A campaign seeking to portray Israel as the aggressor has been launched, and this has been assisted by the comparatively poor performance of Netanyahu government.
In the way that civilian infrastructure and people are used as human shields, extremist groups have sought to camouflage themselves by passing off as the overwhelming majority of the population of a Muslim country. This is done even while a large majority of believers in Islam in those very locations are modern and moderate. Members and associates of Hamas do not represent the population of Gaza, much less the whole of the Palestinian people, yet the effort by their sympathisers is to claim that any action against them is equivalent to an attack against Palestinians as a whole. The reality is that extremism, exclusivism and radicalism are being challenged from within the Muslim community in West Asia, as witness Crown Prince MBS being the first Al Saud to move away from Wahhabism. Should Hamas get away from the necessarily existential consequences of carrying out a terror attack against Jews in Israel on the scale of 7-9 October, it would be a win for the extremist fringe and bad news for the majority seeking pathways to a moderate, prosperous future for the Palestinians. It is within such a context that even well-meaning calls for a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas would result in a boost to extremists rather than to moderate forces in the region.
HAMAS NEEDS A CEASEFIRE
Causing a halt to current military operations by Israel against Hamas is essential for the terror group to survive the consequences of the launch on 7 October the most severe attack that the Jewish state has faced since its inception in 1948. Countries such as Qatar, China, Turkey and Pakistan that are calling for an immediate ceasefire “on humanitarian grounds” would, if they succeed, ensure that Hamas escapes the destruction that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is preparing in a conflict that is clearly existential. Contrarily, should Israel succeed in eliminating Hamas, the cycle of violence and terror that has taken away uncounted lives within both the Palestinian and Israeli communities for more than 75 years could finally get reduced. On the contrary, should the IDF fail in its operations to eliminate Hamas, or be prevented through external pressure from carrying out this mission in ways that assure success, terror groups elsewhere would benefit from that failure and multiply their operations. Over the course of just a few years, many more lives would be lost through such an intensification of mass terror operations than would be lost in the current operation to finish off Hamas as a functioning entity. Those that are calling for a premature end to IDF operations are, knowingly or otherwise, seeking that one of the assumptions of the planners of the 7 October attack be realised, which is that the IDF should have its hands tied by a wave of international opinion that would equate the Palestinian people with those much fewer in number who are active in Hamas. Another assumption made by the planners of the 7-9 October attacks was that the taking of so many Jewish hostages would reduce the strength of the Israeli response, given that in the past, over a thousand anti-Israel elements have been released from prison by Prime Minister Netanyahu in exchange for a single Israeli soldier. Indeed, several of the present leaders of Hamas have been in the past imprisoned and subsequently released as part of hostage swap agreements.
STATE BACKERS OF HAMAS
Given the sophistication involved in the way the operation was planned and carried out, including in its infowar aspect, it is apparent that Pakistan is not the only state backer of Hamas, which is an organisation that has received moneys courtesy GHQ Rawalpindi, a military where the Terror Factory plays a significant role in planning and operations. Countries with far more sophisticated systems than is available in Pakistan would clearly have been involved in facilitating the attack, given the precision with which the 7 October attack was carried out by a force not earlier known for such qualities. Two out of five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council would derive immediate benefits from a diversion of US, UK and EU attention to yet another hotspot, thereby creating a diversion that would drain resources away from targets such as Ukraine and Taiwan. Both countries, unsurprisingly, have taken stands that favour Hamas.
INFOWAR AGAINST ISRAEL
An ongoing infowar has begun that is designed to prevent the IDF from launching more kinetic operations against Hamas, especially a ground invasion of Gaza to demolish Hamas facilities that the Air Force and Navy cannot reach or are unaware of. A high decibel campaign seeking to portray Israel as the aggressor has been launched, and this has been assisted by the comparatively poor performance of the Netanyahu government in such an infowar. Some ministers in Israel have given fodder to anti-Israel groups in the region by speaking of completely cutting off water, fuel and food to Gaza for an unspecified duration. Others have threatened to attack Iran despite the absence of credible evidence that it was behind the 7-9 October attack. Such a diversion, that would be based on emotion rather than reason, would follow the example set by US President George W. Bush, who soon lost focus on Afghanistan (the country in which 9/11 was planned) and turned to Iraq, thereby allowing the Taliban and its terror associates to not just survive but subsequently regain control of the country in 2021. Bush was either ignorant of the fact or ignored the fact that Saddam Hussein was also a target of Al Qaeda, rather than the mastermind of 9/11 that some in the White House claimed he was. The way in which President Donald J. Trump ordered the signing of a surrender document to the Taliban in 2020 at Doha and the manner of the handing over to the Taliban of the whole of Afghanistan by President Biden a year later significantly boosted the confidence of groups such as Hamas that the US lacked the determination to see a conflict through to the end, and could be made to reverse gear through a process of attrition and the efflux of time.
