Hamas: A 2023 Counterfactual

Hamas: A 2023 Counterfactual
By Jeffrey Rudolph (October 2023, last update March 2024)

Hamas’s horrific 7 October 2023 terrorism, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and over 240 more held captive, should not be justified by any serious person. I have nothing to add to the intelligent writings of many thoughtful people on this matter.

However, a worthwhile counterfactual to ponder is: What would have been Israel’s likely response had Hamas exclusively targeted Israeli soldiers during its 7 October attack?

While it’s impossible to know the answer to this counterfactual question, an examination of historical instances where Hamas’s actions were positive or within conventional norms, can offer insights. Accordingly, consider the following seven events. (References for the events are provided at the responses to questions 2, 3, 7, 8, and 23 of the Hamas Quiz and question 17 of the Egypt Quiz (More Detail):
https://detailedpoliticalquizzes.wordpress.com/)

1. In its 2006 election manifesto, “Hamas made no reference to Israel’s destruction. It spoke instead about ‘the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem.’”

After its January 2006 parliamentary election victory, “Hamas proposed a unity government with Fatah ‘for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.’ Israel could have embraced this [as an opening for talks].”

“Instead, the United States and Israel demanded that Hamas formally foreswear violence, embrace two states and accept past peace agreements — a standard that Netanyahu’s own government [has never met]. Hamas, which spent the Oslo years calling the PLO dupes for recognizing Israel without getting a Palestinian state in return, refused. So Washington and Jerusalem pressured [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas to reject a national unity government and govern without a democratically elected parliament.”

Then, in 2007, the US and Israel, in a failed effort to destroy Hamas, “backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.” (“The Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto…wrote in a confidential 2007 ‘End of Mission Report’ that the violence between Hamas and Fatah could have been avoided had the United States not strongly opposed Palestinian reconciliation.”)

Israel, with the support of the US and Egypt, then “imposed a blockade designed not only to prevent Hamas from importing weapons, but to punish Gazans for electing it.” The result was devastation for Gaza’s economy and society. (In fact, “Israel told US officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy ‘on the brink of collapse’ while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to US diplomatic cables [leaked to WikiLeaks and] published by a Norwegian daily…”)

2. According to the respected Israeli journalist and author Shlomi Eldar, after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian militants in a June 2006 cross-border raid, a detailed document was “sent by messenger to then [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.” The document included the following: “Hamas offers two alternatives: (i) A separate track, dealing only with the release of Gilad Shalit in return for 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners. (ii) A release of prisoners will take place in the broader context of a strategic approach ‏(as follows‏), and the number of prisoners released will not be in the hundreds.”

The detailed document, “whose existence and transmission to the prime minister were denied completely by Olmert’s office at the time, constituted an offer by Hamas to conduct a multilevel dialogue with Israel, beginning with discussion about a cease-fire and the building of long-term trust, and ending with a coexistence agreement to last 25 years, and the establishment of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.”

(While Prime Minister Netanyahu constantly expresses his disgust and mistrust of Hamas, “he has negotiated with Hamas…with far more good will than with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. [N]etanyahu reached at least two written agreements with the Gaza terror group; one in the 2011 deal in return for the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, and the second confirming the cease-fire that ended Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012. Netanyahu, who squeezed Abbas hard in exchange for freeing 80 pension-age prisoners who had been sitting in Israeli jails for more than 20 years and who broke up [US-led] negotiations [in April 2014] with the Palestinian Authority over the release of 14 Arab Israeli prisoners, was prepared to give Hamas 1,000 young and healthy terrorists, among them Arab Israelis. While Netanyahu refused to allow Abbas any sign of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank, he did not hesitate to recognize Hamas as sovereign in Gaza.”)

3. In 2006, Khaled Meshal, then Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, told former US President Jimmy Carter that “Hamas agreed to accept any peace agreement negotiated between the leaders of the PLO and Israel, provided it is subsequently approved by Palestinians in a referendum or by a democratically elected government.”

