Tag Archive for: Hamas

Israel is enabling Iran’s war of attrition

In 2017, Iran unveiled a digital clock counting down the days to the destruction of Israel in 2040. The display, located in Tehran’s Palestine Square, embodies the Islamic Republic’s long-held commitment to annihilating the Jewish state. Some view this promise as a mere rhetorical exercise to rally support at home and throughout the Muslim world. But as the Gaza war drags on and seems poised to expand, many in Israel, including former prime minister Ehud Barak, see an actionable plan that Iran seeks to execute, the consequences be damned.

The drive to eliminate Israel is rooted in the Shia eschatological belief that the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam and Islamic messiah, will reappear at the end of the world. The Iranian regime increasingly sees Israel’s eradication as a necessary step for the Mahdi’s return. The founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, attributed Islam’s historical decline to a foreign conspiracy, accusing Western powers of using Zionism to penetrate the Middle East. From this perspective, liberating Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem from Israeli control and destroying the Zionist regime would redeem and renew contemporary Islam.

Worryingly, many in the Iranian regime have indicated that the time is right to achieve this sacred goal. In 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, called the Zionist regime a ‘cancerous tumor’ that would ‘undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.’ Late last year, Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, vowed to remove Israel ‘from the face of existence’ after an Israeli airstrike in Damascus killed a high-ranking Iranian general.

From Adolf Hitler to Vladimir Putin and even Osama bin Laden, history has taught us to take threats of ideologically inspired attacks at face value. But the Islamic Republic has amply demonstrated its cautiousness; being radical doesn’t necessarily mean being irrational and suicidal. Rather than a historic showdown, nuclear or conventional, Iran seems to be waging a long-term war of attrition against Israel.

The Gaza war has illustrated Iran’s strategy of surrounding Israel with a network of proxy forces, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Syria and Iraq. The aim is to wear down Israel while avoiding a direct confrontation. True, Iran’s massive drone and missile attack against Israel in April was a notable exception, but it was necessary to maintain credibility as the leader of the so-called Axis of Resistance and among its conservative constituents.

Iran’s recent decision to step up pressure on Israel through its proxies was influenced by Hamas’s surprising capacity to isolate the country and expose its weaknesses. Specifically, Iran could not ignore the fact that Hamas’s attack on 7 October had thwarted Saudi Arabia’s plan to join the Abraham Accords and normalise diplomatic relations with Israel. The murderous attack and the war that followed have scuppered President Joe Biden’s grand vision of a US-backed Sunni Arab-Israeli alliance, which Iran sees as an existential threat.

Moreover, Iran has recently made ‘alarming and unprecedented progress toward a military nuclear program,’ according to Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. But this doesn’t mean that Iran would launch its first bomb at Tel Aviv. Instead, with this nuclear umbrella, Iran could redouble its efforts to weaken Israel, using conventional means to bring about its collapse. Given Israel’s alleged second-strike capabilities, Iran understands that a nuclear showdown would likely result in its own destruction.

When Iran warns, as its mission to the United Nations did on June 28, of ‘an obliterating war’ should Israel attack Lebanon, it wants to deter Israel and prevent a non-nuclear war that could destroy its Lebanese assets. Hezbollah joined the war against Israel only to save face with the Palestinians and would be happy for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza that would extricate the Shia militia from the conflict.

Against this backdrop, the key enabler of Iran’s war of attrition is, in fact, Israel’s own government. Netanyahu’s unrealistic goal of achieving ‘a complete victory’ in Gaza serves Iran’s strategy of miring Israel in an inconclusive conflict while orchestrating a long-term plan to destroy the Jewish state. By unnecessarily prolonging the war and refusing to accept a role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza’s governance, Netanyahu’s government has isolated Israel, strained relations with its US benefactors and eroded its own strategic deterrence.

It turns out that the only truly irrational, trigger-happy fanatics in this lethal equation are Netanyahu and his theo-fascist allies, who are determined to engage in an apocalyptic war in Gaza and Lebanon. As northern Israel burned from Hezbollah’s largest rocket barrage to date, and its civilian population was evacuated, Orit Strock, the minister of settlements and national missions from the Religious Zionist Party, exclaimed that this was a ‘time of miracles’ for West Bank settlements. Strock was referring to the belief that God would destroy Israel’s enemies and bequeath them the land.

These messianic hallucinators have a willing collaborator in Netanyahu. Together, they are doing more to annihilate the Jewish national project than Iran could ever hope to achieve on its own.

Civilian deaths and proportionality in the Israel–Hamas war

Since the Israeli response to the 7 October terrorist attack by Hamas began, the world’s focus has shifted onto Israel’s prosecution of its military campaign. But in an era where information (and misinformation) can be transmitted instantaneously, and when emotions are raw, context is largely absent or ignored. Terms such as ‘war crimes’ and ‘international law’ are thrown about by people who have little or no understanding what the terms actually mean. Accusations that a religious building, school, medical facility or ambulance has been bombed in most cases are made without knowledge of exactly what the building or vehicle was being used for. Protected civilian objects, for example, lose that protection when they are deemed to be legitimate military targets.

Hamas has spent years building tunnels underneath Gaza to house its weapons, supplies and command-and-control nodes. It is effectively using Gazans as human shields in contravention of international law. It wants to raise the risk threshold (that is, the civilian casualty count) that Israel faces in targeting its facilities. Israel, for its part, claims that it tried to separate combatants from non-combatants by dropping leaflets to people in north Gaza ordering them to head south. It was at best a perfunctory effort at minimising the number of civilians in the target area.

