submission of Gaza to a renewed Israeli occupation.  Over 1,100 people, quite likely many more, are already dead—and the majority of these are  presently Israelis, though at least 400 Palestinians have been killed thus far as well.  Before one proceeds any further to analyze this extraordinary and tumultuous state of affairs, the repercussions of which will doubtless resonate for years in West Asia and beyond, one must first clear the ground on how Hamas might be characterized. 

Israel, the United States, Canada, and the countries of the European Union (EU) designated Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’ years ago, but it must be stated emphatically that this is not the view of much of the world. China, India, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey are among the countries which have resisted the call to declare Hamas a ‘terrorist organization’.  Indeed, a resolution introduced in the 193-member UN General Assembly in December 2018 to condemn Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’ did not pass, with only 87 countries voting in favor of the resolution.  Though Prime Minister Modi has now declared that India stands by Israel, his government was among those that in 2018 cast a vote of abstention.   

Hamas, which is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, is at once a nationalist organization and a political party; it has a militant wing (al-Qassam Brigades) as well as a social service wing (Dawah), but what is almost invariably neglected in Western accounts of Hamas is its presence as a political party.  It contested the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, an election that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel desperately attempted to swing in favor of the Palestinian Authority. International observers, including those from the EU, declared that the election had been ‘competitive and genuinely democratic’; stunningly, Hamas won by a substantial majority, handily defeating Fatah 76-43. The US, Canada, and later EU froze all financial assistance to the Hamas-led government, sabotaging not only Hamas but, clearly, the will of the Palestinian people.  To this day, Hamas exercises a majority in the Palestinian National Authority parliament.

It should not be surprising that this history is being altogether obscured by the commentary now emanating from the West in the face of Hamas’s daring if bloodthirsty assault on Israel.  Certainly, with its indiscriminate and horrific killing of civilians, Hamas has done nothing to commend itself to the world’s attention as an organization that might be taken seriously as a political player at the negotiating table. The 250 some Israelis killed at a music festival just a few hours into the attack had no inkling of the murderous assault that was coming their way.  One must condemn, in the most unequivocal terms, the killing of civilians, whether women, men, children, or the elderly, and similarly denounce the taking of hostage as outrageous and antithetical to all canons of civilized behavior.

Just what the long-term outcome of this ‘war’, as so declared by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will be no one quite knows. For the present, however, it suffices to consider two of the many considerations or questions that form part of the present debate. First, the overwhelming question for many commentators has simply been this:  just how did Hamas manage to launch such a full-scale and coordinated attack from air, land, and sea and take Israel completely by surprise? I would like to suggest that this question, while not unimportant, is less interesting than is commonly supposed.  Israel has been celebrated for some time as a tough, or no-nonsense, state with some of the world’s most sophisticated military technology, the most advanced surveillance technologies, and a small but exceedingly well-trained army with a large number of reservists that is the envy of much of the world. Writing for The Guardian, Peter Beaumont reflects a commonly held view in arguing that Hamas’s ‘surprise attack on Israel … will be remembered as the intelligence failure for the ages.’  He reminds us, as have others, that the Pegasus spyware originated in Israel, and the country’s cyberwar unit, 8200, ‘is now the largest unit’ in the Israel Defence Forces. 

For all of this extraordinary sophistication, Israel was, it seems, wholly unprepared for Hamas’s stupendous infiltration into Israel.  Even Hamas’s most virulent critics, one suspects, must be secretly marveling at their ingenuity in firing thousands of rockets and thus overpowering the Iron Dome air defence system, using bulldozers to bring down a section of the Israel-Gaza border fence, and, most spectacularly, paragliding Hamas fighters into Israeli territory. Just why Israeli—and American—intelligence could not foresee any of this has also been put down to Israeli arrogance, the distractions created by the internal political turmoil that has been roiling Israel for close to one year, and the tendency to see Hamas as largely a spent force comprised of ragtag bunch of fighters. 

What all of this overlooks is the ineluctable fact that there is not now, and never has been anywhere in the world, a foolproof system of security. This is but one of the delusions of those who abide by a purely realpolitik view of the world.  Moreover, no security system in the world can prevail against a people who are determined to gain their freedom and who are unwilling to tolerate the suffocation of the cage into which they have been locked.  The Gaza strip is just that—a cage in which some 2.5 million people have been locked since Israel imposed a draconian and lawless blockade on Gaza in 2007. Not every Palestinian supports Hamas, but there isn’t a Palestinian who does not aspire to freedom—though this is far from the mind of supposedly enlightened Western commentators such as the numbskulled Thomas Friedman, whose only explanation for why Hamas undertook to attack Israel at this juncture is the common geopolitical view that Hamas is keen on sabotaging the Saudi-US rapprochement and similarly the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It would be naïve to suppose that Hamas did not also have this in mind, but by far the greater consideration is the desire of the Palestinian people to secure justice, freedom, and dignity for their people.

This, then, brings us, if briefly, to the second and related consideration. Politicians and commentators in the United States and Europe, speaking as if they were part of a well-rehearsed choral group, are unanimous in describing Hamas’s attack as ‘unprovoked’.  It is seventy-five years since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the newly created state of Israel and its principal backers, the United States and the United Kingdom.  Dozens of resolutions have been passed in the UN General Assembly proclaiming the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Their only effect has been to embolden Israel, which has ever so gradually been encroaching upon Palestinian territory. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have, especially since the last election in Israel which brought far-right Jewish extremists into power and into Netanyahu’s cabinet, gone on a rampage through Palestinian villages and terrorized Palestinian civilians. There is scarcely a people in the world who have lived under such sustained provocation over decades as have the Palestinians. The US has done over these years what it does best, namely act as the world’s greatest mercenary and arms supplier, while mouthing platitudes about being the world’s torchbearer of liberty.

