Hamas has once again shown that the battle between itself and Israel is existential.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel had a wake-up call on 7 October, when hundreds of Hamas suicide bombers crossed over into Israel from Gaza and systematically began killing, assaulting and taking prisoner citizens of the Jewish state. They had faultless intel on where to strike, and how, and this comes as no surprise. Both the Sino-Wahabi as well as the Sino-Russian alliance saw advantages in shifting the attention of the US in particular to a second global hotspot. The war between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas would divert US resources and attention away from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a shift that would come as welcome news to the Russian Federation, which is looking to stabilise the territory it has seized since Russophobes forcibly took over the central government in Kiev in 2014. Rather than embark on a conflict that is proving to be the ruin of the entirety of Ukraine, it would have made sense for incoming President Zelenskyy to accept the status quo where the Russian-speaking lands in the east were concerned. He could have then focused on ensuring that the rest of the country got stabilised. Given that the Kremlin regards Ukrainian membership of NATO as a red line that the entry of the Baltic countries into the alliance were not, it would have been better for the Ukrainian people were its government to have abandoned the search for reunification through kinetic means. The Baltic states are located in a way that makes the overrunning of them by Russian forces a simple matter, but this is not the case with Ukraine, a country that together with Belarus is vital to the security of the Russian flank and thereafter the hinterland from a possible attack by NATO. Given the stark Russophobia that the leadership of this alliance has demonstrated even after the USSR had ceased to exist by 1992, the apprehension of a NATO first strike could not anymore be regarded lightly by the Kremlin, which explains its reaction to events in both Belarus as well as in Ukraine. President Biden has surrounded himself with advisors who remain fixated in the bygone era of Cold War 1.0, and are therefore more, much more, focused on Russia than on China, the country that is the principal disruptor of the present world order in the 21st century. Given that Xi Jinping may need to conduct his own kinetic strike on Taiwan, it suits his interest to have fires such as Ukraine and Gaza burst into flame to serve as diversions from the attention needing to be paid by the US in particular to the threat posed by the PLA to Taiwan.
Qatar and Turkey, the latter a member of NATO and the former a presumed military ally of the US, are both backers of Hamas, the organisation that seized power in Gaza in 2005 and since then has converted the population (now 2.3 million) of Gaza into hostages to their obsession with extinguishing Israel and, if its charter is to be understood correctly, the Jewish people. In the 1920s, an organisation in Germany had a similar idea, and the delay of over two decades in dealing with that outfit resulted in a horrible price to the world. By its 7 October attack on civilians in Israel, Hamas has once again shown that the battle between itself and Israel is existential, and that one or the other of the two combatants will not survive. In effect, those whose humanitarian impulses have suddenly been brought to life once the IDF began its operations against Hamas are implying that an entity that seeks the destruction of not just a country but the faith that the overwhelming majority of its people profess should be allowed to continue to design and carry out operations designed to put an end to Israel. Since 2005, Fatah has been unable to dislodge Hamas from power in Gaza, and the people of that strip of territory have been paying a terrible price for that failure. A failure caused in large part by the fact that even states such as Turkey and Qatar support Hamas openly, while the CCP views it as another accessory in its strategy of creating flashpoint after flashpoint in different parts of the world to divert attention from what the CCP is doing inside and outside the PRC. To take Canada as an example, there are several citizens of that country who have been making regular contributions to entities known to be linked to Hamas. The prospect of Justin Trudeau taking action against them, or even preventing more such assistance to what is a terror organisation, is low. No surprise therefore that within Canada, there have been more marches and rallies backing Hamas and its most recent attack on Israel than there have been even in Gaza.
Hamas had been preparing for a deadly strike on Israel for months, and was waiting for an excuse that it believed could rally support within West Asia for such a move. By allowing Jewish radicals to enter the Al Aqsa mosque in a disrespectful manner, it was Netanyahu who gave them that excuse.
Hopefully, he will do a better job in future of keeping such elements from actions that could alienate hundreds of millions across the world. Hamas seeks to roll back the Abraham Accords and the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement. Those in Israel who identify Hamas with an entire faith, or who want to extend the war into Syria and Iran, are playing into the hands of the terror organisation. No excuse and no quarter should be given to those in Lebanon or elsewhere who seek to open a second front. In such a task, Prime Minister Netanyahu needs to hold back those in his own party who seek a wider war. Meanwhile, the world needs to stand with the people of Israel, while the IDF breaks the death grip that Hamas has had on the people of Gaza. A peaceful, prosperous Gaza will emerge, but only after Hamas retreats into the history books.