Current Events, Episode 159

israel at war, EXPLAINED: hamas & gaza

october 18, 2023

BLOG VERSION below | PODCAST VERSION HERE

Day Eleven of the war between Hamas and Israel. For years Israel has brought sick Palestinian children into Israel for lifesaving medical care. Hamas responded by sadistically massacring Israeli children. Today we’re talking about Hamas and its intersection with Gaza’s history, crucial context for understanding how we got to this moment.

Of everything that has happened in the last eleven days since Hamas declared war on Israel, here is the thing that has been eating at me the most. For years now Israel has taken sick children from Gaza into Israeli hospitals for lifesaving treatment. From cancer to kidney transplants, Israel quietly facilitates passage across the border for children and their families in need of urgent care. Israel does this without a lot of fanfare or PR, and refuses to release details in the name of patient privacy. They’ve saved thousands of Palestinian lives.

Hamas repaid this by massacring Israeli children. Ismail Haniyeh is the top political leader of Hamas. He lives with his millions in a luxury hotel in Qatar, a country on the Persian Gulf, far from having to share in the problems of his people. Israel has treated his daughter, granddaughter, mother-in-law, sister, and brother-in-law. He is now banging on about Israeli atrocities, and complained that, “Even wars have rules.”

This is who we’re dealing with. This is who governs Gaza and is responsible for the lives of its citizens. Or to put it more accurately, responsible for their deaths. We don’t know how many Palestinian civilians have been killed, callously left to be sacrificed on the altar of destroying Israel. People who have no choice, nowhere to run, and are not responsible for this war. They are stuck between a genocidal regime that cares nothing for their lives, and the Israel military that has to strike against Hamas. Hamas is not a movement of liberation, it’s a movement of elimination. They’re not trying to build up the Palestinians but tear down the Israelis.

So there are no good options here, no painless solutions. Israel is once again waging a war that it did not start, and did not ask for. Now there is no choice but to win. But how it can win is the subject of much debate, because it only involves agonizing choices. 

Israel’s single most important goal right now is not eliminating Hamas. That’s it’s second goal. It’s first is restoring deterrence. The idea that attacking Israel will not only be spectacularly unsuccessful, but also isn’t worth the price you’re going to pay. Instead of having been irreparably weakened by the massacre, Israel is still powerful and resolute. The point is, its actions in Gaza right now aren’t just about eliminating Hamas, but also about communicating this message of deterrence to Hezbollah, the terrorist group in Lebanon that is skirmishing along the northern border. And then through Hezbollah to their owner, Iran. 

So we’ve got this convoluted playing field. Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinian Authority and Iran and Saudi Arabia. You can add to it. Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group in Gaza that has several dozen hostages, and which just blew up a hospital, killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians. We can add in Qatar, the Persian Gulf country that supports Hamas. And now President Biden is in Israel. So I have 150 things I want to talk about.

My goal here is to keep this fairly broad so that we can try to stay as relevant as possible with the bewildering changes happening on the ground. Last episode was looking at how we got here through the lens of Israel’s recent past choices. Today let’s put Hamas and Gaza in context. 

I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.

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We need to tell a little bit of Gaza’s story to find where it intersects with Hamas. It may be familiar to some of you, but it will bring us up to speed to where we are today. Like the rest of the Near East, Gaza was a part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. But the Empire collapsed during World War One and the British invaded this area of the Middle East. Gaza became part of the British colony in Palestine for the next 29 years.

Although Gaza was supposed to end up as part of an independent Arab state, Egypt seized the territory for itself in the 1948 war between the brand-new Israel and its Arab neighbors. But Egypt didn’t make Gaza an official part of its territory, nor its people Egyptian citizens, and so Gaza remained, well, an occupied territory. 

By the way, the reason Gaza is shaped the way it is today is because that’s the line where the Israeli and Egyptian armies stopped fighting when the war ended.

So Egypt occupied Gaza from 1948 to 1967. They kept the Palestinians there in misery. The Palestinians weren’t allowed to enter Egypt, their fellow Arab country, and, of course, couldn’t go into Israel since the line marked a hostile border. So they were trapped, with few economic prospects, little housing, no citizenship, and few services. And because many of them were refugees from the war with Israel in 1948, Egypt purposefully kept them impoverished in order to blame Israel for their plight.

