by Michele Nobile
1. Hamas' action: a barbaric and terrorist operation
Commentators have compared Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to several historical events, for example Pearl Harbor (in terms of surprise and impact) and the Tet Offensive (the 1968 North Vietnamese offensive pushed the US administration to begin peace negotiations). By choosing October 7 as the date of the attack, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and allied organizations obviously evoke the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the 50th anniversary of which was the previous day.
By type of attacking force, psychological impact and ferocity of the assault I am among those for which the most pertinent comparison is with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The vast majority of the at least 1,300 Israelis killed in the incursion were civilians, Jews of both sexes and of all ages, including many dozens of Israeli Arabs, to which must be added the wounded and approximately 200 kidnapped hostages. Overall, the number of Israelis killed in just a few hours in Operation Al-Aqsa flood is more than four times the total killed in the fifteen years between 2008 and September 2023.
This is especially true for oppressed peoples and the dominated class: terrorism can produce effects far from those desired or declared, it tends to replace apparatus warfare for the struggle, organization and self-defense of social movements.
The operation launched by Hamas and other organizations aspires to achieve the indicated terrorist objectives: intimidation against Israeli state terrorism and Zionist extremism, revenge for the deaths and suffering of the Palestinians, an «exemplary» gesture for Palestinians, Arab peoples and states against Zionist and Western domination.
What is horribly «ordinary» for Gaza is instead extraordinary for Israel and therefore psychologically and politically traumatic. However, trauma does not necessarily equate to paralysis. If before October the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu was in serious difficulty, now a government of national unity has been formed; a state of war was declared for the first time since 1973; the reservists - in August more than 10,000 had declared that they did not intend to serve if Netanyahu did not give up his reform of the judicial system - are mobilised: 360,000.
It is not possible that, however fanatical and optimistically hopeful of external help, the leaders of Hamas and other organizations underestimated the destructiveness of Israel’s retaliation in the face of an action of this magnitude. It was absolutely obvious that the attack by Hamas and other organizations would condemn the Palestinians of Gaza to terrible and unnecessary suffering: as of October 18, 3,478 Palestinians had already been killed in the Gaza Strip, including 853 children (on the 17th) and 64 in West Bank, the injured in the two regions are 12,500 and 1,284 respectively (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs data). If the bombings do not cease and if the Israeli army invades Gaza, the Palestinian victims, mostly civilians, will be between ten and twenty times more numerous than the victims of the Hamas incursion. We cannot have any illusions about this, we can only hope that as many Gazans as possible will be allowed to reach safety, instead of remaining under siege to act as «human shields» for Hamas and «collateral damage» for the Israelis. And whatever their real motivations and objectives, discussed later in the article, Palestinian leaders cannot fail to have taken into account the possibility - if not the certainty - of military annihilation. The orography of Gaza is not that of southern Lebanon, favorable for defense, where Hezbollah is present in force; the Gaza Strip does not allow for defense in depth; it has no contiguity with countries - Syria and Iran - which could support it with arms supplies; Gaza Strip can be completely blocked: Hamas has no logistical background; the military capabilities and quality of the arsenal of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are much inferior to those of Hezbollah and, presumably, they have already discharged the mass of rockets available.
Operation Al-Aqsa flood was the exact opposite of a spontaneous popular uprising (which may result from and involve the action of an organization but is not determined by it) and of the first Intifada, which was the moment of maximum sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Then it was truly a challenge between David’s sling and the brute strength of the colossus Goliath. Instead, 2023 is a coldly deliberate terrorist operation, not an explosion of popular anger.
This said, I move from the description to the ethical-political evaluation, the reasons for which I will explore further below.
For the Palestinian people, Operation Al-Aqsa flood is a human catastrophe, which does not result from an error of evaluation or from unintentional and unpredictable effects on the part of those who decided it. The material agent of the catastrophe is the Israeli armed force, but Hamas and its allies share political responsibility with the Israeli government and its supporters.
Hamas uses the Palestinians of Gaza as cannon fodder for its own power purposes. Hamas is an enemy of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinians are the first interested in eliminating Hamas and its associates.
For the Israelis and for the world, the Hamas Operation is an act of barbarism worthy of the pogroms of the Russian Black Hundreds at the time of the Tsar or the Nazi Kristallnacht. It is a horror that Jews are still killed because they are Jews. It is a crime on par with the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It is a war crime and a crime against humanity, a shame that tarnishes the Palestinian cause. This fact cannot be reduced by listing Israeli war crimes, nor can it be justified by the daily barbarity that the Palestinians have suffered for many decades. There is no justification for horror wherever it comes from, otherwise all horrors, especially those of the powerful, will always find their justification in the name of the end that justifies the means.
