Nuanced Sensemaking in Troubled Times

Understanding Hamas' Atrocities and the Siege of Gaza

Introduction

The following represents another departure from my health and science briefings meant to offer a nuanced assessment of the tragic recent and unfolding events in Israel and Gaza that have preoccupied my mind the last couple of months. I propose a complex narrative based on history, facts, and reason. Because, like most people, I have strong feelings about many of the issues at the heart of this discussion, these deliberations tested my ability to remain rational and unbiased and have led to conclusions that fail to assuage my sadness, frustration, and anger. This briefing is meant to be understood holistically and is, therefore, best read all at once, but for those who prefer to dine in courses, I have broken my analysis into more easily digestible sections.

I. It’s The Intention That Matters

The concept of intent is deeply embedded within Western culture.  In countries like the US, we understand the world in a way that distinguishes between words intended to tease and those meant to wound – even if the words themselves are the same; between getting hit in the face by a miscalibrated arm thrust through a tight coat sleeve and being deliberately punched in the face during the heat of an argument – even if both things result in the same fat lip.  

Intention and the Law

Construing starkly different meanings from words or actions based on perceived intent is a foundational concept around which Western systems of justice turn.  In the US, liability to criminal punishment depends not only upon proving that an act was committed fitting the legal definition of a crime but on showing that those who acted did so while in a certain state of mind comprised of various mental elements, collectively referred to as mens rea (literally: guilty mind), central to which is the question of intent. We distinguish, morally and legally, between injury caused intentionally, accidentally, and as a result of negligence.

So important, in fact, to our moral and legal interpretation of each other's words and actions are one's perceived intentions that even the gravest of crimes (the taking of a life, for example) can be understood as morally and legally appropriate under the right circumstances (such as in the course of war or self-defense) and it is possible to convict someone of a crime that was never committed if it can be proved that the guilty party intended to do so (conviction for conspiracy to commit murder, for example, carries a sentence of up to life in prison).  

“Tyranny is the Deliberate Removal of Nuance.” – Albert Maysles

For those born into free societies, it can be easy to take for granted the significance of a normative process of nuanced sensemaking that colors our speech and actions as benign or malicious and can tint them with countless degrees of moral and legal shading based on our assessment of the intentions that lay behind them. We have been culturally trained to conduct such mental calculations so automatically and effortlessly that we hardly notice we’re doing it, making intuitive construals in an area of the brain called the gestalt cortex, using an evaluative framework that is tempered by our native mores which are themselves grounded in the system of belief that undergirds virtually all of Western civilization and thought, called secular humanism.

Secular humanism prioritizes science, reason, and logic while eschewing religious dogma, faith, and edicts from which certain freedoms and values have emerged as pillars of Western society. We understand things like free speech and the expectation of fair and equal treatment before the law irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, family name, sexual orientation, religion, or political affiliation, not as luxuries to be enjoyed by the privileged few but as basic rights guaranteed to all citizens. It is the guaranteeing of such rights to all that constitutes the crucible for the Western mode of mind which champions independent inquiry, fairness, nuanced reasoning, and norms of tolerance, civility, democracy, and the practice of respectful disagreement, weaving these highly-evolved, layered concepts into the fabric of Western-style democracies to create policy, shape public discourse, and inform our everyday sense of right and wrong.

II. Uncertainty is Essential For Free Societies

Compromise

As the atom is the fundamental unit of matter, compromise may be understood as the fundamental unit of democracy. In a high-functioning liberal democracy, no one gets everything that they want. Big changes come gradually, constrained by the more-or-less symmetrically opposing forces of moderate progressivism and moderate conservatism. Free societies improve over time by evolving incrementally and thoughtfully, tilting a little left, then a little right, with centrism as their north star and compromise acting as both a vehicle for progress and a brake against sudden, radical change.

The work of dismantling vestigial anti-humanist structures such as racism, sexism, antisemitism, and homophobia is painstaking and gradual in liberal democracies. We may find ourselves impatient – even angry – about this at times but Western-minded people generally accept as part of freedom’s grand bargain that most of the time, progress made in this deliberatively incremental way is a good thing for the overall health of society. Measured changes carry a lower risk for catastrophic missteps compared to radical overhauls and are less likely to inadvertently unleash psychological, economic, and social dislocation.

In short, the democratic process is a political mechanism for slow, steady progress through compromise. But compromise, which is also a highly evolved and nuanced concept, becomes problematic when citizens migrate from the moderate centers of the political and religious spectrums toward the extremes of belief where nuanced thinking tinged with uncertainty is replaced by rigid structures of belief derived from received dogmas and faith. How can we compromise with someone if we know with absolute certainty that we are one hundred percent right in what we believe and those holding an opposing idea are completely and utterly wrong?

Moderate political and religious views open a window to let in the fresh air of doubt that compromise needs to breathe. But when large numbers of citizens in a free society begin drifting toward the extremes of belief, compromise, and therefore, progress, grinds to a halt, making democracy dysfunctional. Over time, a democracy rendered dysfunctional by the certainty of extremist ideas begins to fall out of step with a rapidly changing world. This is the problem we are seeing in the United States and around the world today.

Our criminal justice system acknowledges and reflects this understanding, factoring context and intent into its laws and inviting a spectrum of moral and legal interpretations from which a humble admission emerges that everything that we believe to be true and correct must be taken with a grain of salt. Accepted scientific theories are regularly challenged and updated (or thrown out) to conform to new evidence. In Western societies like the US, jurors entrusted with the intricate task of navigating a complex legal system are asked to endeavor to be fair and impartial, to cast judgment not with absolute certainty but beyond a reasonable doubt, and to weave into their deliberations the supple threads of context and intent which inform mens rea, all with the understanding that the rich tapestry of Western civilization is a reflection of the imperfect nature of its human architects.

Embracing Imperfection: The Power of Tolerance

Few citizens of Western democracies view their government, leaders, or culture as flawless or infallible. And we’re okay with that because we are acculturated to life between the extremes attended by a measure of uncertainty, and to a free society’s relatively moderate call to seek an approximation of truth and justice, guided by good intentions. A tacit understanding unfolds, urging us to both trust in and improve upon our societal structures while accepting our inherent inability to do so perfectly.

Liberal democracies built on science, reason, and logic, are a powerful force that can take credit for nearly all the miracles of modern life from industrial agriculture to evidence-based medicine to air travel to AI to social justice (more about this later). But free societies are also fragile and can thrive only so long as a majority of citizens can resist the simplifying allure of black-or-white thinking that defines the extremes of religion and politics where sensemaking is bridled by faith, dogma, and edict – rigid structures of belief from which nuance has been deliberately removed in favor of the soothing balm of irrational certainty.

In Gaza, for example, where laws and cultural norms flow from an extremist religious ideology, virtually all aspects of life are subject, at Hamas’ discretion, to dogmatic doctrinal beliefs, rules, customs, and practices. A more detailed discussion of Hamas is central to this discussion and will be presented shortly, but for now, let’s simply establish that in extremist cultures all over the world where nuance has been deliberately removed from the norms and laws of society and sensemaking is constrained by edict or scriptural dogma, right and wrong are understood in narrow terms of black or white with little or no consideration given to mitigating factors like context and intent.

For the vast majority of Western-minded people, a careful and comprehensive consideration of what day-to-day life is actually like in an extremist society like the one in Gaza requires robust and sustained imaginative effort. It is nearly impossible for someone born, raised, and educated in Japan, Europe, or the US to internalize the full force of what it means to live in a society in which women are subject to cruelly restrictive laws and barbaric punishments simply based on their sex; LGBTQ adults may be killed for the ‘crime’ of being true to the nature with which they were born; there are no guaranteed freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, or the press; and the nuanced concepts of due process and the rule of law are non-existent.

Such normalized forms of structural oppression, common to all totalist societies, would not be alleviated for the Palestinians of Gaza if Israel and Egypt ended their blockade or recognized the West Bank and Gaza as fully autonomous states because they are culturally self-imposed and self-enforced by a government run by their own dominant political faction, Hamas, whose ethos is rooted in religious extremism.

Just a decade ago, liberal democracy seemed like an unstoppable force destined to emancipate the world from the oppression that informs day-to-day life in places like Gaza.  Tragically, today, as nearly a century ago, the totalist winds of autocracy and theocracy are gathering both abroad and here at home. How can the forces of freedom push back against this terrible backslide? My view is that now, more than ever, citizens of free societies must offer stalwart support to the cause of secular humanism, rededicate ourselves to trusting its political heir, liberal democracy, and insist upon nuanced sensemaking when faced with complex political, historical, religious, and cultural conflicts like the one that began with a terrorist attack against Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and is now unfolding in Gaza as the IDF seeks revenge under the slogan of having no other choice but to exterminate Hamas as quickly as possible, regardless of the cost.

III. The Rules of War

WWII as an Example

Throughout the Second World War, the US and Britain dropped over two million tons of bombs on Germany, many aimed at targets believed to be playing a crucial role in the enemy's ongoing military operations.  But those weapons were crude precursors to the precision-guided munitions of today which hit their intended targets most of the time, and the number of civilians killed or maimed and the damage to infrastructure, including power and water, that resulted from USAF and RAF aerial assaults was staggering. 

Dresden, Germany, January 1945, just before the commencement of the Allied bombing campaign

And then there was the bombing that took place toward the end of the war, not directed at munitions factories, armories, or enemy strongholds but at major civilian population centers like Munich, Berlin, Würzburg, Dessau, Kassel, Mainz, and Hamburg. Over seventy percent of Germany’s largest metropolises had their urban core destroyed and cities like Dresden, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Hanover, and Nuremberg were decimated.  Having attained full command of the skies, the Allies prosecuted a merciless military strategy of systematically razing densely populated urban centers.  In Dresden, pockets of air burst spontaneously into flames for days from the residual heat trapped under rubble following one massive, sustained aerial assault.  

