(...) First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October - and those it did not - have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.
The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.
More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.
Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza - a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.
True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.
A colonial arrogance
Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.
And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.
Israel-Palestine war: Why is the media ignoring evidence of Israel’s own actions on 7 October?
Read More »
No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians - their slaves - were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.
The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could - and should - continue indefinitely.
Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.
The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.
The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza. (...)