Exactly how many civilians and combatants in Gaza have been killed isn’t known. To date the Hamas-run Health Ministry has provided detailed figures of Palestinian civilians killed, yet there’s no mention of any Hamas deaths. The accuracy of the casualty figures have been called into question, and the Health Ministry was certainly caught out fabricating claims of an Israeli strike at al-Ahli Hospital, but without knowing how many Hamas militants were killed or injured in a strike, or the number of civilians, then determining whether the attacks, individually or collectively, breach international law is virtually impossible.

Given the increasingly strident calls for Israel to stop its aerial bombing campaign in Gaza and to reduce civilian casualties, it is perhaps worth examining the two main considerations that drive whether a military response, or aspects of a military response, can be considered to breach international law. I am not a lawyer, and nor are those that authorise the engagement of a target. Lawyers give advice, but it will be a uniformed non-lawyer military officer, or in some cases a senior politician, who will ultimately approve a strike.

The two guiding principles that inform a person’s decision boil down to ultimately subjective concepts: military necessity and proportionality. Both are concepts that can be argued ad infinitum, but the reality is that those charged with observing them often have to make such life-or-death decisions quickly and repeatedly.

Proportionality is perhaps the more contested of the two, and there are any number of well-informed backgrounders on social media explaining the formula that US forces came up with in trying to systematise the concept in the theatres they fought in over the past 20 years. It is an inexact science—indeed, it’s not a science at all, because the measure of proportionality relates not to the number of people being killed but to the military advantage being obtained.

The military effect is relatively easy to determine in a sparsely inhabited, billiard-table-type operating environment. The risk of civilian casualties is low and the nature of the military target is easy to discern. In dense urban terrain such as exists in parts of Gaza, and with an enemy that operates among, and underneath, the civilian population, the decision-making process is much harder and determining proportionality more difficult.

Risk tolerance is also a key practical factor in determining proportionality. In Israel’s case, it’s clear that the level of risk tolerance for civilian casualties and hence the calculation of proportionality are different to what would have been accepted before 7 October. But revenge is not sufficient a reason to make risk tolerance more elastic.

What is likely driving the increased risk tolerance for civilian casualties on the part of Israeli targeters, even more than simple revenge, is the mission. Politically it is to destroy Hamas; militarily it is to degrade the group sufficiently that it is unable to reconstitute for years, if ever. On this, the Israeli government has the backing of US President Joe Biden, who is acutely aware that more than 30 US citizens were killed in Hamas’s initial attack on 7 October and that nearly two dozen were taken as hostages.

The tempo of the operation, with Israel claiming that thousands of targets in Gaza have been hit, makes it difficult to accurately determine the likely impact on civilians of every strike. But before we can decide whether an airstrike was proportional or not, we would need much more information than we are actually privy to. To begin with, there’s the information on which the Israeli targeters who planned the strike based their decisions, relating to not only the risk of civilian casualties (which in many cases are more or less guaranteed) but also the steps they took to minimise them (such as selection of munitions type, attack timing and approach). The newly appointed UN special representative for human rights and counterterrorism, Australia’s own Ben Saul noted this challenge in categorising an airstrike as breaching international law in a recent interview.

The recent attacks on targets in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza provide a case in point. The first strike was alleged to have killed 50 Palestinians and wounded 150 more. The Israelis claim that the first strike killed Ibrahim Biari, a key planner of the 7 October attacks and allegedly commander of the northern Gaza sector, while the second strike killed the commander of Hamas’s anti-armoured forces. It also claimed that other Hamas fighters were killed in the strike because it destroyed a Hamas command post built underneath the refugee camp. This reflects the nature of decisions that need to be made in conflicts such as this.

Assuming that both parties’ claims about casualties in Jabalia are true, Hamas clearly breached international law by deliberately building a militarily key target among the civilian population. The military necessity of the target—the headquarters of Hamas’s northern Gaza defence—is readily apparent. But was the loss of 50 Palestinian lives proportional to the military advantage Israel gained in conducting the strike? Were there other ways of disabling Biari’s ability to coordinate Hamas’s defence without killing him, other Hamas fighters and 50 Palestinians? Or was the opportunity to kill Biari a fleeting one, where firm intelligence placed him at that precise point but for only a limited time, precluding other methods of disabling his command? That is the type of information needed to make an informed judgement on the legality of strikes.

This may seem a sanitised way of looking at issues of proportionality when the pictures beamed nightly into people’s living rooms and uploaded every minute on various social media platforms show that there’s a real cost to the Gaza campaign and real children and civilians are being killed daily. Western governments have understood this and are beginning to change their tone on Israel by degrees. Unfortunately, the levels of the main players’ risk tolerances virtually guarantee more civilian casualties.

Seeking to make up for his government’s spectacular security failure on 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu willingly accepts civilian casualties among the Palestinian population as long as he destroys Hamas. Hamas invites civilian casualties by its positioning of military assets, and now that it knows that Israel’s risk tolerance is well beyond anything it has seen before, it likely sees outcries over more civilian casualties leading to a ceasefire as its only chance of survival. And Washington hopes that by supporting Netanyahu’s military campaign and calling for adherence to international norms it can buy Israel time to inflict grievous damage on Hamas before the White House will have to acquiesce to public opinion and back some kind of ceasefire. Israel, Hamas and Washington are all accepting of civilian casualties in Gaza—they only differ in how many and why.

The threat spectrum

Planet A  

A group of scientists have issued a stark warning that the planet is being pushed into a climate crisis that could threaten the lives of up to six billion people this century. In a report released last week in the journal Bioscience, 12 scientists from Asia, Europe and North America said that they were ‘shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023’.

