Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7 last year were quickly described as Israel’s 9/11: the day the nation’s security system was blindsided in the most remarkable way, setting off the year of death and despair we have just witnessed.
What Hamas did was barbaric and horrific, and yet in many quarters sympathy for Israel evaporated almost instantly. Some felt pure joy. Why? Because in the eyes of many, October 7 did not come out of the blue. It was caused by decades of deadly oppression by Israel, ever since 1948 when the Jews expelled Palestinians from their lands.
For Israelis you can track back to the Holocaust and its lesson that never again will Jews allow themselves to be oppressed and slaughtered in their millions.
We could go on forever like this, back to biblical times. But I am going to take a stab at 2005 as one trigger point, if for no other reason than it explains exactly why Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, is more than happy to give the United States the finger and settle things his own way.
In the sweep of Middle East history, it is only yesterday that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip as a precursor to so-called free and fair elections in 2006. All this was done at the behest of then US president, George W Bush, and his administration’s conviction that what the Middle East really needed was a good dose of democracy as some kind of sunlight to kill off the darkness of terrorism.
US allies in the Middle East warned against it. Egypt’s forever dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was of course acting out of self-interest, but he knew better than anyone that a free vote would also bring the wrong result for the West: it would put Islamic fundamentalism in government. Mubarak had brutally suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood in his country and had come to power only because Islamists in Egypt’s military had assassinated the former Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat.
Sadat was assassinated in 1981 because he had signed a peace treaty with Israel, a move for which he was denounced as a traitor by Palestinians. He was killed on October 6 — a date which lives long in the Arab memory and may or may not be coincidental to October 7.
And so it begins …
In 2006, Hamas won the elections and duly became ruler of Gaza. The word Hamas means zeal or bravery, an acronym of the Arabic Harrikat al Mukawama al Islamia, which translates as the Islamic Resistance Movement. Within months of being elected Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier, an act that triggered an intense bombing attack from Israel. In the same month, the Shia Islamic resistance movement, Hezbollah, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on Israel’s northern border. In response, Israel bombed Lebanon to smithereens.
So here we are, 20 years on, same place, same players. Only this time it is of unparalleled intensity, with gruesome consequences.
This is the logic of power in action, underpinned in Israel’s case by extraordinary technological advances. It is a demonstration that what happens in the Israel/Hamas conflict is not contained to Gaza but is inextricably linked to the wider Middle East.
So where does it go from here?
The West, including Australia, has a strategic mudmap of the Middle East which carves up the region into the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys are the US and its allies. These are Israel as well as the “moderate” Arab governments of Egypt and Jordan, plus oil buddies Saudi Arabia and nearly all the wealthy Gulf states.
Team USA therefore includes the biggest Muslim country in the Middle East (Egypt) and the wealthiest country (Saudi Arabia), alongside Israel. Strange bedfellows indeed. But that’s the Middle East for you. The baddies are Iran and its allies, Syria and the islamic resistance movements of Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis.
israel might have gone to the extremes since October 7 and might be denounced in various parts of the West, but the mudmap of power remains intact.
The Sunni Islam regimes of Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia are opposed to the Shia Islam regime in Tehran and its allies. The so-called moderate regimes among them have for years used violence and torture to suppress Islamic fundamentalism. Egypt might have sympathy for and kinship with the Palestinians but it will never open its border with Gaza and risk Hamas extremism leaking into its country.
Restraint? That’s not in the plans
And what of the US and its urgings for Israel to show restraint? Israel has not forgotten what happened when it listened to the US in 2005.
If it was Hamas’ intention to set up an end-of-days conflict with Israel on October 7 then it has succeeded, and there may yet be tens of thousands more lives lost before Israel considers it has rid the region of threat.
For Palestinians the despair is never-ending. Hamas might have proven to be an effective resistance leader — far more so than the compromised and corrupted Fatah party — but it comes with a hardline Islamic ideology. It is the sort that defines the young revellers they came across at the Nova music festival last year as evil — especially the unchaperoned young women providing a “temptation” to men.
Such is the godawful, miserable and benighted lot of the average Palestinian: the victims of a war where the number of casualties is as nothing compared with the historic stakes in play.
And despite the massive scale of the killings, there is no sign that Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia will defect from Team USA, guaranteeing in turn that the repressive regimes and their stultifying, sclerotic power structures carry on… all to protect the status quo.
David Hardaker was the ABC’s Middle East correspondent in 2006-07 and covered the Israeli/Hezbollah war, primarily from Beirut. He also lived and worked in Egypt where he taught journalism at the American University in Cairo. He later worked in the Arab gulf region, based in Abu Dhabi. Hardaker wrote a Lowy Institute paper on the potential of social media to bring down the authoritarian government of Egypt. Ten years ago he wrote the ABC’s guidelines on reporting on the Arab world. He speaks, reads and writes Arabic.
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