The other war (part 1)
I am going to deviate from my usual subject and offer my perspective on the war between Israel and Hamas. I won’t claim to be unbiased here, just as I can’t claim to be unbiased in anything else I have written in this blog. And — I cannot believe that I am now using the phrase “the war” to mean something other than the war in Ukraine…
(Read Part 2 here)
Since February last year, the first thing I do upon waking is pick up my phone to check the news about Ukraine and Russia — starting with the mainstream sources and quickly moving onto the various bookmarked Telegram channels and the feeds of specific notable Russian and Ukrainian individuals. I also check messages from my Russian friends — we have a private Telegram channel for this.
On the morning of October 7th, our Telegram channel had one new message, from a friend who is still based in Russia. “P., are you and your family OK?”
“What?” My brain scrambled sleepily, “But P. is in Israel. Why is he asking her…”
Israel has a population of 9 million, of whom more than 10% are Russian Jews. My hometown in southern Siberia had a large Jewish population; I grew up side by side with their kids, familiar with their ways of living and their particular take on Jewish culture. In the 1990s and 2000s, many Russian Jews upped sticks and chose Israel as their new home. Despite the geographical distance, some of them, like P., remain my lifelong friends. When all hell broke loose with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and our mutual friends ended up scattered all over Central Asia and the Balkans, I clubbed together with P. to support them physically, financially and emotionally, to the extent I had never supported any friend before. The experience bonded us together in the ways that I deeply treasure.
…For a while, P did not respond to the Telegram message. Then she wrote, simply, “We are alive.”
That’s it. “We are alive.” Nothing else.
She remained silent for the entire day. And then:
“How?! How is this possible, how can one cope with this, even after Bucha, how?..”
Imagine 1400 Londoners being murdered in a day
When writing this piece, I initially started listing the specifics of the atrocities committed by Hamas, but quickly realised that I couldn’t do that without inviting a knee-jerk moral equivalence response from some readers. Additionally, I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic and have no familiarity with the information network where I can find reliable first hand evidence. Even with my limited reach, I realise now that the baby beheading story has been debunked; but so has the Israeli bombing of the al-Ahli hospital(1), and so have the videos of the alleged Hamas militants carefully carrying Israeli babies in their arms. I understand that misinformation is commonly used on both sides of the conflict to incite further hatred — so I defer to Associated Press and Bellingcat for fact checking.
(1) Associated Press 1, Associated Press 2, Bellingcat
But then, my aim is not to prove whether the beheadings were true or not. My aim is not to debate moral equivalence — I won’t engage in “Yes, but” discussions, even as I absolutely do not condone the deaths of Palestinian civilians.
My aim is to give my friend a voice — and to trust her own lived experience.
She told me:
“Many still refuse to believe [the Hamas massacre], and instead believe that these are fakes, as happened with [the denial of the massacre of] Bucha. It’s very hard for me to bear when my downstairs neighbours have lost several members of their family on Saturday; when in my city, which, at 245K people, is large by Israeli standards and only a hundred kilometres away from the south. There are dozens of photographs of children of my son’s age or slightly older who studied at his school, who were killed at that rave festival. One handshake away is the commander of the unit that discovered the dead children [in kibbutz Kfar Aza]. We are a very small country, here you find out the news before it appears in official sources, and therefore it is impossible to lie shamelessly. Although our politicians still manage to do it, everyone just spits on them.”
Nine million is the size of Greater London. Imagine 1400 Londoners being murdered in a single day. For Israelis, this is not exactly an event that’s happened over there somewhere; it has happened on their front door.
When is a spade a spade?
No-one can deny that Hamas has murdered 1400 Israelis on 7th October. Just as no-one can deny that the Israeli rockets have, by now, killed many thousands of Palestinian civilians. Both are indisputable events; one of these has directly led to the other. While undoubtedly, there was a prior complex, bloody history of conflict and domination, this history still does not justify the premeditated slaughter of 1400 civilians in a single day.
Why does it seem to be acceptable for so many to ignore this event when condemning the event that has directly followed? Why can’t we call a spade a spade, and a terrorist a terrorist?
I cannot help but draw parallels with the Twin Towers in 2001 or the ISIS attacks in Paris in 2015. Back then, the survivors and their families were not minimised or gaslit — even as the US went on its rampage of Afghanistan and Iraq, even as France launched its attacks on Syria. Why is it so different here? If you believe that “Israelis brought it upon themselves”, then why didn’t you say the same to the victims of the Twin Towers attacks?