Dresden just a few weeks later, in February 1945, following the Allied bombing campaign

Did the targeted bombing of enemy civilians and civilian infrastructure in places like Dresden represent a proportional use of military force? Was the brutal, premeditated mass killing of German civilians toward the end of the war a campaign of genocide?

Proportionality

Proportionality is a nuanced concept and a cornerstone of international law that applies to military conflicts. It is a term being used widely at the current moment by some journalists, pundits, and politicians to frame Israel's military attack on Hamas in Gaza as a war crime. In this context, proportionality has been used extensively to mean the symmetrical infliction of civilian casualties.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry (an arm of Hamas), the Israeli siege of Gaza has resulted so far in more than twenty thousand deaths and if we accept that statistic as reliable, far more Palestinians have been unintentionally killed as so-called ‘collateral damage’ by IDF bombing and fighting in Gaza than Israelis (and others) were intentionally tortured and murdered by Hamas extremists in Israel on October 7, 8, and 9. But before we dig into the Israel-Hamas war, let's continue to unpack the well-studied and therefore, better-understood Allied mass bombing of more or less defenseless German civilians, mainly women and children, as a means of establishing a contextual framework by which to adjudicate other military conflicts regarding the issue of proportionality.  

All told, approximately one hundred sixty German cities were destroyed or severely damaged and more than six hundred thousand German civilians were killed by Allied aerial bombing.  By comparison, Germany, during its war of genocidal conquest, killed about seventy thousand British and American civilians. Were the Allies therefore culpable of the war crime of disproportionate military action for killing nearly ten times the number of German civilians? It turns out that proportionality, in the lexicon of the internationally agreed-upon laws governing warfare, has nothing to do with symmetrical casualties but refers instead to a requirement to take into account the anticipated degree of civilian harm and to weigh that harm against the concrete and direct military advantage reasonably expected to be gained through a particular military action. 

This is not a biased British or American interpretation of relevant law or a rule crafted post hoc to justify war crimes. It is a foundational element of the UN protocols of war created through a process supported by wide international consensus. Those rules, authored collectively by the West, rooted in secular humanism, hold that nations at war have the moral and legal obligation to take pains to avoid 'collateral damage' but also that even very high civilian death counts may be legal and appropriate if the reasonably expected military objectives are of sufficiently high value. One feels awash in shades of gray navigating such nuanced language…

So, what military objectives could possibly justify destroying civilian infrastructure and killing hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, mostly women and children?  Hitler had built up a fanatical following based on a story rooted in conspiracy theories – a tale of intrigue, humiliation, and betrayal mixed with a dual promise of retribution and world domination.  By the end of WWII, a sizeable share of the German population had been inculcated into an extremist mode of mind by the malignant narratives of National Socialism (Nazism) and many had become so committed to its objectives that they were willing to commit atrocities and offer their own lives in their service, on behalf of a charismatic leader whom they had come to worship as infallible. Hitler never surrendered and until his suicide in a Berlin bunker, continued to rally Germans to fight to the bitter end. The projected cost in Allied lives of urban combat against an enemy brainwashed by ideological extremism was calculated to be exceedingly high, indeed.

This was no matter of mere speculation. Many ordinary Germans had demonstrated a willingness to support or commit ghastly acts of anti-humanism. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has documented fastidiously in his seminal work, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, millions of willing participants from all walks of German life contributed to the firing, boycotting, robbing, beating, humiliating, displacing, kidnapping, deporting, starving, torturing, and murdering of Jews. Taken as a whole, the Holocaust, including the formation and dissolution of Jewish ghettos, construction of rail lines meant to carry prisoners guilty of the ‘crime’ of having Jewish heritage, building and administration of death camps, collecting of clothing, harvesting of gold from teeth and body parts such as the skin from Jewish corpses (used to make lamp shades!), etc., was the single largest public works project in the nation’s history, with hundreds of thousands engaging in a years-long, government-sanctioned campaign of moral depravity so extreme and villainous that one could argue, in addition to the projected costs in blood and treasure involved with subduing those fanatics via hand-to-hand combat, that only a taste of their own medicine in the form of shocking demonstrations of brutality directed against ordinary Germans could break the malevolent fever dream of National Socialism that held so many in its sway.

Genocide

Another term that is currently being used by some to frame the Israeli siege of Gaza as criminal, is genocide. According to international law, genocide can take place in times of war or peace and is defined (in Article II of the Convention on Genocide) as a crime committed with the intent to destroy, in part or whole, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious population. It is notable that, as with proportionality, the legal definition of genocide is nuanced and turns on the concept of intent. But again, before we dig into the war between Hamas and Israel, let's further unpack the Allied mass bombings of German civilians in an attempt to establish a contextual framework for adjudicating other conflicts regarding the issue of genocide.

Part of the appeal of National Socialism for ordinary Germans was that it was conceived, in large part, as a rebuke to Western civilization. Central to its ethos was the narrative that the German people are biologically superior to all others and therefore, ordained by nature to rule over them with absolute authority. Germans, Hitler argued with the supreme confidence and irrational certainty quintessential of an extremist, supported by pseudoscientific ‘evidence’ manufactured under the direction of his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, comprised a ‘master race’ called Aryans, who uniquely possessed the physical strength, moral courage, and mental clarity needed to embrace the self-evident ‘truth’ of their ‘racial’ superiority and take the sort of extreme measures required to dismantle the existing liberal order which he characterized contemptuously as having been built on “Jewish ideas,” and replace it with a German Reich that would rule over the earth for a thousand years. The Aryan people, he exhorted, needed only a leader, touched by the divine, capable of awakening the volk and leading them to their destiny.

“Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners… The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right.”

– Joseph Goebbels

The mythology of a superior Aryan race provided moral cover for the Nazis’ ruthless campaign for world domination and genocide – an extremist vision promoted as a black-or-white proposition. The Nazi regime demanded of its supporters absolute faith in and unconditional loyalty to its leadership: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! was its hypnotically animating battle cry.

Not surprisingly, Nazism was rejected by many (but not all) among Germany’s well-educated business and cultural elites, whom Hitler in turn vilified, along with their control domains of science, liberal democratic government, the arts, and academia, which he characterized collectively as having been corrupted by ‘Jewish ideas’ of tolerance, equality, and pluralistic democracy. His myth-based, antihumanist vision prioritized brawn over brain, ethnicity (‘race’) over ability, and sudden radical change brought about through violence and intimidation over incremental change effected through debate and compromise. In Nazi Germany, those willing to take the most extreme measures in the service of National Socialism’s deepest objective – the creation of a fascist world order with Germany at its center – were elevated to positions of power and respect.

Side note: the Nazis courted the favor of the Palestinian Arabs with an eye toward fomenting an anti-British uprising (Britain, at that time, was the colonial ruler of the area currently known as Israel and Palestine). The then chief leader of the Palestinian Arabs, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, lived in Berlin during the war and incited Palestinians to rise up in support of Germany and to adopt the Nazi conception of ‘racial’ hierarchy that included virulent antisemitism.

The Schutzstaffel, or SS, perhaps the most powerful and feared organization within the German Reich, were selected for their physical attributes (fair complexion, blond hair, and blue eyes were highly preferred), an eagerness to embrace the myth of Aryan racial superiority, and a passion for engaging in extremist rhetoric and behavior, including violence. Its members became infamous for their peculiar brand of creative cruelty that reached a kind of malevolent art form in the death camps.

In the morally upside-down world of National Socialism, the SS were revered as righteous warriors. Closeted sadists who had spent their lives hiding their secret antisocial perversions from civilized society were encouraged to come out of the closet where they were given praise, respect, authority, weapons, and military-style uniforms with polished high leather boots. They wore skull rings and lapel pins along with the swastika which they displayed proudly as symbols of a new, inverted morality in which brute force and ruthlessness were understood as virtues and intellectualism and compassion as vices – ‘Jewish ideas’ that were toxic to the ‘national bloodstream.’

Insomuch as Jews comprise both a religious and ethnic group, it is clear that the Holocaust fits the definition of genocide. But only one of the definitional group identifiers, nationality, set the victims of Allied mass bombings apart from the perpetrators. Like Germans, most Allied soldiers, including British and American bomber pilots were White, Christian, and of European descent. Many, including some who dropped bombs on cities like Dresden, were themselves ethnically German. Some still had relatives living in German cities targeted for destruction. Most importantly for the sake of adjudicating the question of whether or not the Allies engaged in genocide (a concept that turns on intent), Allied command of the skies did not end when Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German Army, offered an unconditional surrender just three months after the leveling of Dresden, but the bombing did. Had genocide been the Allies’ intention, they would have had no reason to discontinue their murderous efforts and certainly would not have spent the next decade and enormous financial resources rebuilding that country under the Marshall Plan.

In the Rearview Mirror

The path to Hitler’s ascent to power was made possible in part by an economic depression that had been all but assured by the Treaty of Versailles – the document that formally marked the end of WWI. Written by the Allies in victory, it was designed to hamstring Germany’s ability to stand, economically and politically, on two strong legs.  A weakened Germany, it had been reasoned (albeit with a profound sense of historical irony) would be less inclined to instigate another world war.

Side note: the 1930s were a time of desperation and hopelessness in many countries around the world, including the US. Historically speaking, such are the times when even well-educated Western-minded people with moderate views may find themselves drifting toward the reassuring comfort of certainty found at the political and religious extremes. Populism rooted in conspiracy theories, and hypernationalism rooted in myth, grow like weeds in the soil of economic turmoil and there was, in fact, a rather substantial pro-Nazi movement in the US during the Great Depression. The German American Bund, formed in 1936, operated youth training camps across the country, eventually growing to membership in the tens of thousands.  In 1939, the Bund held a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden to promote anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and denounce President Franklin Roosevelt. It was attended by some 20,000 supporters and members.

A nuanced historical understanding enables experts to hypothesize that the economic and political indignities suffered by Germany after WWI, codified in the Treaty of Versailles, may very well have enriched the psychological soil into which Hitler sowed his virulent antisemitic conspiracy theories, including the disinformation scapegoat narrative that ‘the Jews’ had acted in secret to engineer Germany’s defeat. This became the basis for his twisted revenge fantasy of the Holocaust as a cleansing tonic that would usher in a new world order organized around the mythological concept of ‘Aryan racial purity.’

