Hamas, the acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, has different etymology and semantics in both Arabic and Hebrew, denoting zeal in the former and violence in the latter. However, on October 7, 2023, the militant organisation from Gaza perpetrated one of the most dastardly and horrendous crimes in recent history, which was anything but zealous and brave.
When they breached the illegal fence and stormed into Israeli settlements closer to the border—opening fire indiscriminately in the wee hours of the morning on revellers in a music festival and storming into houses and Kibbutzim, butchering babies, young and old—little did they know they were forfeiting the legitimacy of their just cause of a Palestinian state.
In a notoriously partisan world order, the global community was quick to condemn the heinous crime of Hamas that killed more than 1300 Israelis. Within Israel, amidst the shock, grief, and cry for vengeance, they believe that the October 7 massacres were tantamount to Israel’s 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
Israel’s much-vaunted security apparatus failed, and the fiasco accentuated by the IDF’s Southern Command ordering three garrisons stationed in Gaza to be redeployed in the West Bank two days before the attacks speaks volumes of Hamas’ deception and Israeli hubris.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, is a power monger whose cumulative term as the country’s premier surpasses that of David Ben Gurion, the nation’s primary founder and its first Prime Minister. Beset by corruption charges and facing trial for fraud, Netanyahu was forced to form alliances with the far-right political parties in Israel, who were earlier relegated to the fringe.
Speaking about the coalition, Joe Biden, the U.S. President, remarked that it has some “of the most extreme members” in Israel. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, was previously convicted by an Israeli court of fomenting terrorism and inciting racism by posting on his social media handle the picture of an Israeli-American terrorist, Baruch Goldstein, who had massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron.
Bezalel Smotrich, the incumbent finance minister, has a long record of homophobic, fascist, and racist remarks. He had boldly declared that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” inviting rebuke and condemnation from the U.S. and Arab countries alike. His xenophobia reached incorrigible levels, as he vehemently opposed Palestinian statehood and advocated a shoot-to-kill order for the IDF against stone pelting by the Palestinians.
When these extremists became mainstream, they pushed for limiting democracy and thwarted the rule of law by backing illegal settlers in the West Bank.
Netanyahu was embroiled in a controversial judicial reform bill that effectively diminished the role and power of the Israeli Supreme Court. Consequently, protests were staged for almost forty successive weekends, with Reservists leading the fray. Israel’s liberals and centre-left politicians feared that such legislation would turn Israel into a single-party state along the lines of Viktor Orban’s Hungary.
Netanyahu sidelined the liberal PLO, led by Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank and beefed up Hamas based on his convoluted logic that an Islamist terrorist rule in Gaza would be a strong argument against a political solution in Palestine. The Abraham Accords—mediated by former U.S. President Donald Trump and signed by UAE and Bahrain that normalised diplomatic and trade relations between Israel and the Gulf states—led to further complacency on the Palestinian issue, erroneously believing it was out of the radar. The impending normalisation deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, with no concessions for Palestinians, would have driven the final nail in the coffin of the decades-long struggle for Palestinian statehood.
In the past two years, Hamas has kept a low profile, never involved in clashes between Israel and Islamic Jihad, another militant organisation in Gaza. They had given the impression that they were only interested in the material needs of the Gazans, building hospitals and schools, happily receiving humanitarian aid from Qatar and work visas.
With Netanyahu reiterating that he has “both hands firmly on the steering wheel,” encouraged by the fanatical ministers of the cabinet who believed in the inalienable rights of Israel in Palestinian lands, the crescendo of hubris met with the savagery of Hamas. It is no irony that Hamas selected October 7, a day after the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, to launch their Blitzkrieg and Tora Tora Tora. Israel struck a deal with Saudis that could have spelt the death knell for the Palestinian cause.
Under Mahmoud Abbas, the moribund, corrupt leadership of the Fatah was reduced to a damp squib for the “Two State Solution” and establishing the Palestinian political mandate. When an internationally recognised and legitimate organisation of the PLO failed to reach the aspirations of the Palestinians, they found solace in an armed militant group, the Hamas, to reverse their fait accompli.
The Palestinian cause made to fade into oblivion in the minds of new-generation Arabs by patronising a technologically advanced and militarily superior Israel is the realpolitik agenda of the extreme right-wing Israeli government.