In 2007, Meshal made the following statements: “[T]here will remain a state called Israel—this is a matter of fact.…The problem is not that there is an entity called Israel. The problem is that the Palestinian state is non-existent.” “As a Palestinian…I speak…for a state on 1967 borders. It is true that in reality there will be an entity or state called Israel on the rest of Palestinian land.” (Again in 2014, Meshal made similar statements.)

In 2008, Meshal, then exiled leader of Hamas, “offered Israel a 10-year truce…if it withdraws from lands it seized in the 1967 Mideast war as proof of recognition of a Palestinian state on those lands. Meshal said Hamas will accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, a departure from the group’s customary claim to all of Israel, Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank for Palestinians. Meshal’s comments appear to be the group’s strongest indication of potential acceptance of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and came hours after former US president Jimmy Carter said the group is prepared to accept the right of Israel to ‘live as a neighbor next door in peace.’”

Meshal’s statements, while dismissed by Israel’s leaders, reveal a common evolution of militant groups. “It’s easy to proclaim abstract-moral solutions when you lack the obligations of power, but each time a Palestinian leadership has reached a position of official responsibility (first the PLO in 1974 when Arafat spoke at the United Nations, then Hamas in 2006, when it won the parliamentary elections), it had to revise its political program from a ‘one-state’ to a ‘two-state’ settlement, because otherwise it could not function on the international stage.”

(Consider that “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood for decades denounced that country’s government for its [1979] peace deal with Israel. But when a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, became Egypt’s president in [June] 2012, he maintained diplomatic ties to Israel even during the war that Israel fought in Gaza later that year. Why? Because political movements evolve in response to circumstances.” (Hamas, it should be noted, is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.) According to top President Obama officials, Morsi was very effective in helping get a cease-fire by November 21 [2012]. In fact, Steven Simon of the National Security Council said that, “He [Morsi] was indispensable.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally thanked Morsi for his effective leadership.)

4. In June 2008, Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak “­brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas…­[that] was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters.”

(In a “document entitled ‘The Hamas terror war against Israel,’ the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides striking visual evidence of Hamas’s good faith during the lull. It reproduces two graphs…[that] show that the total number of rocket and mortar attacks shrank from 245 in June to 26 total for July through October…”)

According to former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, “From the opening salvo [of the resulting 2008-09 Gaza war], [Israel’s] government articulated no strategic goal, held out no hopes for peace talks once the hostilities were over, offered nothing to the Gazan people, and strove neither for diplomatic success nor for reconquering the territory and ousting Hamas.”

5. According to an October 2012 New York Times article, “Hamas…is working to suppress the more radical Islamic militant groups that have emerged [in Gaza].” According to a March 2014 Financial Times article, Hamas militiamen continue to “find and stop renegade militants inside Gaza from firing rockets into southern Israel in violation of the ceasefire declared after the end in November 2012 of Operation Pillar of Defense, in which about 150 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed….Israeli officials share the assessment that Hamas is working actively to contain militants from firing into their country. ‘Today we can describe Hamas as a much more…responsible organisation than it used to be a decade or two decades ago — this all in light of their statehood experience,’ says a senior Israel Defence Forces officer…” (Nevertheless, Israel’s strict air, land and sea blockade of Gaza remained virtually unchanged.)

6. During the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, Netanyahu, “in a national broadcast, stated that the sole purpose of Hamas’s tunnels was ‘to annihilate our civilians and to kill our children’. However, Israel had already seen six instances in which Hamas was able to use the tunnels against Israel. Once when Gilad Shalit was captured [in 2006], and the rest during the [2014 conflict]. In all instances, Hamas’s target were [Israeli] soldiers, not [Israeli] communities.”

Furthermore, a UN report acknowledged that the targeted IDF positions were “‘in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line [i.e., the 1949 Armistice line], which are legitimate military targets.’…[As] Israel has deprived the people of Gaza of their right to self-determination via an externally imposed occupation[,] Hamas has the right to target via tunnels Israeli combatants enforcing this occupation from without…”

“In May 2016, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz obtained a leaked copy of a state comptroller’s report on the 2014 war. According to Haaretz’s summary, the audit stated ‘that the Israeli leadership didn’t seriously consider easing the economic restrictions on Gaza, which might have delayed the eruption of the 50-day war in the summer of 2014.’”