It is reasonable to debate whether or not the Allied mass bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, were, in retrospect, strategically and morally justified. An extremist ideology that inducted many ordinary Germans into an extremist mode of mind enabled an antihumanist moral system that culminated in the Holocaust. But is it certain that the spell of extremism can only be broken by a show of extremism? I will offer some thoughts on this subject later.

Most principled academics would agree that we should welcome reasoned critique of the Allied efforts as part of our evolution toward a better society. But it is not reasonable to blame the Holocaust or Germany’s war of world conquest on the Allies, no matter how ill-conceived the Treaty of Versailles may have been.  Nor is it reasonable to equate the mass bombing of Germany by the Allies with the mass genocide of civilians by the Nazis. The mass killing of civilians as part of a dual campaign of genocide and world domination intuitively and rationally carries the opposite moral valence of mass killing in the cause of defending the world against the forces of genocide and world domination – even if in both cases, the result is the same tragically massive loss of civilian life.  If that makes sense to you, it is because you are capable of the kind of nuanced thinking that takes into account context and intent.  

IV. October 7, Hamas, Iran, and Gaza

The Attack

On October 7, 2023, more than three thousand armed militants from Hamas (and Islamic Jihad in Gaza) invaded Israel's southwest border and went on a rampage of moral depravity (by Western standards) that included infanticide, beheadings, gang rape, torture, kidnapping, dismemberment, and mass murder of civilians.  These atrocities were conducted gleefully, as evidenced by audio and video footage posted proudly afterward by the perpetrators on social media. In terms of mens rea, all available evidence suggests that the attack was premeditated and crafted to inflict as much pain, suffering, and death on Jewish civilians as their minds, morally corrupted by the inverted logic of an extremist ideology, could fathom.

The mass torturing, kidnapping, and killing of Israeli civilians was not 'collateral damage' that occurred as an unintended consequence of repelling an invasion, making gains on a battlefield, rescuing innocent captives, or emancipating ordinary Palestinians from Israeli occupation (Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza in 2005, withdrawing all its security forces and turning over all Jewish settlements, including technologically advanced greenhouses, to the Palestinians [which Hamas immediately burned to the ground to their detriment as a testament to their anti-Jewish hatred]).

The aim of the attack was not to advance civil rights, put an end to the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza (which the Hamas leadership has not mentioned since the attack), or achieve some other understandable objective.  The kibbutzniks whom they joyfully brutalized were not religious or political fanatics in the grips of a conspiratorial fever dream of Palestinian genocide or territorial conquest (ironically, many of the Israelis targeted by Hamas were political and social activists in the cause of Palestinian rights and the creation of a permanent two-state solution with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in peace). Nor can Operation ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ (Hamas’ name for the tidal wave of evil unleashed on October 7) be reasonably understood as a wrongheaded but understandable expression of frustration after decades of Palestinian oppression (although the Palestinian people have been oppressed for decades – more about that below). To understand the intentions that lay behind the events of October 7, 8, and 9, we must first try to understand Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Hamas

Hamas, the chief architect of the October 7 attack against Israel, is an extremist religious, political, and military group that has ruled Gaza since 2006. Officially designated as a terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, the EU, Japan, the UK, the US, and others, it oversees virtually all areas of life within and controls the robust financial aid supplied by the international community to Gaza. From 2014 to 2020, U.N. agencies funneled about $4.5 billion into Gaza, including $600 million in 2020 alone, not counting direct financial aid from (especially Muslim-majority) countries the world over, including annual support of an estimated $100 million each year from Iran, according to the US State Department, enormous sums of cash supplied annually by Turkey and several Arab states, including Qatar (which supplied an estimated additional $1.5 billion from 2012 to 2021).

Despite dilapidated infrastructure and an estimated 46% unemployment in Gaza, Hamas has spent the lion’s share of that financial support during its seventeen-year reign, not on building a safe, clean, modern society known for its beautiful white sand beaches, gleaming infrastructure, and fabulous hummus, but on preparing for and carrying out murderous terrorist attacks directed at Israeli citizens in service of a genocidal revenge fantasy rooted in mythology (Palestinian Arabs have never had a country of their own) and virulent antisemitism that would, if Hamas had its way, culminate in the total annihilation of the State of Israel and the death or forced evacuation of all of its Jewish inhabitants. Their genocidal battle cry, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!”, refers not to freedom from oppression for the Palestinian people, but rather to ridding Israel of Jews.

What Hamas does not spend on its territorial and genocidal ambitions, it keeps for itself. Its three top leaders, Abu Marzouk, Khaled Mashaal, and Ismail Haniyeh are each multibillionaires living lavish lifestyles outside Gaza on money stolen from the Palestinian people, even as they impose an extremist theocratic ideology on impoverished ordinary Gazans, central to which is the concept of martyrdom (more about this below). Officially called the Islamic Resistance Movement (the word ‘HAMAS’ is an acronym for this in Arabic), it originated as an offshoot of the Egyptian extremist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which coined the term Islamism to describe their vision of a totalist movement whose aim, like the Nazis before them, is to violently oppose Western civilization, as exemplified in the following obligatory declaration of faith from its adherents:

“God is our objective. The Prophet is our political leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our method. Martyrdom is our aspiration.”

There is no question that Gazans are an oppressed people. There should also be no question that the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played an important and escalating role in the suffering of Palestinians, especially over the last year in the West Bank (more about this later). But there should also be no question that Hamas has been and continues to be the chief oppressor of the Palestinian people for the last seventeen years, politically, economically, religiously, and, as they use ordinary Gazans as ‘human shields’ (more about this below), militarily as well.

Moral and Legal Sensemaking Turns on Intent

Even the most nuanced sensemaking would tie itself in a knot attempting to promote a narrative that features the October 7 terrorist attacks as an expression of Hamas’ frustrated aspirations for sovereignty, human rights, self-determination, or freedom from oppression on behalf of the Palestinians of Gaza, whose lives they control and routinely offer up as cannon fodder (martyrdom) to the cause of Jewish genocide while personally enriching themselves. Those who participated in the attack had been inculcated into what has been described as a death cult, brainwashed by an extremist, faith-based narrative from which nuance had been intentionally removed in favor of absolute certainty.

Listen below as one of the Hamas terrorists calls his family in Gaza from Israel on October 7 using the phone of one of his victims to brag about how many Jews he has killed so far that day. Two of the many noteworthy points in this brief but stunning audio clip stand out to my ears. First, neither his parents nor siblings seem at all morally troubled by his confession of mass murder. When he informs his mother that he had killed ten Jews “with my own hands,” she responds pridefully, “I wish I could be there with you.” The second is how imperiously aware the terrorist is of his imminent death at the hands of IDF soldiers whom he knows are on their way, and how he expresses not fear or resignation but an eagerness to seal that fate. The tone in which he conveys these things makes clear his absolute certainty that dying while murdering and torturing Jews (martyrdom) will ensure him the eternal pleasures of paradise. This is critical for understanding his motivation and intent (mens rea).

The killer’s certainty, emblematic of the extremist mode of mind that runs on fixed tracks from which nuance has been deliberately removed, brings into focus the Hamas militants’ mens rea. It also offers a clue as to how humans may become capable of committing atrocities. Extremist ideologies in Japan, Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Turkey, the US, and many other places throughout history have led to the atrocities of genocide, slavery, and other grotesque expressions of extremism.

Iran’s Role in the October 7 Attack

It is well documented that Hamas receives significant funding, arms, drones, and training from the equally extremist Mullahs in Qom who impose their own brand of religious extremism in Iran, brutally repressing the creative and brilliant people of that country. As in Gaza, Iranian theocrats have failed to deliver on the regime’s promises made by the first Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic revolution of 1979, who pledged to end political corruption, ensure that Iran’s oil wealth would be equitably distributed to the people, and create a more egalitarian and prosperous society purified of sin in the fire of religious extremism.

For the last two decades, Iran has struggled with extremely high levels of unemployment, stagnant wages, and, despite the rolling back of sanctions, has over the last four years experienced 30 - 40% consumer price inflation, year on year, all while the country’s significant oil wealth is funneled into the leadership to support their aspiration of building a nuclear weapon and personally enrich the elites comprised mainly of the regime’s top clerics and their family members who control virtually all of the state-owned industries and live in extravagant comfort and luxury.

For more than a decade, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and elite Quds Force have provided arms, training, and financial support to anti-American and anti-Israeli militant movements in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and Yemen, and through that support, it can reasonably be inferred, exert significant operational influence on those groups. What might be the goal(s) of that influence? The Mullahs’ chief aspiration appears to be to establish military and political hegemony across the Middle East which holds a significant share of the world's oil reserves.

Hezbollah supporters in Beirut display a picture of Iran's current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

After decades of war, the Iranian military is experienced and battle-hardened, and the government has invested heavily in growing its strength and influence. Since the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the Bathist Party in 2003 which removed the Sunni/Arab world's chief power check against Iranian aggression and expansion, the Mullahs have been able to project their power throughout the region, including via Hezbollah located across Israel’s northern border in Lebanon, and via Hamas in Gaza on Israel’s southern border.  Iran has acted strategically to become a force feared by Arabs, Israelis, and Turks. 

But the tide has been slowly turning against the Mullahs, threatening their military, political, and financial aspirations. Domestically there have been significant challenges to theocratic rule, beginning with the Green Movement of 2009 - 2010 when millions of Iranians took to the streets in peaceful protest for reform, demanding what in Western societies are considered basic human rights and democratic norms, including gender equality and freedom of expression. The Green Movement was brutally suppressed and its leaders, along with thousands of peaceful protesters, were arrested, subjected to kangaroo courts, jailed, tortured, and/or killed.

