Hamas 2023 Strategy+Anti-Semitism

On October 7, 2023, Hamas’ terrorists invaded Israel, murdered 1200 civilians, took 240 hostages and then cowardly melted away among Gazans, making civilian human shields for themselves and publicly threatened to repeat this atrocity. Hamas Says “We Want Oct. 7 Massacre Again and Again”

This is an existential threat to Israel and as such unacceptable; the glaring truth is this situation must immediately be ended… Period.

Israel responded to the October 7 attack by declaring war ‘until Hamas’ destruction’ and proceeded with heavy precision airstrikes of Hamas’ tunnels and headquarters. But Gaza is densely populated, so, despite attempted precision targeting and pre-warnings of civilians (leaflets, phone calls, ‘knocking-on-the-roof’), the collateral loss of civilian lives was horrendous: some 27,000 civilians, about a third of them children.

This is unacceptable; the glaring truth is this situation must immediately be ended… Period.

Recent good news is that “Israel has just begun a less intense phase of its invasion of Gaza, its military said.. The Israeli military has started the transition to a campaign that would involve fewer ground troops and airstrikes.” Yet, this is only the welcome beginning.

The challenge is to coordinate and balance two equally life-saving urgent fundamental but seemingly incompatible, opposite truths? In fact, it is not two but one and the same truth: people are never and nowhere to be massacred, Palestinians, Jews, Sudanese, Congolese, Ukrainians, Tamils, Rohingya, the list goes on… It is unacceptable; wherever happening, it must be immediately ceased.

To cease it might seem easy for Gazans: immediate ceasefire! But it is a deceptive easiness. The idea would be overwhelmingly appealing… except for the injustice of it as being one-sidedly supportive for Hamas but mortal for an Israel that has already been hurt by Hamas’ aggression on October 7.

What is to be done? Had the global community simultaneously offered the same protection and support to Israel as an immediate ceasefire would offer to Hamas, a balanced justice would be provided. How could it be executed? Maybe, by cutting Hamas’ access to money… and/or announcing Hamas terrorists as legitimate targets of Interpol… and/or having NATO armed forces engaged against them… or experts would find the ways. So far, nobody has volunteered such assistance but this simultaneous two-sided action would correct the injustice thus facilitating an urgently needed immediate ceasefire. What could be fairer? Is there an alternative? Preservation of Hamas which is inevitable with an immediate ceasefire is an existential threat for Israel. Accepting it one-sidedly, are we not trading the lives of Gazans for Israeli civilians, as October 7 showed? Let alone justice – does it make SENSE for people not infected with antisemitism?

What are the grounds for such a pessimistic forecast? Let’s see. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh stated in the address broadcast by Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen television: “The blood of our women, children and elderly […] we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens with us resolve.”

Zvi Yehezkeli, the head of the Arab Desk at Channel 13, commented on the mindset of Hamas:”Killing Jews is Yahya Sinwar’s [another Hamas leader] strongest instinct… Their concern is not for the residents. Yahya Sinwar doesn’t care that two million people have become refugees. It simply doesn’t matter to him…. A soldier said to me, ‘Jews kill to survive, while Arabs live to kill.’ That’s the difference.” “ If Israel could use a nuclear bomb there wouldn’t be war; if Hamas – there wouldn’t be Israel”.

Ghazi Hamad, yet another Hamas leader, declared that the Palestinian terrorist group would repeat attacks (like on October 7) many times in the future until it destroyed Israel: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove it because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation. We are not ashamed to say this.”

Iran, Hezbollah, Yemeni Houthi, all crave for Israel’s destruction…. Tiny resource-poor Israel like baby Heracle squeezed by murderous snakes. “Ex-senior Houthi official warns that an Iran-backed group will eventually hit Tel Aviv.Former spokesperson Ali Al Bukhaiti cautions that the Yemen-based terror movement should not be treated as a joke, is gaining popularity around the world for its attacks on Israel.”By Glenn Valis, Quora:

“...Hamas ADMITTED to everything, and THEY provided the video evidence, [their own footage]. Not only did they behead babies but they alsoput one in an oven, turned it on, and raped its mother as it screamed next to her… Damn, Hamas is using international aid to buy weapons instead of helping their own people, and using their own people as human shields.”