In 1967 Israel was once again forced to fight a war against the Arabs, what became known as the Six Day War. You should all know about this because you’ve all been listening to my Season 7 here at Jew Oughta Know, right? The war was a huge victory for Israel and it captured territory three times its own size: including, from Egypt, both the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. Now, part of the problem is we have different definitions of what constitutes the occupation. Most people understand it to mean the territories that Israel took in the Six Day War, like the West Bank and Gaza. But Hamas, and many other Palestinians, consider the occupation to be the entirety of Israel as established in 1948. Anywhere a Jew lives is occupied, the entire state is illegitimate, and therefore resistance is justified until such time that Israel is destroyed.

So after ’67 Gaza was still occupied, but this time by Israel. Life did not get much better for the Palestinians. Because Israel wasn’t sure whether it wanted to annex Gaza into its own territory, and didn’t want to be responsible for the Palestinians there, Israel engaged in various schemes to try to get them to leave on their own volition. They tried paying people off. They tried reducing services to make daily life miserable. Tens of thousands of Gazans did leave, but several hundred thousand remained.

And at the same time began the settlement movement to establish Jewish villages in the new occupied territories. Small settlements began cropping up in Gaza. These settlements then required an Israeli military presence to protect them. So the resentment started building and there were acts of violence, including murder, against Israeli civilians, while the Israeli army then also struck back with its own punitive measures. Eventually Israeli settlements comprised about 20% of Gaza, and while that boosted the economy, and tens of thousands of Palestinians went into Israel for work, most of the gains benefitted Israel and the Israelis. 

In the meantime Israel fought yet another war with the Arabs when Egypt and Syria invaded in 1973, the Yom Kippur War. In 1979 Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement, in which Israel gave back the Sinai Peninsula. But Gaza, both militarily strategic and now packed with settlements, wasn’t part of that deal. It remained in limbo.

Fast forward to the end of the 1980s and the Palestinians revolted against Israel throughout the occupied territories. It was called the intifada, meaning “shaking off,” in Arabic. It was the first of two intifadas, which we’ll get to. For the next 6 years, from ’87 to around ’93, the Palestinians engaged in both nonviolent protests and acts of violence, including against each other, and Israel responded with harsh measures. This is where Hamas now enters the picture.

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From 1967 until 2005, Gaza was ruled by the Israelis, but the political situation was a bit more complicated than that. The PLO had some involvement, as did the United Nations through their refugee camps. Ordinary Palestinians, though, had very little political power and were deeply disillusioned with Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

Hamas stands for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It was founded in 1987 amidst this First Intifada. It picked up the mainstream Palestinian goal of armed struggle against Israel to create a Palestinian state. But it added some twists. It called for the complete elimination of Israel and the death to every Jew there — no peace deals, no compromises, no negotiations whatsoever. It adopted an excessively antisemitic philosophy that blamed Jews for everything from the French Revolution to alcoholism, claiming the same old conspiracy theory of Zionist world domination. Hamas insisted that it was the duty of every Muslim to to kill Jews wherever they could be found, including children and the elderly, and that Israel would exist until Islam could overthrow it. This is all explicitly stated in its charter, you can find it online. 

So whereas the mainstream Palestinian groups were secular, Hamas emphasized an Islamic religious aspect to the armed struggle against Israel. Palestinian politics was fractious and bitter, with many groups fighting for influence, power, and popular support. Hamas’ brand of fundamentalist Islam gave it a lot of legitimacy amongst Palestinians, who saw a resistance to Israeli occupation that also spoke to their cultural and religious traditions.

But Hamas wasn’t interested in Palestinian liberation except as a means of genocide against Israel that would find Hamas in charge of a tyrannical Islamic regime. One in which, they declared, for instance, that the purpose of women is to “be the makers of men.” Hamas’ coming-out act was the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers. These acts of violence, invited harsh Israeli responses, and back and forth everyone went. Although Hamas routinely executed Palestinians for collaboration with Israel, whether real or imagined, their popularity increased. Ultimately, though, they remained a small player in the late 1980s and 1990s.