The report provides a snapshot of the health of the earth measured against 35 ‘planetary vital signs’. The analysis shows that human activity has reached new extremes on 20 of these measurements, including global gross domestic product, fossil-fuel subsidies, annual carbon pollution and glacier thinning. A lead author on the report says: ‘We’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.’

Record-breaking climate anomalies including extreme heat waves, floods and bushfires have rocked many parts of the world in recent years. Researchers have found that 14 of the large-scale disasters recorded in the past year were ‘definitely’ or ‘likely’ exacerbated by climate change, killing thousands and affecting millions.

Democracy watch

Several national and local governments in major European countries have banned pro-Palestinian protests and slogans that have arisen since the Israel–Hamas war began on 7 October. Citing the need to maintain public order and safety, these governments are testing the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. Germany, France, Italy and Britain, along with the European Commission president, are among those who have offered their overwhelming support for Israel.

In Berlin, education authorities last week told schools that they could ban students from wearing the Palestinian Kufiya scarf and ‘free Palestine’ stickers. France is likewise cracking down on pro-Palestine sentiment, with its interior minister announcing that he had initiated judicial proceedings for ‘antisemitism, apologia for terrorism and support for Hamas’ against 11 organisations. Local authorities in France are also banning pro-Palestine protests on a case-by-case basis.

More than 8,000 Gazans and 1,400 Israelis are estimated to have been killed since the conflict started.

Information operations

Members of the Kuki-Zo and Meitei communities have taken to social media in a bid to shape narratives on the ethnic violence that has engulfed India’s northeastern state of Manipur since 3 May. The information operations range from campaigns brimming with misinformation, disinformation, hate, claims of victimhood and requests for solidarity.

The Meitei-controlled state government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party has used internet shutdowns to control the public narrative about the turmoil while Kuki activists mount a digital resistance. Analysis of the digital battlefield, largely fought on X, mapped 2,722 handles to 487 Meitei-affiliated accounts that often accuse the Kuki community of ‘narcoterrorism’ and 455 Kuki-affiliated accounts calling for a separate state.

Social media warriors on both sides feel that their communities have been wronged and will likely continue to press their versions of the story in an effort to win hearts and minds in the rest of India and the world.

Follow the money

Australia has reimposed financial sanctions and travel bans on 19 Iranian individuals and 57 entities for their role in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Announced earlier this month, the sanctions were previously imposed under a UN Security Council resolution and have now been listed under Australia’s autonomous sanctions framework.

The Australian government has long been concerned that Iran has violated the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and continued to expand its ballistic- and cruise-missile programs. The action by Australia will be matched by a range of international partners including the European Council, which has announced that it will take the ‘necessary steps to maintain the restrictive measures’ in place under the EU non-proliferation regime on Iran.

Iran’s missile program has raised tensions in an already volatile Middle East. Despite being heavily sanctioned, Tehran has been militarily and financially propping up Hamas and other terrorist groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah for years.

Terror byte

FBI director Christopher Wray has told the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that Hamas’s surprise invasion of Israel on 7 October could inspire large-scale terrorist attacks against Americans and the West. The remarks came as other US officials reported an increase in threats made against Jewish, Muslim and Arab Americans since the start of the Israel–Hamas war.

US government concern over ‘historic levels’ of homegrown violent extremism may have reached new heights over the past few weeks, but the tempo of anti-Semitic acts in the US has surged in recent years. Three of the past five audits of anti-Semitic incidents in America conducted by the Anti-Defamation League have recorded unprecedented numbers.

This trendline is reflected in a recent survey, which found that 20% of Americans believe six or more anti-Jewish tropes, more than double the rate reported in 2019 and the highest level measured in decades—a dire situation given the spread of white-supremacist propaganda and new nationalist groups across the country.

Gaza tunnels give Hamas an advantage in fight against Israel

Israel’s intention in ordering the evacuation of civilians from Gaza City is to create a free-fire zone where anyone who remains can be assumed to be a member of Hamas. The next phase of its coordinated air, ground and naval offensive in Gaza will be putting in ground troops to secure northern Gaza, which will allow specialist units to start searching and destroying the Hamas tunnel system.

This phase could be costly in terms of Israeli lives because Hamas fighters underground will have access to the surface to inflict casualties on Israeli troops—in much the same way as Islamic State fighters did in Mosul when they inflicted heavy casualties on advancing Iraqi soldiers.

Gaza tunnel entrances are hidden under houses, mosques and schools, while the territory’s narrow streets and alleyways are expected to be infested with booby traps and command-detonated improvised explosive devices. It will also be difficult and dangerous for the Israel Defense Forces to clear a path through collapsed buildings and areas blocked by rubble.

Use of tunnelling is not a new insurgent tactic. Australia had experience of it in South Vietnam where A Company, of the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, was ambushed from and uncovered the famous Cu Chi tunnel system. Insurgent forces that lack the capability to take on regular forces head to head can use tunnels to fight a survivable war of attrition that may eventually lead to war weariness and a negotiated settlement.

Once Israeli Special Forces get into the tunnel system, their aim will be to kill Hamas leaders, destroy Hamas fighters and weapons—particularly the rocket arsenal—and free any Israeli hostages held in the tunnels. However, it will be a costly process because Hamas is intimately familiar with the environment and has had time to booby-trap the tunnels and prepare defensive positions underground.

Indeed, Hamas has spent two decades building the labyrinth of deep, defensive tunnels to resist any ground assault by Israeli troops. It started building them in Gaza even before Israel withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005. Hamas ramped up the construction after both Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on the area in 2007.

The extensive tunnel network is believed to be as much as 30 metres beneath the surface in some places and is an integral part of the Gaza defences Hamas has spent years preparing.