For for the protests against the war and for Palestinian rights to have political and moral credibility and therefore consensus, the atrocity of Hamas and its partners must be condemned in the clearest and most unequivocal way.
Whatever the expectations of the Hamas leaders, the terrorist characteristics and the consequent effects of Operation Flood objectively demonstrate the impossibility of militarily defeating Israel, whose destructive potential, including nuclear weapons, remains intact. Knowing history, one can understand that the prospect of winning the State of Israel through armed struggle died at least more than forty years ago, when Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 led to the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from that country. Operation Flood is the last barbaric but desperate coup that marks its definitive failure.
It is proven that on the path of armed struggle and terrorism the Palestinian people will never be able to obtain justice. It has become a politically useless path and a morally unacceptable waste of lives.
The rise of Hamas was the result of another failure: that of al-Fatah, of the Oslo accords and of the aspiration for an independent Palestinian state alongside that of Israel. On the other hand, as long as Israel remains constitutionally an ethnocentric and Zionist state, the Palestinians will not be able to have justice. At this point, the only pursuable objective is therefore that of a single multi-ethnic Israeli-Palestinian state, obviously secular so that the feud between Judaism and Islam does not survive.
2. A critical assessment of speculations about Hamas’ objectives
What drove Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their associates to take an action that was extremely risky, if not downright suicidal, to say the least? To this question, the Israeli government and some commentators have responded that the «hand of Iran» could be behind the attack on Israel; or that, with or without Iran’s involvement, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is intended to be a sort of detonator for the uprising in the West Bank and give impetus to Hezbollah’s offensive actions from Lebanon. From a military point of view, the possibility of an extension and internationalization of the conflict would be a way to divide Israeli forces.
The large number of hostages - which with their dispersion makes their release by force impossible - and the population of Gaza itself can act as «human shields» and slow down Israeli action, due to considerations regarding the national and international reactions to a humanitarian catastrophe. This may be part of Hamas’s calculations but, conversely, it may also be thought that it intends to provoke an Israeli reaction so ferocious as to discredit it and block the re-establishment of normal relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, part of the process of the so-called Abraham Accords, which have already led to diplomatic normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco.
Those who sympathize with the Palestinian cause can say that it is a popular uprising, the legitimate reaction to the daily violence to which Israel subjects the Palestinians, to the inhuman living conditions in the blockaded Gaza strip, to the historic injustice of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian Arabs and the creation of the Zionist state. Therefore the Hamas attack would be aimed at demonstrating that Israel is not invulnerable and that there can be no peace in Palestine without justice for the Palestinians. To those who exalt themselves or remain ambiguous about Operation Flood, it must be pointed out that it costs the Palestinians thousands more deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees, in addition to the destruction of the Gaza Strip.
One can only make conjectures about the strategic calculations of Hamas and company, and conjectures are usually simpler and more linear than the truth. The elements and problems underlying these explanations must be taken into account, but overall they leave me perplexed.
Just in March of this year, with the mediation of China, Iran and Saudi Arabia re-established diplomatic relations and opened their embassies again (Iran in June, Saudi in August); both states have applied to join the Brics group; and it seems that, according to the agreement, Iran must suspend aid to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, fought by the Saudis. It is this agreement between the two reactionary Islamic theocracies - one Sunni, the other Shiite - that (perhaps) could damage the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Furthermore, after a year of indirect negotiations, an informal understanding was agreed between Iran and the United States over the summer (different from a formal agreement, which would require ratification by the US Senate, where it would encounter strong opposition): Iran should give up enriching the uranium in its possession beyond 60% (below the threshold that can be used for war purposes), collaborate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and free some Iranian Americans imprisoned for espionage (four have gone under house arrest); in exchange the United States would not tighten sanctions and would make available 10 billion dollars of «frozen» Iranian funds, which the Iranian theocracy absolutely needs; on October 12, the United States and Qatar agreed to freeze six of these billions, which had been transferred to Qatar.
Middle Eastern diplomacy is extremely opportunistic, but it is in motion: given the circumstances, I would not say it is in the interest of the Iranian theocracy to upset the framework by promoting, precisely at this stage, a destabilizing attack by Hamas against Israel. And wanting to disturb Saudi diplomacy, other actions could have been implemented, not only against Israel. Or actions that, while serious, did not necessarily result in an Israeli reaction that would put Hamas’ control of the Gaza Strip at risk. For the same reason, I am not convinced by the idea that the intent of Operation Flood is to push Israel into a bloody invasion which, by causing the massacre of many Palestinian children, would bring moral discredit to the Jewish State. This seems to me more like advice to Israel than a motivation for Hamas’ action. The problem exists, but Israel and its supporters have already demonstrated that they can put moral scruples aside and this is even more true now, precisely because of the scale and brutality of the massacre of Jewish civilians.
