Smoke rises following Israeli strikes in Gaza on 15 October 2023. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Mohammed Saber) 
Pro-Palestinian student groups in the US last week lauded the Hamas attacks on Israel as a “historic win” for the “Palestinian resistance” and held up “Rhodesia, South Africa and Algeria” as models of the defeat of settler colonies.
It was unlikely that this statement was written by a student of history, because these were very different roads to liberation.
In Algeria, the FLN’s choice of a full-on revolutionary terror campaign was met with extreme brutality by the French colonialists. More than a million people died, and a million people fled Algeria, which remained a shattered country for decades afterwards.
By contrast, in South Africa, as Peter Beinart wrote in The New York Times this weekend, the ANC was worlds away from Hamas in how it conducted the Struggle.
Beinart quoted the ANC as declaring that targeting civilians is wrong: “Our morality as revolutionaries dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”
This was also because the ANC of Nelson Mandela was concerned about what was to happen after apartheid, and wanted all South Africans to buy into a vision of a multiracial democracy.
The events of the last week or so have shown Israel and Hamas scooting headlong down the Algerian road towards mutual annihilation, killing any chance of peace.
If it continues, it will not remain within the borders of Israel and Palestine for very long.
The heightened and explosive geopolitical environment means that without peace, this could escalate into a world war stretching from Taiwan to Ukraine and encompassing the entire Middle East.
Taking the bait
The attacks were a humiliation for Israel. Its much-vaunted intelligence services were taken completely by surprise.
One of the most horrific atrocities was the massacre at an outdoor music festival in the woods near Kibbutz Re’im, where 250 young partygoers were gunned down, and some survivors taken as hostages.
The best-selling author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, explained the impact of these events on the psyche of Jewish people.
“It goes back to the deepest fears and the darkest moments of Jewish history… Everybody is now comparing it to scenes from the Holocaust or from pogroms. The state of Israel just disappeared for a couple of hours.
“Jewish communities were slaughtered. The comparisons are with the Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing units of the Nazis that in 1941 to 1942 would just come, surround a Jewish village and burn people in their houses or just shoot them all to death,” Harari wrote.
Hamas’s attack was clearly an attempt to provoke by tearing open the deepest wounds — the purest form of terrorism.
The attacks have been compared to Osama bin Laden’s attack on the US on 9/11, when Al-Qaeda baited US President George W Bush and the neocons into wars in the Middle East that it took 20 years for the US to extricate itself from.
“I fear that Hamas’s intention is to get Israel to retaliate massively and have the conflict escalate: a West Bank uprising, Hezbollah attacks, a revolt in East Jerusalem,” Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, warned within days.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ignored pleas not to impose collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza, by baldly announcing: “We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
Israel is resorting to its default mechanism of unleashing terrifying military power in Old Testament-style retribution on the people of Gaza.
But the very predictability of this overwhelming display of violence means they have forgotten the most elementary lesson of Sun Tzu’s Art of War: to “mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy”.
Hamas has turned Israel’s greatest strength into its greatest weakness.
As the IDF prepares to invade the Gaza Strip, Hamas has had a long time to prepare its tens of thousands of fighters in urban neighbourhoods whose streets and underground tunnels they know by heart. If their record so far is anything to go by, they have some surprises in store.
Hamas, which is holding more than 120 hostages, is goading the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) into a trap that will bring them into conflict with the population and inflame the Arab world. It is designed to break the Abraham Accords under which Israel created alliances with Arab states. Even longer-term relationships such as Egypt and Jordan will come under pressure.
Anger is already growing on the Arab streets, which saw massive protests at the weekend.
Israel was on the verge of making a deal for “normalisation” with Saudi Arabia, that would have set the final seal on a pact with its former Arab adversaries while offering almost nothing to the Palestinians.
That is on hold for now and could be off the table permanently, depending on how long the war rages — and how much it connects to regional and global conflicts.
Leadership failure
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an editorial pointing out what many US outlets did not dare express:
“The disaster that befell Israel is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister ... completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”
Israel was fractured politically by Netanyahu’s attempts to undermine the independence of the judiciary. His ruling coalition has grown ever more extreme, allowing settlers to run amok in the West Bank and attacking Muslim holy sites such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
A unity government was created following the attacks, but it is still headed by Netanyahu and includes extremists such as the violently anti-Arab Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who wants to rid the West Bank of Palestinians and replace them with Jewish settlers.
