The Gaza Terror Attack Has Reshuffled the Deck
The brutal and bloody incursion by Hamas out of Gaza carries massive international repercussions.
Just over a week ago, a top White House official had sounded an optimistic tone about the entire Middle East. As The Atlantic reported,
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking at The Atlantic Festival, rattled off a long list of positive developments in the Middle East, developments that were allowing the Biden administration to focus on other regions and other problems. A truce was holding in Yemen. Iranian attacks against U.S. forces had stopped. America’s presence in Iraq was “stable.” The good news crescendoed with this statement: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
“Challenges remain,” he elaborated. “Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. But the amount of time I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today, compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11, is significantly reduced.”
So much for that. The brazen and deadly attack by Hamas militants on Saturday utterly ended any relative calm in the Middle East. Armed gunmen from inside Gaza bulldozed through security barriers and attacked several Israeli military installations, then began killing civilians indiscriminately, including hundreds of revelers at an outdoor music festival near the Gaza border. Coinciding with the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the attack—echoing the Yom Kippur War of 50 years ago—left Israel stunned, mourning, and determined to retaliate.
The terrorist strikes were well-coordinated, according to reports, comprising thousands of rocket launches and a series of assaults upon key military outposts. After breaching the border in several places, the militants sped through scores of Israeli towns, killing and abducting civilians, including elderly residents, children, and infants.
The Israeli military continues to find gruesome scenes of atrocities and mass murder. Preliminary assessments put the number of Israeli casualties at 900 dead and another 150 taken hostage by Hamas militants. There were also Americans among the dead and wounded, and likely among the abducted.
The retaliatory counterstrike by Israel was swift and punishing. Hundreds of Gaza residents have been killed from missile attacks and gunfire, including 140 children. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned of a “long and difficult war” ahead. His Minister of Defense announced on the third day of the siege that no food, water, electricity, or fuel would enter Gaza.
Over two million people live inside Gaza. Nearly half are children. Critics of the Israeli government have compared it to an open-air prison because of a years-long Israeli blockade and militarized border that have kept its residents penned in. Any protracted conflict is bound to bring further misery to the region, yet such a conflict now seems all but inevitable.
Today’s piece surveys what experts are predicting the geopolitical fallout from the surprise attack by Hamas could be, with a strong caveat that the scale and ferocity of this attack is without precedent, and it is therefore difficult to assess the full likely impact. Despite the lack of historical comparison, there is general agreement that the attack set several forces in motion while slowing or halting others, both in the region and with Israel’s allies and adversaries. And the geopolitical deck has been entirely reshuffled as a result.
Israeli public opinion hardens
In the wake of the brutal attack, Israelis rallied as a people in a manner similar to how Americans responded to 9/11. The opposition, which had been staging consistent demonstrations against the judicial power grabs by Prime Minister Netanyahu, called a halt to street protests as the nation prepared for a retaliatory strike inside of Gaza and proposed a unity government to help manage the crisis.
The result is a situation where Netanyahu, at least for a time, might enjoy “full political cover to do what he wants,” said Natan Sachs of the Brookings Institution. While he has historically avoided sending troops by the thousands into Gaza, Netanyahu’s calculus appears to be different this time, with some 360,000 reservists now activated.
That Netanyahu intends to wage a full-scale war with the support of most Israelis reflects a hardening of public opinion around the Palestinian Question in the wake of the attack. Images of mass murders and brutal hostage-taking are now seared into the collective national consciousness. And progressive voices within Israel and the U.S. speaking on behalf of the Palestinians inside Gaza and the West Bank are being quickly drowned out and labeled as apologists for terror, even when what they merely wish to provide is a context for what has fueled extremism and terrorism.
If Hamas wanted to hasten the end of broad sympathetic support for the Palestinian cause, it could hardly have devised a surer way.
Questions arise over the government’s role and response
Even while Netanyahu’s government enjoys some initial support and national unity for the war it has declared, there remains a troubling question that is quickly gaining in volume: How is it that the government allowed this attack to happen in the first place?
