On October 7th, 2023, Hamas militants broke the latest ceasefire by invading Israel and committing a massacre. They murdered about 1,200 innocent people, explicitly targeting noncombatants for slaughter as opposed to seeking military objectives that incidentally killed civilians.
The largest of the mass murders was at a music festival. They killed the young and the old; men, women, and children alike. They executed the wounded and those running or hiding. They did not accept surrender or spare even infants. They relished the bloodshed, celebrating the deaths of Israelis.
This was not an act of war, although it started one; it was terrorism. To ensure that Israel would be fully enraged by this pogrom, they raped women and took hundreds of hostages, most of whom are still captive and being abused. Moreover, they swore to repeat these massacres in the future.
Why did they do this now? Well, the specific timing is obvious: it successfully ended the efforts of Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and dragged America into a war in an election year. It’s unclear whether it’s just a coincidence that the massacre occurred on Putin’s birthday, but it certainly turned out to be a present for him. Having said this, the goal of retaking Mandatory Palestine by committing genocide against Israel is in their charter; it’s why they exist.
Hamas fully embraces terrorism as a means to that end. They do not want a two-state solution: they want a single state, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, built over the corpses of Israelis and populated solely by Arabs. They want to remove the aberration of a democratic, non-Arab nation in a sea of Arab states. And they really, really want to kill Jews.
What did they expect would come of the massacre? War. No military objectives were achieved: they went after civilians. This was the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust and there was never any doubt about whether Israel would retaliate. For Israel, 10/7 was their 9/11, and the threat of repeating the massacre made it absolutely necessary for Israel to remove Hamas’ ability to attack again.
Who did they do this for? Not the Palestinians, certainly. A war between Israel and Hamas would necessarily result in heavy casualties among civilians in Gaza and would not achieve the goal of conquering Israel. Hamas had about 31,000 soldiers at the start of this war and that’s nowhere near enough to take Israel head-on. The only reasonable expectation would be that Gazans would die en masse as a result.
This was fine with Hamas, because even though it’s the semi-elected government of Gaza, it doesn’t care about Gazans. It is a proxy for Iran, and its leaders are millionaires and billionaires who live in safe luxury outside of Gaza, in places like Qatar and Turkey. Moreover, Iran and the Saudis are rivals, so scuttling normalization serves Iran’s political goals. Iran is also behind other proxies, such as the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi in Yemen, all of whom are simultaneously attacking Israel using Iranian weapons. They’re not doing this out of “sympathy” for Palestinians, it’s all part of Iran’s war on Israel.
This is the key point: it is not just a war between Israel and Hamas, it’s an attack on Israel by Iran and its proxies. Iran leads the Axis of Resistance, which opposes Israel, America, and the West. So this isn’t just a war involving America’s ally, it’s a war against America through its allies. That’s why Iran’s Houthi terrorists in Yemen are shooting at American ships in the Red Sea and we’re shooting back. It’s why Iran’s Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon are shooting at American bases and we’re shooting back. It’s all one war and we are already participants in it, whether we like it or not. To abandon Israel is to abandon ourselves.
Gaza is a dense, urban environment. Even in the best of circumstances, a war in that territory would have massive civilian casualties as collateral damage, but Hamas wanted more. It built a network of tunnels that open up into homes, schools, and hospitals, turning them into military installations. Yes, this is a war crime, precisely because it leads to the enemy being forced to attack these places just to defend itself, resulting in increased civilian deaths. Hamas has used these buildings and tunnels to hold soldiers, ammunition, and hostages. It has launched attacks directly from them.
The coldblooded strategy of Hamas is to blur the line between soldiers and civilians so that the former can use the can latter as human shields. If you’re an IDF soldier in Gaza and you see someone who looks like a civilian, you can’t treat them as one, not if you want to survive. After all, Hamas uses suicide bombers, including women and children. The result is many otherwise avoidable deaths, notably even the case of IDF firing upon escaped Israeli hostages due to miscommunication and panic.
