A madness in the method? Hamas’ onslaught on Israel

 

Hamas launched a large-scale scale operation against Israel early in the morning of 7 October 2023. The attack started with a rocket barrage, followed by a swift land, air, and sea invasion through foot soldiers, ultralight aircraft, paragliders, and landing craft. The militant groups forced their way through Gaza border crossings after bulldozing the barrier that separates the 140 square kilometer Gaza strip from Israel. They entered the Israeli settlements and military installations, surrounding civilian communities and military bases, taking the settlers and military personnel by surprise.

According to a Hamas claim, around 100 settlers and combatants, including an Israeli major general, were taken hostage and shifted to various locations in Gaza. It is the first direct conflict within Israel's boundaries since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.  Some observers have referred to these events as the beginning of a third Palestinian intifada (Shaking Off).

For the first time since the 1973 Yom Kippur War which took place fifty years before the 2023 attacks, Israel formally declared war, this time specifically on the Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to decimate Hamas and hinted at expelling the entire Palestinian population from Gaza. Some observers say Hamas, backed by an invisible drummer, has thrown a bloody spanner in the US-sponsored plan to bring about peace between the pliant Arab states and Israel. India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel, the primary beneficiaries of the so-called India-Middle East – Europe Corridor, are in a state of shock. With Hamas, or without it, Palestinians have demonstrated that peace in the Arab Middle East without them will be a phantom.

According to the biblical narrative, Samson died when he grasped two pillars of the Temple of Dagon and "bowed himself with all his might". This has been variously interpreted as Samson pulling the temple down on his head. Is there a method in the Hamas’ madness, or, like Samson, it wants to pull the Middle East down on its head? We will have to trace the history of the Arab-Israel conflict to find the answer.

 

The state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948 and was immediately attacked by armies of its Arab neighbors. Even in 1948, the Jews were far more advanced and better organized than the Arabs. The Zionist settlers had, through the finances provided by the Rothschilds, purchased Palestinian lands and transformed them into paramilitary settlements. Haganah was a Zionist paramilitary group formed in 1920 with the expressed goal of defending the growing Jewish population in British mandate Palestine against attacks by Arab residents. Lehi, often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was a Zionist paramilitary militant organization founded by Avraham Stern in Mandatory Palestine. Its avowed aim was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by use of violence, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state.

On the Arab side, Syrians were represented by bands of marauders headed by Fawzi el Kawaukji, an ex-Ottoman Army officer. The Egyptian army, according to Jamal Abdel Nasser, who was then a captain in the Egyptian Army, was busy making toilets for King Farouk (Nasser toppled Farouk in a military coup in 1954 and ruled Egypt till his death in 1970).  Trans- Jordan had a British-trained army which, under Glubb Pasha, its British commander, could take on the far better-trained Haganah and Stern Gang and secure the West Bank of the river Jordan and East Jerusalem.

Though Israel managed to capture the Negev desert during the 1948 Arab-Israel armistice, Egypt imposed a naval blockade of the Tiran Straits, denying Israel access to the Indian Ocean through its Red Sea port at Eilat. On July 26, 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, the joint British-French enterprise that had owned and operated the Suez Canal since its construction in 1869. The Suez Crisis, or the Second Arab–Israeli War was an invasion of Egypt in late 1956 by Israel, followed by the UK and France. The aims were to regain control of the Suez Canal for the Western powers and to remove President Nasser from power. Israel's primary objective was to re-open the blocked Straits of Tiran. After the fighting had started, political pressure from the US, the Soviet Union, and the UN led to a withdrawal by the three invaders. The episode humiliated the United Kingdom and France and strengthened Nasser. Israel, however, withdrew its army from the Sinai Peninsula only after Egypt agreed to end the blockade of the Straits of Tiran.

The United Arab Republic was established on 1 February 1958 as the first step towards a larger pan-Arab state, originally proposed to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser by a group of political and military leaders in Syria. During Nasser’s rule (1954-70), Egypt, then officially designated as the United Arab Republic (UAR), was a bulwark of Arab nationalism and the nerve center of the Arab world. A towering personality, Nasser commissioned Nazi scientists who helped UAR in producing supersonic fighter aircraft, biological weapons, and a delivery system (providing the backdrop for Frederick Forsyth’s thriller “The Odessa File”).

In May 1967, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran for Israeli shipping when Syria, part of the UAR, accused Israel of having deployed its army along the Syria -Israel border.  In the weeks before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, tensions again became dangerously heightened: Israel reiterated its post-1956 position that another Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping would be a definite act of war.  

Though the Suez War was a political victory for Nasser, he was jilted by the Israeli army's rapid advance in the Sinai Peninsula that rubbished his bluster about his "rockets landing in the south of Lebanon in a future war". Blockading the Straits of Tiran again in 1967 was a bluff he used to equalize Israel’s territorial gains during the Suez War. He expected that, even if UAR were defeated, the superpowers and the UN would again intervene to restore the status quo ante bellum -the situation as it existed before the war. Israel, backed by the US, called Nasser’s bluff. While considering the threat from Israel, perhaps Nasser ignored that, during WW II, many of the future Israeli military commanders had served on the Allied general staff.

After its defeat during the 1967 Arab- Israel War, Egypt gradually lost its clout in the Arab world. In 1973, Anwar Sadaat, Nasser’s successor, tried to restore the status quo ante by attacking Israel in a two-front war planned with Syria. In going to war with Israel in 1973, Sadaat also attempted a bluff on Israel and the US. He knew full well that Egypt and Syria would not be able to defeat Israel and recover the lost Arab territories from it. Sadaat’s strategic aim was to end the Middle East stalemate, involve the superpowers, particularly the US, and force Israel to vacate the occupied territories. This he achieved through a series of post-war diplomatic maneuvers that culminated in the Camp David Agreement. Hamas’ recent attack on Israel should be viewed in this context.

What may happen next? Israel will try to kill the Palestinian fly with the Israeli sledgehammer. But, as the histories of 20^th  and 21^st century conflicts between large conventional armies and much smaller militant groups prove, in a dissimilar conflict the large armies always fail to fully degrade the rag-tag groups fighting them.

Will, then, Netanyahu succeed in deporting the two million Palestinians living in Gaza to, say, the neighboring Arab states? Shortly before, during, and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. And what about the India -Middle East – Europe Corridor? Will the American applecart carrying the Abraham Accords topple so soon? I say this because the recent pronouncements by the Saudi Crown Prince about canceling the peace talks with Israel point toward this direction.

For the last century, the Palestinian national consciousness refused to die. It lingered on as a dysfunctional conflict, breeding frustrations and creating a no-war -no peace environment in the Middle East. The problem with a dysfunctional conflict is that it creates inertia which sometimes needs to be broken through negative and violent means. This is what the wars are about. And this is what Hamas is trying to tell the world.

Saleem Akhtar Malik

11 October 2023