Many political commentators believe that Gaza is the biggest open-air prison in the world within a 3.7-mile by 25-mile area. It is also one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with over 2 million inhabitants. Unemployment hovers around fifty per cent, youth unemployment is over seventy-five per cent, and most are disillusioned about their grim future. Israel controls the access to land, sea, and air for all the seven borders Gaza shares with the outside world, including the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan famously said, “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.” More than five million Palestinians live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and they are subjected to humiliation, atrocities, and ridicule almost daily from the Israeli forces.
Nelson Mandela never doubted that Palestinians lived under Apartheid. Bishop Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid hero and champion of civil rights, encapsulated it poignantly in March 2014,
I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing in the Holy Land that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under Apartheid. I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is like the black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid regime.
Nelson Mandela vociferously expressed concern about Palestinians in his fight against Apartheid and summarised it in the following words:
The U.N. took a strong stand against Apartheid, and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
Though the PLO recognised the legitimacy of the State of Israel in 1993, under the Oslo I Accord, it suspended the recognition in 2018, following Israel’s policy of illegal occupation, colonialism, and dispossession of Palestinian lands. It further emphasised that suspension would remain in place until Israel recognised a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders.
The former head of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Agency, Tamir Pardo, has condemned Israel imposing Apartheid on Palestinians. He told the Associated Press that Israel’s state apparatus is discriminatory by imposing restrictions on free movement and denying civil rights liberties to Palestinians by placing them under the ambit of military law. In contrast, the illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied territories are governed by civil courts, resembling the South African Apartheid system. He quipped:
There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.
In a damning report, Amnesty International voiced grave concern over the retrogression of Israeli governance into an apartheid system in Gaza, West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and Palestinians living in Israel. The comprehensive report is based on protracted research and legal analysis of Palestinian, Israeli and International Non-Governmental Organisations.
Israeli Apartheid takes on myriad forms: massive seizures of land and property, unlawful killings, institutionalised oppression, denial of human rights, forcible transfers, disrupting free people-to-people movement, torture, and administrative detention. It is a clear contravention of rules listed in the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute.
Israel could counter-argue that Hamas’ charter exhorts total obliteration of Israel from the face of the earth. However, the international community does not recognise Hamas as a legitimate arbitrator of the Palestinian cause and relegates it as a terrorist outfit. In April 2021, Human Rights Watch released a 213-page report titled “A Threshold Crossed”, a compilation of Israeli human rights violations and persecution of Palestinian Arabs.
In his 1936 book Principles of Topological Psychology, the American psychologist Kurt Lewin expresses the monumental equation B = f(P.S.). It states behaviour (B) is a function (f) of the person (P) and their environment (S). It means that if you want to change a person’s behaviour, changing his environment and circumstances is inevitable, not the person. Disproportionate Israeli military responses to Palestinian terrorist atrocities have claimed thousands of innocent lives in contravention of Article IV of the Geneva Convention. It is worth remembering that, over the decades, disproportionate Israeli retaliations to sporadic Palestinian terrorist engagements haven’t reached a solution and resolved the conflict.
Moral relativism is the official position of the Western world on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Americans and Europeans, the value of human lives extinguished in the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate is characterised by Confirmation Bias. The Western world unites with zest, zeal, and vigour to quickly condemn reprehensible Palestinian violence and Israeli deaths but explore plausible excuses for Israeli atrocities, ill-treatment, and oppression of Palestinians. It is mostly Israel acting in self-defence, and Palestinian casualties result from ignominious “human shields.”
The United Nations has set great precedence by playing a lynchpin role in ending Apartheid in South Africa, with concerted support from the Western world, media, think tanks, and governments. West’s reticence to the ongoing Apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) will only exacerbate violence and bloodshed in the region.
Denying the right to a dignified life is as much a moral turpitude as unlawfully taking lives. Indefatigable motivations of hopeless and disillusioned people will prove perilous to any deterrence.
The theatre of war expanding to become a regional conflict is very real. In the current leadership deficit, real leadership is warranted to have political deliberations for at least aspirations of peace. And the revelation should dawn on the leaders that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The only solution lies in getting back to the negotiating table.
The West must call good and evil by proper names and in absolute terms, not relative terms. Ending Apartheid is the inevitable step towards consensually formulating a “Two-State Solution” or a “One-State Solution” with equal rights. And the high moral principle is to be mindful of the difference between explanations and justifications.
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