(The July-August 2014 war may well have traced back to yet another display of Hamas’s pragmatism. “At the end of April 2014, the Islamic movement and its secular Palestinian rival Fatah formed a ‘consensus government.’…Hamas did not object when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking on behalf of the new unity government, reiterated his support for the [US’s traditional] preconditions [for diplomatic engagement: recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence, and recognition of past agreements]….The prospect of ‘Palestinian unity’ was a ‘red line’ for Netanyahu (and Israeli leaders in general), so he reflexively sought to sabotage it. In the event that the Palestinian consensus held, he could no longer invoke standard Israeli alibis—Abbas represented only one Palestinian faction; Hamas was a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction—to evade a settlement of the conflict.”)

7. “In 1988, Hamas published a despicable and blatantly anti-Semitic Charter that cited the Protocols of the Elders of the Zion. In 2017, it published a new Charter that claimed ‘its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion…’ Asking which [charter] represents Hamas’s ‘real’ views misses the point. Like other movements, Hamas evolves in response to events.”

“It’s not Hamas’s Islamism that keeps it from recognizing Israel. It’s simply good politics. In the eyes of most Palestinians, Fatah’s strategy of recognizing Israel has failed. It has led not to Palestinian statehood but to deepened occupation. That creates a market for a more hardline alternative. Eliminate Islamism from Palestinian politics and some leftist or nationalist faction would fill that same hardline niche and become America’s new bogeyman. Nor would eliminating Hamas eliminate Palestinian violence. After all, Palestinian leftist and nationalist groups fought Israel violently for decades before Hamas was born.”

“Fundamentally, Israel doesn’t have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem. It dominates and brutalizes another people. Until that domination and brutalization ends, every cease-fire will be merely an interval until the next war, regardless of which parties lead the Palestinian struggle.”

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Explaining vs Justifying
-UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, addressing the UN Security Council on October 24, “prefaced his incendiary truth-telling [of the horrible conditions in Gaza] by noting that he had already ‘condemned unequivocally’ the atrocities committed by Hamas. ‘Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.’ Then he said: ‘It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements, and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.’”
 ”Guterres seems to think you can…explain bad behavior without excusing it…” The contrary view, what may be called the explain/excuse conflation, has a “pernicious effect: If people get shouted down every time they start a sentence with, ‘I think the reason bad thing X happened is…’ then we’ll have trouble understanding enough about bad things to reduce their frequency.”
 However, it is true that people tend to become “less harshly judgmental as they understand more about the causes of bad behavior….Hence the French aphorism: ‘to know all is to forgive all.’”
 ”As a rule, people only move from knowledge all the way to forgiveness if they can imagine themselves, or at least imagine a typical person, doing the bad thing in question under the same set of conditions. And not many people can imagine themselves, or a typical person, randomly killing Israeli civilians….[However,] [i]f some Americans start to understand why Palestinians whose friends or relatives have died via Israeli air strikes wouldn’t be nearly as outraged by the death of Israeli civilians as the average American is, that’s a loss from Israel’s point of view.”
 ”This basic dynamic has distorted discourse about all kinds of issues. The Ukraine war, for example. Hardcore Ukraine hawks want to discourage any explanation of Putin’s invasion that isn’t confined to such factors as malevolence, wanton imperialism, and evil. So if you suggest that the [2022] invasion may have been partly a response to the expansion of NATO toward Russia’s borders, you get accused of reciting ‘Putin talking points’ or being a ‘Putin apologist’—much as highlighting the plight of Palestinians can get you labeled a Hamas apologist.”
 ”In both cases, the concern of the people doing the labeling isn’t just that the enemy’s bad behavior may seem to have a mundane explanation; it’s also that the explanation in question might seem to place some portion of the blame on the wrong side of the ally/enemy divide…”
 ”Will understanding why people do bad things make it harder for the average person to blame them? Yes, that can definitely happen. But right now isn’t a time when we have to worry about that. Because right now a slight leavening of moral outrage could do a world of good.”
 ”Israel’s ongoing retaliation has devastated Gaza and killed more than 7,000 Gazans—which, given the population of Gaza, is comparable to more than 1 million American deaths and more than 30,000 Israeli deaths. Already this massive reprisal is moving the region closer to a conflagration that could be bad for pretty much everyone…So if a deeper understanding of the sources of Palestinian grievance had the effect [of Americans placing more pressure on Israel to restrain itself]…that could turn out to be a good thing for both Palestinians and Israelis.” (27 Oct. 2023)
https://nonzero.substack.com/p/israels-gaza-speech-code