After the last flare-up of fighting between Israel and Hamas in 2021, the IDF claimed to have destroyed more than 60 miles of tunnels. Hamas responded, saying that only 5% was damaged and that its underground infrastructure comprised 300 miles of tunnelling.

Daphne Richemond-Barak at Reichman University in Israel, an expert on the tunnel system, said the tunnels beneath Gaza were deeper and more sophisticated than the cross-border tunnels used to access Israeli territory.

She noted: ‘The tunnels inside Gaza are different because Hamas is using them on a regular basis. They are probably more comfortable to be in for longer periods of time. They are definitely equipped for a longer, sustained presence. The leaders are hiding there, they have command-and-control centres, they use them for transport and lines of communication. They are equipped with electricity, lighting and rail tracks.’

Jonathan Conricus, an IDF spokesperson, said in a briefing last week: ‘Think of the Gaza Strip as one layer for civilians and then another layer for Hamas. We are trying to get to that second layer that Hamas has built. These aren’t bunkers for Gazan civilians. It’s only for Hamas and other terrorists so that they can continue to fire rockets at Israel, to plan operations, to launch terrorists into Israel.’

Even if the Israeli forces are able to destroy the tunnels and clear Hamas out of northern Gaza, they will then have to decide whether to occupy the territory—which could take large numbers of troops—or to withdraw.

Tom Beckett, executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the Middle East, said: ‘If the IDF attempts to mount a garrison large enough to control Gaza while continuing to protect the country from threats emanating from the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Syria, its capacity will soon be stretched thinly.’

Israel had clearly become complacent under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about its ability to contain the Hamas threat and control Israel’s Palestinian population. The latest round of violence shows once again that Israel will at some point have to engage in a negotiated settlement with the Palestinian leadership, whoever that may turn out to be.

Even if Israel decides to force more than a million Palestinian civilians out of northern Gaza on a permanent basis, it still has to contend with the more than three million disaffected Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

Israel may find Gaza easy to enter, but it will be hard to leave

As any army officer will tell you, it’s very hard to achieve a destroy mission. Yet that is what, publicly at least, Israeli leaders have tasked the Israel Defense Forces to do. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to ‘crush and destroy Hamas’, adding that ‘every Hamas member is a dead man’; Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised to ‘wipe [them] off the face of the earth’ and said that they would ‘cease to exist’.

The IDF has been slightly more circumspect, saying variously that its mission is to ‘degrade and destroy Hamas’s capability to attack Israel’ or to ‘dismantle Hamas and its military capability’ and that it is targeting Hamas’s operational and government capabilities, including the group’s leadership.

There’s obviously a political imperative that drives members of Netanyahu’s government to use the words they use, given that it is a government on whose watch 1,200 Israelis were killed in the attack launched from Gaza on 7 October. And the ground phase of the Israeli response will be significant and consequential—as one spokesperson said, this is war, not another military operation. The Israeli air campaign has already been going for days and the ground campaign is not far off. Gallant has said that it will take weeks or months to achieve the military aim to eliminate Hamas.

So, what will mission success look like for Israel? Hostage recovery is obviously an immediate priority, and there’s no doubt that Hamas will pay an enormous price for it reckless and bloodthirsty attack that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, mostly Israelis but also many foreign nationals whose governments also hold Hamas accountable for their deaths. Israel has already indicated that this won’t be another mow-the-grass-style operation where ground forces’ incursions into Gaza are limited in duration and scope since the punitive effect is considered to have been sufficient to re-establish the rules of the game.

But the attack from Gaza did away with any concept of conflict norms, and because of that the region is entering uncharted territory. The number of civilians killed in Gaza has likely matched those killed in Israel already, and those numbers will only rise despite Israel’s direction that residents evacuate to the south of Wadi Gaza. Israeli ground and air forces will exact a frightening toll on Hamas during the course of the operation, setting back its operational capability by years. There’s no doubt that Hamas will be degraded to a larger extent than it has ever been before. But it is unlikely to be destroyed.

The big question, though, is what happens after the Israeli ground forces have prosecuted all the targets, cleared all the ground they have been required to clear and are left in the semi-deserted wasteland that is Gaza. If they seek to destroy Hamas, including its ability to govern, who will administer Gaza? To withdraw precipitously will simply allow Hamas, or those with similar views, to re-establish themselves, while the idea that the Palestinian Authority would be willing (or capable) of governing Gaza after an absence of 20 years is similarly fraught. And the idea that Israel would seek to re-occupy Gaza is untenable politically on many levels.

It’s likely that the Israeli government has yet to decide what happens after the bloodletting has been exhausted. For now, it’s time for war.

But if there’s one lesson that should have been learned from the US experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; the Gulf states in Yemen; and Israel’s own two-decade-long occupation of south Lebanon, it’s that it is always easier to forcibly enter a country than it is to leave it. While the desire for revenge is the dominant driver of the Israeli government at the moment, its desire to destroy Hamas may not be practically achievable. More importantly though, Israel’s leaders needs to start turning their minds now to what happens after that desire for revenge has been sated.

The spiral of violence that led to Hamas

Hamas’s brazen and vicious attacks within Israel have rightly drawn condemnation from around the world. If this is a war, as both sides agree it is, then Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians counts as a major war crime.

But the brutality demonstrated by Hamas didn’t emerge in a vacuum. The lesson of what is happening in Israel and Gaza is that violence breeds more violence.

The last real chance of avoiding the tragic conflict being waged between Israel and Hamas was destroyed by a single killing: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The assassin was not a Palestinian militant, but an Israeli extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords, by which Rabin sought a ‘land for peace’ deal that was anathema to Israeli radicals, for whom Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land is non-negotiable.