When Israeli civilians are massacred, we see them as victims of terrorism, but when Palestinians are killed, they are lauded as shuhada: martyrs who died for the cause of Palestinian freedom. Hamas engineers their deaths and then cynically uses them to attack Israel with false claims of “genocide”. Strangely, but perhaps not unexpectedly, this is immediately recycled into an attack against Biden, as though he’s responsible for the deaths that Hamas chose for the Palestinians at the hands of Israel.
What’s going on here? All war is political, but this one is more so than most. Iran thrived under Trump’s misrule and wants him back. Iran’s ally, Russia, is in a holding pattern in Ukraine, just waiting for Trump to regain power and throw Ukraine under Russia’s tanks. Even Netanyahu wants Trump back, because Trump is antimuslim and welcomes the death of Gazans. The attacks on trade in the Red Sea can be expected to increase inflation globally, hurting incumbent leaders, such as Biden, by weakening the economy.
So the massacre wasn’t just terrorism against Israel, it launched a multipronged attack on normalization with Saudi Arabia, on Biden’s presidency, on global trade, and on the West as a whole. It’s not an incident that can escalate; it is the first, most visible escalation by Iran.
Let’s talk about the “genocide”. First, the entire claim is deeply hypocritical because Hamas openly supports genocide. Their stated goal is to kill the Israelis and take over their land.
Second, there is no “genocide”. Genocide requires targeting civilians, which is something Hamas did in its massacre, but Israel is not doing in its retaliation. Collateral damage, so long as it is proportionate, is not genocide; it is the grim reality of modern urban warfare.
Third, the ratio of civilian-to-soldier deaths in Gaza is about 2 to 1, which compares favorably with similar wars, such as in Iraq. War is hell, but these casualties are proportionate.
Fourth, Hamas’ practice of war crimes that turn civilians into human shields is directly responsible for increasing their death rate, which makes this false claim even more hypocritical. Hamas is also negligent in providing aid for its own civilians, instead confiscating it for the troops.
Netanyahu is Israel’s Trump. He wants to use this war to purge Gaza, but he can’t because we won’t let him. Biden is reining him in, which is why Netanyahu’s apparent strategy is to drag this out long enough for Trump to bail him out. But while Biden is right about Israel needing to narrow its focus to minimize civilian deaths, a ceasefire is not possible at this time.
Remember, Hamas has broken every single ceasefire it has ever agreed to. It uses its safety during these pauses in the violence to prepare for its next attack. Besides the ceasefire it broke on 10/7, it broke the one that Biden arranged to allow exchanging hostages for prisoners. As of the time of this writing, another proposal is in the works to call a month-long ceasefire to allow for the rest of the hostages to be freed. Holding on to the hostages is one of the obvious things Hamas is doing to keep the war going.
What else does Israel need in order for it to agree to a ceasefire? Safety from further massacres, which means that Hamas must go. That’s one of the elements of the ceasefire proposals from Egypt, which Hamas rejected. Hamas can end this war any time it wants by freeing the Gazans from its grip, along with the Israeli hostages, but it doesn’t want to. It wants war, it wants martyrs, it wants fuel for Iran’s PR campaign against Israel and against Biden.
Hamas started this war with the goal of getting Gazans killed and Hamas refuses to stop this war by allowing the Gazans to hold elections. While it’s not a “genocide”, there are many deaths, and they are ultimately caused by Hamas and its Iranian masters. Hamas sacrificed the people it claims to represent for its own gain.
I could stop here, but I’m going to go one step further: we should not mourn the Gazans as innocent victims. The overwhelming majority of them fully support the Oct. 7th attacks. Hamas is a repressive, illiberal, terrorist government, but it continues to enjoy broad support by the people. These are the people who helped hide the hostages and spat on the corpses of massacred Israelis; they want this. It is only just for those who support terrorism to die as a consequence of that terrorism.