A consideration of method: if you do not have a conspiracy vision of history, you must think that a State or a political organization allied with a more powerful State is not therefore its puppet: it has its own agenda which does not always coincide entirely, for objectives, times or methods with that of the patron. Sometimes the ally puts the patron in front of the fait accompli, thus forcing him to align; other times the ally corrects his orientation, not out of passive obedience, but because he is forced by his patron. This also applies to Hamas towards Iran and to Israel towards the United States.
3. From "mowing the grass" to the military annihilation of Hamas and its associates?
Between the end of December 2008 and 18 January 2009, the Israeli operation Cast Lead in Gaza caused 2,300 deaths for the Palestinians, for the Israelis 66 soldiers plus five civilians; during Protective Edge, in July and August 2014, 1,300 Palestinians, three civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers were killed, including four by friendly fire. Between March 2018 and December 2019, tens of thousands of inhabitants of the Gaza Strip took part in the Marches of Return. The demonstrations were essentially peaceful, with relatively few clashes. Yet, according to Israeli authorities, 234 Palestinians were killed, including children, women, disabled people and journalists, and 33,000 were injured. In 2021, in ten days in mid-May, yet another war (or episode of a single long war) between Hamas and Israel produced at least 256 victims among Palestinians and 13 among Israelis, including several children.
In this year 2023, after 87 days of hunger strike in protest of his detention without trial, on May 2 Khadr ʿAdnān, a well-known militant of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, died in an Israeli prison. Upon hearing the news, Islamic Jihad fired rockets across the Gaza Strip, which was followed by a ceasefire. However, between 9 and 13 May Israel conducted a series of air strikes, which killed three Islamic Jihad leaders and several dozen (at least 13) Palestinian civilians. From Gaza they responded with the launch of hundreds of rockets, until a new ceasefire was negotiated by Egypt. In turn, the rocket attack unleashed from Gaza on October 7 follows a previous series of serious violence by Israel, notably in July in Jenin and its refugee camp in the West Bank, which left at least 12 dead, 250 injured, extensive destruction of homes and civil infrastructure, the flight of five thousand refugees. And according to the United Nations, 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005 and between 2008 and September 2023, 6,400 Palestinians and 300 Israelis were killed (https://www.ochaopt.org/data /casualties); furthermore at least 65-70% of the victims of Israeli attacks are civilians.
A ratio of 1 to 21: this is the value of a Palestinian life compared to an Israeli life for Israel and its supporters. The above briefly shows the immeasurable difference in firepower in favor of Israel and its consequences for the Palestinian civilian population, something that cannot be ignored in political evaluation. It also shows a cyclical pattern whose political significance can be understood by considering Israel’s military strategy. I believe it is also important for understanding Israel's war objective at the current juncture and for defining political prospects for the future.
The Israeli strategy towards Hamas and other Palestinian fighting organizations in the 21st century has been called mowing the grass. It presupposes that it is not possible to influence with military action the motivations and objectives of the adversary or even the consensus enjoyed by the population. However, it does not aim at the definitive annihilation of the enemy or the occupation of its territory, but rather at constant attrition, at degrading its operational capabilities by destroying its assets and hitting key leaders. The desired effect is a relative, not absolute, deterrence: the preferred means is therefore the attack from the air, while Israeli territory is protected by the army and the anti-rocket batteries of the Iron Dome. When a certain threshold is exceeded, large-scale operations take over, such as Cast Lead and Protective Margin mentioned above. The result is a cycle of more or less intense violence that, overall, maintains the status quo. Indeed, and from the Zionist point of view this has its own perverse logic, the idea has been put forward that the Israeli government (which has long been in the hands of the right and Netanyahu) preferred not to destroy Hamas because this would give it the alibi to maintain constant repressive pressure on all Palestinians, maintain the impossibility of a negotiating line with terrorist leaders and extend Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
This until October 7, 2023. The unprecedented trauma of a Palestinian terrorist offensive of this size, complexity and ferocity, not only with rockets but from land, air and sea inside Israeli territory and with unprecedented massacres of civilians, means the end of this strategy.
The temporary success of the Hamas attack results, on the one hand, from long and meticulous planning and, on the other, from the presumption of the Israeli espionage and military apparatus to control the situation on the field (taking into account that what arouses greater concern for Israel was the situation in the West Bank and not in Gaza). However, the success of the Palestinian attack is only tactical and temporary, similar to the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973.