In 2017, 2018, and again in 2019, there were widespread protests over poor economic conditions which resulted in hundreds killed and thousands jailed and tortured by the regime. Then, in 2022, after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, was detained and murdered for the ‘crime’ of wearing an “improper hijab” by Iran’s morality police, protests erupted again against the regime’s brutal suppression of personal freedoms, with protestors in Teheran and elsewhere taking to the streets to chant “Woman, Life, Freedom” and “Death to the Dictator” (a reference to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei). That wave of demonstrations continued until May of 2023, leading to more than 500 protestors being murdered and nearly twenty thousand jailed and tortured.

During this same period, the Middle East has undergone a significant realignment as an awareness of shared interests between the West, including the US and Israel, Turkey, and the Sunni Arab world (except for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza) has led to increased cooperation, trade, and new political alliances.  Once the committed enemies of Israel and the West, many Arab countries have recently begun to warm to the notion of a regional peace with social and economic progress based on Western values – a vision of the region that is fundamentally incompatible with the ones held by the Mullahs and Hamas.

The Abraham Accords which normalized relations between Israel and Morocco, the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, are a reflection of this awakening.  Last year, Israel and Saudi Arabia negotiated the normalization of relations between their respective countries and were only a few weeks away from signing an agreement when Hamas launched the October 7 attack. Notably, that agreement would have required that Israel re-engage with the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank to negotiate a two-state solution. I will speak more about this later but for now, let’s take careful note of Hamas’ timing in launching Operation “Al Aqsa Flood,” and of how disastrous peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors would be for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Mullahs in Iran. A Middle East with Israel, Turkey, and virtually the entire Arab world united (even loosely) politically and economically, supported by the US, and welcomed broadly by the West, would create a nearly insurmountable bulwark against Iran’s religious, economic, territorial, and military aspirations in the region.

Back to Hamas

Understanding that Hamas’ terrorist aspirations align with several of Iran’s chief objectives and that Iran, therefore, supplies Hamas (and Hezbollah) with funds, training, and munitions, and further understanding that by so doing, it exerts significant influence over those militant groups, let us now try to construct a theoretical framework, based on the evidence, that makes sense of the seemingly incomprehensible events of October 7, 2023. 

For the perpetrators themselves, ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ appears to have had a two-pronged objective: 

1. Murder and inflict massive suffering on Jews.

2. Die themselves in the process, thereby becoming martyrs which, according to their extremist belief system, offers the most direct path to eternal paradise.

For the Mullahs and Hamas’ leadership, there appear to have been four objectives:

1. Shock, enrage, and humiliate Israelis and especially Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, triggering a psychological state of primal self-defense designed to goad Israel into a massive retaliation resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, and, by so doing:

2. Wrestle control of the narrative away from the victims of the October 7 attack (the Israelis) and direct the world’s focus away from what was arguably the most heinous act of terrorism in that country’s history, to Palestinian suffering at the hands of Netanyahu and the IDF.

3. Showcase the suffering of Gazan civilians that they had calculatingly engineered, by deploying Palestinian women, children, and elderly non-combatants as human shields, to muddy the waters of moral sensemaking, including in the West where human life is sacred to diminish support for Israel and:

4. Use the suffering of Gazans to enrage the Arab world and derail the peace process between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would have included a renewal of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, and perhaps weakening or even breaking the newly formed bonds of normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco achieved by the Abraham Accords.   

In short, operation ‘Al Aksa Flood’ was a ‘Hail Mary’ pass whose aim was to impede or destroy the burgeoning regional peace between Jews and Arabs that threatened the aspirations of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Mullahs in Iran.

Iranians and Palestinians are ethnically different. They descend from different ancestry (Iranians, not Germans, are the true Aryans, while Palestinians are Arabs), speak different languages (Iranians speak Farsi while Palestinians speak Arabic), and adhere to different Islamic sects. These differences significantly underwrite the geopolitically adversarial relationship between Iran and the vast majority of the Arab world. Most experts agree that Sunni Muslims, who make up the vast majority of the Arab world, view the growing military power and pursuit of nuclear weapons by their Shiite neighbor to the east as an existential threat.

That said, the clerics of Qom and the militants of Hamas and Hezbollah have some important things in common. Beneath their shared antisemitic genocidal ambitions operates an extremist mode of mind, central to which is a commitment to and a goal of spreading through violence a forced understanding of reality that is black or white, agnostic to context or intent, and rooted in faith, not reason, that exalts the concept of martyrdom – a concept that can only take root in a culture from which nuance has been deliberately removed in favor of certainty.

Totalism, whether grounded in political or religious extremism, has a distinctive flavor familiar to oppressed peoples everywhere. In Iran and Gaza, normalized oppression grounded in rigid interpretations of Islamic law (sharia) has fostered a sense of shared identity. Societies built on fanaticism and administered through violence and intimidation are almost always marked by structural misogyny, intolerance toward out-groups, and rigid belief structures that are undergirded by irrational (faith-based) certainty that fosters not only a sense of separateness from but a feeling of contempt for Western democracies that pride themselves on nuanced concepts like tolerance, pluralism, and incremental progress through compromise. In places like Hamas-controlled Gaza, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, and Mullah-controlled Iran, a shared antipathy for Western values has fostered a strong in-group vs. out-group mentality that helps make sense of the recent broader geopolitical alignment of Iran, Russia, North Korea, and China.

The Hamas charter makes clear their anti-compromise, anti-peace position. For them, there exists no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict other than violent struggle culminating in an Islamic theocracy that rules with absolute authority over the entirety of modern-day Israel.  Here are some of the proclamations included in their foundational document, updated in 2017:

• "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them."

• "There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital."

• “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

A little over two weeks after the attack, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas member, gave an interview in which he proclaimed jubilantly that the atrocities committed on October 7 were just the first of many. “There will be a second, a third, and a fourth,” he assured his host on Lebanese television.  “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it,” he continued. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Notably, Hamad did not offer himself or his own sons up for martyrdom.

Religious fanaticism clearly informed the mens rea of those who perpetrated the October 7 orgy of evil.  In the inverted morality of their inflamed minds, radicalized by an extremist interpretation of Islam, the concept of jihad (something that moderate Muslims in the US and elsewhere understand to mean an inner striving or struggle toward spiritual growth) is understood as a call to armed struggle against non-Muslims. For those inculcated into this extremist mode of mind, terrestrial life has no intrinsic meaning except as a proving ground for separating those sufficiently committed to Jihad and martyrdom (and therefore deserving of eternal paradise) from those who fall short in their devotions and are condemned to suffer eternal hell.

We should be clear in our understanding that Hamas has always been and continues to be a violent extremist organization opposed to peace with Israel. They initiated waves of suicide bombings that derailed the Oslo Peace Accords in the eleventh hour. On October 7, they invaded Israel to perpetrate a genocide just weeks shy of Israel signing a formal peace agreement with Saudi Arabia that included, as a prerequisite to normalization of relations between the two countries, a mandate for Israel to reopen peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority for a two-state solution. The PA is the governing body of about one-third of the West Bank that arose out of the political faction Fatah and constitutes Hamas’ chief power rival in Palestine. A deal for peace between the PA and Israel would have ended Hamas’ ambition to gain full control over the lives of all Palestinians. The timing of this is probably not a coincidence.

Why is Hamas against peace or any form of compromise with Israel? One reason is that in the realm of religious fundamentalism, where reason, logic, and nuance have been intentionally removed from the fabric of society, many of the rights and freedoms born of secular humanism, such as the ability to choose one’s spiritual path, criticize one’s government and its leaders, the expectation of equal treatment before the law for all, including women, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQ adults, etc., are no mere quirks of Israeli society that one can respectfully disagree with, but constitute a moral abomination, a provocation to jihad.

From the perspective of the Hamas leadership, the flow of money into Gaza as foreign aid is linked directly to the ongoing state of conflict with Israel. An independent Palestinian state at peace with its neighbors would carry the same burden as any nation to create a civil society based on commerce, not conflict, and would significantly slow or even end the stream of dollars that Hamas’ billionaire leaders continue to pilfer for themselves. Their livelihoods depend on this criminal enterprise exclusively.

These factors drive Hamas’ extremist hate-based narrative which does not distinguish between the IDF and kids at a music festival, between the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu and far-left kibbutzniks committed to peace with Palestine, or between Israeli men and women of fighting age and children, babies, or elderly civilians.  Through the lens of the leadership’s financial interests, such distinctions are counterproductive as their goal is to turn up, not down, the heat of conflict. For the militants themselves, operating out of fanatical, dogmatic certainty, such distinctions are meaningless. In their eyes, Israelis are all, simply, Jews.  And here is what Hamas' spokespersons have to say (publically) about Jews: 

"Whoever is killed by a Jew receives the reward of two martyrs, because the very thing that the Jews did to the prophets was done to him.

"The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah.

"Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world.

"Our plan for this stage is to liberate any inch of Palestinian land, and to establish a state on it. Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy. "

The premeditated gruesome attack that included painstakingly smoking families out of their safe rooms, forcing children to watch as their parents were butchered, forcing mothers to witness their babies being beheaded or cooked in ovens, gang-raping and then mutilating the genitals of young girls, etc., should be nearly impossible for Western-minded people to fathom. But understood within the context of an extremist religious ideology whose highest ambition is martyrdom, their morally inverted goals can at least be identified, and with an understanding of the financial and geopolitical aspirations of the Hamas leadership (the latter of which is shared with the clerics in Qom and the leaders of Hezbollah), a picture emerges that helps make sense of both why and when ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ was made operational.

Human Shields

The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) is a set of broad rules whose aim is to prevent unnecessary suffering and destruction through limiting or mitigating the harmful effects of hostilities, especially on civilians. LOAC provides a legal framework that defines how wars may be fought based on fundamental principles.

According to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the term human shield refers to “utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations.” Using human shields is considered a war crime by the ICC and under LOAC.

Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, installed military-related infrastructure hubs, and engaged the IDF militarily from civilian residential and commercial areas, including from within and beneath apartment buildings, private homes, mosques, schools, and hospitals. They have used UN facilities, vehicles, and personnel for their military operations. By their own account, they have dug more than 300 miles of underground tunnels that crisscross Gaza beneath civilian infrastructure, including under Al-Shifa and other hospitals to conceal military operations, hold hostages, store weapons, and operate military command nodes, according to US intelligence agencies. These are definitional examples of the war crime of the use of human shields.

Hamas’ use of human shields had been well-documented before the current hostilities, including during the Second Intifada in 2000, the 2008–2009 Gaza War, and the 2014 Gaza War and is widely understood to be an integral part of their military strategy, the logic of which is manifold.

First, Israel, a secular democracy, has traditionally taken seriously its legal mandate to take all reasonable measures to avoid ‘collateral damage.’ In the past, this put significant political pressure on the IDF to constrain its use of military force, making Hamas less susceptible to Israeli counterattacks aimed at destroying its assets, and helping to buy time in which to flee or regroup after a terror attack. Despite the Israeli public’s generally high level of support for the IDF during military operations, civilian casualties have traditionally been a friction point between Israeli society and the defense and intelligence services.

Second, by goading the Netanyahu government into a massive retaliatory response to the grisly October 7 atrocities, Hamas’ political wing is now capitalizing off of the operation ‘Swords of Iron’ (the name that Israeli military intelligence has given to the siege of Gaza), filming the tragic destruction of infrastructure and civilian injury and loss of life that they strategically engineered to promote the disinformation narrative that Hamas exists to protect and defend the people of Gaza from ‘colonial aggression’ while accusing Israel of the war crimes of disproportionality and genocide.

Third, by engineering and then pretending to be aggrieved by the loss of civilian life in Gaza, Hamas’ leadership has succeeded in persuading many in the international community, including many in Western democracies, to call for imposing economic and political sanctions against Israel, including reviving the flagging BDS movement.

Perhaps most importantly, Arabs throughout the Middle East viewing the death and destruction unfolding in Gaza through the lens of Hamas’ false victimhood narrative are now putting pressure on the leaders of their respective countries to break off cooperative efforts and normalization of relations with Israel.

Will the Abraham Accords hold? Will Saudi Arabia finish the deal with Israel that seems to have been put on indefinite pause? By using ordinary Gazans as human shields and radicalizing young Gazan men into a death cult of martyrdom, Hamas has strategically used the bodies of Palestinians to manipulate public perception throughout much of the world to undermine all meaningful efforts toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians. If Hamas has its way, there will never be a successful two-state solution with Israelis and Palestinians living in peace and cooperation. Tragically, I fear the same could be said of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

V. Netanyahu, War Crimes, and Israel

The Problem(s) With Bibi

In 2019, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, currently serving a sixth (non-consecutive) term as prime minister (PM) of the State of Israel, was indicted on charges of criminal corruption that involved fraud, bribery, and fundamental breach of trust attendant to his elected office.  Since the indictments were handed down four years ago, it is fair to say that Netanyahu’s political efforts have been focused on one thing above all others: holding onto power to avoid going to prison. 

Israel's governmental system does not possess the multiple layers of checks and balances that were built into the US Constitution to protect us against drifting toward autocracy or theocracy, such as state and federal congresses, each subdivided into separate (house and senate) chambers, or three coequal branches of state and federal government (legislative, executive, and judicial), each capable of acting as a brake on the potential excesses of the others. Instead, Israel has a simpler federal system with a single house of Parliament (the Knesset) run by a democratically elected coalition of political parties that report to the chief executive (the PM), and a Judicial Authority headed by the Israeli Supreme Court, the independence of which provides the only real check against governmental power. If the Knesset passes a law or the PM issues an order that runs afoul of the principles outlined in Israel’s foundational document (the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel), the Supreme Court has the power to overturn or rescind it.

But in 2023, while preliminary hearings in the criminal cases against him were being held, Netanyahu and his coalition partners put forward proposed ‘judicial reforms’ that would roll back the Supreme Court’s power to check governmental overreach or hold government officials accountable for corruption. The proposed legislation would give the government and its ministers immunity against many of the court’s rulings. Netanyahu, as PM, would be the final arbiter of legality in any matter before the courts, including in cases brought against him personally.  He would also be able to remove and appoint judges at will and eliminate independent legal advisors from government ministries. Should they pass, Netanyahu’s so-called ‘reforms’ would, in essence, eliminate the ability of the Supreme Court to check government abuse of power, even in cases where the PM or his coalition partners pass laws or take actions that are deemed "extremely unreasonable" and anti-democratic.

The legal argument Netanyahu and his far-right coalition are advancing is that the Supreme Court is an appointed body, not an elected one. Therefore, so they claim, it is undemocratic to give them the power to check government overreach. Furthermore, they have argued that the Supreme Court has abused its power by advancing a political agenda of its own. The same ‘activist court’ argument had been made by the far right in the US for years until Trump appointed three of the most extreme right-wing Supreme Court justices in modern history, giving the far-right a majority position. Critically, for the sake of this discussion, Netanyahu’s reforms do not offer any alternative mechanism for checking government overreach. To most astute political observers, this offers compelling evidence of his (and his extremist coalition’s) true intentions.

As head of the conservative Likud Party, Netanyahu has always tilted right of center politically but until his indictments, he had kept an appropriate distance from the extremist elements on the far-right of Israeli politics. Following the multiple criminal indictments, and amidst the release of evidence by Israeli police demonstrating that as PM he engaged in a longstanding pattern of corruption, Netanyahu had lost a considerable share of support among moderate conservatives and centrists who had backed him in the past. To hold onto power, he has tacked further toward the extreme right than any other government in Israel’s history, forming a coalition with extremists in the ultranationalist Religious Zionist Party, headed by Bezalel Smotrich, whom Bibi appointed to serve as Israel’s finance minister. Smotrich, a messianic settler living in a Jewish-only settlement in the occupied West Bank, has been given wide powers to oversee the daily lives of Palestinians in that area, including the ability to order home demolitions, cut off water and power, mobilize the IDF, and to pursue justice for or turn a blind eye to alleged acts of violence, murder, and forced evacuations by armed Jewish settlers against Palestinian Arabs.

Another new partner in Netanyahu’s extreme-right coalition is the Jewish Power Party, an ultranationalist openly anti-Arab party headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, appointed by Bibi to serve as Israel’s Minister of National Security. Like Smotrich, Ben-Gvir is a messianic settler in the West Bank. He has faced charges of hate speech against Arabs and was convicted of supporting a terrorist group known as Kach, which espoused Kahanism, a religious ideology rooted in extremist Zionism that has among its chief goals the annexation of the entirety of the West Bank by Israel, the forced removal of all Arabs “not loyal to Israel” from that land, the overhaul of the Judiciary to eliminate its ability to rein in government corruption and abuse of power, and a reversal of the secular nature of Israeli laws and culture.

There is significant overlap in the agendas of these two extremist parties which together represent the interests of about ten percent of Israelis. Both espouse anti-Arab racism and are maneuvering politically to replace the country’s pluralistic, tolerant, secular democratic society with a quasi-theocratic state that would constrain women’s rights, make homosexuality illegal, narrow the definition of Jewish identity to exclude the majority of Jews currently living in the world from Israeli citizenship on the grounds of being insufficiently religious, and make the observance of religious laws such as keeping Kosher and observing the Sabbath compulsory in public settings. Both parties also share the objective of expanding Jewish settlements and ultimately, formally annexing the entirety of the West Bank into the State of Israel, and creating separate systems of justice for Jews and Arabs (something that, should it become the law of the land, would turn Israeli society into an actual apartheid state).

Thanks to Bibi, these small extremist parties now wield outsized power through their coalition with Likud, which Netanyahu has dragged from the moderate center-right toward the extremist far-right. All three parties have spent the last year politically focused mainly on removing the power of the Supreme Court to issue checks and balances against governmental overreach which (not coincidentally, I think) would also pave the way for the cancellation of criminal proceedings against Netanyahu.

More than two-thirds of Israelis are secular or traditionally/moderately religious and view the actions of Netanyahu and his Jewish supremacist partners as not just inconsistent with the ethics and values that define Jewish culture but as a direct extension of Bibi’s corruption that threatens the identity of Israel as the only secular democracy in the Middle East.  About six and a half million Israelis (in a country of just over nine million people) have participated in protests against Netanyahu and his far-right coalition over the last year.  Military reservists, active duty forces, jet fighter and helicopter pilots, and other elite fighting units of the IDF had stopped showing up for duty as a form of protest against his self-serving, anti-democratic agenda before the October 7 attack.  It seems fair to say that as part of an effort to shield himself from justice, Netanyahu has divided Israeli society as never before.  It is also fair, I think, to say that Iran and Hamas could not have missed noticing that fact which likely strengthened their decision to attack when they did.

War Crimes

As an American, I remember well how I felt in the days following the 9/11 attacks. I wanted justice. I wanted revenge. Currently, I feel a modicum of relief knowing that thousands of Hamas terrorists and several among its leadership have been killed in retaliation for what they did on October 7, 2023.

As a Jew, what happened on that day was not just another in a litany of terrorist attacks against Israel. The specific cruelty of the terrorists, the sadistic glee that they took in their work, filmed and posted celebratorily on social media, the gang-raping and then mutilating and dismembering of Jewish girls, the beheading of babies, etc., triggered the deepest elements of collective trauma among Jews the world over, recalling the moral degeneracy of pogroms and even the Holocaust itself. A lifetime of serving others and honing my moral mind toward the secular humanist ideals of tolerance, peace, compromise, and understanding is not enough to suppress a swell of rage, grief, and a desire for vengeance that now dwells within my own heart.

But I am also painfully cognizant of how my country’s rush for payback led us down a dark and perilous road that ended in misery and disaster. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan directly caused an estimated half a million or more deaths, mainly of civilians, including more than two hundred fifty thousand in Iraq and one hundred fifty thousand in Afghanistan. Indirectly, an estimated additional 3.7 million people have died as a result of the sectarian violence, starvation, and spread of disease that was ushered in as a result of the wars that we and our allies brought to that region in response to the 9/11 terror attacks.

