How Israel is interfering with Hamas’s route to victory
As the sun went down on Friday October 6, Israelis began preparing for shabbat. For some, their weekend plans were not particularly restful; this would be the fortieth consecutive Saturday on which thousands would take to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the Netanyahu government.
Others had gentler intentions. Two hours south of the buzzing metropolis, in the sleepy kibbutz of Kfar Aza near the Gaza border, Aviv and Livnat Kutz were hoping to spend the following afternoon with their three teenage children and other likeminded locals flying kites near the fence as a gesture of peace towards their Palestinian neighbours.
When Saturday dawned, neither the rallies nor the kite flying took place. With the nation in shock, anti-Netanyahu groups like Bonot Alternative (Women Building an Alternative) pivoted their networks to offer emergency support to the survivors of the massacre of October 7.
The Hamas savages had rampaged through the quiet kibbutzim along the border, many of which were populated by peace activists who spoke Arabic and would volunteer to drive ailing Gazans to Israeli hospitals. Later, in Kfar Aza, the corpses of the murdered Kutz family were found huddled together in the same bed.
The stories of the anti-government activists in Tel Aviv and the murdered peaceniks in the south reveal, in their different ways, two aspects of pre-October 7 Israel that have come to haunt it.
Firstly, there was the political disunity. After months of infighting triggered by the return of Benjamin Netanyahu on the back of a handful of extremists who immediately attempted to upend democratic convention, Israel was profoundly divided, with tens of thousands rallying every shabbat. Tech companies and investors were deserting the country and its credit rating was wobbling. It was all anybody was talking about. Families turned against families; across the border, forgotten fanatics were taking notes.
Secondly, both the security establishment and ordinary citizens alike had fallen into a deep complacency, even a somnambulance, regarding the threat from Gaza. After almost a decade without a ground war in the Strip, everyone believed that the jihadi threat was manageable.
A billion-dollar border fence, dripping with sensors and secret technical innovation, had brought all the fruits of Israel’s tech miracle to bear upon its security. The Jewish state’s fearsome air force and intelligence capabilities provided a powerful deterrent, while the Iron Dome missile shield – and even a cutting-edge Iron Beam laser system with the capability to shoot down rockets – kept its civilians safe. While painful, flare-ups could be dealt with.
In concert with these extensions of hard power came Israeli attempts to stabilise society in the Strip. Tens of thousands of Gazan labourers were allowed to cross into the Jewish state each week to work, bringing much-needed liquidity into the Hamas-run economy.
Israel allowed water, food trucks, suitcases of Qatari cash and other resources to cross the border, compensating for Hamas’s use of its own funds for tunnel construction; whatever the bluster, the terror group was not expected to throw away such stability lightly. The overarching hope in many quarters was that one day, a political settlement might neutralise the threat.
Looking back, the complacency that prevailed in Israel, a regional superpower so formidable that even the Saudis were considering a normalisation deal, was remarkable. Not only remarkable but agonisingly naïve.
In the conventional Israeli security picture, the ragtag Gazan militia, whose weaponry amounted to little more than homemade rockets and its own civilians, was dwarfed by the threat of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran further afield. With Hamas supposedly contained in the south, the eye of Israel’s intelligence community was turned unblinkingly on Tehran, which was on the threshold of nuclearisation.
Indeed, as one defence source wryly told me: “If Iran had directed the attacks, Mossad would have known about it.” Meanwhile, residents along the Gaza border were busy driving Palestinians to hospital and flying kites for peace.
These twin examples of hubris – the societal infighting and the military complacency – neatly converged in the form of the Brothers In Arms movement. This group of military reservists, including elite pilots, was refusing to serve in protest at the direction in which Netanyahu was dragging the country.
Their passions were not unreasonable. Grasping desperately for power, beset by corruption charges and operating in a dysfunctional proportional representation system, the prime minister had ushered a number of extremists into his coalition in order to secure his third premiership. The radical programme of reforms they then attempted to introduce – from upturning the supreme court to proposing prison sentences for immodestly-dressed women at the Western Wall – provoked howls of outrage across Israel, even among many who would have been sympathetic to some of the more reasonable measures.