Conclusion: Iran-supported Hamas and other Islamist organisations are an EXISTENTIAL threat for Israel. WORSE: not only for the state of Israel but for every Jew anywhere – in the ‘best’ Holocaust traditions. They proved it on October 7 and are “not ashamed” to prove it again and again.

Since October 7, the Palestinian Authority has added thousands of Palestinians to its list of people who qualify to receive ‘terror stipends’.Palestinian officials announced that 3,550 terrorists imprisoned in Israel would receive payouts, as would the families of 23,210 “martyrs.”

Why do Palestinians suffer such bleak wretched existence, whose fault is it? Zillions in donations flow to Gaza (“$1.86 BILLION from Qatar between 2012–22 alone, and in 2023, $30 MILLION to Hamas EACH MONTH. Hamas uses $350 million of international aid money for its annual armed terrorist budget while 47% of Gazans are unemployed and 80% of the population lives in poverty. Just three Hamas leaders alone have amassed personal fortunes of a total of $11 BILLION,”); where is this money? Hamas has been spending millions on armament, on building over 350 miles of technically sophisticated tunnels, on lavish lifestyle for their families turned billionaires in Qatar. But their answer always is: our decrepit life is Israel’s fault, ‘of course’, because it ‘occupies’ Gaza (Israel gives Palestinians jobs, water, electricity, food, medical assistance… but who cares? Nothing like a handy scapegoat!). There is only one way to eradicate this antisemitic hypocrisy: to fight and destroy Hamas. And the only way to reach it,unfortunately, is to decline an immediate ceasefire. Like the Senator Cato the Elder in ancient Rome: “Carthago delenda est” where today ‘Carthago’ is Hamas and militant Islamism.

How far should Israel go in self-defence? To attempt an answer, allow me first a quick thought experiment. Let’s imagine that terrorists captured a school full of children and teachers. No negotiations are possible, terrorists are set on shooting everyone in view. What is to be done?

In fact, it is not only a thought experiment, but it did also happen in real life. The violent takeover of a school in Beslan, Ossetia (North Caucasus), on September 1, 2004, was perpetrated by Islamists linked to neighboring Chechnya. At least 32 terrorists stormed the school and took more than 1,000 hostages. The hostages were denied water or food; some children resorted to drinking urine. On September 3, Russian special forces attacked the school. More than 330 people, the majority of them children, were killed; hundreds more were wounded. My question is: should we blame the Russian special forces – even partly – for this horrendous loss of innocent life? Wouldn’t justice be done if we state that the crime and human loss were perpetrated only due to and by Islamic terrorists even if some, hell, even if most murdered children might have been killed technically by Russian fire? Well, this story is just a metaphor.

Now let’s conclude our thought experiment: imagine further that the terrorists announced that they would kill a hostage a day until their demands were accepted. Therefore, procrastination was not an option. What remained? Only an attack on terrorists no matter how dangerous for the hostages it would be (one third of them were killed in Beslan).

So, Israel attacked – yes, with tragic loss of Gazans’ lives despite that IDF has done more than any other army ever, warning civilians (to leave to-be-bombed areas) andexercising precision strikes. The world erupted in howling: ‘Ceasefire now! Civilians are being killed!’ Bitterly true, they are… But the immediate ceasefire would allow terrorists to escape unrestrained while they keep publicly menacing with new attacks. Is it really an option?

Or let’s briefly consider another metaphor: a madman-killer threatens to kill you and rape your daughter. And the localpolice are unresponsive, ‘not to be bothered’. What remains for you but to shoot him in self-defence? Even if he had forced a stranger with her child to be his human shield? Yes, your self-defence would mean a tragic loss of two innocent lives… But isn’t it obvious: the madman is to be blamed, not you, even if technically both hostages were killed by your bullets?

In my books it is self-evident that 1) immediate Hamas-saving ceasefire with no simultaneous protection of Israel is NOT an option; 2) it is Hamas who is responsible for the abysmal loss of life in Gaza even if Gazans were killed by retaliating Israeli fire. Hamas set the stage for it, ready to pay with Gazans’ lives (but not with Hamas leaders’ lives!) for annihilation of Israel.