As I have noted, and as merits constant reiteration, one must unconditionally condemn violence and, in this case, Hamas’s attack upon Israel.  Hamas cannot prevail in a military conflict with Israel:  with or without further US military assistance, Israel will pulverize Hamas.  Still, while we recognize the cycle of violence to which Hamas has most unfortunately given yet another lease of life, we must remind ourselves that it is also possible to degrade and kill an entire people in slow motion.  The world must ensure that the Palestinians, who have endured much, are henceforth spared this cruel fate.

First published at abplive.in under the title of “Hamas’s Insurgency and Israel’s Humiliation” on 9 October 2023. Two small but important errors inadvertently appeared in the first edition of this essay as circulated to subscribers but have now been corrected.

*The Cheek of It: Russian Intervention in American Politics

Annals of the President-elect Trump Regime VI

 

“As I’ve said before, any foreign intervention in our elections is entirely unacceptable.  And any intervention by Russia is especially problematic because, under President Putin, Russia has been an aggressor that consistently undermines American interests.”

–Paul D. Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives, US Congress, December 12, 2016

 

Ten years ago, much to the surprise of the US administration, Hamas swept to victory when elections were held in the Occupied Territories.  The promotion of ‘free elections’ around the world has long been a platform of American democracy, and the US now found itself in a spot of trouble since an organization that the US had condemned as a terrorist outfit had legitimately assumed power.  Hillary Clinton was then a Senator representing the state of New York and she was evidently greatly disturbed by the outcome.  On September 5, 2006, shortly after the elections were concluded, Hillary Clinton gave an interview to Eli Chomsky of the Brooklyn-based Jewish Press where she said the following: “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake.  And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”  An audio recording of this first came to light only about two months ago.

 

Only those who somehow think of Hillary Clinton as a great champion of democracy will perhaps be taken aback by her boldness indeed arrogance in thinking that it is for the US to “determine” who wins elections in other countries.   That “elections”, free or otherwise, should be the litmus test for a democracy is an assumption that receives little interrogation, no doubt because, to rehearse the old cliché, an electoral democracy is perhaps the best of a range of rotten political options.  Another assumption, scarcely questioned by what is assumed to be the most vigorous press in the world, is that the US has always held free elections.  I do not refer here to the example that will most easily come to the mind of most people, namely the election of George W. Bush to the Presidency of the United States after his brother Jeb, then Governor of Florida, and a pliant Supreme Court handed the election to him.  Of course, the proposition that the US elections are “free” is in some sense undebatable, even if one can easily complicate the narrative by pointing to various stratagems that have been deployed over the decades to keep certain people from voting.  In many states, convicted felons lose the right to vote in perpetuity; similarly, even long after the Voting Rights Act was passed (and recently gutted), facilities for registration have been denied to racial minorities in a number of places.  The other, equally substantive and unimpeachable, piece of evidence which puts into question the whole notion of “free” elections in the US is of course the extraordinary reach of what we might call big money, which has not only made it all but impossible for people of ordinary means to compete in elections but also clearly “rigged” the outcome to reflect the interests only of the corporate and moneyed interests.

 

However, the revelation, now seemingly endorsed by the CIA itself, that Russia intervened in the US elections suggests what is even more obnoxious in the present commentary, whether in the liberal media, on conservative blogs, TV stations, and radio shows, or as the opinions of politicians, military officials, and officials in the intelligence community.  The US has long assumed that it is perfectly within its right to intervene in other countries:  such interventions, of which the examples are numerous enough to fill several volumes, have extended far beyond seeking to influence electoral outcomes, and have often involved overthrowing or attempting to overthrow legally elected governments.  Many such interventions have taken the form of connivance by the CIA, though this has seldom occurred without a signal from the American administration of that time and the State Department that such a course of action is a calculated element of American foreign policy.  The most notorious example, with repercussions that have lasted to this day, is the CIA- and MI5-engineered coup that overthrew the legally elected government of Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953.  Just as unpalatable to the US was Salvador Allende of Chile:  to be sure, there was domestic opposition to Allende’s socialist policies, but the evidence which supports the view the overthrow of his government was strongly supported if not instigated by the US is incontrovertible.

 

It may be far from being an established fact that the Russians were the ones who plotted to hack the emails of the Democratic National Committee just as it is far from being proven that Russian intervention, if indeed it occurred, played a decisive role in swinging the election in favor of Trump.  But let us assume the worst and suppose that Vladimir Putin and the Russians were deliberate in their hacking of DNC emails and planted misinformation.  They are, needless to say, easily capable of doing so.  Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the major leader, gave it as his firm opinion that “any foreign breach of our cybersecurity measures is disturbing, and I strongly condemn such efforts.”   This is the view that is being echoed by every American political leader and commentator, and perhaps that is how it should be.  If, however, the US stands by the idea of national sovereignty, and views intervention by any other state, particularly one with which it has a relationship of deep suspicion over decades, as reprehensible, how is it that the sovereignty of other states means nothing?  The question here is not merely one of hypocrisy; rather, it points to a fundamental problem in American politics, namely the inability of the public sphere in the United States to generate any kind of self-reflexivity.  One might easily say that the conduct of the United States is what one expects of a world power; one might say that this is characteristic of an imperium.  But one wonders whether any empire has been so singularly lacking in self-reflexivity, so pathetically lacking in an awareness of how it came to acquire its own sovereignty and how it positions it positions itself as the aggrieved party in every discourse?  The cheek of it:  the Russians did something to which only Americans have an unquestioned right.