Comparing Abuses
-While supporters of Israel know that the country commits serious abuses, they also believe that it “never does things that are as bad as the worst governments in the world since it’s…fundamentally a benign liberal democracy.” However, let’s consider some comparisons.
 ”According to the UN Refugee Agency, 11 million people in the Ukraine have been displaced since Russia extended its invasion…in February 2022. That’s 11 million either internally or externally displaced out of a population of 44 million[;] one quarter of the population. That’s a staggering figure…[T]he percentage of the people in Gaza that have been displaced from their homes since…Israel’s response to October 7th [is] [s]eventy-five percent[;] 1.5 million out of 2 million…”
 ”[S]ave the Children did a comparison of the number of children who had been dying in Gaza per day compared to other conflicts…Save the Children’s figures in Ukraine since February 2022: 0.7 children per day have died….In Yemen, 1.5 children per day. In Syria, since the height of that conflict, 3 children per day. In Gaza, since October 7th, the figures are as of late October, 136 children have died per day.”
 Embedding amongst a civilian population “is the way all guerilla groups fight. This is the nature of insurgencies fighting against far more powerful armies.” Mao’s fighters and the Viet Cong communist guerillas, for instance, embedded, and thus used defenseless women and children as shields. They didn’t simply confront more powerful armies. “Because when you’re a very weak guerilla force facing a much more powerful army, that’s the way you fight….It’s not unique to Hamas.”
 It’s argued that “the people who are morally responsible for [Gazan civilian] deaths are Hamas because Hamas is fighting with guerilla tactics.…It’s not that different from saying, as some on the left have, that Hamas is not responsible for the massacre that took place on October 7 because Israel had provoked them because Israel had made the Gaza Strip unlivable, made it an open-air prison…[T]hat argument from the left was wrong because no matter what the provocation that Israel was doing in Gaza, the people who had the primary moral responsibility for pulling the trigger when they went house to house…were the people who pulled the trigger. And you can’t say that but then say Israel is not morally responsible for when it decides to drop a bomb in Gaza that destroys an entire apartment building…because you think that there were some Hamas members there. You can’t have it both ways.”
 Supporters of Israel argue that “Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties. Well, it’s just not doing a very good job of it….[T]he UN has estimated that 68 percent of the people who’ve been killed are women, children, and the elderly. Human Rights Watch has noted that Israel is using white phosphorus, which they describe as unlawfully indiscriminate when used in populated urban areas that it burns down entire houses and causes egregious harm to civilians…”
 It’s worth noting that data from the Gaza Health Ministry have been generally reliable. For example, “in 2014 the Gaza Health Ministry said that 2,310 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. Israel’s number was 2,125. The UN’s was somewhere in between.” (13 Nov. 2023)
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/facing-the-horror-in-gaza

-“More Palestinian children have been killed in the past several weeks than the 3,000 children killed in all the world’s major conflicts—involving two dozen countries—during the year 2022.” (The New York Times, 30 Nov. 2023)