Two decades later, as we consider the loss of thousands of US and NATO soldiers, the expenditure of an estimated eight trillion dollars, and the loss of civilian Arab lives in the millions, all as a result of prosecuting the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ we must, if we are committed to truth and fairness, face some painful facts squarely: the Taliban is back in control of Afghanistan; Al Qaeda, once thought to have been defeated, is enjoying a resurgence; and new Islamic extremist militant groups such as ISIS, Al-Shabaab, Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), Boko Haram, and Islamic Jihad in Palestine have sprung into being – at least in part as a response to the ‘collateral damage’ caused by our post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts.

It could be reasonably argued that the War on Terror, despite its astonishingly high costs, has made the world less safe and more radicalized – worse, not better. As a citizen of a country that responded reflexively and emotionally to a vicious terrorist attack carried out by religious extremists seeking martyrdom, I understand well the urge to act swiftly and severely, the wish to see one’s enemies crushed. But as a secular humanist, acculturated to nuanced sensemaking, and compelled to base my ideas and opinions on facts and data, I also understand that, especially in the aftermath of trauma as horrific as the October 7 attack, reacting emotionally and impulsively can be a trap of the worst kind. This understanding informs not only the issue of strategy but of legality.

i. Proportionality

By all accounts, the IDF’s siege of Gaza has been a catastrophe with an estimated twenty thousand Palestinian deaths so far, most of whom, thanks to Hamas’ intentional use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes, are women and children. The stated goals of Operation ‘Swords of Iron’ include the complete and total destruction of Hamas and the safe return of hostages taken from Israel. These are high-value military objectives and, under the legal definition of proportionality, a theoretical case could be made that they justify the high number of civilian casualties – especially when it can be reasonably argued that Hamas, not Israel, engineered the current events and continues to deploy Gazan civilians as human shields to maximize ‘collateral damage’ for political purposes. But attendant to the nuanced concept of proportionality is the reasonable expectation that these military objectives can be met by the use of deadly military force.

Of the Palestinian deaths reported, an estimated eight thousand were Hamas militants. If we take this statistic as reliable, then somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of the estimated fighting force of Hamas has been destroyed so far. However, according to the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, Hamas has quickly and easily replaced its top commanders and recruited new ‘foot soldiers’ among young men enraged and devastated by the leveling of Northern Gaza and widespread death of civilians. It would appear as if things are going according to plan for Hamas. “I cannot see any signs of collapse of the military abilities of Hamas nor in their political strength to continue to lead Gaza,” he said.

Hamas has survived repeated past attempts to eliminate its fighters and leadership. According to military experts, the organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies. As we learned from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, without committing to a long-term total occupation and enormous investments in generational, population-level reeducation, ideological extremism is virtually impossible to eradicate. If recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything it is that Israel’s siege of Gaza will likely create rich soil in which to grow new extremist ideologies and the recruitment and radicalization of a broad segment of the Palestinian population, especially among young people. More than half of all Gazans are under the age of eighteen – a time in life when humans tend to be deeply impressionable and highly susceptible to indoctrination into extremist ideologies.

Will the IDF’s use of extreme force succeed where US and coalition forces failed after two decades of fighting in places like Afghanistan and Iraq? It’s possible, but that hardly rises to the level of reasonable expectation. Nor is it reasonable for Israeli intelligence to expect that the mass bombing of civilian infrastructure will lead to the safe return of hostages. There have already been reports of several hostages killed accidentally by the IDF as a direct result of fighting.

The legal case against Israel for disproportionate military action, in my view, is sound. Not because more Palestinians have been killed by the IDF than Israelis were killed by Hamas, and not because Israel does not have the right to go after Hamas with everything it has (it does), but because Israel does not, in the view of most experts, have a reasonable expectation of achieving its high-value objectives of putting an end to Palestinian extremism and getting the hostages back safely through reducing most of the Gaza strip to rubble. Even if every last Hamas fighter could be killed or captured (something difficult to imagine), it is hard to see how the future safety of Israel and its citizens would be safeguarded by the creation of a new generation of traumatized, radicalized Palestinians. And even if the IDF’s efforts result in the freeing of more hostages, too many have already been killed by those efforts to justify the current strategy, legally.

ii. Genocide

Many journalists, pundits, and even some politicians in the US like Rashida Tlaib, have sought to frame the Siege of Gaza as a genocide against the Palestinian people. As previously discussed, genocide, per Article II of the Convention on Genocide, is a crime committed with the intent to destroy, in part or whole, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, not a committed terrorist organization or military force.

Israel has the capacity to commit genocide in Gaza. They have nuclear weapons and bigger bombs than the ones they have been dropping. They could target Palestinian civilians indiscriminately as Russia has done in Ukraine (indeed, as the Allies did during WWII). Instead, the IDF and Israeli government have deployed more measures to avoid civilian casualties (short of not dropping bombs at all) than any country at war in history, including:

• Leaflets: The IDF has distributed tens of thousands of leaflets in areas slated for bombing, encouraging residents to evacuate ahead of time. Many of these leaflets also include maps identifying safe zones to minimize the risk of harm.

• Phone calls, robocalls, and text messages: Israeli agents have made more than fifty thousand live pre-bombing phone calls to urge Palestinians to evacuate their homes and/or go to Israeli and UN-designated shelters and humanitarian zones since the siege of Gaza began. In addition to this, twelve million voice messages and fourteen million text messages have been sent issuing the same warnings of imminent bombing.

• Roof knocking: Even with phone calls, robocalls, and text messages, some Palestinians do not heed the warnings to evacuate their homes. Some are afraid of reprisal by Hamas. Others might not believe the warnings are real (Hamas has called the campaign to warn Palestinians ahead of bombing raids a form of psychological terror and have ordered civilians to disregard them). Still others might require assistance to vacate. When previous incursions into Gaza caused unacceptable levels of ‘collateral damage,’ the IDF developed a tactic designed to save Palestinian civilian lives when they feel forced to go after terrorist operatives. After calling and encountering a refusal to leave the home, the Air Force first fires a missile developed by Israel Aerospace Industries known for being small, accurate, and capable of being configured to carry a very limited payload. It is usually shot into a corner of a building’s roof, far from where people might be standing, to make a terrifying boom. In some cases, the missiles are configured to burst in mid-air, further minimizing the chances of casualties. After residents experience the noise and vibration of ‘roof knocking’, they usually flee the building. After Israeli drones verify that the residents have left, the Air Force then drops a much heavier bomb, destroying the structure.

These measures are far from perfect as evidenced by the extraordinarily high reported civilian death toll but if genocide was its aim, why would the IDF engage in such robust efforts to minimize civilian casualties? Unlike Hamas, the Israeli government has never, including under Netanyahu, promoted genocide.

That said, under the current Netanyahu government, Israel’s security forces have been turning a blind eye over the last year toward violence against Arabs by far-right Jewish extremists committed to driving Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, biblically and historically referred to as Judea and Samaria (the birthplace of the Jewish people). Allowing hate speech and violence against Arabs by messianic extremist settlers in the West Bank is yet another signal of the current far-right government’s tilt away from secular democracy with its concepts of plurality, tolerance, and equal rights under the law.

Is the Seige of Gaza a genocidal action? No. Is Netanyahu, in conjunction with far-right extremists, working to move Israel toward becoming a country in which the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Judea and Samaria through forced evacuation could be seen as an acceptable national objective? It would appear so…

VI. A Collision of Cultures

Barbarism v. Modernity

In the immediate aftermath of the attack that began on October 7, Israelis stood in abject horror and for a moment, the civilized world stood with them.  The impenetrably convoluted, multi-stranded knot of narratives that together comprise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, suddenly appeared to have come undone when arguably the most defining thread of all was yanked loose by Hamas’ atrocities, revealing to many around the world, perhaps for the first time, a level of cruelty and sadistic perversion unfathomable to civilized people, and hinting that, at the heart of the entrenched enmity between Israel and Palestine, is a showdown between the irreconcilable forces of modern secular democracy, once believed to be unstoppable but now waning on the world stage (including in the US and Israel) and the once believed to be vestigial forces of pre-Enlightenment totalism, which seems to be making a comeback.  A conflict between a culture of moderatism that promotes a nuanced understanding of reality that turns on intent and invites its citizens to accept a measure of uncertainty while participating in the eternal project of gradual evolution towards a ‘more perfect’ society, as the framers of the US Constitution phrased it, and an extremist culture of black-or-white understanding that violently promotes a view of reality that is rigidly fixed by cruel and unjust religious dogma, irrational certainty, and is taken as an article of faith to be eternally perfect despite its inequity and oppression.

Progress v. Regress

Humanity has come a long way over the last few centuries. The life expectancy of humans worldwide averaged just thirty in the 1700s; today it’s over seventy. Child mortality back then was around thirty-five percent; now it’s down to about four percent. Modern Western medical science has eradicated or nearly eradicated many infectious diseases that once decimated human populations (smallpox, tuberculosis, polio, cholera, HIV/AIDS, etc.). For most of our history, extreme poverty and malnutrition were norms affecting more than 90% of people; today these problems plague fewer than one-fourth of humanity. Violence against women and children, child labor, and slavery have all dramatically declined while guarantees of basic human rights and freedoms have gone way up.

How was all of this achieved? Steven Pinker argues persuasively that the Enlightenment values of secular humanism which gave rise to liberal democracy were the driving force. Most of these important changes occurred over the last century – the blink of an eye in evolutionary time – as secular democracy made its way around the globe.

Opposing Cultures Have Opposing Systems of Morality

But not all societies prioritize freedoms, rights, equality for women, or the fair distribution of societal benefits like health, safety, opportunity, and longevity. In some parts of the world, freedom itself is not seen as good or desirable for all people. For example, the most current data from Statista shows that slavery persists in most Arab countries today.