Rabin’s assassination occurred at the end of a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 Israelis, hopeful of an end to hostilities between Israel and Palestinians. At the time, that hope seemed realistic.

The great beneficiaries of the assassination were Israeli nationalists, above all Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party. Netanyahu had rejected the Oslo Accords, because they required Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967. In a protest against the accords, and against Rabin, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession, complete with a coffin and hangman’s noose.

In the years after Rabin’s murder, and particularly following the failure to reach a settlement at Camp David in 2000, right-wing extremists gained power in Israel, and the prospect of achieving a viable Palestinian state in the occupied territories all but disappeared. At the same time, the failure of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah movement to deliver Palestinian statehood strengthened the Islamist Hamas, which, along with other Palestinian militant organisations, bases its legitimacy on killing Israelis (as well as accused collaborators with Israel).

With Hamas extending its influence (and exporting its violence) from Gaza, which it has controlled since 2007, to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority is nominally in charge, a growing number of Israelis supported the repressive measures Netanyahu promised. And with the hapless PA unable to halt the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the cycle of extremism and violence continued.

Netanyahu now leads the most fanatically nationalist government in Israel’s history, a government that includes Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose responsibilities include administration of a large part of the occupied West Bank. Smotrich has repeatedly incited violence against Palestinians.

In February, after a Palestinian shot dead two Israeli settlers, hundreds of Israelis rampaged through Huwara, a nearby Palestinian village, in scenes reminiscent of Cossack pogroms against Jewish settlements in Russia more than a century earlier. The Israelis set fire to Huwara, leaving one villager dead and others injured. And, like the Russian police when a pogrom was underway, Israeli forces in the area didn’t intervene to protect the residents or arrest the perpetrators.

None of this excuses the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists who killed more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them defenceless civilians, including women and children. Horrific videos show Hamas gunmen shooting, in cold blood, young people at a music festival. As a proportion of the population, this attack killed 10 times as many people as al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

When Hamas attacks Israeli civilians, it knows that this will lead to Israeli counterattacks in Gaza that are bound to kill and injure many civilians. Hamas locates its military sites in residential areas, hoping that this tactic will restrain Israeli attacks, or at least lessen international support for Israel.

Hamas reportedly holds roughly 150 hostages and has said that it will kill one every time Israel bombs a Gazan home without warning. Hamas leaders surely remember that in 2011, Netanyahu, as prime minister, was willing to free more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Against that background, they may believe that Israel won’t be prepared to sacrifice the lives of the hostages in order to achieve its military objectives.

If that’s what the leaders of Hamas believe, they may find that they have made a mistake. Whether Israel can eliminate Hamas as a military force remains to be seen, but it’s clear that in the battle to achieve that objective, Israel will have to be prepared to lose many lives, probably of both soldiers and hostages.

How far Israel will go with its declared intention to deny electricity, fuel, food and water to the two million citizens of Gaza, many of them children, is hard to know. What is certain is that Hamas’s brutal crimes do not entitle Israel to starve children.

In the eyes of many outside observers, the cause of Palestinian autonomy and statehood has long held the moral high ground. Now that cause has been stained by the gruesome murders and abductions—many of them captured on video—carried out in its name. Paradoxically, if Palestinians are ever to regain the moral high ground, they must hope for the destruction of Hamas. As long as Hamas can claim to represent them, the evil it has perpetrated will taint their cause.

An Israeli dilemma

The history of Israel has often been a history of conflict. A partial list includes the 1948 Arab–Israeli War that followed Israel’s birth, the Israeli–British–French attempt in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal and topple Egypt’s Arab nationalist leader, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. There are also the two Palestinian intifadas and numerous smaller conflicts.

To this list must now be added Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel. Thousands of short-range rockets were launched from Hamas-controlled Gaza against towns and cities in western Israel. Hundreds if not thousands of Hamas fighters crossed into Israel by breaking through defensive barriers, flying over them or sailing around them.

The human toll of these attacks is enormous and growing. More than 900 Israelis have lost their lives. Several thousand have been injured. Some two hundred Israelis attending a concert were killed in cold blood. At least 100 have been abducted. It was terror—the intentional harming of innocents by a non-state actor—on a large scale.

It was also a colossal Israeli intelligence failure. The most likely explanation for Israel’s being caught unprepared is less a lack of warning than a lack of attention. As was the case in 1973, the attack has demonstrated that complacency and an underestimation of the adversary can be dangerous.

It was a defensive failure as well. Deterrence broke down. Expensive physical barriers were overrun. Israeli military readiness and troop levels were woefully inadequate, possibly because attention had shifted to protecting settlers in the occupied West Bank. There will surely be official inquiries and independent investigations.

Why Hamas attacked remains a subject of debate. The most likely explanation is that the group wanted to demonstrate that it alone—not the Palestinian Authority that rules the West Bank and not Arab governments—is able and willing to protect and promote Palestinian interests.

The timing of the assault is another matter. It’s possible that the date was chosen to coincide with the last successful surprise attack against Israel, carried out by Egypt and Syria 50 years ago almost to the day. But the planning and training for the attack took place over months, which suggests a strategic purpose not tied to a specific event. The timing may have been motivated by a desire to disrupt the growing momentum in negotiations to normalise diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, an outcome strongly opposed by Iran, the principal backer of Hamas. Hamas may also have sought to take advantage of Israeli political divisions. Or all of the above.

The Hamas attackers took hostages back to Gaza for two reasons: to limit Israel’s freedom of action lest those individuals be placed at even greater risk, and to exchange them for Hamas operatives held in Israeli jails.