Should the IDF fail in its operation against Hamas by allowing the organisation to survive in the way that the US did in the case of the Taliban and its auxiliaries, terror attacks would soon multiply, especially in Europe, where sleeper cells of such groups have been waiting for the kind of excuse that the entry of Jewish settlers into the Al Aqsa mosque presented to Hamas.
Disrespectfully trespassing into the Al Aqsa mosque, one of the three holy sites of Islam, was a strategic disaster committed by Israeli settlers overconfident in their assessment of the incapacity of the Palestinians to respond to such a provocation. That single action has been largely responsible for the outpouring of opposition across many in the Muslim world towards operations of the IDF that are designed to eliminate not the Palestinian state but Hamas, which is a threat not just to Israel but to the people of Gaza themselves. Several thousands of Gazans have paid with their lives since 2007 for opposing the violent methods favoured by that terror group in its repeated attempts at finishing off Israel and its people from the map. Each time that entities claiming to represent the Palestinian people have used terror and kinetic methods against Israel, more territory has been lost to the Jewish state. Almost certainly, this time around will be no different. What the Palestinian people need to succeed in their quest for a viable state of their own is to be led by a disciple not of Ayatollah Khomeini or Ayman Al Zawahiri but of Mahatma Gandhi, and hopefully once the hostilities end in the Hamas-Israel war, an individual in the mould of the Mahatma and Nelson Mandela will emerge from within the Palestinian people and assume the leadership role by public acclamation.
HAMAS ATTACK EXPERTLY PLANNED
While the Israeli side was caught unawares on 7 October, it became apparent from the start that Hamas together with its covert and open backers had worked out a detailed plan for both the terror attack as well as its aftermath. The use during the planning stage of sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and videography from space-based systems were clearly visible in the way that the targets selected by Hamas for the attack had been selected, and the points of vulnerability mapped out. The reality in Gaza is that, together with friends and family, any resident would be at risk of torture and death were she or he to be considered as opposed to Hamas. Given that, it is a measure of the success of the infowar campaign carried out by the terror group and its facilitators and sympathisers that even some analysts in Israel repeat the line that Hamas enjoys the support of the population of Gaza. They do, in the way Kim Jong Un enjoys the support of the people of North Korea.
The 7 October attack in particular has shown that the dismissive approach of the Netanyahu government to the Palestinian Authority has been unhelpful to Israel itself. The way in which the Netanyahu government expanded settlements comprising of its supporters in territories that are acknowledged to be in land under the authority of the Palestinian Authority has weakened the PA, in the process strengthening groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, an outcome that is contrary to the interests of Israel. There have been precedents to such errors. In the past, after routing the forces of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, President George W Bush appointed a US national, Paul Bremer, as the Administrator of Iraq, with US citizens ( some of Iraqi ancestry) serving as his assistants. Had the Iraqi military not been declared by Bremer to be a gang of criminals and disbanded, had a credible Iraqi national taken over as Administrator of Iraq, and had the US military confined itself to securing the borders of Iraq from external infiltration rather than acting as an occupation force, the country may have avoided the fate that it endured for more than a decade after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was in such soil that ISIS grew. The PA needs to be strengthened rather than ignored, and Gaza needs to be handed over to it once the present mission of the IDF gets completed. At the same time, both Gaza as well as the West Bank need to be given the preconditions to emerge as economic powerhouses, rather than remain dependent on charity, as has been the case for long.
FRINGE POSES AS MAINSTREAM
Just as the manner of the Doha surrender and the subsequent US withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened terror groups including Hamas to ramp up operations, failure by the IDF to achieve its stated objective of eliminating that terror organisation would lead to a fresh wave of terror attacks across different countries. However, eliminating Hamas will not be enough, unless it is followed by Israel ensuring that the people of the territory that comprises the Palestine of today be given the freedom needed to improve their lives, including through external investment. Blunders of the kind made by the US after the rout of the Taliban in 2001 need to be avoided by Israel after the elimination of Hamas, or else other terror organisations will come up. That being said, should Hamas escape the fate that the IDF is planning for it, terror groups worldwide will get fresh impetus to launch operations in a variety of locations. It is such a realisation that is behind the support that Israel is getting from countries that have been the victim of terror attacks themselves, including India. Although the fog of infowar has blurred that fact, the reality is that the elimination of Hamas would bring the most benefit to the people of Palestine themselves, provided the lessons of history ensure that wisdom prevails in the aftermath of that outcome in both Jerusalem as well as Ramallah. Such a situation would give oxygen to moderate groups across the world, enabling them to displace radicals and extremists from positions of authority in countries where such a fringe wields an outsize influence or even control, as is presently the situation in Gaza.