-From the Washington Post: “The Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip has been unlike any other in the 21st century. In response to the unprecedented assault by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion that began 20 days later have destroyed large swaths of the besieged territory, killed at least 20,057 people and displaced a vast majority of the population. The most ferocious attacks have come from the air, flattening entire city blocks and cratering the landscape. The Washington Post analyzed satellite imagery, airstrike data and UN damage assessments, and interviewed more than 20 aid workers, health-care providers, and experts in munitions and aerial warfare. The evidence shows that Israel has carried out its war in Gaza at a pace and level of devastation that likely exceeds any recent conflict, destroying more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the US-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.” (23 Dec. 2023)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/israel-has-waged-one-of-this-century-s-most-destructive-wars-in-gaza/ar-AA1lWcmx

-Human Rights Watch “reports that Israel is systematically targeting hospitals without military justification”; and “a detailed investigation by the Washington Post has debunked the agitprop that Hamas ‘put its headquarters’ under al-Shifa hospital.” (The Washington Post piece establishes that Israel failed to show that Hamas was using the hospital or tunnels under the hospital as military headquarters at the time of Israel’s attack.) (27 Dec. 2023)
https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/sam-harris-savant-idiot
 According to a 2 January 2024 New York Times article, US intelligence sources are claiming that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad were using Al-Shifa Hospital as a “command center”, and also held captives there, until shortly before it was invaded by the Israeli military in November 2023. The NYT notes that its intelligence sources “provided no visual evidence” to back up their account, so – like Iraqi WMD – we will have to take their confirmation on faith.

-The following are portions of an account from an American doctor who went to Gaza in late January 2024.
* “I have worked in other war zones. But what I witnessed during the next 10 days in Gaza was not war — it was annihilation.”
* “A hospital designed to accommodate about 300 patients was now struggling to care for more than 1,000 patients and hundreds more seeking refuge.”
* “I began work immediately, performing 10 to 12 surgeries a day, working 14 to 16 hours at a time. The operating room would often shake from the incessant bombings, sometimes as frequent as every 30 seconds. We operated in unsterile settings that would’ve been unthinkable in the US. We had limited access to critical medical equipment: We performed amputations of arms and legs daily, using a Gigli saw, a Civil War-era tool, essentially a segment of barbed wire. Many amputations could’ve been avoided if we’d had access to standard medical equipment.”
* “The majority [of my patients] had been sleeping in their homes, when they were bombed. I couldn’t help thinking that the lucky ones died instantaneously, either by the force of the explosion or being buried in the rubble. The survivors faced hours of surgery and multiple trips to the operating room, all while mourning the loss of their children and spouses. Their bodies were filled with shrapnel that had to be surgically pulled out of their flesh, one piece at a time.”
* “On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children

-In February 2024, “Israel blew up Gaza’s last standing university, Al-Israa University.” In fact, since Israel’s invasion “all or parts of Gaza’s 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed. Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors. Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.” “The destruction of education systems and buildings is known as ‘scholasticide,’ a term first coined by Oxford professor Karma Nabulsi during the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza. Scholasticide describes the systemic destruction of Palestinian education within the context of Israel’s decades-long settler colonization and occupation of Palestine.”
https://www.juancole.com/2024/03/palestines-education-knowledge.html