Is this because when ordinary Westerners are killed, they are just like us — “good people” — whereas it’s convenient for Westerners to see Israelis as bad people? Is this because acknowledging that Hamas are monsters would destroy the neat black-and-white narrative that many here have of the suffering Palestinians? Is it because living with cognitive dissonance is a bitch?
And how can the good Western people prove to the Jewish people that there is no trace of antisemitism here at all and it’s just about the Israeli policy towards Palestine, while they are watching synagogues around the world being defaced, Jewish houses being marked with stars, and witnessing the Makhachkala airport pogrom?
Hamas are not Palestine
“Classically, a terrorist provokes a state in order to generate so much suffering among his own people that they will take the terrorist’s side indefinitely.” — Timothy Snyder
When the well-meaning Western people join pro-Palestinian marches, they rarely make a distinction between Palestinians and Hamas. And hey — they are in good company! Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan and the Iranian government have all hailed Hamas as “freedom fighters for Palestine”! I wonder whether these good people ever halt their marching for a second to consider why they are all of a sudden on the same side as the world’s scariest, most authoritarian regimes.
I can’t claim to have deep knowledge of Hamas, but since 7th October, I have been reading as much as I could find about them. The language barrier and suspected biases limit the range of reading materials available to me, but I tend to trust Associated Press, Peter Beaumont and the Russian dissident publication Novaya Gazeta. Here is what I understand to be true about Hamas.
- They are unelected, having seized power in 2007 and halted all elections since then.
- Their leaders are observing the war from the safety of Qatar, not fighting on the streets of Gaza.
- They receive arms from Iran and enjoy the support of the Iranian regime.
- Instead of spending as much money as they could on improving the infrastructure and quality of life for the citizens of Gaza, over the past decade-and-a-half they have built palaces for themselves, funnelled money for themselves and their military, and built a network of tunnels, only some of which were intended for getting aid into Gaza, but most were for the movement of their military.
- Under their rule, poverty in Gaza skyrocketed, even despite the large amounts of humanitarian aid pouring in; whereas in the West Bank, in contrast (and despite the occupation and the unrest), poverty continued to reduce steadily. No-one can deny that this poverty was caused by the Israeli blockade, but Hamas’ skewed priorities also clearly had a big role to play.
- The claims made by the Israeli government that Hamas are using Palestinian civilians as human shields, appear at least in part, true. Over the course of this war, Hamas have openly treated their own citizens as disposable.
- Over their years in power, using propaganda of comparable intensity to that of Putin’s government, Hamas continued to ensure that ordinary Gazans would blame everything bad happening to them on Israel instead of their own military rulers.
Even despite my last point above, many Gazans don’t support Hamas and don’t want continued conflict with Israel. Vadikh El-Hayek from Novaya Gazeta reports, using the words of the people in Gaza who he has interviewed since the start of this war:
“Wherever you turn in Gaza, you will find Hamas leaders looking at you. All houses and streets are hung with their portraits and their appeals. Is this a city or is it military barracks? Many [Palestinian] people you see on social media proclaim their willingness to become martyrs, but all I hear in their words is despair. Okay, sure, Palestine is our righteous cause. But this does not mean that Palestinians need to continue dying for reasons that are not very clear to us.
In Gaza, you won’t hear open criticism of Hamas (…). But in the kitchens, the conversations are completely different: “Nobody here wanted another war. Nobody except Hamas. Many of us who live here do not want Israel to cease existing. We are all tired of endless wars. We live in slums while Hamas leaders live in villas with swimming pools. [The Hamas leader] Ismail Hanniye lives with his family in Qatar. They have mansions and private jets and dine in the best restaurants.””
Furthermore, the historian Timothy Snyder has this to say about the reasons behind the massacre of 7th October:
“In evaluating what Hamas has done, it is important to remember that the atrocious crimes are not (or are not only) ends in themselves. They are utterly horrible and deserving of every condemnation, but they are not mindless. Unlike Israelis, who are shocked and feel they must urgently act, Hamas has been working out this scenario for years. The people carrying out the bestial crimes follow a plan that anticipates an Israeli reaction. Classically, a terrorist provokes a state in order to generate so much suffering among his own people that they will take the terrorist’s side indefinitely.” (Emphasis is mine)
So, let’s call Hamas what they are: terrorists, and not “freedom fighters.” Let’s call the events of 7th October what they were: a massacre designed by Hamas to provoke the Israeli attack and cause the suffering among their own people, not an “act of liberation of Palestine.”