Israel now faces an acute dilemma. It wants to deal a decisive blow to Hamas, both to weaken the organisation militarily and to discourage future attacks and Iranian support for them. And it wants to accomplish this without bringing Hezbollah, which has some 150,000 rockets in Lebanon that could reach much of Israel, directly into the conflict. It also doesn’t want the war to expand to the West Bank. Restoring meaningful deterrence without widening the war will be difficult.

There is the additional consideration that Israel’s military options are limited. The hostages are one reason. In addition, occupying—or, more precisely, reoccupying—Gaza would be a nightmare. There are few, if any, military undertakings more difficult than urban warfare, and Gaza is one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world. Many Israeli soldiers would lose their lives or be captured in such an operation.

Massive attacks from the air, designed to avoid the need for a ground invasion, will inevitably kill or injure a significant number of innocent inhabitants of Gaza, thereby decreasing international sympathy and support for Israel. Efforts to shut off Gaza’s supplies of food, water, fuel and electricity will also be counterproductive. Regional and international pressure for a ceasefire would surely mount.

There’s also the question of the operation’s strategic objective. Hamas cannot be eliminated, because it represents an ideology as much as an organisation. Efforts to destroy it risk building support for it. What comes to mind is the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the famous question posed by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who wondered whether American drone strikes on suspected terrorists, which at times killed innocents, were effective. His question—‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?’—remains worth asking.

All of which is to say that while there must be a military component to Israel’s response to its security challenge, including reconstituting Israel’s ability to defend itself from attacks and targeted strikes on terrorists in Gaza, there is no solely military answer. A diplomatic element will need to be introduced into the equation, including a credible Israeli plan for bringing about a viable Palestinian state.

There’s an American saying that you can’t beat something with nothing. Rewarding those Palestinians who are willing to reject violence and reach an accommodation with Israel is still the best way to marginalise Hamas.

Without evidence, it’s unwise to assume Iran is Hamas’s puppeteer

As the world comes to grips with the death toll from the multi-pronged assault by Hamas on southern Israel and tries to understand how Israel’s security agencies were blindsided and its military not appropriately postured to respond, people also want to know why it happened and what the strategic aim was.

There’s been a mad scramble from some in the commentariat to point the finger at Iran as being responsible. Tehran is a long-time supporter of Hamas and the Palestinian cause in general and is implacably opposed to Israel. Ideological differences—Sunni Hamas versus Shia Iran—are routinely set aside because Iran and Hamas are fellow swimmers in what Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah once described as the ‘Islamic current’.

But those differences are nevertheless real, and to describe Hamas as an organisation beholden to Iran and willing to do its bidding is simplistic at best. As a Palestinian group based in Gaza, it has a peculiarly Palestinian and Gazan worldview separate from that of Iran and Hezbollah. Relations between Hamas and Hezbollah, for example, soured over disagreements over whom to support in the Syrian uprising.

There’s no denying that Iran and Hamas have enjoyed a close relationship. Tehran has provided training, logistical and financial support as part of its support to ‘frontline’ semi- and non-state actors bordering Israel. But to portray Hamas as simply doing Tehran’s bidding is to misunderstand the nature of such relationships because it denies Hamas any agency. The working theory put out there is that Hamas launched the attack after approval from Tehran because Iran wanted to scupper the normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that the White House had been assiduously working on for months.

If such a deal were reached, the argument goes, Iran would be isolated through some grand coalition of Israel and Gulf Arab states. But Palestinians’ concerns are arguably greater given their fear that normalisation without resolution of their issue would consign them to the dustbin of history. Concerns about what normalisation might mean for Palestinians, including their eventual absorption into Israel, were heightened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s September speech to the UN General Assembly.

The Tehran-as-puppeteer theory was given a push along by the Wall Street Journal in an article claiming that the Gaza attack was given the green light by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps during a meeting in Beirut on 3 October. According to the report, the coordination had been ongoing since August and had included attendance by Hezbollah’s secretary-general, the head of the IRGC Quds Force, the Iranian foreign minister, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the head of Hamas’s military wing. If that is true, it’s extraordinary that nobody appears to have been aware of it.

The article also claimed that Iran had pushed for closer cooperation between Palestinian groups in their fight against Israel and a coordinated rocket attack in April had been ‘a roaring success’. The reality of those rocket strikes, however, fell well short of being a ‘roaring success’.

Australian media such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian have accepted the Journal’s claims without challenge. Others have criticised the sourcing of the report.

The right-of-centre Journal article must also be seen in light of a domestic American political environment where Republican members of Congress and presidential hopefuls are heaping criticism on President Joe Biden for his recent retrieval of American hostages held in Iran, in return for the release of more than US$6 billion in funds owed by South Korea to Iran but frozen due to Trump-era sanctions. Donald Trump said the attack was a direct result of Biden giving that money to Iran, a line of attack echoed by other Republican hopefuls.

A local Lebanese newspaper has run with a version of the same story, citing the passage of information between groups based in part on Hezbollah’s experience of probes against Israeli border security. Accepting the theory that the Gazan attack was centrally planned and directed, though, means that Hamas decided to accept the future deaths of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Palestinians in Gaza from the consequent Israeli retaliation simply to achieve an Iranian strategic goal.

The idea that Iran was willing to fight Israel to the last Palestinian may seem attractive, but there’s precious little evidence that this is the case. All these groups have their own domestic constituencies to consider, and while they may all share a strategic aim to attack Israel, decisions to undertake an operation of this scale wouldn’t be imposed on an actor.

Although it’s early days yet, Iran has denied any involvement and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has indicated that there’s no evidence that Iran directed or was behind the attack. The senior Israel Defense Forces spokesman has also indicated that Israel couldn’t yet say if Iran was involved in the operational planning or training for this attack.