IGNORANCE OR TREASON
-Ignorance: One likely reason Israeli Jews support the massive destruction of life in Gaza and have so little empathy for innocent Palestinians is ignorance. “Look at the publications that support this war: the publications in Israel, the publications in the United States. Look at the Jewish institutions that support this war. Look at the think tanks that support this war. And one of the things you will notice they have in common is they almost never platform Palestinians. If a publication does not publish Palestinians, you can be pretty certain it supports this war. Same with a television network. If a publication regularly publishes Palestinians, or a TV network regularly puts Palestinians on the air, or a think tank regularly hosts Palestinian speakers, or a Jewish institution regularly hosts Palestinian speakers…you can be certain that they will not support this war….One of the things that I think Americans have not sufficiently appreciated about discourse in Israel, for instance, is the almost universal absence of Palestinian voices from Israeli mainstream media….Where you have an absence of Palestinian voices, you have support for mass killing of Palestinians.”
 Unsurprisingly, Palestinians believe this war “will make Israeli Jews less safe because it will create more Palestinian hatred and lead to more Palestinian desire for violence, perhaps even from groups that are more radical than Hamas. So…if you listen to Palestinians, it’s likely to undermine the basic argument that people are making for this war. [A]t a more human level…it’s very difficult to support massive violence against people that you can humanize, that you can see as fully human, that you listen to, and that you can identify with. And that’s why the almost total blackout on Palestinian voices in pro-war media is so important.” (2 Jan. 2024)
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/who-will-deradicalize-us
 ”[I]sraeli media in the era of Netanyahu is filled with genocidal crazies saying horrific things. And it’s all totally normalized. Makes Fox look moderate. This is how you pave the way for war crimes. It worked in middle Europe in the thirties, Rwanda in the nineties, and it works in the Levant today.” (Robert Scott Horton, Facebook post, 15 Feb. 2024)

-Treason: “An unlikely charge of intent to commit treason landed [Jewish Israeli] Meir Baruchin, a grey-haired, softly spoken history and civics teacher, in the solitary confinement wing of Jerusalem’s notorious ‘Russian Compound’ prison in early November [2023].”
 ”The evidence compiled by police who handcuffed him, then drove to his apartment and ransacked it as he watched, was a series of Facebook posts he’d made, mourning the civilians killed in Gaza, criticising the Israeli military, and warning against wars of revenge. ‘Horrific images are pouring in from Gaza. Entire families were wiped out. I don’t usually upload pictures like this, but look what we do in revenge,’ said a message on 8 October, below a picture of the Abu Daqqa family, killed in one of the first airstrikes on Gaza. ‘Anyone who thinks this is justified because of what happened yesterday, should unfriend themselves. I ask everyone else to do everything possible to stop this madness. Stop it now. Not later, Now!!!’ It was the day after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel, when the country was reeling from the slaughter of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of more than 240.”
 “‘Most Israelis don’t know much about Palestinians. They think they are terrorists, all of them, or vague images with no names, no faces, no family, no homes, no hopes,” Baruchin said. “What I am trying to do in my posts is present Palestinians as human beings.’”
 ”Inside Israel, veteran journalists, intellectuals and rights activists say, there is little public space for dissent about the war in Gaza, even three months into an offensive that has killed 23,000 Palestinians and has no end in sight. ‘Make no mistake: Baruchin was used as a political tool to send a political message. The motive for his arrest was deterrence – silencing any criticism or any hint of protest against Israeli policy,’ the long-established Haaretz newspaper said in an editorial.”
 ”He is not the only teacher to be targeted. Authorities also summoned Yael Ayalon, head of a Tel Aviv high school, after she shared a Haaretz article warning that Israeli media was hiding the suffering of Gaza’s civilians….[Baruchin also] received hundreds of private messages of support from fellow teachers and students who were too frightened to go public…”
 ”Baruchin believes he is the only Jewish Israeli to have been detained for denouncing civilian deaths in Gaza, but this would not be unusual if he was a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Hundreds have been arrested and jailed, or lost jobs or access to education because of social media posts….The country’s differing free-speech standards for Jewish and Palestinian citizens was cited by a group of prominent Israelis in a letter warning that incitement to genocide had been normalised in the country.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/13/it-is-a-time-of-witch-hunts-in-israel-teacher-held-in-solitary-confinement-for-posting-concern-about-gaza-deaths
Professor Suspended: “In a statement from March 12, [2024] the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced the suspension of Professor Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, an internationally renowned Palestinian scholar and a faculty member in the Law School and School of Social Work. The drastic and unprecedented move came after Shalhoub talked in an extended podcast interview about the October 7 horrors and the ensuing devastating war and mass killings in Gaza. Two sentences that were taken out of context dominated the public conversation. First, ‘And of course, they will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, they will continue with million other lies every day with another story.’ Second, ‘Only by abolishing Zionism, we can continue. …’ The public outrage…ignored her comments, conveying sympathy to the victims…In fact, she said, ‘My reaction to the stories on October 7th was horrified…I will never allow anybody to touch a baby, to kidnap a child, to rape a woman’ … [The University’s statement also said “that the University ‘is proud of being an Israeli, public, and Zionist institution. As in the past, the heads of the university repeated their call for Professor Kevorkian to find another academic home that suits her position. In this stage, and in order to maintain a safe climate on campus for the benefit of our male and female students, the university decided to suspend her from teaching.’”
https://www.juancole.com/2024/03/zionist-academia-dissent.html
On 27 March 2024, Hebrew University made the following announcement reinstating Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian: “In a meeting held today between the Rector of the Hebrew University, Prof. Tamir Sheafer, and Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian clarified that as a critical feminist researcher, she believes all victims and does not doubt their words, and that she did not deny the fact that on 7.10 there were cases of rape in the South. After this clarification, the Hebrew University will allow Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian to continue teaching at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare.”
https://www.juancole.com/2024/03/palestinian-suspension-professor.html