What is badly needed is an effective protection of civilians on BOTH sides – Gaza and Israel – at the same time. But with Jews always the scapegoats, this seems a hopeless dream. You be the judge: since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 140 resolutions criticizing Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Over the same period, it has passed 68 resolutions against all other countries taken together, including Iran, N. Korea, Russia, Myanmar, Venezuela, all the Arab countries with poor human rights records, Sudan, Congo, etc. Sounds like a parody on justice, would you agree?

Technically though, perpetrating this anti-Jew discrimination at the General Assembly couldn’t have been easier: there are 50+ Muslim-majority countries (hence – votes in the UN) and only one – Jewish, which makes voting against Israel, ‘a-houseboy-for-beating’ accused in everything and anything -just a bad joke.

An example: ‘bad Israel locked poor Gazans like in prison.’ Egypt, so much bigger, richer, a Muslim country, also has direct crossings with Gaza and also locks (and keeps locked) them. Where is the outrage against Egypt keeping Gazans prisoners? Not a whisper.

Of course, Israel is far from being blameless as well. One could list many major mistakes, discrimination, violence: it is a 75-year-long struggle to survive unrelenting aggression (because “Under the Islamic law, any land captured by the Muslims ought to permanently become Islamic land!”). But it is a fact of life that Israeli Arabs live incomparably better lives than Gazans or Arab populations in neighboring countries. Of course, the enormous loss of lives in Gaza is abysmal and it must be stopped ASAP as global protests justly demand. Israel must curb settler violence in the West Bank.

Everyone (aged 5+ and some younger) has had grudges and grievances against someone; it will become a living hell with homicides, wars, violenceabound, if we accept historical grudges as a valid reason for aggression today. Imagine the mayhem if North American Natives suddenly attacked: ‘You all, get out or get killed, we want our land back!’

As well, when people point to Israel’s ‘excessive’ airstrike response, they need to remember: the last time when Jews were announced ‘less-than-humans’, no one stood up for them, and 6 million of them went on to die. A ship of Jewish refugees with more than 900 passengers (the M.S. St. Louis) was denied landing/entry in multiple countries including the U.S. and Canada (‘Please, please, take and save only children!’ NO was the answer). They all had to return back to their persecution by gloating Nazis. It all is still a living memory. There is a deeper sensibility to Israel’s show of force in war.

For centuries banned by antisemitic laws from land-possessing or occupying any professions except of hard manual labor (and two others), European Jews were forced into those two others (the only ones allowed by laws) to make a living: tax collector and money-lander. Both were considered ‘sinful’ for and naturally hated by Christians. By Jews too – but Jews were deprived of other options by laws. Next, naturally, Jews became a target of accusations that they (just as being Jews) are born money-grabbers craving for secret control over the world.

Why did the soil to Jew-hatred turn out so fertile? Because it is crucial to always have a scapegoat who can be blamed for whatever went wrong – to hide own errors and failures. Stateless shelter-less Jews, welcome nowhere, have been indispensable as scapegoats. And by now, sadly, antisemitism is an item transmitted ‘with mother’s milk’, universal and mortal like a virus. People are getting infected with antisemitism so early in life (when they are as yet unable to make any own judgements) that it becomes a matter of ‘common sense’ which no longer needs any factual evidence, ‘self-evident’ like daylight. Like in an old joke: “Keep away from him! Either he stole a coat or his coat was stolen… But he is tainted, keep away!”

An example? Look at antisemitism on university campuses. “Jewish students at Harvard, MIT, NYU and Penn facing death threats, assaults: Back to 1939”. Why? Allegedly, because they are held responsible for the actions of Netanyahu. What? Have Russian students on campuses ever been responsible for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine? Have Iranian students – for the crimes of Ayatollahs? But Jews, they are always blanket-guilty: it is so habitual as to be considered ‘normal’.

With WWII, antisemitism has massively spread to the East, a goldmine forradical Islam to always have scapegoats at hand. Over the centuries Jews were expelled (‘convert, get killed, or get out, all possessions left behind’) over 50 times from various European countries and in the XXth century – from Arab countries over 20 times (in 9 Arab countries in 1940 over 850,000 Jews resided permanently; in 2018 only 3300 remained). Think how life-crippling, dispiriting, disruptive, humiliating and dispossessing it was for Jews.

