7 Quick Thoughts to Get Perspective on the Israel vs. Hamas War
If you don’t have a personal connection to either side, it’s best to stay directly out of this conflict. But, that doesn't mean you can't strive to understand it better.
Charles D. Ellison | Publisher’s Riff
We’ve wondered what’s the best advice experts can give while everyone watches, in real time everyday, the war between Israel’s military and militant political group Hamas unfold. We’re inclined to say that if you don’t have a personal connection to either side, it’s best to stay directly out of it. Just don’t take a side.
Yet, that’s hard for a transfixed, but weary public to do. It’s now impossible when the war consumes every headline. Public response is a dangerous new front, even more unpredictable than the Middle Eastern front itself, with the cacophany of social media making it much worse. What we can see is that public outrage seems to have accelerated what Hamas was aiming for with its initially horrific and indiscriminate suprise attack killing 1,400 Israelis in a rampage through towns and various kibbutz locations: provoking various governments into total regional and, potentially, world war. It’s also accelerating the aims of Israel’s far-right and rather racist political elements as indiscriminate bombing of the Gazan strip has led to the killing of nearly 2,800 Palestinians: total repression of a whole people through an opportunistic revenge war, with the mistaken assumption that such activities can be contained to Israel without provoking other regional and global players into it.
Here are some thoughts to consider as we’re going through what is definitely the most consequential war for Israel since the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (50 years on the mark, with Hamas more than likely timing that for ugly nostalgic reasons) …
Don’t forget that this is a war involving two extreme political elements, both far-right and extremist and neither representing the popular views of their respective ethnic and religious populations, nor are they representing their religious identities. Both Hamas and the far-right led Israeli Defense Force (IDF) are engaged in indiscriminate targeting and killing of civilians, which violates very explicit Geneva Convention and Additional Protocols on reducing civilian casualties.
Palestinians should not be indiscriminately targeted and killed by IDF retaliatory strikes, period. Nor should Palestinians, after this round of conflict (if it can be resolved) be forced back into apartheid as engineered by far-right political elements in Israel’s government. Understanding the history of Israel is key to this, but it does not justify the killing of civilians - either Palestinians or Israelis - when there are available diplomatic avenues.
Hamas, however, is a completely different matter and totally separate from the plight of the Palestinian people. Keep in mind: Hamas fits the complete definition of a terrorist group because it planned the active targeting and brutal killing of 1,300 unarmed civilians. That’s a terrorist act and it’s unjustifiable, regardless of said terrorist group’s stated political rationalization for the act. There is none. And it’s this act of terror which triggered the broader and growing conflict we’re seeing now.
History lessons please: bold, multiple casualty acts of terror by loosely structured terrorist groups such as what Hamas committed typically lead to declarations of larger wars. It seems that’s all terrorist groups are good for. Americans need look no further than al Qaeda’s direct attacks killing 2,977 of our own on September 11, 2001. Foreign policy expert Audrey Kurth Cronin offers an excellent point in her recent Foreign Affairs analysis ….
Terrorist groups often attempt to polarize the polities they target, carrying out attacks that will pit one part of society against another and hoping that the state will rot from within.
What Hamas was trying to do, instead, was to provoke and mobilize. Terrorists often try to provoke states into counterproductive overreactions. The nineteenth-century Russian group Narodnaya Volya used provocation effectively to undermine the tsarist regime, by killing Tsar Alexander II, which inspired a brutal state response. Killing the tsar also killed Narodnaya Volya, but the regime was unable to reform, and 30 years later the Russian Revolution overthrew it. Many other groups followed Narodnaya Volya’s example, notably the Black Hand, the Serbian nationalist group that lit the fuse of World War I by assassinating the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.
In the present case, Hamas is likely hoping that an Israeli overreaction might reverse the diplomatic momentum toward “normalization” in the Middle East, which has seen a number of Gulf Arab states start to align with Israel even in the absence of any Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. An Israeli overreaction might also increase the chances that Hezbollah and its patrons in Iran will join the fray.
In the meantime, there should be more reporting on the political aims of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nentanyahu with this conflict as it arrives at a very convenient time for him. Netanyahu still faces criminal corruption charges and the spectre of a trial in March 2024 - how long this war goes on could reshape that. He is also a very polarizing, far-right political figure who is unpopular with many Israelis and was already drawing large daily demonstrations calling for his ouster. It’s interesting and very convenient that when Egypt’s foreign affairs minister called him to warn Israel of an impending attack by Hamas, Netanyahu was dismissive (thereby making Netanyahu just as responsible). There should be ongoing questions from the media about Netanyahu’s own political motivations during this conflict.
Netanyahu, also, has been pushing for more ethnic cleansing in Israel, not just involving Palestinians, but involving the estimated 40,000 Eritreans who migrated from Eastern Africa. Just last month the Prime Minister called Eritreans a “threat” to Israel’s “character” - meanwhile, it wasn’t the Eritreans preparing to indiscriminately kill Israeli residents and wage war on Israel, it was Hamas.
This conflict is at risk of fast evolving into a variety of alarming and virtually apocalyptic scenarios. The stakes are high. People should exercise caution when engaged in public and social media discourse. There is a high chance Israel could find itself split into two fronts, fighting one war against Hamas in the South in Gaza and another war against Iran-backed Hezbollah in the North at the border with Lebanon. Perhaps it becomes a three front war if there is a flare up at the West Bank. With now two U.S. carrier groups on Israel’s coast, you’ve got one major superpower directly involved if U.S. warplanes are utilized to bomb targets on behalf of Israel. That’s already raising the prospect of regional power Iran, a longtime U.S. adversary, involved as it might see an opening of U.S. vulnerability. Do other regional governments get involved if the war spreads? Does Egypt get impatient with Israel as Gazans mass at the border it controls? If the U.S. is directly involved, will Russia view this as an opportunity for military clap-back for the U.S. ruining its aims in Ukraine? Will China play a role? Russia and China could look at this as an opportunity to gang up on the U.S. as the Biden administration already requests military budgets for the supply of allies and conflicts on four fronts: Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel … and the U.S. border with Mexico. That’s a lot of conflict we don’t want to end up getting directly involved in. While Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the U.S. can “certainly” afford it, it’s not clear at all that we can truly manage it at this scale, especially as internal political and ideological divisions grow rapidly within the U.S. during this upcoming 2024 election season.