HAMAS’S MOTIVATION
-“Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s leadership team currently in Qatar, told…the New York Times that Hamas’s goal in their attack of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists crossed from Gaza into Israel and tortured and killed about 1,200 people, taking another 240 hostage, was to make sure the region did not settle into a status quo that excluded the Palestinians.”
 ”In 2020 the Palestinians were excluded from discussions about the Abraham Accords negotiated by then-president Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (and later Morocco). More recently, Saudi Arabia and Israel were in talks with the United States about normalizing relations.”
 ”Al-Hayya told the reporters that in order to ‘change the entire equation and not just have a clash,’ Hamas leaders intended to commit ‘a great act’ that Israel would respond to with fury. ‘[W]ithout a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,’ al-Hayya said, but ‘[w]e had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.’” Hamas media adviser Taher El-Nounou told the reporters: ‘I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us.’”
 ”Hamas could be pretty certain that Israel would retaliate with a heavy hand. The governing coalition that took power at the end of 2022 is a far-right coalition, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to hold that coalition together to stay in power, not least because he faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.”
 ”Once it took power, Netanyahu’s government announced that expanding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank was a priority, vowing to annex the occupied territory. It also endorsed discrimination against LGBTQ people and called for generous payments to ultra-Orthodox men so they could engage in religious study rather than work. It also tried to push through changes to the judicial system to give far more power to the government. From January 7 until October 7, 2023, protesters turned out in the streets in huge numbers. With the attack, Israelis have come together until the crisis is resolved.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-17-2023