Amid real fears for the future of the country’s pluralistic democracy, the Brothers In Arms withdrew their contribution towards Israel’s defence. Nobody was thinking about Hamas, which was watching and sharpening its knives.
Two weeks before the gates of hell swung open, one elite Israeli airman gave an interview to the Jewish Chronicle. “In the past, you would go in the middle of the night and they would say they needed you to go to Gaza,” he said. “Whatever it was, I would say yes. But now, we ask: what kind of war are we talking about?”
He would undertake a raid against the existential threats of Hezbollah or Iran, the lieutenant-colonel said, but a mission over Gaza would make him hesitate. “I don’t think there will be a war tomorrow,” he added.
At 6:30am on October 7, these delusions were shattered. Before long, the pilots were back in the skies over Gaza and the country had rediscovered its solidarity under a unity government. The street protests were forgotten. That day was a pivot point in the history of Israel, the region and to some extent the world. In the weeks that followed, every day was October 8. But you can’t keep
old tensions away forever. This week, they found new expression in the anguished crucible of the hostages.
Israel has always had a unique approach towards winning the freedom of captives. This was exemplified in 2011, when 1,027 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for the return of a single abducted soldier, Gilad Shalit. To the outside world, this may seem baffling. But Israel’s armed forces are different.
In the shadow of the Holocaust, not only do senior officers put themselves in danger by leading from the front, but everyone knows that heaven and earth will be moved to secure the return of a single soldier, whether alive or dead. This is a great comfort to people like my brother, who volunteered as a combat medic with no family in the country. It contributes towards a sense of camaraderie and morale that conjures great bravery and fighting effectiveness. We’re one family. Commit your heart and soul to the cause and nobody will be left behind. Never again.
Hamas, which uses psychological manipulation as a force multiplier to compensate for its military weakness, has become skilled at turning Israel’s humanity against itself. As the gruesome videos that emerged last month showed, it places no value upon human life; terrorists toyed with severed heads, baked babies, disembowelled women while raping them, put out the eyes of corpses and dragged the bodies of the elderly behind motorcycles.
And as its widespread use of human shields demonstrates, Hamas places no more value on the lives of its own people. In a viral television monologue two weeks after the massacre, as Israeli bombs rained on Gaza, leading Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Eissa demanded to know why Hamas had not built “even one bomb shelter” for its civilians while digging terror tunnels under their homes and hospitals. Today, several weeks into the ground incursion, the hard truth is clear to anybody who will hear it: in the war of public opinion, every death is a victory for Hamas.
The jihadi group had seized captives in the past. But never on a scale like this. Its terrorists swarmed across the border with hostage-taking handbooks in their pockets and as more and more Israeli civilians were dragged into Gaza, both commanders and footsoldiers were intoxicated with jubilation. To Hamas, the abducted Israelis opened a route to victory.
Speaking on Saudi television after the attacks, the former terror chief Khaled Mashal said: “The rule we follow is that
prisoners are swapped for prisoners. We took over 1,000 prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit. Today, we have in our hands dozens of soldiers and officers. Inshallah, we will use them to empty the [Israeli] prisons.”
They would also be used, Hamas hoped, to deter, delay and eventually suspend the Israeli retaliation, allowing the terror group to repeat the massacre. The Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad made this point explicitly on Lebanese television. “Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time and there will be a second, third and fourth because we have the determination, the resolve and capabilities to fight,” he said.
When asked if his goal was the annihilation of Israel, he replied, “Yes, of course. We must remove that country.” In an extraordinary echo of the cult of victimhood common in the West, he added: “We are the victims of the occupation. Full stop. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October million, everything we do is justified.” The fact that Gaza had not been “occupied” since 2005 made no difference.
But Hamas had drawn up its victory plans based on the old status quo. It was correct in its basic analysis that while its own side fetishised death – terrorists were filmed lying in their own graves to quell any remaining hesitation – the Israelis were obsessed with life. But leveraging Israel’s humanity against itself would not work this time. It was wrong in its calculation that if 1,027 prisoners had been exchanged for one hostage in the past, 240 hostages would fetch 246,480 Palestinians. It was also wrong to assume that hostilities would stop for long stretches in the meantime, allowing it to fight another day.