The savagery unleashed by Hamas gunmen on innocent Israelis and, as is now becoming apparent, some non-Israelis cannot be justified for any reason. And given the unprecedented nature of this attack, there will be an unprecedented military response from Israel. But there are many Palestinians (and some non-Palestinians) who believe the operation was justified as revenge for the thousands of Gazans killed by Israeli forces over the past decade.

For Hamas there will be kudos for doing what other Palestinian groups have been incapable of doing or too timid to do—carrying out a major attack against Israel proper. It may have welcomed Iranian support and training over the years, but there’s no indication that Hamas needed Iran’s support to plan or execute its savage assault or Tehran’s permission to launch such an attack.

Hamas’s strategic logic wasn’t developed in the boulevards of Tehran; it was developed in the slums of Gaza. Those advocating the omnipotent Iranian puppeteer theory would do well to understand that groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah have their own domestic agendas that also drive their decision-making.

Hubris meets nemesis in Israel

Sooner or later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destructive political magic, which has kept him in power for 15 years, was bound to usher in a major tragedy. A year ago, he formed the most radical and incompetent government in Israel’s history. Not to worry, he assured his critics, ‘I’ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel.’

But by ruling out any political process in Palestine and boldly asserting, in his government’s binding guidelines, that ‘the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel’, Netanyahu’s fanatical government made bloodshed inevitable.

Admittedly, blood flowed in Palestine even when peace-seekers such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were in office. But Netanyahu recklessly invited violence by paying his coalition partners any price for their support. He let them grab Palestinian lands, expand illegal settlements, scorn Muslim sensibilities regarding the sacred mosques on the Temple Mount, and promote suicidal delusions about the reconstruction of the biblical Temple in Jerusalem (in itself a recipe for what could be the mother of all Muslim jihads). Meanwhile, he also sidelined the more moderate Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, effectively beefing up the radical Hamas in Gaza.

According to Netanyahu’s twisted logic, strong Islamist rule in Gaza would be the ultimate argument against a political solution in Palestine. By rewarding the extremists and castigating the moderates, Netanyahu believed that he, unlike the soft leftists, had finally found the solution to the Palestine conflict. The Abraham Accords, which normalised Israel’s relations with four Arab states (and will probably soon include Saudi Arabia), blinded him to the Palestinian volcano beneath his feet.

But, in the ruthless, barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians in the villages surrounding Gaza, Netanyahu’s hubris met its nemesis in the form of Hamas’s savagery. Fifty years and a day after Egypt and Syria launched their surprise attack in what became known as the Yom Kippur War, Hamas stormed Gaza’s borders with Israel and slaughtered hundreds of defenceless civilians. Scenes of young women raped next to the bodies of their friends were recorded on social networks. About a hundred people—among them whole families, elderly women and toddlers—have been abducted and taken to Gaza.

Many have expressed surprise that Hamas so easily penetrated Israel’s defences along the border with Gaza. But there were no such defences. When Hamas began slaughtering hundreds of defenceless civilians, Israel’s glorious army was mostly deployed elsewhere. Many were assigned to the West Bank to protect religious settlers in clashes (sometimes initiated by the settlers themselves) with local Palestinians, and in festivals around invented holy shrines. For long hours, desperate men and women cried for help, and the strongest army in the Middle East was nowhere to be seen.

The assumption was always that Gaza was not a vital priority. The underground wall of sensors and fortified concrete that Israel has built around the enclave was supposed to block the tunnels through which Hamas tried in the past to penetrate Israeli border villages. It was of no use. Hamas militias simply stormed the fences on the surface.

There was no intelligence about Hamas’s intentions, either. The ‘start-up nation’, whose sophisticated cyber units can detect the movement of a leaf in a tree in an Iranian base in Syria, knew nothing of Hamas’s plans. Israel’s obsession with Iran’s possible nuclear breakout and its internal security services’ focus on the occupied West Bank partly explain this negligence.

The attack by Hamas was not just a tactical surprise, but also a strategic bombshell. This was apparent in the group’s calculated decision not to participate in any of the clashes of the past two years between Israel and Islamic Jihad, another militant group in Gaza. Hamas was creating the impression that it was becoming a government more interested in meeting its people’s material needs than in presumably ineffective armed resistance. And the Israelis believed what they wanted to believe: that subsidies from Qatar and their own gestures would dissuade Hamas from future military adventures.

And now what? Restore deterrence? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? A land invasion is difficult to imagine. The atrocious level of destruction and casualties that would entail is one reason, with the many Israeli hostages now in Gaza providing additional insurance. The risk of Hezbollah opening an additional front from Lebanon in the north is another. Hezbollah’s capabilities dwarf those of Hamas, and a two-front war, with Iran possibly backing Israel’s foes, is an apocalyptic scenario.

This is exactly why US President Joe Biden warned Israel’s enemies ‘not to exploit the crisis’. To drive home the point, Biden has ordered the US Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean.

But then when has the Israel–Palestine conflict ever responded to Cartesian logic?

We learned from Clausewitz that war is supposed to make sense in the context of a political objective. Hamas’s current war has such objectives: securing its hegemony in the Palestinian national movement, freeing its men from Israeli prisons by trading hostages for them, and preventing Palestine’s plight from being forsaken by the ‘Arab brethren’ in their rush to normalise relations with the Jewish state. For Netanyahu’s government, however, this is a purely reactive war with no political objective beyond that of reaching a pause until the next round of hostilities.