But then came the Oslo Accords, the peace agreement in the mid-1990s between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas’ secular Palestinian rivals. The PLO agreed to give up violence in pursuit of what became known as the two-state solution: very simply, the creation of a Palestinian state next to the Israeli one. Two states, to be governed by the Palestinian Authority, also known as Fatah. Although the peace deal didn’t answer every question, it created a framework for further negotiations. 

Hamas, though, was determined to wreck it. It set out a suicide bombing campaign designed to force Israel to respond harshly, to anger Palestinians and reduce support for the Palestinian Authority’s peace efforts. As well as to sour Israelis on making peace. It worked. By the year 2000 the peace process fell apart. And then Hamas, along with other groups, launched what became the Second Intifada, vastly more violent than the first. For four straight years Israel was plagued with relentless suicide bombings. No place was safe: not the bus, nor the super market, not a discotheque filled with teenagers, not even Hebrew University.

Now I realize we’re doing a lot of history here. But the effects of the Second Intifada were profound, and essential to understanding what is happening today. 

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The Second Intifada ran from 2000 to about 2004. There were four major effects. One is that Israel engaged in a series of defensive measures designed to reduce violence. They began building a wall around some areas of the West Bank to stop terrorists from so easily crossing into Israel. And they also engaged in the practice of targeted killings: assassinating terrorist leaders. These measures worked, suicide bombings became rare, but they also angered the Palestinians. 

The second thing that happened was the political left in Israel collapsed. The left were the doves, who saw in the Palestinians partners for creating the two-state solution, in which Israel would give up most of the occupied territories in exchange for peace. Hamas’ suicide bombings convinced Israelis that there was no partner for peace, that any territory given up would just be used to attack Israel, and that a Palestinian state would just be taken over by extremists. Israelis had lost all hope for peace. Like the Palestinians, they, too, were embittered by the conflict. At the same time as the Hamas campaign, an extremist Jewish settler assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as punishment for trying to make peace.

Which brings us to the third thing: the fall of the left led to a rise of the right, and in particular the settler movement that was its backbone. The settlers, now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, mostly in the West Bank, became more entrenched and more ideological. Many of them are deeply religious and feel they have a right to settle in what is historically the Jewish homeland. They are fiercely opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state, and to Israel giving up any land. Now in the mid-2000s, they were in a position to elect blocs of politicians who supported them, or who came from their own ranks. So Israel’s government became gradually more right-wing, more hawkish, and less interested in making peace. Finally, in the mid-2000s, Israel elected its most right-wing Prime Minister yet, Ariel Sharon, famous — or infamous — as a ruthless military commander whom the Arabs both feared and hated.

And then the fourth thing: in a absolutely stunning blow to the settler movement, Ariel Sharon announced that Israel was unilaterally disengaging from Gaza. That is, Israel was giving up the entire Gaza Strip all on its own, without a peace agreement. Every last trace of Israel would be taken out of Gaza: 21 settlements, 8,000 people, buildings and schools and synagogues, even graves would be dug up. Every Israeli soldier out, though not until they had forcibly removed some of the Israeli settlers who had refused to leave. Gaza was handed over almost completely to the Palestinians. I’ll come back to that “almost completely” in a moment.

The right-wing never got over what they saw as an act of betrayal by the Israeli government. We could follow that thread all the way up to today’s efforts to reform the judicial system, for it explains a lot of what ails Israeli society today. But let’s go back to Hamas.

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So in 2005 Israel left Gaza. It was no longer occupied. Though, remember, Hamas considers any inch of Israeli territory to be occupied. Israel and Egypt still surrounded Gaza and held fast to a tight border. Israel still maintained control over the airspace, the sea coast, and most of the border crossings. It supplied most of Gaza’s utilities, such as electricity and water, and controlled what was allowed in and out of the Strip. Egypt, too, kept a tight grip on its side of the border. But various agreements led to a relaxation of the controls to allow freer movements of goods and people. It is not an open border by any means, but it wasn’t a completely closed one, either. The hope was that the Palestinians would be able to cooperate with Israel in governing the Strip, to the point where it would demonstrate what a viable Palestinian state could look like.

