Warning: this article contains mention of killing of civilians, rape and sexual assault
The Israeli government was taken by complete surprise as the enemy came across the desert.
Having made an intelligence assessment it was confident of, it stuck to it out of hubris, professional rigidity, internal battles — all the usual things. So when the enemy came across the border on October 6, it gained territory fast, landed a palpable blow, and united a fractured country against an external adversary.
But that all happened in 1973, when Egypt and Syria used the cover of the religious holiday Yom Kippur as cover for an attack to regain the Sinai and the Golan Heights at the very least — and took Israel so greatly by surprise that they threatened the possibility of overrunning it altogether. Fifty years and one day later, Hamas launches an attack which takes the country by surprise, etc etc.
To be honest, this beggars belief. One is assured by various people from the shadows that this is a genuine intelligence stuff-up, a product of the complacency and false projection of mastery by Western intel agencies, Mossad included; but, well, one struggles. For many reasons.
First, the 1973 intelligence failure was what set Israel on the path to developing the world’s greatest high-tech surveillance industry and application system (as detailed in Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory). A sparrow doesn’t fart on the Gaza-Israel border without it being known. Part of Gaza’s status as an open-air prison is to be one of the most surveilled states on earth.
Second, even if you didn’t expect this, you would surely be expecting something on the 50th anniversary of the most powerful blow landed by Arab armies against Israel since its 1948 foundation. Third, there’s reports that Egypt warned the Netanyahu government a week ago that “something big” was coming from the Palestinians.
Who knows what to believe? It’s usual to go with incompetence, but this is the Middle East we’re talking about, the original wilderness of mirrors. Hamas’ motives are clear and multiple. Israel signed accords with half a dozen small Arab states during the Trump presidency, and was on the brink of signing one with Saudi Arabia — a much bigger proposition, which the Biden administration has been working on for years.
Effectively, that means that the Sunni Arab petro-monarchies have deserted the Palestinians (who are Sunnis), leaving only Iran as a solidarity nation with them, linking Hamas to Hezbollah. The Hamas attack may have put the Saudi deal on hold for the moment, as the Saudis worry about the view of their own population about such collaboration — which has surely been the intent.
But why such an attack, with a stomach-turning degree of visible, cruel terrorism, one which will license in international eyes a response of utmost severity from Israel? The foreign policy establishment view is that Hamas is simply a pawn of the Iranians, doing their bidding. The answer is more likely the opposite. The Hamas leadership not only has a desire to do something, anything, to shift the game a little. It also has to keep its own operation in business, and give something for its young cadres to do — other than moulder and die in prison Gaza.
The raid itself was a calculated risk, licensing huge retaliation from Israel. The notion that this attack was in its impact a genuine act of war or an existential threat to Israel is ridiculous. This is the most that Hamas could muster, beyond its usual volleys of rockets, etc, and it consisted of squad attacks in motorboats and on motorbikes, with AK-47s. Both sides, the embattled Netanyahu government, and a Hamas leadership which has been stagnating for years, have an interest in bigging this up.
Leaving aside for the moment the psychological impact of the events, this raid not only does no great damage to Israel, it demonstrates that Hamas, unaided, can do no great damage to Israel. The anti-imperialist struggle of the Cold War has been over for some time. The Palestinians are once again largely friendless and bereft.
That is going to get worse, because it is becoming clear that this attack, with its gratuitous, sadistic violence, is of a new order as far as terrorism directed towards civilians goes. Both Zionists (in the 1940s) and Palestinians in the 1970s and ’80s, used civilian-directed terrorism, but there was a degree of calibration by both, a limit to the mayhem so as to keep the act political.
This attack was something else, its scale and indiscriminate killing inviting comparisons with 9/11 and the Mumbai attacks, in which the aim was to simply pile high the bodies, the more hideous the death the better. But it may have an added dimension. If reports of the massacre at the Tribe of Nova music festival are accurate, then the mass rape and execution-murder of large numbers of young women has occurred, with various horrific, sadistic features. One needs to take care about the full detail of such reports, but the documentation is coming in from multiple sources.
If these details check out, one suspects the solidarity between Western progressivism and Palestinian solidarity is more or less over. It’s not going to matter that Zionist atrocities in the 1940s included massacre and rape, or the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, or that families being blown apart by Israel Defence Force shells may be an equally awful death. The image and meaning of the Hamas raid will not be centred around breaching the Israel-Gaza border. It will be attached to an event of toxic nihilism, driven by Islamist rage at modernity and women, the burnt stump where a radical politics once was.
Thus while an increasingly beleaguered left will try to maintain a focus on the systemic state-terror of Israel, a wider group of progressives will abandon it altogether. Their attachment to the remnant anti-imperialism of Palestinian solidarity was vestigial anyway; one suspects a whole section will swing around to a de facto pro-Israel position, as a repository of women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights.
No amount of brazening it out or accurate conveyance of Israeli violence is going to work. Increasingly, it will simply make clear the degree to which much Western left solidarity with Palestine was the substitution of that cause for the exhausted politics at home. Anyone trying to positively attach to this event either needs their head read or to join certain sections of arts at Sydney Uni where they will fit right in.
At ground zero, for all the chest-beating on both sides, the aftermath of this event will be drawn back into the transactional, after a very bloody passage. Netanyahu has been clear before about supporting Hamas as a rival to Fatah, basically co-founded the thing in the 1980s, as an Islamist rival to the Marxist and secular Fatah. Maintaining the back-channel support of Hamas may now prove impossible.
Israel is intent on annexing the West Bank and creating a full and explicit apartheid state, and daring the West to punish it for doing so. The calls to obliterate Hamas by the right-wing foreign policy mavens are simply a mirror of the left’s barracking; the right needs to fantasise that Israel is a noble state, carrying on the West’s mission when the latter has lost its resolve.
Meanwhile, the people of Gaza remain sequestered and terrorised, lacking their own port, airport, water supply, electricity and much more because all those facilities remain on stolen land — at which point the Gazans are taunted for their lack of initiative and dependency.
For Israel, 1973 was a real challenge (and not without its own dark aspects, to say the least). This is, if the stories check out, some ghoulish absurdist simulacrum of it, let through by the Israeli government, bike gangs with Kalashnikovs attacking a nuclear-armed state, both sides declaring it a war, and the main business being the mass rape-murder of teenage girls.
That is simply a midnight farce, both mocking and drawing on what was once, however brutal in its own way, a global politics of liberation, which may have just bled out in the sands.
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