-“[Many Palestinians] give Hamas credit for fighting, even though it fought in a terribly immoral…way. [T]hey [also] give Hamas credit for getting…Palestinian prisoners released. The issue of Palestinian prisoners is a huge issue in Palestinian society because Israel has imprisoned so many Palestinians…under military law, [without] real due process.”
 The journalist and author Nathan Thrall, in his 2017 book The Only Language They Understand, documents that Israel has a record of giving more concessions to Palestinians “when they respond violently than when they respond nonviolently. And there are many examples of this…[It was] after Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier, was taken prisoner by Hamas, that Hamas managed to get in exchange for him more than a thousand prisoners released. [I]t was after the murderous Second Intifada…that Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements from Gaza [in 2005], even though Israel kept Gaza under blockade. [I]srael withdrew from southern Lebanon [in 2000] after Hezbollah militarily resisted. Compare…those concessions to what has been achieved by the Palestinians who have used nonviolence or ethical resistance…[W]hen Palestinians produce Gandhis, they get nothing…When Palestinians tried to go to the United Nations, [looked] to the International Criminal Court, [called] for boycotts, disinvestments, and sanctions [the response has been negative or very limited]. [I]t’s worth recognizing that when you defeat, and even criminalize, these efforts again and again and again, you are sending a message.”
 ”Even when Palestinians have essentially collaborated with Israel, done security cooperation that allows Israel to [more easily] control the West Bank…[it didn’t] bring them closer to a Palestinian state. [Consider Salam Fayyad, who] was the Palestinian Prime Minister that Israelis and establishment Jews around the world loved…because he was so moderate. He was fighting corruption. He was working hand in glove with Israel to make sure there was no violence against Israelis. This is what he said [in 2013] as he was leaving office to Roger Cohen of the New York Times, talking about the fact that he had not managed to stop settlement growth in the West Bank for even a single day[:] ‘We have not delivered. I represent the address for failure. Our people question whether the the Palestinian Authority can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.’”
 ”When [Gazans] tried the [2018-19] Great March of Return, which was…largely nonviolent[,] [they didn’t]…get any prisoners released [nor] any concessions[.] [Instead] thousands of people [were] maimed by Israeli sharpshooters…[W]hen you shut down and defeat avenues of ethical resistance, you empower [groups] like Hamas who use unethical resistance. And then when you reward them…you’ve gotten yourself in this cycle in which you’re…rewarding unethical resistance and essentially weakening people who believe in ethical resistance.”
 ”[The Biden administration] bears a lot of blame for this continuing pattern…by never using America’s leverage with its $3.8 billion in military aid or its protection of Israel in international forums…to stop settlement growth[;]…by basically opposing Palestinian elections that could have produced a more legitimate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank;…by moving towards a Saudi normalization deal that essentially was going to sideline Palestinians except maybe with the barest of fig leaves….Of course, the politics was shaped by establishment American Jewish organizations and others that virulently opposed any concessions to Palestinians in response to nonviolent and ethical Palestinian efforts to create freedom.” (27 Nov. 2023)
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/the-joy-and-tragedy-of-the-hostage

US MILITARY AID
-“The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, US officials told members of Congress in a [March 2024] classified briefing. The triple-digit figure, which has not been previously reported, is the latest indication of Washington’s extensive involvement in the polarizing five-month conflict even as top US officials and lawmakers increasingly express deep reservations about Israel’s military tactics in a campaign that has killed more than 30,000 people…Only two approved foreign military sales to Israel have been made public since the start of conflict: $106 million worth of tank ammunition and $147.5 million of components needed to make 155 mm shells. Those sales invited public scrutiny because the Biden administration bypassed Congress to approve the packages by invoking an emergency authority. But in the case of the 100 other transactions, known in government-speak as Foreign Military Sales or FMS, the weapons transfers were processed without any public debate because each fell under a specific dollar amount that requires the executive branch to individually notify Congress…‘That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support,’ said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official…”

“Israel, like most militaries, does not routinely disclose data about its weapons expenditures, but in the first week of the war, it said it had already dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza.” (Israel’s military campaign has leveled entire city blocks and destroyed huge numbers of homes across the strip.) “Republicans have largely opposed efforts to rein in US arms provisions to Israel and earlier this year introduced legislation to provide an additional $17.6 billion to Israel on top of the $3.3 billion the US provides annually. The Biden administration also supports additional military aid to Israel, but a package has been held up due to infighting in Congress over border security and aid to Ukraine.”

“What is clear is Washington’s deep involvement in the conflict, even if it isn’t the entity dropping the munitions or pulling the trigger, said Konyndyk, the former administration official. ‘The US cannot maintain that, on the one hand, Israel is a sovereign state that’s making its own decisions and we’re not going to second-guess them, and, on the other hand, transfer this level of armament in such a short time and somehow act as if we are not directly involved,’ he said.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/06/us-weapons-israel-gaza/

Jeffrey Rudolph, a retired college professor, was a regional representative of the East Timor Alert Network and presented a paper on its behalf at the United Nations. He was awarded the prestigious Cheryl Rosa Teresa Doran Prize upon graduation from McGill University’s faculty of law; has worked at one of the world’s largest public accounting firms; and, has taught at McGill University. He has prepared widely distributed pieces on various topics which are available at:
https://detailedpoliticalquizzes.wordpress.com/

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