Maybe the most crucial news is that there’s no reason to be confident that we know much about what’s happening. Are there fifty-two Israeli hostages in Gaza? Are there more like a hundred? Are perhaps half of them already dead? We don’t know. Every few hours the number of dead given by parts of the Israeli government goes up, always prefaced by ‘At least”. Late this afternoon it was north of 700. Does this number include Palestinian dead? We don’t know. Hamas estimates of Palestinian dead have fluctuated, and are so far significantly lower than Israeli estimates of what are (probably) only intended as counts of the Israeli dead. How accurate are either of these changing estimates? We don’t know.
How did the strategic and tactical surprises happen? The nature of the latter is becoming visible, but not yet too much of the former. Other than the obvious but still unparticularized “massive intelligence failure”, we don’t know, but some of the surmises are interesting. Here’s one: it’s claimed that on the eve of Hamas’s attack the IDF had 25 battalions in the West Bank–the previous number averaged 13–guarding ever-more aggressive and provocative settlers. This doubling is alleged to be the work of Ben-Givr, the Minister of National Security and head of the Jewish Power party (Otzma Yehudit) and Bezalel Smotrich, another ultra-Rightist who has the Ministry of Defense and the Finance Ministry. Both men are very widely believed to be goading West Bank Palestinians to react to provocations with enough violence to give the government a chance for mass expulsion. There are apparently no concrete plans for expulsion, which would make this a malevolent pseudo-strategy. The interesting claim was that the dozen new battalions had been redeployed from the border with Gaza. As an explanation for the disaster this may not be true, but it makes a kind of sense–I remember hearing a West Point professor at an academic conference explaining the fall of Fort Ticonderoga in 1777 by reciting the maxim that an undefended obstacle has no military value. I’ve seen some reporting asserting that some of the Israeli defenses were unmanned or grossly undermanned. If those allegations are true, the horrors Hamas’s infiltrators committed adjacent to and then in Gaza were the result of the malice and incompetence of malevolent lunatics in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Is it true? Who knows?
The claim that the Israeli government produced opportunities Hamas exploited is not the same as the claim that the Israelis kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Hamas—one of them three years old, another five–deserved whatever happened to them because of their government’s previous, current and impending crimes. To believe that, a Harvard education may help. Something like thirty-five Harvard student organizations (another site claims something like sixty) either yesterday or today signed a short statement: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime wholly responsible for all unfolding violence…The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” But when another Harvard student, from his name probably Israeli or Israeli-descended, tweeted the statement, he added that “this is the final crack in my broken heart…I could be sitting in class with these students, watching children brutally murdered, raped, mutilated and kidnapped, torn apart by a jeering crowd—and hear why it’s justified.” So Harvard students, like Gazans, differ from one another. One of the oddest notions on the net now is that Gazans don’t: that Hamas speaks for all of them. Another notion out there on the net is that the Israelis are wholly responsible for yesterday’s horrifying crimes committed against them—that oppression and occupation left Gazans no possible response save the ones now so accessible on YouTube. Some of the videos are probably faked, akthough my guess is that most probably aren’t. But some portion of five hundred Hamas infiltrators committed these crimes, out of more than two millions Gazans. How wonderfully undifferentiated Gazans seem to be in the eyes of some who imagine themselves Gaza’s defenders.
Do the Harvard students who signed the statement understand what they’d written or implied? Who knows? Did the Harvard students even know what they were excusing? Not if they read the only the Times, which was curiously late and pretty chary of linking to almost any of those ghastly videos, also of describing their contents. No mention yet—not by late this afternoon, anyway–of the infamous footage (and a still) of a young woman stripped and dragged by her hair into a Hamas crowd, where other videos reportedly show her being repeatedly spat upon. Other rumors hold that she was then killed, but perhaps that was another young woman—more than one has been kidnapped. This one was a dual citizen, a German Israeli. For me this odd fact made the still recall some old newsreels, or reading about the Anschluss in descriptions of that particular day in Vienna. What sort of a person seriously thinks these acts were irresistibly forced upon those who committed them yesterday? Who knows? Maybe people are in part confused by euphemisms: one of my daily papers, actually more than one of them, denominates even peculiarly sadistic terrorists only as “militants”, a word that until pretty recently denominated committed trade unionists, often ones leading a strike. One of my grandfathers was for a once-important moment a union militant; I must hope I am not here misunderstood.
Do the people who say the five hundred Hamas men who yesterday crossed the border really believe that they had no other possible choice? Those who say this, assuming they actually believe it, are not gifted historians. After all, the SS was rarely if ever able to make the wartime French or Danish Resistance do what Israel allegedly made all of Gaza do, or at least I cannot recall a story of those movements kidnapping and torturing any German female clerical workers (or their grandparents or their toddlers) during the Occupation itself—post war “justice” was very rough indeed, and not always justice, but that was revenge, not resistance. I do not remember the Black and Tans getting the Irish to do it either, and I do not think the PA ever did it as freely as Hamas did yesterday. The Israeli press is noting that Netanyahu always seemed to help Hamas in ways he refused to help the PA—he seems to have preferred to help Hamas in order to diminish and discredit a group fighting for a two state solution Netanyahu abominated. Do Hamas’s new enthusiasts know this? Who knows?
Will the now one hundred or so hostages prevent the Israelis from invading Gaza? Very few if any Israelis are quoted saying so, and my guess is probably not. Will the Israelis inevitably kill a lot of the civilians Hamas will use as human shields in Gaza? That certainly seems likely. Will sympathy, much of it in this country and Europe now apparently on the side of the Israelis, disintegrate when the inevitable civilian casualties mount? Probably—that’s what’s happened in the past.
It would be unfair to say that Hamas has won at least brief infamy and accomplished nothing. It may (or may not) produce an Israeli coalition government, and it has almost certainly put off for a long time an Saudi-Israeli agreement, which is presumably a significant Iranian and Hamas goal. On the other hand, Hamas has apparently at least briefly closed unprecedented rifts in Israeli society. It is extremely unlikely to have done that forever, but the effect may last for longer than many think. Those 500 Hamas men have for now produced what I was long ago taught to call Burgfriedenspolitik—strong political unity within a previously divided polity that suddenly thinks itself under mortal threat. This will not last forever, but a significant portion of Hamas, soon to be very violently attacked, may not survive to see this particular Burgfrieden collapse. Alas, far too many of those misrepresented as its Gazan enthusiasts won’t survive, either.