By Gray Allan, Falkirk Labour member
Despite the pleadings of Western politicians that Israel has a ‘right of self-defence’, the Hamas raid into Israel on October 7 last year can in no way justify the genocidal attack on Gaza that has left more than 32,000 dead, the big majority of them women and children, and the virtual obliteration of anything resembling normal civilian life in that area.
The ongoing one-sided war that Israel is waging on a largely defenceless population is not so much a vengeful attack, although it is that, but is also part of a pre-arranged and pre-conceived attempt to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip, so it can be absorbed into a ‘Greater Isreal’.
But the horrors of the Israeli onslaught – and the massive and sustained reaction from workers and youth around the world, threatening to turn Israel into an international pariah-state – does not mean that activists in the labour movement should not also discuss the events of October 7, although through a socialist lens.
The murder on that day of around 1,100 Israelis by Hamas, many of them unarmed women children and youth, was rightly condemned at the time as an appalling act of terrorism. It remains to be seen – and no doubt official enquiries in Israel will reveal in due course – how many deaths were the result of helicopter gunship attacks and tanks bombardment by the IDF, hurredly trying to retrieve the situation on the ground, and trying at all costs to prevent hostages being taken. But the general scale of the killings cannot be denied.
That incursion by hundreds of armed Hamas militants into Israeli border facilities, settlements and even a music festival was met with little serious resistance to begin with. The Hamas fighters did not restrict themselves to attacks on the security units set up to defend the local kibbutzim or the small numbers of IDF soldiers on border duty. They appear to have systematically hunted down and shot anyone they could find, including youths at the music festival.
United Nations rapporteur on the Hamas attack
Kibbutzim were attacked, houses burnt and residents killed where they were found. Some hundredes were taken hostage. Some of the horror stories spread by the Israeli Government and its Western supporters have been discredited by a United Nations rapporteur investigating the Hamas attack, but she did conclude from witness statements and statements of released hostages, however, that there was ‘credible’ evidence of sexual assaults on some Israeli women on that day.
The Hamas incursion was the biggest single military and security lapse by the Israeli state for fifty years, since the beginning of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. The Israeli Defence Force took hours to organise itself. This was all the more remarkable considering reports now circulating that for weeks there had been intelligence reports about Hamas ‘training exercises’, some of them showing fighters assaulting mocked-up villages. After the war, Netanyahu and his government will have many serious questions to answer.
Since that day, the reaction of the Netanyahu Government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history, has been off the scale. It vowed vengeance on the perpetrators, Hamas the only guilty party, as if there was no history between Gaza and Israel prior to October. Netanyahu pledged ‘root out’ Hamas and totally eliminate it.
The Israeli right-wing, out-and-out racists, have long since dehumanised all Palestinians, and see no difference between Hamas and the mass of the Gaza population: for them there are ‘no innocent Palestinians’. As they always do, these politicans feed on the history of sufferings of the Jewish people and the Holocaust, describing Hamas as an ‘existential threat’ to Jews in the Middle East.
Some of the rantings of Israeli Government ministers were so extreme that they were used as evidence of genocidal intent by South Africa and others at the International Court of Human Rights. Likud MP Tully Gotliv, for example, said he was in favour of “erasing all Gazans from the face of the Earth”.
An article on the Mother Jones website, noted that one of the most sinister comments was from Netanyahu himself, who used a Biblical reference to describe the Palestinians as “Amalek”. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” Netanyahu said. They were the only nation in the Bible that Jehovah ordered the Jews to destroy completely; “do not spare them, put them to death, men, women, children and infants”
Israel’s past role in the funding of Hamas
The Netanyahu Government, which was embroiled in a vicious political battle for its very survival over its proposed reforms of the Supreme Court, has used the attack as a pretext for a brutal war on the people of Gaza. It is a bitter irony that many of the Israelis caught across the border, particuarly the youth, were by Israeli standards ‘liberals’, supportive of a peace initiative between Israel and the Palestinians.
Although Hamas is the main target of the IDF and Netanyahu, to be hunted down and wiped out, in reality it is a political movement, with support or sympathy extending beyond its military arm, the Al-Quassam Brigades. Also involved on October 7 were other rival groups, the most significant of which was the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who are reported to be holding some of the Israeli hostages.
Western as well as Israeli politicians talk about October 7 is if it was the beginning of all history. As if there was no suffocating seige of Gaza for a decade and a half, as if there had not already been many occasions when Israeli jets and tanks bombarded civilians, as if the Gaza Strip wasn’t already the largest open prison in the world.
Neither, among all the vitriol directed at Hamas by Israel and its supporters, is there any mention of the role played by Israel itself in funding and propping up Hamas in the past, as a deliberate counterweight to Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank.
The New York Times of December 10 2023 reported, in an interview with Shlomo Brom, a retired general and former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser, that Israel empowered Hamas because it helped Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state.“One effective way to prevent a two-state solution”, Brom said in the interview. “is to divide between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” That division, he added, “gives Mr. Netanyahu an excuse to disengage from peace talks”, an excuse to say “I have no partner” with whom to negotiate.
Right Wing openly describe peace talks disengagement strategy
Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is now Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister, put it even more bluntly in an interview in 2015, the year he was elected to Parliament.“The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” he said. “Hamas is an asset.”