A country that didn’t hold its leaders accountable for an outcome like what has played out in the horrific scenes around Gaza would lose its claim to being a genuine democracy. But Netanyahu’s machine of poisonous political disinformation is already at work disseminating a conspiracy theory according to which leftist army officers were responsible for the negligence that led to this dirty war. No one should be surprised that Netanyahu would resort to the infamous stab-in-the-back narrative—a conspiracy theory also peddled by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. How else could the inciter-in-chief explain his criminal negligence?

When the fighting ends, negotiations for an exchange of hostages and prisoners are inevitable. Possibly, the clearly ineffective blockade on Gaza should be lifted. In any case, a different question will remain: whether the barbarity that the Hamas militias displayed in the killing fields around Gaza is the right path to Palestinian redemption. Their moment of supposed glory will live in infamy for many years to come.

Australian statecraft will be tested as Israel confronts Hamas’s terror

Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on 7 October marks a decisive moment in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and will be a crucial test of Australian statecraft. As a respected regional power with significant interests in the stability of the Middle East, Australia has the means and legitimacy required to play an active role in managing the crisis and developing the basis for an enduring peace. As shown by the collective response to Russian aggression against Ukraine, sitting on the fence is not a viable option.

To channel Churchill, we are not even at the beginning of the end of this crisis. Right now, we are fixated by the horrific reports coming from Israel, which include the deliberate slaughter and hostage-taking of hundreds of Israeli civilians going about their ordinary lives. Israel has been shocked to its core just as the American people were by the 9/11 attacks. In the coming weeks and months, we should expect Israel to retaliate by attempting to destroy Hamas and its grip on the Gaza Strip, which will almost certainly involve a long and bloody ground campaign that will test the stomach of public opinion in Australia and around the world.

This crisis has much wider implications for the Middle East and global order. Israeli strategists will already be planning how to reshape the region in pursuit of long-term security. Those plans will cover measures against Iran and its regional proxies, including Hezbollah, which is already exchanging fire with Israeli forces across the border with Lebanon. The course Israel pursues will depend largely on the position of the US, which has deployed an aircraft carrier and other warships to Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Among the autocratic powers, Beijing’s position will weigh on decisions in Tehran and Moscow. Canberra must acknowledge this wider context without losing sight of the facts on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The first task for the Australian government is to get its lines right. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has condemned Hamas’s attack as indiscriminate and abhorrent and recognised Israel’s right to defend itself. A stronger and more coherent message would be sent if Australian ministers consistently referred to Hamas’s conduct as terrorism rather than as fitting the ‘definition of terror’, which was how the PM put it. This would align our rhetoric with the US, the UK and others and reflect the fact that Australia already lists Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong is right to urge for the protection of civilians—after all, the laws of war must be observed even when dealing with terrorists that pay them no heed. But opposition leader Peter Dutton has a point when he criticises those calling at this stage for restraint—the immediate threat to Israeli hostages and civilians in range of Hamas’s rockets must frame our expectation of proportionality. Finding a common and consistent lexicon to discuss this crisis could help avoid the national debate descending into partisan sniping and allegations that Labor has feet of clay on Palestine and Iran.

The government must also be clear that this seemingly faraway crisis affects Australian interests and the safety of our citizens. Our potential adversaries around the world will be gauging solidarity and resolve among Western countries, as well as mulling opportunities to exploit the crisis for gain elsewhere, as we saw from Beijing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like our regional partners, we rely on stability in the Middle East not only for critical supplies like oil, but also maritime connectivity to Europe through the Suez Canal. At an individual level, the murder of Israelis in Egypt raises the risk to Australians overseas, Jewish or otherwise. Thankfully, the public’s clear-eyed indignation about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine shows that Australians are not isolationists by nature—we are ready and able to handle a grown-up conversation about the stakes and the options we have.

Beyond our shores, Australia should consistently articulate its stake in this crisis across our diplomatic channels. While Australia lacks heft in the Middle East, it has regular dialogue with Indo-Pacific partners—including large Muslim countries like Indonesia and Malaysia—that have intimate ties to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Similarly, Australia’s Quad partner Japan relies on the Middle East for more than 90% of its oil imports and has expanded its diplomatic reach accordingly. Strong support for Israel from another Quad partner, India, would also be significant. Even Indo-Pacific partners that don’t immediately spring to mind could send useful signals. For instance the Philippines, with its experience of Islamist terrorism, might send a message similar to that of Australia. Wong met her counterpart at the Philippines–Australia Ministerial Meeting in Adelaide today.

Australia’s upcoming summits with the US and China are an acid test for the government’s vision of middle-power agency in a crisis. Albanese will expect to discuss this crisis with President Joe Biden when he visits Washington at the end of the month. He should also be clear that the crisis in the Middle East will be high on the priority list when he visits Beijing shortly afterwards, however crowded the bilateral and regional security agenda. If Chinese leaders want China to be seen as a responsible country, they cannot duck playing a constructive role in this crisis—in public comments and through channels to Moscow, Tehran and other Middle Eastern capitals. Even more importantly, the appearance of Australian disinterest in the Middle East that could be conveyed by not raising the topic might be viewed by Beijing as another sign that Western democracies are parochial, distracted and ripe for division.

Finally, no discussion of the Middle East should be attempted without drawing on history. This month marks the 106th anniversary of the First World War Battle of Be’er Sheva, in which ANZAC forces played a decisive role. Today, the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva is handling the casualties of Hamas’s terrorism. Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles spoke about the enduring ties between Australia and Israel at the 2022 Be’er Sheva Dialogue, which ASPI jointly hosts. Now is the time to ensure that Australia again plays its part in seeking that most elusive but worthy of goals: a peaceful future for the Middle East.