The freedom to criticize one’s government or its policies is prioritized by only a small minority of the Arab World.

And in nearly all Arab countries, it is still believed that men should have authority over women including having the final say in all matters related to the home and family.

Our brains still carry basic code that expresses itself in ways often described with collective terms like human nature or our baser instincts. It is part of our mammalian programming to seek warmth, comfort, and gratification. We are programmed to procreate and defend ourselves from attack. We survived as a species by evolving in a way that calls us to use whatever means are most readily at our disposal to achieve our ends, including violence, mendacity, and intimidation. Such programming underwrites humanity’s long history of war, strife, domestic violence, and oppression of women. Potentially antisocial urges such as greed, aggression, lust, exploitation, boastfulness, sadism, and revenge seem to be encoded within the human genome in contrast to antithetical ‘higher’ aspirations for peace, fairness, compassion, tolerance, generosity, altruism, egalitarianism, pluralism, cooperation, compromise, and the ability to live well with a modicum of uncertainty. Which among these encoded human drives and learned aspirations a culture seeks to promote or exalt and which it seeks to constrain or demonize are what define its systems of morality and legality.

Taken as a whole, the ideas of secular humanism, derived from rational deliberation, seek to constrain the baser instincts of human nature which, left unchecked, push society toward primitive states of violence, tribalism, and oppression (especially of women) while lionizing the aspirational concepts that move society toward more civilized conditions of peace, tolerance, and equality. Laws and norms in secular democracies are intended to dampen impulsiveness, cool emotional fevers, and give pause to passions, in part by lowering ambient levels of injustice and increasing opportunity while fostering consonance with the inevitabilities of change, uncertainty, and imperfection. Layers of nuanced accommodations between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collective, the desire for liberty and desire for safety, between emotional and rational understandings are reflected in its customs and etiquette, the currency of which is compromise.

The ideas of religious extremism, by contrast, derived not from rational deliberations but inherited or apprehended as fully-formed divinations originating in the brain’s intuiting center, the gestalt cortex, seek to validate the expression of our embedded baser instincts for some while denying them categorically to others based on a hierarchical framework of power structured around gender, race, ethnicity, and demonstrations of faith – the same organizational structures that informed humanity’s earliest attempts to form civilizations. This is reflected in the laws, customs, and etiquette of theocracies which flow directly from ancient scriptural doctrines.

‘Honor Killing’

In the West Bank and Gaza, morality is narrowly understood as a binary construal of conformity or non-conformity to the dogmatic prescriptions that comprise a fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran, which directly (among religious extremists) or indirectly (through a culture in which the principles of religious extremism are embedded) underwrite societal norms of gender-based, racial, sexual, religious, and political inequity, engineered to empower men belonging to the dominant in-group at the expense of everyone else. Nuanced concepts such as context and intent do not inform the legal or moral landscape in Gaza or the West Bank where, for example, a girl or woman who is raped is herself deemed to be guilty because, according to scripture, sex outside of marriage is immoral, particularly for girls and women, and the father, uncle, brother, or male cousin who kills her for the ‘crime’ of having been raped is deemed to be moral because in so doing he upholds a norm known as ‘honor killing.’

In 2000, UNICEF estimated that as many as two-thirds of all murders in the Palestinian territories were likely honor killings. The Palestinian Authority, using a clause in the Jordanian penal code, has exempted men from punishment for murdering female relatives who bring ‘dishonor’ to their families. In 2019, in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, twenty-one-year-old Israa Ghrayeb was beaten to death by her brother because she posted a selfie with her significant other on social media the day before they had planned to become engaged. He suffered no legal consequences.

Honor killings offer just one particularly striking point of contrast between the ethics and values of theocratic and secular democratic societies. Gang raping Israeli girls at a music festival and then mutilating their genitals is another. But it is worth noting that discrimination against girls and women is a central feature of religious fundamentalism that extends beyond Hamas, Islamic Jihad in Gaza, or Islam. Though less horrifically violent, Jewish and Christian extremists follow and promote the same well-worn path of misogyny that holds women and men to different standards and specifically binds females professionally, socially, sexually, and legally. As secular humanists, we should be careful not to become distracted by arguments of moral relativism that eschew condemnation of extremism in the name of pluralistic tolerance. Discrimination and violence toward women, LGBTQ adults, minorities, and other societal classes that flow from an extremist bent of mind fixed by ancient dogma must never be ignored or tolerated as mere cultural quirks of totalist societies – things to which we must turn a blind eye in the name of ‘inclusion.’

A Society’s Morals Informs Its Laws And Its Laws Reflect Its Morals

The concept of the separation of church and state is embedded in the US Constitution and also in Israel's Declaration of Independence which was one of the first national documents in the world to include women as a group classification with a guarantee of equal social, economic, and political rights.  The Women's Equal Rights Law, passed by the first Knesset in 1951, explicitly guarantees Israeli women equal status to men in all areas of life. Women in Israel are legally entitled to pursue any form of self-enrichment or expression that men can.  They can marry whomever they choose or choose not to marry at all.  They can go into a profession, start a business, worship in any faith, or choose to have no faith at all. The same is also true for ethnic and religious minorities including Israeli Arabs who make up about one-fifth of the population of Israel, LGBTQ adults, and other protected classes within society.

In the false choice presented by many in the press today between supporting Israel, a free society that guarantees basic human rights and equality under the law for all its citizens, and one like Palestine that prohibits basic human rights for most and guarantees the oppression and persecution of societal classes that fall outside the dominant in-group, I’m for Israel and against Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. But this is a nuanced conversation. Being pro-Israel does not mean being pro-Netanyahu or his extremist political agenda, nor does it mean offering unqualified support for the specific actions of the Israeli government or the IDF, including the siege of Gaza currently unfolding. Nor does being against Hamas and the PA mean being against ordinary Palestinians who have as much right to freedom and self-determination as any people on earth. A nuanced, Western understanding of this conflict makes critical distinctions between Israel, Israelis, and Netanyahu, and between Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians, Hamas, and the PA.  

Back To Bibi (And His Jewish Extremist Partners) 

To astute political experts like Anne Applebaum, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Netanyahu and the religious and ultranationalist extremists who are now his partners, under the false banner of judicial democratic ‘reform,’ are in reality maneuvering to tilt Israel's identity as a secular, Western-style democracy toward a quasi autocratic religious state. The fate of many including secular Israelis, all Israeli women, and Israeli Arab men hangs in the balance of a societal division that Bibi and his collaborators have calculatingly fomented for their political profit to the great harm of that country.

One of the tactics of Netanyahu’s extreme-right coalition seems to be the worsening of Palestinian suffering in the West Bank to provoke violence by Arabs that can then be used politically to justify the territorial expansion that is the chief aspiration of the Jewish settler movement, driven in part by an extremist interpretation of Zionism in which taking back the ownership of places like Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, is prioritized over the more moderate (and much more broadly supported) Zionist vision shared by most Jews and non-Jews worldwide of the creation of a safe and secure Jewish nation in or around their ancestral homeland. After the Holocaust, and given the fact that no indigenous people since the Jews had ever established a sovereign state in that land (it was the British, who ruled the area from 1917 to 1948 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, who named it Palestine), that moderate vision of Zionism can hardly be seen as an unreasonable proposition.

Ultrareligious and ultranationalist extremists committed to the idea of reclaiming all the land that was historically the home of the Jewish people are now armed, organized, and busily engaged in what can best be described as an illegal land grab in the West Bank, in some cases driving Arabs from their homes by force, in other cases constructing new Jewish-only settlements on land that most of the world, including most of the Western world and most Israelis, view as legally belonging to the Palestinian and Bedouin Arabs, and meeting resistance to their agenda with violence and intimidation. These extremists justify their actions through their faith as the fulfillment of a prophecy, citing biblical text in which God promised what is today Israel, Palestine, and parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to the Jewish people. This ‘prophecy’ is shared by the Christian Evangelical movement in the US who have offered spiritual, financial, and material support to the messianic settler movement.

The notion that one’s faith supersedes all else, that it definces morality, legality, and reality not just for oneself but for others, including those of other faiths, is a quintessentially extremist idea, and extremist ideas are at odds with modern conceptions of morality, legality, and justice in secular democracies. More than 400 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank just in the last year – some by the IDF as part of counter-terrorism operations but many by messianic Jewish settlers, sometimes with the support of the IDF under the orders of Bibi’s new far-right political partners.

In the past, such actions would have led to the arrests and prosecutions of those settlers but today the government provides them with cover. It is fair to say that the Netanyahu government has not merely dropped the ball or even turned a blind eye to this criminal behavior but has greenlighted it as part of what by all appearances amounts to a pact of convenience formed between the legally embattled PM and ultra-orthodox and ultra-nationalist extremist elements within Israel.

Back to Hamas

All of this should be deeply concerning to moderate Western minds. But so should be the fact that, despite the contributions of Bibi’s new far-right coalition, the lion's share of the normalized suffering of the Palestinian people in both Gaza and the West Bank has for decades come mainly from the astonishingly barbaric and corrupt leadership of Hamas and the PA, who promote and enforce a culture of religious-based extremism that fetishizes and exalts jihadism and martyrdom while its leadership enjoys lavish lifestyles supported by stolen funds meant for the Palestinian people. The son of one of the founders of Hamas lays this out with keen moral clarity in the following video which should be required viewing for all Americans but especially for college students marching in support of Hamas:

VII. Understanding The Seige Of Gaza

We Must Take Immediate Action!

The first obligation of any government is to protect its citizens. Israel has on its doorstep two religious and military terror organizations (Hamas and Hezbollah) with openly declared territorial and genocidal aspirations rooted in virulent anti-semitism, the rhetoric of which is remarkably similar to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s. Israel has not only the right but indeed, the obligation to defend its land and people against the expanding malignancy of genocidal extremist terror groups. No nation worth its salt would do otherwise and this should be granted as reasonable even if the only option Israel has at its disposal is the immediate waging of a brutal war with unavoidable massive civilian casualties.

