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.

*A ‘World Historical’ Figure? The Politics of Lincoln’s International Legacy

The US has been awash this year with celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial. The feeling is widespread that Lincoln, more than anyone else, represents the idea – and thus the dream and hope – of America better than any other figure in American history.  He has been lionized as the savior of the Union, the emancipator of the slaves; he is also, perhaps, the most eminently quotable American.   At his death, as I recall from my American history textbook from over three decades ago, his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton declared that he ‘now belongs to the ages’.  Lincoln has topped most American polls as the most widely admired person in American history.  Tolstoy was unequivocal in his pronouncement that Lincoln “overshadows all other national heroes.”  The great storyteller that he was, Tolstoy has mesmerized Lincoln’s acolytes with his account of the conversation that transpired between him and a tribal chief in the Caucasus who was his host.  Tolstoy told the tribal chief about great military rulers and leaders, but his host remained unsatisfied.  “You have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world”, he told Tolstoy, adding the following:  “He was a hero.  He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as a rock . . .  His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived.  Tell us of that man.”

The hagiographic portrait of Lincoln that has circulated since his death has, to be sure, also been punctured with criticisms.  While the ‘Great Emancipator’ to some, to others his commitment to equality between blacks and whites is profoundly questionable.  For the present, though, one might profitably turn one’s attention to another, not unrelated, question:  to what extent can Lincoln reasonably be viewed as a ‘world historical’ or universal figure?  As I have elsewhere argued, in an “interchange” among scholars of Lincoln published in the Journal of American History (September 2009), Lincoln had many constituencies, to take one country as an illustration, in India.  Gandhi and Ambedkar, however opposed to each other, nevertheless shared in common an admiration for Lincoln.  In 1905, while Gandhi was waging a struggle on behalf of the rights of Indians in South Africa, he penned an article in his journal Indian Opinion which pronounced Lincoln as the greatest figure of the nineteenth century; Ambedkar, on his part, quotes Lincoln in his closing speech as the Constituent Assembly was on the verge of adopting the Constitution of India of which Ambedkar was the principal drafter.  In Britain, not unexpectedly, there was much veneration for Lincoln, among, for example, the Welsh and in Liberal Nonconformist working-class communities; and one can, similarly, point to the enthusiastic reception given to him in most countries of Europe and Latin America.

It is wholly understandable that Americans should be unable to minimize representations of Lincoln as the preserver of the Union, the emancipator of slaves, and the self-made man who, moving from a log cabin to the White House, brilliantly exemplified the possibilities of humankind in the relatively unencumbered circumstances of the New World.  But once we are beyond this, the question persists:  what, if anything, qualifies Lincoln as a world historical figure, in the manner of, to name some highly disparate figures, Marx, Mao, Darwin, and Gandhi?   Is there in his writings something that might be called a body of thought that can be viewed as having made a substantial difference to intellectual activity worldwide?  Histories of human rights will doubtless always have a place for him as the figure who precipitated the formal end of slavery in the US.  But, nevertheless, the fact that he is an inspiration to so many, or that his humanism is immensely appealing, should not be conflated with any estimation we might have to offer of Lincoln’s contributions to the principal questions that have animated those who work and deliberate on such issues as nationalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, the creation of postcolonial states, and so on.  The invocations over the last few decades have been to the likes of Cesaire and Fanon, not to Lincoln.  Once the Lincoln who is forever enshrined in popular memory as the author of the observation that “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” has been reckoned with, what is there in the body of his work that would appeal to those especially outside the Anglo-American world?  It does not appear to me that Lincoln figured prominently, if at all, in the discussions about human rights that ensued in the 1930s and 1940s and culminated in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s; likewise, debates about decolonization, the principal political issue of the 1950s and 1960s, except of course to those who view everything through the prism of the enmity of the US and the Soviet Union, seemed to have bypassed Lincoln.

There is yet another consideration:  many American figures have much larger reputations than they might otherwise have had owing to the immense influence wielded by the US in nearly every sphere of life, particularly in the post-World War II period.  America’s history has been everyone’s history, and not only because the US has been a distinct immigrant society; just as significantly, America has been part of the national imaginary of every country, foe, friend, or otherwise.  When the attacks of September 11 transpired, Le Monde unhesitatingly described it as an attack on the world:  “We Are all Americans”, the newspaper declared.  Can one even imagine such a response had the attacks been conducted on Chinese soil?  When, however, America’s star begins to fade, will it also not lead to a fundamental reassessment of American history and culture.  How is Lincoln going to fare in a world where America’s history is no longer perceived to be everyone’s history?