As the New York Times report makes clear, the recent flow of Israeli money into Gaza to support Hamas was ostensibly for its civil administration and for provide humanitarian aid, but Israeli intelligence had long believed that Qatar was secretly funding the Hamas military wing. Yet Netanyahu did not consider it presented a serious military threat.
“As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state. The official in the prime minister’s office said Mr. Netanyahu never made this statement. But the prime minister would articulate this idea to others over the years.” (New York Times).
Before October 7, Netanyahu clearly saw Hamas as a political asset, a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The crude rocket attacks by Hamas from Gaza were also politically useful to Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing, giving them a continuous pretext to beat the drums about an ‘existential threat’ to Israel. Hamas and its military brigade were always used as the principal argument against the two-state option, the establishment of a Palestinian State co-existing alongside the State of Israel. For Netanyahu and the Israeli political right, if Hamas had not existed, they would have had to be invented.
The PLO and Fatah originally seen as the main threat
Throughout the 1970s, Israel had seen the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its main component, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah Party, as the real enemy. Fatah was a secular party, which followed the example of other, left-wing, pro-capitalist national liberation movements.
Elements of the PLO carried out assassinations and kidnappings of Jews and Israelis, creating a baleful tradition that drove many Israelis and Jews across the world into the arms of zionist politics, yet without moving the Palestinian struggle one inch further forward. At the same time, the PLO was often recognised by many Arab states. Arafat was feted at the UN and rubbed shoulders with all kinds of reactionary Arab leaders – but again, without moving the Palestinian struggle one inch forward.
It is worth bearing in mind that the ‘Gaza Strip’ is a completely artificial and arbitrary geographic and political entity. It simply represents that corner of Palestine that was not conquered by the nascent Israeli military forces when the state was established by force of arms, and by driving out Palestinians in 1948.
For nearly twenty years it was controlled by Egypt, but kept as an open festering sore, deprived of economic development and aid. It was a useful diversion, as were the Palestinian refugees in other Arab states, to ward off the Arab revolution. Under Egyptian control, the Palestinians of Gaza were not allowed Egyption citizenship (they were ‘guests’ in Egypt) and the population lived in poverty, many of them in refuguee camps.
During this time, the Egyptian government suppressed Islamist movements, specifically the Muslim Brotherhood. But once Gaza was conquered by Israel, in the 1967 ‘Six-Day War’, the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to operate openly, and they set up a wide network of schools, kindergartens, clinics and other facilities. Even at that early stage, Israeli saw this organisation, the Mujama al-Islamiya, as a very useful counterweight to the secular PLO.
As part of a report of that period, the Washington Post interviewed an Israeli government official, “When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake” one Israeli official who had worked in Gaza in the 1980s said in a 2009 interview. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”
In an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades wrote, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”. Back in the mid-1980s, he even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists [ie the PLO]. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face.”
The only election ever held in Palestinian areas was won by Hamas
In 1993, with the Oslo Accords, Israel formally recognised the PLO and the Palestinian Authority was established, with an administration led by Fatah taking control of the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas, however, refused to accept the existence of the Israeli state and pledged to continue the ‘armed struggle’. They became effectively the leading group in the opposition to the Israeli occupation and eventually, Israel decided that it could not police a large Gaza population and protect a few isolated Jewish settlements at the same time: the cost in lives and money was too great. Hence the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
In 2007, largely because of the corruption of the PLO in its governance of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas won the only elections there have ever been across the whole of the Palestinian areas. However, neither Fatah nor the Israeli state accepted that result.
On the West Bank, where the Fatah armed wing was stronger, they collaborated with Israel to arrest Hamas militants and neutralise it. Some of those Hamas leaders have been imprisoned ever since. But in Gaza, where Hamas was stronger, and from which Israel had already withdrawn, it was Hamas that was able to neutralise Fatah.
Israel’s response to the domination of Hamas was to isolated Gaza from the rest of the world, physically, economically and financially. Gaza became an open prison, subject to frequent bombing raids, sniper attacks and starvation rations. In return, Hamas lobbed random missiles into Israel, rarely causing damage or injury, but hugely increasing support for Netanyahu, who made his political career on calls for more ‘security’.
Divide and Rule tactic of the Israeli Government
Israel, over the years, therefore, has carefully calibrated its repression and its support for Hamas, enough to make it militarily weak (or so they thought, up to October) but not so much that it wasn’t a useful counterweight to the PLO while also giving a pretext to stop any moves towards a Palestinian state. Directly or through intermediaries, Israel has therefore assisted in the rise of Hamas; they sowed the seeds of the movement that attacked Israelis so viciously on October 7. Having sowed the wind, Israel reaped the whirlwind.
Yet all that Arab and Jewish workers want, and they have this in common, is peace, a home that is not at risk of being bulldozed or bombed, a decent life for themselves and an education and a future for their children. These are not outrageous demands.
All the Israeli right wing can offer Jewish Israelis is perpetual conflict, insecurity, wars and economic sacrifices. We can now add to that the international condemnation of workers and youth around the world. All that Hamas can offer Palestinians in Gaza or anywhere else is ‘martyrdom’ in the tens of thousands. Neither can provide for the basic demands of workers.
The bitter and twisted old men, religious fanatics, at the head of Hamas and the Zionist right wing in Israel will never stop, until the day they are swept away by a united movement of workers across Palestine/Israel.
[Top picture from Al Jazeera newsfeed, showing a panic among Palestinians in Gaza looking for food convoys]