The Israeli right has become completely unmoored from mainstream Western sentiment. Henry Luce, writing in the Financial Times, commented: “Last Saturday’s killing was horrific, yet should come as no surprise. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison. Netanyahu has deprived Palestinians of hope for the future and peaceful outlets to express their frustrations. John F Kennedy, Biden’s original hero, said: ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.’”
A poll from the Israeli daily Maariv last week showed a massive drop in support for Netanyahu’s party, Likud, since the attacks.
Many Israelis blame Netanyahu for the events because of the failure of his policy of divide and rule, which was to tolerate, even support, Hamas in Gaza so as to avoid having to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The conduct of the war in Gaza so far by the IDF, whose bombing campaign has shown scant regard for the lives of innocent Palestinians, is rapidly alienating even its most sympathetic supporters in the West.
‘A huge earthquake’
US President Joe Biden has given full-throated support to Israel and sent two aircraft carrier groups to the region while warning Israel to proceed within the laws of war.
He wants to ensure that the response does not escalate into a conflagration that will draw the US into another war in the Middle East.
Because of its long-standing support for Israel, the US will get blamed for whatever Israel does, but so far neither Biden’s entreaties nor US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy appear to have done anything to moderate the vengeful nature of the Israeli response.
The need to break the cycle of violence gained urgency at the weekend when Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, after meeting Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, threatened to attack Israel if it continued bombing Gaza and warned the US that it would suffer heavy losses if it intervened.
“I know about the scenarios that Hezbollah has put in place. Any step the resistance [Hezbollah] will take will cause a huge earthquake in the Zionist entity,” he said.
The US has no desire to get into a war with Iran, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan says there is no evidence that Iran helped Hamas plan the attacks. They are probably hoping they don’t find any.
The conservative Stanford and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson echoes a growing concern in the West of a cascade of conflict and its likely consequences. He has bragging rights, as just weeks ago he predicted a major war in the Middle East.
Apart from Ukraine, there are wars from the Sahel through Sudan and Somalia to Syria and up to Azerbaijan and Armenia. There is tension in Serbia on the border with Kosovo and between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. Days before the Hamas attacks, Russia and Syria bombed Western allies in Idlib.
“As with London buses, you can wait ages for one war and then several come along,” says Ferguson.
He believes that a fiscally overstretched US will soon face a nascent Axis-like combination of China, Russia and Iran, none of which condemned the Hamas attack, in three theatres: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.
Kyrylo Budanov, the Head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, agrees and he claims (without evidence so far) that Russians supplied satellite intelligence, infantry weapons and drones to Hamas — and that the world is on the brink of a major war.
What this does is create a massive imperative from above to find a solution, which seems more impossible the longer the fighting continues.
The battered old roadmap
Growing up white in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, we believed our world would go on forever.
When the colonial regimes up north gave way, one by one, to black rulers, people worried that the tide of history would reach us one day.
But mostly they believed it could not happen here. The myth of an invincible military machine, the “best in Africa”, itself an expression of white superiority, coupled with a lack of understanding or empathy for those of darker hue living in parallel worlds, allowed many to continue their lives as if we were a normal country.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly when South Africa’s ruling class lost faith in itself, when the entire edifice of dehumanisation and propaganda was exposed for what it was — and when the leaders realised they had to find a path out of the abyss.
The turning point for Israel can be precisely identified: Hamas’s brutal surprise attacks on 7 October have torn holes in the Zionist state’s aura of invincibility.
Tareq Baconi, the president of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and a former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told the New Yorker, “The scale of the offensive and its success, from Hamas’s perspective, mean that we’re actually in a new paradigm, in which Hamas’s attacks are not restricted to renegotiating a new reality in the Gaza Strip, but, rather, are capable of fundamentally undermining Israel’s belief that it can maintain a regime of apartheid against Palestinians, interminably, with no cost to its population.
“By challenging the myth of invincibility that Israel holds on to, it shatters the illusion that they can maintain this regime indefinitely, and that there will be Palestinian acquiescence to that.”
As the bombs keep falling and the world awaits an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, there is one message that can be taken away: this world cannot go on forever.
Even if the IDF eliminates every single Hamas operative and flattens Gaza, that still leaves the Palestinians. At some point, the two peoples will have to find a way to re-engage.
It might seem in bad taste to even mention the possibility of a political process when there is so much pain and rage on all sides.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s offer to mediate in the conflict is not crazy. Israel could be entering uncharted territory for which the only battered roadmap in existence might be the South African invention of a more inclusive society. DM