The Hamas attack was intentionally shocking. Its lurid intimacy seems to have been conceived to provoke the kind of emotions that blind rational decision-making – to goad Israel into responding reflexively with military action on a shocking scale. Can extreme terrorism only be countered by equally extreme military retribution? My view is that the horrific events of October 7 presented Netanyahu with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to demonstrate the kind of rational, clear-headed, Western-minded statesmanship that could have vaunted him personally and led, in due course, to a massive win for his country, his people, and all those around the world who stand for liberal democracy. It would have required extraordinary restraint, vision, and sober deliberation (things that in the past the Israeli security apparatus has proven itself quite capable of), including a historical assessment of what has and has not worked when fighting extremist groups, all while bearing in mind Israel’s broader strategic security goals which rest on building and expanding partnerships with its neighbors, not fomenting more enmity between them.

But what’s good for Israel or democracy (or Israel’s strategic allies like the US) appears to be a remote consideration for Bibi who has spent the last few years dividing his country as no Israeli PM has done before through empowering an extremist anti-secular, anti-democratic minority with whom he has found common cause. Netanyahu, acting out of his own self-interest, carelessly put at risk both Israel’s security and its crucial relationship with the US. And if the charges against him (compelling evidence for which has already been made public) are true and he did, as alleged, engage in a years-long pattern of fraud and bribery while holding the highest elected office in the land, we can also reasonably assume that circumspection, sober deliberation, and prioritizing what is right over what is personally expedient are equally far from the front of his mind. As is common among so-called ‘strongman’ leaders, he has advanced an agenda to tilt Israel away from democracy, and events with whose proper handling his office charges him, seem almost always to be adjudicated through the lens of how they will affect Bibi personally.

Having campaigned on the slogan that only he could keep Israel safe from terrorism, the breathtaking success of Hamas’ ghoulish attack amounted not only to a tragedy for Israel but also a personal humiliation for Netanyahu. The tough-guy brand he had painstakingly constructed over decades and leveraged to justify a political agenda that would put in question Israel’s very identity as a Western-style secular democracy, collapsed in the aftermath of the security services’ stunning failure.

As the graph below demonstrates, prior to the October 7 attack, Israeli security services had managed to keep fatal terrorist attacks mostly at bay since 2005 when Israel withdrew from its occupation of the Gaza Strip. This was not the result of Hamas fearing the wrath of Bibi (who was out of government for significant periods during that time), but because Israel’s intelligence and security apparatuses, when unified and functioning at their highest level, are among the most sophisticated and effective in the world.

High-quality intelligence, limited IDF operations, and targeted strikes on terrorist infrastructure and personnel in Gaza and the West Bank by special forces and covert operatives had foiled hundreds of Hamas and Hezbollah-directed terrorist operations over the last decade, enabling Israeli society to function mostly unmolested. But since winning back the premiership in 2022, Netanyahu’s focus has been less on security and more on solidifying his power in the face of criminal indictments and the largest anti-government protests in Israeli history. By October 7, 2023, the county’s organs of national defense had become fractious and dysfunctional, leaving the nation vulnerable to attack.

The tried and true strategy of degrading terrorist groups like Hamas through limited counter-terrorism operations was one alternative to the knee-jerk, all-out invasion of Gaza. But that course would have required personal qualities that Bibi simply does not seem to have including forbearance, humility, temperance, and a love for his country that supersedes his love for himself. A slower, more deliberative strategy would have forced him to fill the news void, at least in part, with some kind of accounting for his own failure instead of scuttling any such discussion, ostensibly to focus the nation’s attention on getting even with Hamas. “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations!” Netanyahu proclaimed just days after the attack, seemingly unaware of (or unconcerned by) the costs associated with the vengeance fantasy conjured by his words. One could almost see the telegraphed political maneuvering aimed at capitalizing off the moment's emotional cocktail of anguish and rage to deflect blame from himself.

His rhetoric about retribution has sounded biblical, not modern, reactionary not measured, emotional not rational. In short, Netanyahu, presented with an opportunity to demonstrate to his country and the world, through words and actions, what distinguishes a liberal democracy from an illiberal theocracy, blew it, choosing instead to roll out in haste a strategy aimed at salvaging his ‘tough guy’ brand built on lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories that demonized intellectual and cultural elites and the ‘deep state,’ and predicated on the narrative that peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors is simply not possible (despite recent evidence to the contrary provided by the Abraham Accords).

Two months into the siege of Gaza, with an estimated twenty thousand or more Palestinians dead, twelve thousand or more of whom were civilians, most of the hostages are still being held captive and at least several have been killed, Hamas has been somewhat weakened but far from extinguished, and most of the world has been inducted into a planned public relations and propaganda campaign engineered by Hamas and Iran with civilian rubble and the bodies of Palestinian children as a backdrop, framing Israel as the imperialist colonial aggressor nation with genocidal ambitions and Hamas as the defenders of the beleaguered Palestinian people. One cannot blame a tired, distracted American and European public, most of whom possess only a glancing understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for succumbing to the narrative that both sides are equally violent, equally ruthless, equally hateful, equally unmoored from the norms and values of Western civilization, and hopelessly deadlocked in a slow dance of mutually assured destruction. 

My View

But what if Netanyahu had taken a different course entirely? We know from Bibi himself that just before the October 7 attack, Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the cusp of signing a historic peace treaty that would have normalized relations between the two countries and reanimated negotiations for a two-state solution between Israel and the PA. What would have happened had he, during the now infamous press conference in which he promised vengeance that would reverberate for generations, instead informed Israelis, Palestinians, and the world that as a secular democracy that values human life, especially the lives of civilians, Israel would take its time figuring out how best to bring Hamas to justice while making certain that the peace deal with the Saudis was finalized?

The leadership of Hamas and Iran could not have had any reasonable expectations that Operation ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ would, in and of itself, destroy Israel. The actual perpetrators may have acted out of an irrational aspiration for martyrdom fueled by religious extremism but the plan of leadership was almost certainly political. Had Netanyahu resisted taking the bait, he would have deprived Hamas and the Mullahs of the propaganda victory that was their goal, spared thousands of Gazan lives (and the lives of hundreds of IDF soldiers), and potentially hastened (rather than risked derailing) the Isreal-Saudi accord.

Had Netanyahu demonstrated, rhetorically and through action, that Israel’s commitment to forging peace with its Arab neighbors is so strong that even the barbarism of Hamas could not shake it, one can imagine the entire civilized world standing with Israel now, turning upside down the October 7 gambit to demonize Israel in the court of public opinion. Broad, united condemnation of Hamas by the international community would likely have resulted in a reduction or cessation of financial aid which would have applied significant political pressure on the terror group to release the hostages and thwarted Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s shared objective of inflaming the decades-long conflict between Arabs and Jews.

VIII. Conclusion: A Nuanced Understanding

Hamas And Its Aims In Summary

Hamas is a complex ‘idea’ – part extremist religious sect, part military force, part extremist political movement, part social services provider, with a base comprised mainly of a radicalized group of young men raised in conditions of poverty, staggering unemployment, and abject hopelessness. For these men, extremist ideologies offer a sense of purpose and a feeling of belonging that informs their lives with structure and meaning.

Selected for an extremist mindset and a tendency toward violence, the ‘soldiers’ of Hamas are not reviled for their violent or sadistic inclinations as they would be in civilized society, but rather, within the inverted moral system of Islamism that exalts an extremist understanding of jihad and martyrdom, are heaped with praise. They are given respect, authority, weapons, vehicles, and uniforms that make them feel powerful and special. The more passionate their commitment to the aspirations of jihad and martyrdom, the higher their status within the group.

Meanwhile, at the top of the organization sits a small bevy of savvy political actors – billionaires who cynically promote an extremist ideology to which they seem far from committed on a personal level. Their goal is to keep the conflict going and the money flowing. Their corruption is boundless as they pilfer billions meant to uplift the Palestinian people over whom they rule with ruthless authority to support lavish lifestyles in Qatar. What is not stolen for themselves they invest in the infrastructure of continued conflict, offering up the lives of young Palestinian men to the cult of martyrdom, and deploying the bodies of Palestinian civilians, especially children, as human shields – all for their personal gain. It is fair to say that everything the Hamas leadership enjoys in terms of wealth, power, and privilege comes at the direct expense of ordinary Gazans.

Netanyahu, His Partners, And Their Aims in Summary

As Western-minded people, it is essential to remember that a nuanced understanding of complex events turns on intent. All of the available evidence speaks against the narrative that the tragic deaths of ordinary Gazans being used as human shields by Hamas is the intended goal of Netanyahu or the IDF. Conversely, all of the available evidence speaks to the narrative that murder, mayhem, torture, infanticide, and genocide of Jews were the intended objectives of the Hamas militants who perpetrated the atrocities of October 7. That may make the siege of Gaza understandable on an emotional level but it does not make operation ‘Swords of Iron’ strategically, morally, or legally justifiable (it is not, in my view) and may be argued constitutes a form of collective punishment. That is not the same thing as genocide, but it does place it what is happening a sphere of illegality and wrongdoing akin to the distinction between premeditated murder and malpractice resulting in death.

Israel must defend itself but, once the IDF had secured the border and killed or captured every last Hamas fighter within Israel, there was no longer a military necessity to take immediate further action. By all appearances, operation Al Aqsa Flood was conceived specifically to provoke a self-focused, ego-driven, bellicose, impulsive, politically and legally embattled Bibi into retaliating in a manner that would result in massive civilian casualties in Gaza, generating potent material for a propaganda campaign that Hamas and the Mullahs in Iran could then use to advance their strategic goals of framing Israel (and not Hamas) as a genocidal aggressor, derail the peace process between Israel and the Arab world, and enrich the conditions for the radicalization of a new generation of young Palestinians to help ensure that the money keeps flowing and the dream of a two-state solution with Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side by side remains just that – a dream. In my view, Bibi played right into their hands.