But that’s not what happened. Hamas came to power in an election in 2006. At first they shared power with the Palestinian Authority. But then the two turned on each other, battling it out in a civil war that killed over 1,000 Palestinians over the next year. Hamas won. The PA was tossed out of Gaza.

Now free to rule Gaza on their own, Hamas turned it into a platform for making war on Israel. Anything that came into Gaza was seized by Hamas to use first for their own purposes. Food wasn’t delivered to the grocery stores but used by Hamas’ men to enrich themselves by selling it at inflated prices. They didn’t build power plants so that the Palestinians were forced to rely on Israel for electricity — all so Hamas could scream about atrocities whenever Israel turned off the power. Building materials weren’t used to construct houses but to build military infrastructure. Hamas built tunnels under the border with Egypt in order to smuggle in weapons. Hamas went on to initiate four wars with Israel. Their weapon of choice were rockets fired indiscriminately at Israeli civilians. 

In response, both Israel and Egypt almost completely sealed their borders. Anything going into Gaza has to be carefully inspected, since a truck labeled “medicine” is liable to actually be carrying weapons. Still, until this week, some 20,000 Palestinians came into Israel everyday for work and medical care. 

The reality is that Israel is dealing with a hostile power. There’s no doubt it’s blockade is very tough and contributes to the misery of the Palestinians in Gaza. And yet there is no evidence to suggest that allowing in more goods would benefit those people, since Hamas seizing everything for itself. I can’t think of another country that is expected to supply electricity to a group dedicated to its destruction, but here we are. And by the way, Egypt runs an equally oppressive blockade. Strangely, they don’t seem to attract as much blame as Israel, even when they kill Palestinians by pumping toxic gas into those smuggling tunnels. Yes, it really happened two years ago, but you never heard a word of protest from the pro-Palestinian groups. 

And there’s another group that wholeheartedly supports the blockade of Hamas: the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the PA has objected to any attempts by Israel to lift certain parts of the blockade, arguing that doing so would be a boost to Hamas. I never hear a word from the pro-Palestinian groups about that either.

None of this is to let Israel off the hook for its side of the equation. But at the end of the day, Hamas cannot be reasoned with, negotiated with, placated, or managed. It’s not trying to end the occupation, since Gaza isn’t occupied. They could make something of it. But they don’t want to. They want to destroy Israel and kill every Jew, even at the cost of killing Palestinians. They have never been shy about their purpose and, now, never been clearer.

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So what we have is a deeply cynical genocidal regime that has created in Gaza a hostile territory. And as I discussed last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s colossal mistake was thinking that he could deal with these people.

The Palestinians have no way out, literally and figuratively. There’s no horizon for an independent Palestinian state, and even if there was, it wouldn’t be a land of liberation and freedom but a tyrannical Islamic regime. The Israeli right is maximally ascendent, with extremist settlers allowed to run amok in the West Bank, using violence against Palestinian civilians to further inflame the whole situation. Hamas will never allow Gaza to be developed, or even rescued. And then there’s the internal Palestinian politics that also magnifies the violence and extremism. 

So, of the 150 things I wanted to talk about, I think I hit two of them. For next episode, I want to turn to the bigger geopolitical picture. Hamas is trying to drag Israel into a devastating war in Gaza. Besides the terrible loss of life, why would it be so devastating? To understand that we have to consider how other players fit in: Hezbollah and Iran and the Saudis and Qatar and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. 

I also want to address the response to all this: the media’s insanity, the pro-Hamas college campuses, the United Nation’s constant condemnations, and the lies about Israel’s supposed atrocities. 

It generally takes me a few days to write and produce an episode, so hang in there. Huge thank you and appreciation to the people writing in with kind and positive thoughts. And to the people attacking me as being a Zionist, well just so you know, I don’t take that as an insult. 

As always I’m at jewoughtaknow.com and my email is jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, l’hitra’ot and am Yisrael chai — the Jewish People live.

© Jason Harris 2023

***Correction***. Ismail Haniyeh did not say, “even wars have rules.” The UN Secretary-General did. Haniyeh declared that Israel had committed war crimes.