This time for Israel it is not a question of striking hard to wear down the enemy by destroying weapons depots, vehicles, bases and personnel. The Israeli government’s objective in the coming weeks will no longer be a debilitating attrition of the Palestinian forces in Gaza, but the determination to definitively annihilate their military capabilities and, possibly, eliminate the institutional control of Hamas in the strip. The Israelis will take as much time as they deem necessary, but the only way to achieve their objective is a total invasion. This implies heavy aerial and artillery bombardments like those underway which, despite the use of precision munitions, claim the majority of victims among civilians and civilian infrastructures, as well as hitting Palestinian leaders, military bases and fortifications, institutional and command centers, weapons depots and factories, launch sites and mobile rocket launchers that the Israelis can detect. To crush the Palestinian defenses, the Dahiya doctrine will be applied - if it is not already the case - from the name of the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Beirut razed to the ground by the Israeli air force during the 2006 war against Hezbollah, with the disproportionate use of force to cause maximum destruction.
When the terrain shall have been «softened» by bombings, operational plans revised, the units adequately supplied (and the 360 thousand reservists are the strength of the Israeli army), measures taken against Hezbollah, a massive ground operation will begin, with the combined action of all the Israeli army's weapons, because this is the only way to track down all the rockets and achieve the military liquidation of Hamas. Under the circumstances, in order to achieve the war objective, Israel will accept bloody street fighting, which will be lethal for the population that has not been evacuated: the suspension of supplies of water, food, energy and electricity and the appeal to civilians to leave the strip is significant of the intentions and firepower the Israelis intend to use. The fate of the Israeli hostages hangs by a thread, like that of over two million Palestinian civilians.
In all of this there are the elements of a war crime as far as the Israeli government is concerned. But the political responsibility also lies with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their associates.
4. The dualism of political and territorial power between Hamas and Fatah and Operation Flood
I return to the question: what could be the point for Hamas and its associates to launch a terrorist operation which, from a conventionally military point of view, appears like suicide? In my opinion, the answer to this question should not be sought primarily in the international dimension, but in internal relations within the Palestinian world. The hypothesis I put forward is that, in the intentions of those who launched it, the Al-Aqsa flood Operation purposes are to gain total leadership of the Palestinian struggle and to resolve the problem of dualism of political and territorial power between Hamas and Fatah - in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. Objectively, it would be a fanatical and cynically audacious, but extremely contradictory way of addressing what is a bitter truth, up to this moment: the historic failure of the struggle for the national rights of the Palestinian people, the failure of all the strategies attempted by the major Palestinian political organizations. I remain within the realm of conjecture, but I believe that the essential points of the question must nevertheless be taken into consideration.
In reality, the Oslo agreements did not provide for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state at all, as is clear from the way in which they (Oslo II, 300 pages) structured the «Palestinian» territory. Just look at a map of the West Bank, divided into three zones. In practice, Oslo II established exclusive Palestinian control over only about 3% of the West Bank, in Zone A (later extended), joint Israeli-Palestinian control over about a quarter (Zone B), and exclusive Israeli control over the rest, i.e. three-quarters of the West Bank (zone C), largely closed to Palestinians and populated by Jewish settlements. In practice, the territory was fragmented as if it were a Polynesian archipelago: a series of Palestinian islands separated by the sea of areas under Israeli control, a sort of indigenous reserve, devoid of elementary attributes of sovereignty.
It should be noted that less than half of the approximately 12 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that half reside in Arab countries and the rest of the world, and that approximately 1.5 million live in Israel. More than five million Palestinians are registered as refugees, making up about two-thirds of the Gaza Strip’s population, but only a quarter of the West Bank’s population. This demographic is also reflected in the stratification of different living conditions: for example, in the Gaza Strip poverty and unemployment have always been higher than in the West Bank. The point is important because the Oslo agreements and the two-state objective do not resolve the issue of the internal division of the Palestinian people nor that of the return of the 1948 refugees and their descendants.
The Oslo Accords were the result of the first Intifada and, at the same time, a way to neutralize it. The crucial fact is that they institutionalized a good part of the PLO and al-Fatah apparatus in a sort of non-sovereign semi-state, to which the Israelis also delegated the task of monitoring and repressing violations of the agreements: the personnel of the Palestinian administration in the West Bank and Gaza grew to around 140,000 personnel, of which no less than a third were security personnel, in collaboration with Israeli security and well financed by foreign donors.