We should mourn the innocents among them, though. Some Gazans do not support the massacre, do not support Hamas, and do not deserve to die for Hamas’ crimes. Many are too young to be held accountable for the evil that their parents do. But it’s those Palestinian adults who are responsible for the deaths of the innocents; not Israel, and certainly not Joe Biden.
To quote Golda Meir, “Peace will come to the Middle East only when Arab mothers will love their children more than they hate the Jews.” What we’re seeing in Gaza is Palestinians choosing violence and bringing suffering upon themselves and their families.
There would be no war in Gaza but for Hamas wanting one. All those Gazans, the guilty and innocent alike, would be alive today if those 1,200 or so Israelis were alive today. So if you claim to oppose genocide but want to absolve Hamas, you’re a hypocrite, too. You can’t pave over the massacre by excusing it with some sort of historical context only to ignore context entirely when declaring the retaliatory war a “genocide”.
The war will end when Hamas ends it, likely when it has no choice. And lasting peace will not come until Likud is removed from power, to be replaced by Israeli leaders willing to embrace a two-state solution. Likewise, the UNRWA must go, because it is training children to be terrorists and harboring terrorists itself. None of this will happen if Trump is allowed to take over America, though.
There are people desperately trying to amplify Hamas’ self-destructive war into a “genocide” so that they can weaponize this label against Biden. It’s not just hyperbole thrown around by a far left that is hostile to Democrats, isolationist in its foreign policy, and not just a little bit antisemitic. Rather, it is a propaganda operation with the self-evident goal of providing an excuse for the puritan left to sit out the election and allow Trump to regain power.
The irony is that it’s not merely unfair, but exactly wrong. America supports our ally as it’s being attacked, but this has never been unconditional. Privately, and increasingly publicly, Biden has been reining in Netanyahu’s territorial ambitions and apathy about casualties. He’s stood firm on the necessity of a two-state solution and brokered the ceasefire that rescued many of the hostages. He continues to work, behind the scenes and otherwise, through seasoned diplomats such as Blinken, to keep the situation from getting even worse.
However, Joe Biden is not president of Israel, and Netanyahu is neither obedient nor even reasonable. Blaming Biden for the actions of Netanyahu, much less those of Iran and Hamas, requires invoking the tired old trope that assumes Democrats are omnipotent so that any failure to accomplish impossible goals can be blamed on their laziness or malice.
Even if Biden pulled all aid from our ally, this would not stop the violence. If anything, Israel’s enemies would be emboldened and Israel would face an existential threat. At that point, while it might run low on conventional arms due to our withdrawal of aid, it will still have its own nuclear weapons. And Iran doesn’t, not quite yet, so now would be the time to strike. Netanyahu is just crazy enough to do this. So do we really want this to escalate to nuclear war, even regionally? Think this through.
If you’re angry about the bloodshed, that just means that you’re not a sociopath. But if you’re angry at Biden, you’re an idiot who’s been manipulated by our enemies. Anyone throwing around the term “genocide” and trying to attach it to America is carrying water for Trump. And if Trump wins, American democracy dies and the world is plunged further into violence and chaos.
P.S.
Iran is the new “I” in BRICS. This is “an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.” Did you notice that the “S” in BRICS is South Africa? The same South Africa that is spearheading the attempt to paint Israel’s self-defense as “genocide”.
South Africa is not a neutral country which has the moral high ground due to overcoming its Apartheid past. It’s an ally of Iran that is aiding Iran by politically attacking Israel. If you’re swallowing this “genocide” propaganda and spreading the hyperbole, you are a useful idiot for Iran and Russia.
P.P.S.
It looks like there are some recent signs of the Gazans rejecting their Hamas overlords because they don’t want to die. Good for them.
P.P.P.S.
There’s enough here for an entire essay in itself, but here’s a link to a translation of Hamas’ propaganda guidelines. Note, in particular, the falsehoods they insist upon and the truths they wish to obscure. This is a war, and generating material for propaganda is a key objective for Hamas.