What Hamas has always missed is the fact that Israel is not a colonial power like France, whose occupation of Algeria ended in death by a thousand cuts. The Israelis have no other country to which to withdraw. And such is the alchemy of Israeli society, whose conscription culture creates deep bonds of social responsibility and national pride, that turning up the volume of agony on its public produces an equal and opposite reaction of solidarity and grit.
The Jewish state is determined to defeat the enemy, whatever the price.
On the Israeli side, everything changed on October 7. In butchering the innocent with such savagery, and taking so many hostages, including babies and Holocaust survivors, Hamas had inadvertently changed the security calculation. The policy of containment, which for decades had been the main peg in Israel’s defence posture, was torn up.
For years, everybody had known that Hamas had both the capacity and the intention to cause serious harm to Israelis. The group had made a secret of neither – Jerusalem had known about its tunnels and genocidal ethos, but had believed that the threat was under control.
After October 7, one harsh, new lesson overshadowed all others – if your enemy has the capabilities and motivation, sooner or later he will act. By way of spectacular success, Hamas had signed its own death warrant.
If the hostages were part of Hamas’s route to victory, Jerusalem refused to join them on it. Gone were the days in which Yahya “the Butcher of Khan Yunis” Sinwar – a convicted terrorist who received life-saving surgery while in an Israeli prison – would be freed in a prisoner exchange, only to repay Israel by masterminding the October 7 atrocities 12 years later.
As Golda Meir famously remarked: “They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise. And that’s why we have no choice.”
Days after the attacks, with the public united behind him, Netanyahu announced Israel’s war aims. These were twofold – to return the hostages and destroy Hamas. The elision of the two was intended to unify the natural doves and the hawks, and to begin with, no tension was acknowledged between the objectives. Some commentators worried that smashing Gaza would scatter the hostage takers, making it impossible to gather intelligence on their whereabouts; everybody worried that the captives would be harmed by Israeli bombs.
But Hamas had to be destroyed. The new concept that only military pressure would win the release of the hostages gained broad support. To be sure, more Israeli lives would be lost, but the terror threat had to be defeated. Powered by this attitude, Israel went to war.
Fast-forward several weeks, however, and the political divisions that had dogged Israel before October 7 had started to creep back under the door. The polls reflected the extent to which Israel’s old rivalries were now refracting through the prism of the hostage debate – 22pc of Israelis maintained that there should be no talks with Hamas, according to the Israel Democracy Institute earlier this month.
Support for hostage negotiation and a pause in the fighting, meanwhile, grew from 17pc in mid-October to 22pc in November. When voting intention was taken into account, however, the differences were stark – 49pc of Netanyahu supporters were against the deal, while among his opponents, 76pc were for it.
In a sign of the combustibility of political tensions, this week, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the firebrand national security minister who stands foremost among the Government’s far-right extremists, took part in an undignified shouting match with the families of captives during a parliamentary committee session. After the swap was approved, he labelled it a “disaster” and accused Israel’s leaders of “idiocy”. This friction was reflected in an alleged split within the war cabinet.
Netanyahu and his rightwing defence minister, Yoav Gallant, were said to favour relentless military advance, while the centrists Benny Gantz and Gabi Eisenkot preferred a ceasefire in return for hostages. When Eisenkot met the families of those abducted last week, it was sensationally reported that he had confided that releasing their relatives was a higher priority than destroying Hamas.
For many Israelis, the four-day ceasefire is seen as a heavy price to pay. They understand that it will place their soldiers – husbands, brothers, sons – not only at a tactical disadvantage but also in harm’s way.
As Danny Danon, a leading figure in Likud and a political rival of Netanyahu, told me this week: “The deal endangers our soldiers in Gaza by allowing Hamas to resupply, take pictures of our forces and plan future attacks. Not only will we have tens of thousands of soldiers in hostile territory, not allowed to move or fire, they will be vulnerable to ambush.”
Moreover, the influx of fuel and other aid into the Strip will inevitably be raided and used by Hamas, replenishing its fighters and powering its tunnel network. Yet Israel’s appetite for saving its civilians won through. Its old ethos had not been completely forgotten.