Hamas plays the diabolical card of antisemitism (“Hit them where it hurts!”) with great sophistication and unparalleled success: Jews are deemed to be doomed in public opinion merely because they are Jews. Never mind that worse things happen elsewhere, if those perpetrators are not Jews – who cares?

An example: over 110 wars are currently raging globally. 

Are the atrocities of those 110 wars playing on TV daily globally (like they are for the Gaza war)? No, the world has been skillfully forced to wear eye-blinders, to focus on Gaza only – and this is the greatest achievement of duplicitous Hamas propaganda. They publicly admitted: they wanted a new war because they had feared that the Palestinian question (which is a conditio sine qua non for Hamas’ very existence) was fading away from global attention. To put it (and themselves) back in the center, to get financed…The Gazans’ lives were not even in the picture in those plans – who cares? Once again: “The blood of our women, children and elderly […] we are the ones who need this blood…” (see above).

“On 16 October 2020, Samuel Paty, a French school teacher, was beheaded by an Islamist terrorist. The response from Muslim world was typical: all around the world screaming ‘we’ve been the victims’ and initiating a boycott of French products all around the world,” (Wikipedia). It was the response, playing the same servile-multitudes card as for Gaza: ‘we, Islamists, are everywhere! We always over-scream you into submission’.

“According to The Economist Group‘s Democracy Index 2022 study, Israel is the only democratic country in the region,” (Wikipedia). This year, over 80 national elections are scheduled to take place, directly affecting an estimated 4.2 billion people—52 percent of the globe’s population—in the largest election cycle the world will see until 2048. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” President Biden said in a speech on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. This makes it even more critical to preserve and support the existing global democracies, Israel being one of the most threatened ones by the ayatollahs of Iran and their outshoots like Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis.

There are 50+ Muslim-majority countries with some 1,7 billion Muslims in the world and about 22 of them are populated by 300 million Arab. Grand total of 7 million Israeli Jews who have created their ‘blooming garden’, have nowhere to go but this minuscule formerly unenviable arid patch (no mineral and scant water resources, tiny arable land, it was just sun-baked malarial swamps/desert), size of New Jersey (8,000+ sq. miles). That is all they have, all they ask for: Israel (an uncolored spec) among Arab (green) world.

How can Islamists be stopped from playing their foul card (of antisemitism/civilian mass-murder), forcing Jews to choose between annihilation of Israel or global Jew-hatred? And conceptually the situation is urgently overdue for fundamental improvements. Since time immemorial humans have followed nature in that the stronger always wins; might makes right. It had been self-evident from Alexander the Great and Hannibal to Napoleon and Clausewitz. No wonder, Jews, dispersed and oppressed, exiled and murdered for two millennia, dreamt of becoming strong again. It has become the principal self-defence doctrine of the tiny, impoverished from inception, perpetually attacked, Israel. With harsh self-sacrifices, they succeeded in it magnificently. But in the last 50 or so years this success became outdated and fundamentally misunderstood thanks to the introduction of TV, Internet and Social Media. Global multitudes win now, not military strength. And here Islam is dangerously (to Israel) nearly invincible.

It has become grotesquely obvious in military history of Israel versus Islamists. Repeatedly, they play provocateurs with a sudden singular act of aggression – and melt away among civilians triggering repeated knee jerk-responses by Israel – like the blind fighting gadfly, only to be inevitably blamed for ‘disproportionality’ and even ‘genocide’. The gadfly always escapes public condemnation among the outcry against Israel.

All intifadas/wars were orchestrated by Islamists working puppeteers, and Israel obediently obliging in a predictable self-harmful way. Always the same pattern: Israel wins on the ground but tragically loses in propaganda wars. Those losses accumulate and become more and more dangerous. This must stop, urgently.

By T. Vargazon, Quora:

This suicidal conceptual ideation must be eradicated as soon as possible. As well, Israeli military theorists must quickly become alert to a changing reality; it is not impossible that AI will soon bring new revolutionary changes in information/propaganda spread that are not to be overlooked either.

A Survey by the American Jewish Committee concluded, “78 Percent of US Jews Feel ‘Less Safe’ in Wake of Hamas Pogrom”.