That Hamas, which is under constant surveillance in a police-like state in Gaza, was able to pull off a coordinated attack of such magnitude is a massive indictment of Israeli intelligence and military preparedness. Small bands of terrorists were able to overrun key military installations and kill and capture many Israeli citizens without any real initial resistance, indicating a shocking mismanagement of the nation’s basic defenses.
There are now indications that the Netanyahu government may have been forewarned of the danger by Egyptian intelligence but chose to ignore the risk in Gaza, as it was more focused on threats from within the West Bank and had deployed much of the nation’s active armed forces there. As reported by The Times of Israel,
An Egyptian intelligence official said that Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning “something big” — which included an apparent direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister to the prime minister….
He said Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of West Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown there in the face of a rising tide of violence over the last 18 months.
Critics of the government are now reminding Israelis that Netanyahu had actually favored supporting Hamas as a way to help bring an end to the two-state solution. Writes Gidi Weitz in Haaretz, the nation’s largest paper,
Netanyahu’s entire worldview collapsed over the course of a single day. He was convinced that he could make deals with corrupt Arab tyrants while ignoring the cornerstone of the Arab-Jewish conflict, the Palestinians. His life’s work was to turn the ship of state from the course steered by his predecessors, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Olmert, and make the two-state solution impossible. En route to this goal, he found a partner in Hamas.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Fifty years ago, when Israel was caught off-guard by a surprise attack, it ultimately led to the downfall of the Labor government that had ruled the country for decades. The same may hold true today, and Netanyahu knows he must now deliver or suffer the same end. Another editorial in Haaretz has already warned today that Netanyahu’s policies and lack of readiness led to this moment:
The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession….
For now, the government is responding with bombs and a wholesale cutting off of all life’s necessities in and out of the territory. But Netanyahu, and the nation, will face a cold and bleak reality soon, when the lives of the hostages taken are publicly on the line.
In the past, Israeli public opinion did not tolerate the idea of any of their own citizens held captive and suffering behind enemy lines, and the government has been willing to trade hundreds or even thousands of prisoners for the life of a single hostage. As the Associated Press noted,
The Islamist militant group’s 2006 seizure of a sole young conscript, Gilad Shalit, consumed Israeli society for years — a national obsession that prompted Israel to heavily bombard the Gaza Strip and ultimately release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom had been convicted of deadly attacks on Israelis, in exchange for Shalit’s freedom.
What Netanyahu’s government will do in the face of dozens of hostages taken, including many elderly victims and children, remains unclear. Equally unclear is how the public will respond now that Hamas has threatened to take a life each time an Israeli airstrike hits Gazans in their homes. As NBC News reported,
Hamas now saying it will begin killing civilian hostages, starting with one, and broadcast the execution in audio and video in front of the world, unless Israel stops killing civilians in Gaza.
The stakes are now impossibly, and gruesomely, high and we are in uncharted waters, both politically and morally.
A suicidal move by Hamas…to what end?
In an interview with The New Yorker, Nathan Thrall, director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, made this observation about the seemingly politically suicidal attack by Hamas:
It is an attack of unprecedented scope, and Israel will retaliate to a greater degree than it has before, potentially leading to outcomes we haven’t seen before: not just a simple razing of Gaza by airplanes but also a ground incursion and potential reoccupation of parts of Gaza. So the decision to wittingly, knowingly, undertake this comes from a sense that there are no other options and that there’s nothing left to lose. And part of the reason that Hamas, and Palestinians in general, feel that they’re in such a desperate situation is that they have been entirely abandoned by those who should be their allies: the Arab states.
Hamas may have been trying to disrupt a peace process that was leaving Palestinians without friends and support within the Arab world. The Abraham Accords, begun under the Trump administration, sought to normalize relations between Arab nations and Israel, to the likely detriment of the Palestinian cause. Already the nations of the UAE, Qatar, Sudan, and Morocco had moved this way. Saudi Arabia was next on the list.
