OCTOBER 14 ― Nobody saw it coming, they said. October 7, 2023 happened to be the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah wrapping up one week of Sukkot celebrations. People did their groceries, went to synagogue, or took their daily walks. Families picnicked together in parks. Partygoers in their twenties and thirties danced it out at a trance festival in the southern Israeli desert.
Then the music stopped, and the air raid sirens blared. Thousands of Hamas rockets rained death and destruction on the Israeli townships surrounding Gaza. Simultaneously, Hamas commandos broke down the barrier fences that have kept two million Gazans shut in for years and stormed the kibbutzim on the periphery of the Gaza Strip by land, sea, and air. Hundreds of Israelis and other nationalities were killed in the initial attack. Scores more were kidnapped. The scale of Hamas’ incursion was unprecedented, not only in its degree of preparation and coordination, but also for the fact that it was the first major invasion into undisputed Israeli territory since 1948.
The Jewish state responded accordingly: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel was “at war”, threatened to turn Gaza into a “deserted island”, and promised to reduce Hamas centres of operation into rubble. At time of writing, 300,000 Israeli reservists have been called up in preparation for a potential ground assault on the Palestinian enclave. Thousands of people on both sides have been killed, and before the war is over thousands more will die.
For their part the Western press has been quick to label Hamas’ coordinated attacks as a “stunning intelligence failure” (New York Times) on Israel’s part, one in which the country was “taken by surprise” (BBC), and an “intelligence failure for the ages” (The Guardian). Many Israeli experts admitted as much; former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Yaakov Amidror conceded that it was a “major failure” for Israel. An IDF spokesman has described the attack as their 9/11 and Pearl Harbor combined ― Israel’s day of infamy.
But was it really? Were the Israelis so utterly blindsided that they truly did not expect this to come out of nowhere?
The Netanyahu government ought to know full well that this is the logical outcome of keeping two million human beings under blockade for more than seventeen years. Two million souls, sardined within 365 square kilometres of largely inarable land, with very limited access to basic necessities, and heavily reliant on humanitarian food baskets for their day-to-day existence.
Surely Israel’s much-vaunted security services would have picked up on the signals. In the months leading up to the attack, Israeli settlers had upped the ante with a marked increase in organised acts of violence against Palestinians. Lawmakers in the Knesset, many of them from settler backgrounds, had increasingly pushed for outright annexation of land in the West Bank ― land that is, at least on paper, designated as Palestinian territory. Just a few days before the invasion, Jewish settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem, Islam’s third-holiest site, in a bid to perform what one waqf department official called Talmudic rituals. Did anyone honestly expect the Palestinians to sit on their hands while such blatant acts of provocation were being visited upon them?
It needs no repeating that this systematic erasure of Palestinian rights has been going on since 1967. Day in and day out the Palestinians have had their houses stolen from them. Brick by brick, inch by inch, the Palestinians are being walled off from their own country. Rubbing more salt in the wound, illegal settlers in the West Bank enjoy extraterritoriality as Israeli civilian law is pipelined into the areas of settlement; by contrast, the Palestinians living literally next door to them are instead subjected to martial law. Anyone who cares to look at a map of the Palestinian Territories ― what’s left of them ― would see how Palestinian neighbourhoods have practically been reduced to apartheid-style bantustans, scattered and fragmented and cut off from each other as a direct result of illegal settler encroachment. No one with the slightest shred of self-dignity would just stand by and let something like this happen to them. When push comes to shove comes to the sociopolitical annihilation of an entire people, the natural order of things would be to push back as hard as your circumstances allow you to.
Certainly the murder and kidnapping of civilians and the wanton destruction of property in the course of Hamas’ assault on Israel cannot by any means be justified. But it is an equally valid truth that Israel has been doing the exact same things to the Palestinians, on a far larger scale, in a far larger geographical expanse, and for a far longer period of time. The sense of doom and foreboding that Israelis are experiencing in the current war is but a tiny fraction of what Palestinians have been going through for generations. Do only Israeli lives matter? Do Palestinian lives matter less, or not at all?
The Israeli government has warned Gaza residents to leave in anticipation of an all-out bombardment of the enclave. But where are they to go when Gaza has essentially been transformed into the world’s largest outdoor prison? In an area less than half the size of Singapore, with a population density comparable to Hong Kong’s, it is a grim, foregone conclusion that collateral damage will be extensive and civilian casualties will be extremely high. Munitions do not discriminate between those who support Hamas and those who don’t.
The debacle in Gaza also underscores yet again the monumental failure of US foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. Even as the Palestinian question flared up again in recent months, threatening to ignite another powder keg in the region, the Biden administration showed little initiative to put out the fire, preferring instead to chase butterflies and broker a normalisation agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This absurd preoccupation with making peace between Israel and the Arab states, while completely ignoring the dire facts on the ground in Palestine, has been the order of business in Washington since the Trump era ― the same president who recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, completely sidelining what the Palestinians had to say in the matter, not to mention long-standing international consensus on the status of the city.
For all the boy-scout pretensions to peace, equality, and justice, the overarching dictum of Mideast Realpolitik is that might invariably equals right. In this game, the odds have never been in Palestine’s favour. Not only does Israel have the most sophisticated military in the Middle East, its lobbyists have a solid grip on Washington’s policymakers, and the US has consistently used its UN veto to stonewall Security Council resolutions condemning Israel and its repeated violations of Palestinian rights (53 times to be precise, but at this point, is anyone counting?). The “two-state solution” has once again proven to be a hollow slogan, a mere charade played out in front of the cameras just to keep the illusion of diplomacy alive.
The sensible thing to do would be to call for an immediate ceasefire and summon all parties back to the negotiating table. But what hope do the Palestinians have in reaching a fair and equitable deal with the most right-wing government that Israel has had in its history, one that counts 700,000 West Bank settlers as a principal vote bank?
Hamas’ brazen invasion of Israel, for all the casualties and the physical and psychological damage it wrought on the Jewish state, will ultimately prove futile. They knew they were up against a far superior opponent, fitted with cutting-edge military hardware and a steady supply of materiel from its most powerful backer. The Israelis will retaliate with disproportionate force, as they are already doing. But the symbolism of the invasion, and the image of those bulldozers tearing down the barriers that have caused the people of Gaza so much grief for so many years, will reverberate long beyond the final volleys of this latest war. This is their way of saying “We are here. We matter. And we will make sure you never forget.”
This was no surprise attack. This was an attack that took almost eight decades in the making. It’s the opening paragraph to yet another bloody chapter in the endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No one read the room, and the innocents ― Palestinians and Israelis ― are now paying for it, as they always have been for the past eighty years.
Tomorrow a new dawn will rise over the erstwhile Holy Land, and the cycle of carnage will start anew.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
