Hamas embodies a feral, Islamist mutation of Palestinian nationalism. It is formally committed to the destruction of Israel which it refers to as the “Zionist entity”. Its militia conducts guerrilla warfare against Israel when it can. Gaza has the strategic depth of a strip mall and Hamas cannot aspire to the dignity of a State with a standing army. It runs an unrecognised regime in a besieged canton. It is a protection racket, a social welfare organisation, a liberation movement, and a terrorist militia, all in one. If Gaza is the largest open-air prison in the world, Hamas is that jail’s self-appointed trustee. The jail’s warden is Israel.
Israel embodies Zionist nationalism. Its claim to the territory it holds is founded on the belief that the national homeland of the Jews ought to be the lands from which their ancestors were expelled in ancient times. This claim is not merely ideological; for a century and a half, Zionist Jews have migrated to Palestine/Israel to claim their homeland. Zionists used to cite the continuous presence of small Jewish communities in erstwhile Palestine in support of their homeland claim.
Israel’s legitimacy grows out of the tragedy of the Holocaust and the West’s guilt about this genocide in the heart of Europe. Brandenburg Gate or 10 Downing Street are unlikely to have Palestine’s colours projected on to them. The memory of anti-Semitic genocide makes Palestinians killing Israelis wicked in a way that Israelis killing Palestinians cannot be.
The settled position of all Western governments is that Israel, the State, can be accused of disproportionate violence but not terror because it is an article of faith that Israel’s Spartan citizen army responds to terror with discriminating violence. Israel’s right to self-defence can lead to collateral damage but never terrorist atrocity. That, by definition, is the province of militias that knowingly attack civilians in orderly countries that keep civilians and soldiers apart. There can be no moral equivalence between Israeli violence and Palestinian violence because Israeli violence is always a legitimate response (the right to self-defence) to unprovoked Palestinian mayhem.
Historically, this is a hard position to maintain. Palestinian violence is not unprovoked. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is amongst the longest-standing occupations of modern times. It is an occupation that has continuously expanded. The land earmarked for a Palestinian State has been deliberately sown with Jewish settlements to ensure that no contiguous territory exists on which a Palestinian State might be built. The theft of land destroys Palestinian livelihoods. Their disenfranchisement reduces them to helots. Their claim to East Jerusalem is continuously eroded through evictions. Hard Right governments, settlers and orthodox fanatics relentlessly challenge the status quo at Jerusalem’s sacred sites. The nature of the occupation produces a routine of provocation which the Palestinian subject of Israel’s raj must endure daily, to merely survive.
The terrorist attack on the rave and the kibbutz was both provoked and monstrous. Human actors aren’t just symptoms of their situations. Hamas’s fighters had volition; they could have chosen not to kill women, children and unarmed civilians. Likewise, the Israel Defense Force’s response to Hamas’s atrocities was provoked and monstrous. It will eventually be more monstrous than Hamas’s worst efforts because of the sophistication of Israel’s arsenal, its total air superiority, and over two million people trapped in a locked-down strip of land with nowhere to go. An IDF general declared that the bombing would choose damage and destruction over precision. Another promised to deal with Gazans like “human animals”.
In the history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israelis have killed well over ten times as many Palestinians as Palestinians have Israelis. Numerically, there is a case for Palestinian suffering and Israeli atrocity, unless you choose to believe that all the Palestinians killed are terrorists or terrorist-adjacent or human shields, like the 500 children and 276 women killed in Israeli air strikes in Gaza at the time of writing. This is the first time in half a century that hundreds of Israelis have been killed and the pronouncements of the Israeli government and its top brass make it clear that Israel is looking to even the score. Given Gaza’s congestion, this should happen quickly. Bombing Gaza is the military equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
A hawkish op-ed in The Telegraph (UK), anticipating atrocities, wrote “Of course, overwhelming force is not always a clean process; there will be narrative and PR difficulties. That is why Israel needs the understanding and the backing of Western governments now more than ever” (emphasis added). On cue, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Kier Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen chorused the line about Israel’s right to self-defence, its right to blockade and besiege Gaza, with the barest mention of the need to protect civilians.
Perhaps Palestinians should have thought about the consequences of murdering Israeli civilians, accepted the reality of Israel, abjured violence and armed struggle, and negotiated with Israel in a peaceful way. East of Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian National Authority, the internationally recognised representative of the Palestinian people, has done all these things. His reward has been an inexorable expansion of Jewish settlements, the contemptuous rejection of the two-state solution by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli political Establishment that he represents, and the status of a political eunuch amongst his own people.
Having abandoned the two-state solution, Israel is looking not for a negotiated settlement but unconditional surrender. Hamas is a crucial component of the no-negotiation strategy. Its hold on Gaza allows Israel to argue that there is no one representative of the Palestinian people that it can negotiate with. Netanyahu’s complicity in Qatar’s funding of Hamas has been reported on by Haaretz. His relationship with Hamas is like Indira Gandhi’s cultivation of Bhindranwale as a counterweight to the Akalis. Both created monsters they couldn’t control.
Netanyahu’s strategy is two-pronged. First, create facts on the ground in the occupied territories and Jerusalem that extinguish the possibility of a two-state solution. Second, normalise relations with Arab petro-states without promising a Palestinian State. The first part of the plan has been in process for decades. The blueprint for the second is the Abraham Accords, negotiated by Donald Trump but seamlessly owned by Biden. This two-track pincer would reduce the occupation and dispossession of a people to noises off in slummy Bantustans.
The West’s support for this plan has been evident for years but in the aftermath of the kibbutz massacre by Hamas and the bombardment of Gaza by Israel, it has achieved a performative frenzy that is grotesque. The United States of America and the United Kingdom have sent ships and planes and weapons to support Israel in its existential struggle with Gaza. The US secretary of state has compared Hamas to the Nazis. The IDF has produced ISIS flags and conducted atrocity tours. Biden has accused Hamas of beheading babies and his spokespersons have then ‘walked back’ the accusation because it was made without confirmation.
If Palestinians were to begin uploading pictures of exploded Gazan babies on TikTok, it is unlikely that Biden would share them. Nor would Blinken consent to an atrocity tour of a Gazan neighbourhood levelled by Israel. Killing civilians remotely or from a great height is not as wicked as killing them at close quarters. Western leaders and Western newspapers have taken to calling the Hamas massacre Israel’s 9/11. This makes Israel’s pulverisation of Gaza Palestine’s Dresden. The difference is that every Western state endorses this bloody bombardment: give them this day their daily Dresden.
As the IDF “mows the lawn” and deals with “human animals”, the sponsors of a just war against Russia outdo each other to succour and arm the occupier in Israel/Palestine. The fig leaf of the two-state solution is gone: this is full, frontal nakedness. “Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.” (Revelation 16:15)
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