The war Hamas began against Israel likely will put an end to further normalizations and recenter the Palestinian Question in the minds of everyone in the region. Once the Arab world sees both that Hamas can strike at Israel, even from within Gaza, and that Israel will respond with devastating, disproportionate collective punishment, it will be nearly impossible for any more Arab nations to recognize Israel diplomatically.
Other territories and countries
In the West Bank, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas also likely finds himself under enormous pressure. Across that territory, many Palestinians, however regrettably, now see a terrorist group like Hamas as the only group to effectively resist Israeli rule. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority is viewed as collaborating with Israel to tamp down any real resistance. Were Hamas to gain in popularity among Palestinians despite its bloody campaign of terror, this would be a dark development for the region.
Observers are also watching the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah, which might seek to capitalize on the instability. On Sunday, Israeli defense forces and Hezbollah militants exchanged fire across the border with Lebanon. “Our hearts are with you. Our minds are with you. Our souls are with you. Our history and guns and our rockets are with you,” said a top Hezbollah official at a rally in Beirut, referring to Hamas.
For its part, Israel very much wants to avoid attack by its enemies along multiple fronts. At present, it is unclear whether Hezbollah really wants to get involved in the war. The shelling that has occurred remained limited to the Shebaa Farms area, a territory currently disputed between Lebanon and Israel. This limitation may signify that Hezbollah is merely signaling its allegiance to Hamas while not fully investing in the conflict—at least not so far.
The Biden Administration must reset its priorities
Returning to Jake Sullivan’s words, which he probably wishes he could take back, the war between Israel and Hamas will now require Sullivan and the White House to spend much of their time on the Middle East—which is precisely the result Hamas in its twisted logic wished to achieve. The Palestinian Question had been set to one side for many years, with waning international interest in resolving it. But after Saturday, it is once again front and center, and at a terrible cost.
Much like 9/11 did for the U.S., with so many civilian casualties from such a horrific attack, the attention of Israel and its allies will necessarily shift from diplomatic relations with its neighbors to war inside the occupied territory. Sadly, that war will likely eclipse past campaigns inside Gaza, where Israeli bombardments killed thousands of Palestinians in 2006, 2008, and 2014. When the bombs fall, there is nowhere for the people to go, trapped as they are by borders secured by both Israel and Egypt in one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
The two-state solution is now largely in the grave while far-right policies of the Israeli government create even more radicalized positions among Israeli settlers and Palestinians alike. The Biden Administration is without a blueprint for peace, and given that we are heading into an election year, that leaves them in a rather awkward position. In the wake of the attacks, the White House understands it must voice full support and do everything it can publicly to back Israel, even after very recently criticizing Netanyahu for moving anti-democratically against the nation’s judiciary and for indulging the kind of right-wing extremists the White House condemns in the U.S. and around the world.
If, as expected, the military response by Israel results in its own horrific tally—or even war crimes as the residents of Gaza suffer the consequences from the actions of a few—the White House will have to walk this particular political tightrope carefully. Meanwhile, as the war drags on, the democratic values the U.S. seeks to uphold through its support of Israel likely will be sorely tested in the coming days and weeks.
Terror begets more terror, and after the expected violent reprisals within Gaza by the IDF, both sides will yet gain count their dead and an exhausted and uneasy calm will fall over Israel and the Occupied Territories. But, make no mistake about it, the terror-counter-terror cycles will continue absent a definitive peace agreement and an independent Palestine. Israel and Arab states can sign all the treaties they want, but in no way can the parties set aside or ignore the Palestinian cause. Seventy-five years and counting, and still no solution, all the while the body-counts continue to mount up. Where is reason when it is so desperately needed.
What’s the likelihood that 45 orchestrated this by revealing Israeli Defense Plans to Russia? WHO benefits? Putin Trump Iran