During the 2014 war in Gaza, infantry officer Hadar Goldin was killed in a Hamas ambush just hours after a UN-brokered ceasefire had come into effect. On that occasion, Danon, then deputy defence minister, was sacked after he opposed Netanyahu’s decision to stop the war without finishing off Hamas. The prime minister believed that this would have cost the lives of 400 soldiers, and felt this would be too high a price to pay.
Tragically, nine years later, that judgment looks naïve. “I still think continuing the offensive in 2014 would have been the right approach,” Danon told me. “We should not have given in to international pressure. We should have finished the job.”
These concerns are reflected among the public at large. An old school friend of mine, now living in Jerusalem, said: “I can send my son to risk his life fighting for our nation. But I can’t send him to throw his life away for the whim of politics… If Bibi had even the slightest intention of (destroying Hamas), he would not agree to a ceasefire that undoes all the work our soldiers have done to reach this point.”
The release of the hostages on Friday, with elderly women and children speeding across the border in jeeps beneath fluttering Red Cross flags to the sound of cheers, deeply moved both the country and the world. But these scenes were haunted by the fear that this represented the cracking of Netanyahu’s resolve, which would lead to an accommodation with Hamas rather than its destruction. Not only would this store up further terrorist atrocities and hostage crises in the future, it would degrade Israel’s deterrent towards its more formidable rivals in the north.
In recent weeks, anti-government activists have found their voices again, returning to the streets in support of the families of the captives and piling political pressure on the Netanyahu government.
Calling for the release of the hostages is of course deeply humane, but Hamas wishes to weaponise the movement, refusing for example to release all the members of one family to keep the pain flowing and the screws tight on Jerusalem. The current deal may have bought the prime minister some time, but time has a habit of running out. If the old disunity is coming back into the Israeli body politic, the old security complacency is in danger of creeping in its wake.
This matters for Israel’s future. The Gulf states are watching developments closely. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain joined the Abraham Accords because they saw Israel as an economic, tech and security powerhouse in the region. So compelling were these advantages that before October 7, Saudi Arabia was also considering taking the plunge; this may be one explanation for the timing of Hamas’s attack. If Israel shows itself to be a paper tiger, such alliances will be off the table, leaving the Jewish state isolated in the region once again.
This is where the international community comes in. To begin with, the leaders of the democracies stood united behind the Jewish state, which had clearly suffered unprovoked aggression. But they have faced swelling protests in their capitals, as the ill-informed liberals of the West responded to images of Palestinian suffering by reaching for the easy conclusion and joining the Islamists on the streets.
Before our eyes, a natural compassion for the suffering of innocents is being channelled into a potent political force, reeking of Israelophobia.
Sometimes it seems that Hamas enjoys more support in western cities than it does in the Arab world, and even in Gaza itself. On Wednesday, an old Palestinian colleague called me from the grounds of the hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza. Hamas was facing a groundswell of repressed rage from its own people, he confided in hushed tones.
No such rage is evident in London. Or indeed in Paris. Emmanuel Macron was the first to break the consensus and call for Israel to stop defending itself, but the clock is ticking until others follow him.
As time goes on and the images of Gazan suffering become ubiquitous, sensible arguments in favour of a just war are placed under unbearable strain. Indeed, one of the main reasons why the Netanyahu government agreed to the hostage deal in the first place was sitting in the White House; with his two aircraft carrier strike groups in the Eastern Mediterranean, Joe Biden spoke loudly in its favour.
This pushes Israel to the very precipice. The slow return of division and complacency at home, combined with growing international pressure, is eroding its ability to defend itself. If an effective deterrent is to be re-established, Hamas must be despatched unequivocally. As costly as this will prove in terms of blood, treasure and international standing, Hamas is very much Israel’s lesser foe.
The ultimate lesson of October 7, which was learnt vividly in the first weeks but has since lost some of its purchase, is clear – no longer can Israel live in a world that contains genocidal enemies. Sooner or later there will be a reckoning, and from now on it must be on Israel’s terms.
The logical conclusion is that Israel must destroy both Hezbollah and Iran. It probably has the military might to do so. But pressure from the international community and activists within the Jewish state itself are conspiring to prevent the country from acting in its best interests.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It