Where was Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome when Hamas went rogue on October 7? Who silenced the air raid sirens that had earlier unfailingly warned residents of the kibbutzim abutting the Gaza Strip and the highrises of Tel Aviv that they must head for underground shelters? Where were the mines that the Israeli forces had planted on the border to keep Palestinian militants from using the land route into Israel? Did Hamas unblock the underground tunnels that Israel claimed to have mapped down to the last bolt-hole?
The battering that Hamas handed to the hitherto-impregnable state of Israel on Saturday—even attacking the military’s southern command headquarters—beggars belief.
Hamas militants tore through the so-called indefensible barrier between the Gaza Strip and Jewish settlements at eight points. They went in under the cover of 2,000 rockets, penetrated deeper on foot and, some say, on drones too. They fired from close range at young Israelis at a rave party in the desert over the holiday weekend, killing over 500 and taking another 100 hostage. The world is understandably awash with a wave of sympathy for the Jewish state.
The sheer brutality of the Hamas cadres—dragging away hundreds of hapless residents, young and old, at gunpoint from their homes in Sderot and other kibbutzim—is nothing short of reprehensible.
Israel has unleashed its wrath with a siege of Gaza and is preparing a full-on ground assault. Hamas, who had been given an inexplicable free run in Gaza at the expense of the moderate Fatah faction headed by Mahmoud Abbas, are now threatening to kill off one prisoner of war after another.
World leaders are standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel. Turkey and Qatar are offering to mediate. China is neutral for now and India is looking at the end of the India-Middle East-Europe trade corridor.
While the world sympathises with the Jewish people, the disastrous consequences of the Netanyahu government’s duplicitous policy must be re-examined—his ruinous disregard for the safety of Israeli citizens while foisting his own strategy of thwarting the founding of a Palestinian state.
Curious, too, is the question why Hamas chose this point in time to launch such a daring ground offensive. The group—founded in 1987 by paraplegic Sheikh Yassin, whom Palestine Liberation Organisation founder Yasser Arafat openly called ‘a creature of the Israelis’—named its offensive Operation Al Aqsa Flood. In doing so, it was clearly tapping into the anger of Palestinians in Gaza, from where Israel pulled out 9,000 settlers in 2005 to create a buffer zone that would keep a lid on 2.25 million Palestinians, and in the West Bank, where Israel has steadily expanded settlements.
Israeli forces have stomped on challenges to its writ, particularly in East Jerusalem, the capital of a future Palestinian state. This has pushed many in the West Bank to join a new militant group that calls itself the Lion’s Den. This group has violently opposed Netanyahu’s security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s repeated visits to the Temple Mount and the ‘desecration’ of the Al Aqsa mosque by Israeli tourists. Hamas does not want to give the Lion’s Den an opportunity to lead the charge, say insiders.
The far more interesting debate centres on whether the Netanyahu government did indeed have a catastrophic intelligence failure, as some have claimed. Why did it ignore repeated warnings from the Egyptian government in the weeks before the attack? A Middle East analyst said that dismissing Cairo’s alerts was part of a plan that would allow Hamas to attack and give Netanyahu a credible excuse to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and into Egypt.
There are others who say that Netanyahu was distracted, focused on limiting the judiciary’s powers to ensure he could continue in office. He failed to take cognisance that the militant group had been openly training for armed combat this past year under the aegis of Iran. On the other side, the almost continuous street protests by thousands of young Israelis had led Hamas and Tehran to mistakenly conclude that Israel was vulnerable; more so as hundreds of reservists were refusing to join the army.
Iran’s involvement has also been put down to Tehran’s inability to allow the rapprochement between its two arch-rivals—Saudi Arabia, the leader of Sunni Muslims, and its nemesis Israel. It would lead to a re-ordering of the Middle East that would greatly diminish Tehran’s clout and edge it out of the power equation. Israel’s peace agreements with other Gulf states had already set off alarm bells in Tehran. Some reports suggest that Iran hosted a meeting in Beirut some weeks ago to co-opt Hamas alongside Hezbollah into launching the offensive.
Either way, the attack has spelt finis to the deal between Tel Aviv and Riyadh. The powerful, ambitious Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman can no longer be seen as brushing away the need for a just settlement for the Palestinian people—be it a one-state solution where Palestinians are given equal rights, or a two-state solution which gives Palestinians a homeland. A Palestine not enslaved and finally free.
As Israel scrambles into attack mode and rains punishment on the Palestinian residents of Gaza, the prospect of another Camp David-style peace accord seems distant. Israel’s vulnerable northern border with Syria and Lebanon is also seeing some military activity. These proxy wars must end. Netanyahu must be persuaded that he cannot carve out a Jewish homeland that stretches from the Euphrates to the Nile, as depicted in some maps displayed in the Knesset. The region cannot afford to be sucked into another long war.