By repression, military operations, destruction of Palestinian homes and growth of Jewish settlements, unequivocally Israeli policy has demonstrated not only that an independent Palestinian state can never exist, but that the Oslo agreements themselves can be trampled upon; not even the attempt to revive them ever came to life, the Road map for peace agreed by the United Nations, Russia, the United States and the European Union in 2002 which, provided in its first phase «the immediate end of every act of violence against Israel», indicated in its third phase the establishment of a Palestinian state, with provisional borders.
To this we must add, not in the background, the pervasive corruption in the administration of the Authority and the crisis of al-Fatah, due to the clashes for power between factions and personalities.
At the end of ten years, consensus for the Palestinian Authority and al-Fatah had collapsed, already visible in the results of the 1996 elections, boycotted by Hamas and other organizations: Arafat obtained the Presidency with 88% of the valid votes but, despite obtaining 62% of the seats in the Legislative Assembly, al-Fatah obtained only 30% of the valid votes, compared to 60% of the independent candidates, who however obtained only five seats. The twist - confirming the results of the municipal elections of the previous year, in which Hamas had participated - were the elections to the Legislative Council, on 25 January 2006: Hamas won 76 seats out of 132, against 43 for al-Fatah. Clashes between Hamas and al-Fatah immediately began, which became more serious in 2007. The final results of this civil war between Palestinians were:
a) 350 dead, thousands injured, a crackdown on dissidents in both territories;
b) the division of the administrations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the first in the hands of al-Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, the second in the hands of Hamas and other factions;
c) since Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization and isolated from aid and international diplomacy - first of all because it does not recognize either Israel or the Oslo agreements and therefore persists in its militarist strategy - the socio-economic polarization further grew - in poverty and unemployment - between the strip of Gaza, subjected to economic blockade, and the West Bank, on the basis of a gap that already existed due to the different attitude of Egypt and Jordan towards the neighboring Palestinian regions, before and after 1967.
The cynical political calculation of the political leadership of Hamas - presumably not of the fanatical perpetrators - is that, while reducing the Gaza strip to rubble, Israel decides not to proceed with the total invasion of the strip or that it cannot then control it, except temporarily. The tactical sacrifice of Gaza and its population would definitively unmask the opportunism of al-Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, therefore gaining to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their associates the strategic objective of the single direction of the struggle, both in Gaza and in the West Bank.
Whatever the calculations that led to the Al-Aqsa flood operation, this will be the strategy of Hamas and its partners at the end of the war. Crazy, cynical and barbaric, this strategy however has its own fanatical logic, that of martyrdom raised to the extreme. It has its own logic also because it does nothing but bring to its extreme consequences the strategy of the armed struggle for the destruction of Israel, which is now aimed at an Islamic Palestinian state. However, it is also extremely contradictory, because it arises precisely from the failure of that military perspective, which Operation Al-Aqsa flood perhaps intends to unblock through an unprecedented action
It turned out to be a failure the strategy formulated by al-Fatah after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, adopted by the PLO in 1971: to conquer a democratic Palestinian state through armed struggle, also open to Jews. The rejection of chauvinism, both Arab and Jewish, and the distinction between Zionism, a political ideology, and the Jewish people were very important; however, it did not recognize the Jews as a national collectivity.
Also failed the possibility of achieving the coexistence of two states, one Jewish, the other Arab-Palestinian, fueled by the illusion of the Oslo agreements. The facts say that, as long as Israel is a Jewish and ethnocentric state, a Palestinian political entity will never be able to have the characteristics of political sovereignty and economic vitality typical of an authentic state.
Both the objective of a democratic Palestinian state and that of two states have failed. Both the armed struggle and the diplomatic path have failed.
The alternative to these failures is the worst nightmare of Zionists and holy war fanatics, because it denies their raison d'être: that Arabs and Jews can peacefully coexist in a single state. For the Arab Palestinians it would mean resuming the original objective of the struggle for a one democratic state, but with two fundamental differences compared to the PLO’s past. The first is that this State one state solution would be based on the explicit recognition of two nationalities with equal rights, the Arab and the Jewish; the second difference concerns the form of struggle: political, not war. The Jews of Israel should instead become fully aware of the difference between Zionism, which is a specific nationalist and colonialist movement, Judaism and Jewish nationality. The one state solution requires a movement of Palestinians and Israelis against their respective chauvinistic and fanatical nationalists, in which Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews converge, the redefinition of their identities, ultimately the revolution of both the Palestinian and Israeli political scenes.
I realize how enormous the psychological, political and social, ideological and practical problems of this path are, and how very long and difficult it is. However, there are no others solutions in sight that could put an end to the succession of harassment, attacks, reprisals and counter-reprisals. The first people interested in traveling along it are the Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. It is on this path that a credible and powerful international movement for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel can be rebuilt.