Hamas is engaged in a genocidal war. Israel has the right to defend itself

Amid the fog of war, the truth about the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often obscured or even lost. Here are a few points to bear in mind.

This is not a battle between two equally legitimate sides. Hamas is not a recognised state, as Israel has been since 1948, but an Islamist terrorist organisation. It is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, which it refers to as “the Zionist enemy”, as part of an apocalyptic struggle against Jews. It was founded in 1988 by the Muslim Brotherhood and its covenant or charter advocates armed jihad as the only solution to Palestinian problem. 

Although Hamas has evolved over time, it has never renounced its original aim. The charter quotes a notorious hadith (saying) in which Mohammed prophesies the annihilation of the Jews: “The Day of Judgement will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” 

The 1988 charter is not only anti-Zionist, but explicitly anti-Semitic: “In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” The Hamas charter incorporates and endorses every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory ever advanced against the Jewish people, claiming among other baseless lies that Jews control the world media and all “imperialist” states, that they were behind all revolutions and wars. It draws on Nazi propaganda to claim that the Jews engineered the Second World War for profit. A new Hamas manifesto was issued in 2017 which omits much of this anti-Semitic material, but made it clear that this does not abrogate the original covenant. Hamas is officially classified as a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US and the EU, along with many other states.

The present conflict was started by Hamas, on the pretext that Israeli police had entered the al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites, to clear rioters. According to the Israel Defence Force (IDF), at the time of writing, Hamas has fired more than 1,600 missiles at Israeli towns and cities in just three days. The aim of such an indiscriminate bombardment is to kill Israeli civilians, including Arab-Israelis. This is a war crime. The use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Hamas, by basing its missile launchers in densely populated areas of Gaza City, is also a war crime. These crimes receive incomparably less international attention than retaliation by Israel. Unlike the IDF, however, Hamas makes no attempt to minimise civilian casualties because images of civilian deaths, particularly that of children, are its main propaganda tool. It is a highly effective one, too, as the wave of hostile coverage of Israel in the Western media shows. Such coverage invariably increases anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in Britain and elsewhere.

Hamas also regularly commits crimes against its own people, torturing and executing political opponents on the pretext that they are collaborators with Israel. The last conflict with Israel in 2014 was an opportunity for Hamas to settle scores with Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and dozens of its members were killed. The present conflict should be seen in the context of the power struggle between Hamas and the PA. The Hamas rocket attacks follow yet another postponement of the long-delayed elections in the West Bank, which had been announced by the PA’s President, Mahmoud Abbas, in January. He was elected in 2005 after the death of Yasser Arafat and has not faced an election since. He is now 85. The onslaught on Israel has been accompanied by an incendiary social media campaign to incite Palestinians in Israel to riot and attack Jews. 

In considering the Israeli response to this week’s Hamas attacks, it is helpful to recall how the West responded to the emergence of Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh). This, like the Hamas enclave in Gaza, was a terrorist proto-state run by Islamists. Unlike Hamas, Islamic State claimed to have founded a Caliphate with territorial claims across the whole Middle East and beyond. But both organisations shared the genocidal aim of destroying Israel and made no distinction between Zionism and the Jewish people. 

The West immediately recognised Islamic State as a deadly enemy and moved to destroy it, in alliance with Iraq and other Arab states. Between 2014 and 2019, every one of the cities occupied by Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere was recaptured. However, in the process several of these — notably Raqqa, the “capital” of Islamic State — were largely razed to the ground by Western air strikes and ground assaults; by 2017, some 170,000 sorties had been flown by coalition forces. Along with many tens of thousands of terrorists, an unknown number of civilians were killed. After the fall of Mosul in 2017, Associated Press reported that between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians had died in that city alone. To this day, nobody has taken responsibility for these civilian deaths. They were simply collateral damage in the war to defeat Islamic State. 

Democracies, then, do whatever is necessary to defend themselves. Israel is no different. So far, it has reacted to the hail of missiles with remarkable restraint. It has refused to unleash its formidable firepower against Gaza and has made extraordinary efforts to target only Hamas leaders and operatives. The casualties so far on the Palestinian side are mainly terrorists. Would we, in similar circumstances, be so restrained? Britain was attacked in 1944 by Nazi V1 doodlebugs and V2 rockets. These V (“Vengeance”) weapons killed several thousand civilians and service personnel in London and elsewhere; at its height, the offensive damaged 20,000 houses a day. But the RAF and the US Air Force wrought far greater havoc in retribution: they destroyed every city in Germany. No attempt was made to spare civilians. The debate about the morality of the air war goes on to this day, but few at the time doubted its justification. The comparison with Israel’s predicament today is a fair one.

The missiles now used by Hamas, using technology from Iran, are increasingly accurate and destructive. Only the Iron Dome defence system has prevented a much larger civilian death toll. Hamas only need to get lucky once to inflict large scale casualties. As it is, every Israeli has friends and relatives who have been victims of terror and war. No wonder Israel is determined to protect its people, many of whose families fled the Holocaust, expulsion from Muslim countries or persecution elsewhere. Hamas is engaged in a yet another genocidal war against the Jewish people. In this conflict between a friendly nation and a terrorist organisation, Britain cannot be neutral. The UK Government should uphold Israel’s right of self-defence at the UN and do what we can to cut off support from Hamas.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.