Marking the Fault Lines in Israel’s War on Terror

The firing of the first shots by Hamas at 6:29 a.m. on October 7, 2023, triggered not only a bloody kinetic war in which a lot of Gaza was, and continues to be, flattened, but also a war of narratives which roiled the West much more so than the Middle East itself.

The Israel-Hamas war split open societal fault lines in the West, polarized relations between countries, embedded itself into domestic divides, and accelerated trends such as the growth of far-right movements and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Even so, governments, historically leery of civil chaos no matter their politics, shifted closer to Israel’s point of view, even as public opinion, especially the younger generations and shaped by a large Muslim minority across Europe, shifted in favour of the Palestinian (sic) cause. This is evidenced by the huge public protests across Europe highlighting the split between public opinion and governments.

But those huge public protests are only superficially about the human cost of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, or even about the seeming power imbalance between a violent, messianic terror group in Gaza wedded to wiping out a neighbouring sovereign state because it is Jewish, and a ME military heavyweight determined to prevent a repeat of the atrocities and massacres perpetrated on it by Hamas in 2023.

Across Europe, in America, and even in the Antipodes in Australia, mass protests sprang up protesting, it seemed initially, Israel’s robust military response to the Hamas terrorists embedded deep inside Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

Within a couple of months, that changed into something else: blatant antisemitism coupled with a wide ranging cultural war aimed at the very roots of Western traditions.

But not only traditions, even the language of ideas was under attack as words no longer meant what they had, until recently, meant.

Thus, Israel, with 2.1 million Israeli Arab citizens with equal rights, was an “apartheid regime”; targeting and killing Hamas terrorists purposely embedded amongst nominally innocent civilians was a “genocide” albeit pointedly not framed as such by seventeen judges from the ICJ; Jews in and out of Israel were “racists” even as the mass protestors screamed at Jews to go back to Poland/Russia/Ukraine in open racist taunts; and placards demanding “justice” seemed more to demand merely revenge.

Revenge on Israel through a range of measures including sanctions, cancel culture where Jewish and Israeli authors, as one example, were boycotted and where their books may not be sold or even translated from Hebrew to another language.

This was accompanied by a slow-walking of military parts requirements from various European countries and vitriolic public speeches by Muslims and Islamophiles which seemed to have stunned governments around the world into bewildered silence.

Tent cities sprang up across campuses. As Seth Mandel (Commentary, 8 October, 2024) pointed out: “The tent isn’t the point of the tentifada. The point is the violence, the normalization of second-class citizenship for Jews, the loyalty oaths, the street mobs outside Jewish-owned restaurants smashing windows. It’s the evil energy that can’t be re-corked.”

But, while notionally protesting “Gaza”, it was actually Western culture, and Israel as its “Western European” “colonising” standard bearer in the region that generated the most vitriolic hate speech and where Western achievements in thought, art, philosophy and culture were under sustained attack as an embarrassment and the product of “dead white males”.

This irony has not been lost on either Diaspora Jews who were expelled to the Diaspora because they were not white and on Israelis where the population census figures show that 45% of Israelis are Mizrahim, 15% are Russian immigrants, 20% are Arab Israelis, 2.2% are Ethiopian, and 25-30% are Ashkenazi Jews and others. Meaning that 55-60% of the Israeli population is ‘non- white’……

Thus, in America, as in Europe, the Israel-Hamas war led to a selective moralism where international NGOs from Amnesty to MSF refused to hold Islamist terror entities in Gaza to account for a plethora of documented war crimes and crimes against humanity and where that moral blindness, growing unchecked, allowed despotic and corrupt regimes like South Africa to bring charges of genocide against a democratic sovereign state and where the chief prosecutor at the ICC indicted the PM and MoD of a country fighting for its existence on seven fronts against declared terror entities, for “crimes against humanity”.

Further, together with the tidal wave of mainly Muslim migrants from Syria to Europe in 2015-16, the Israel-Hamas war threw into sharp relief the fault lines across Europe of resentment not only against Hamas for its atrocities, but also against Arabs and Muslims in general. The emotions triggered by the Hamas atrocities in Israel and its massacre of Israeli civilians no doubt ended up conflating terrorists, illegal migrants, and asylum-seekers in the minds of Europeans who generally have no detailed knowledge of the politics of the Middle East.

For better or for worse, this fed into Europe’s voting demographic and may well explain the political gains of more right wing parties based as they are on both the fears this mass immigration created among their followers as well as the concerted academic push to re-locate loci of power in Western society through things like Critical Race Theory accompanied by aggressive activism as seen through that lens.

Closer to home, Israel’s war on terror in both Gaza and Lebanon led to an accentuating of local fault lines.

Egyptian officials were worried about the possibility that Palestinians in the coastal strip would stream into the Sinai Peninsula through the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border.

While they may publicly profess that this would mean the death blow to a cherished “Palestinian State”, such “endangered” “statehood” did not seem to be part of their calculus when they illegally occupied the Strip between 1948 and 1967 with never a single peep made about Palestinian statehood.

The real reason, apart from the country’s economic woes, why Egypt feels the fault line should not widen is altogether less altruistic: Egyptian President Abdelfattah al-Sisi has been has been battling jihadist cells in the Sinai. He has outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, a designated terrorist organisation in Egypt, of which Hamas is the Gazan branch. His concern is that should a significant number of Gazans infiltrate the Sinai, and Palestinian jihadist groups establish logistical, ideological and operational links and bases there, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate Palestinian militants from the mass of new refugees. These militants could very well try to launch attacks on Israeli targets from Egyptian territory, inviting retaliation from Israel and unsettling its relations with Egypt.

For its part, Jordan fears that Israel plans to force West Bank Palestinians into the kingdom. Jordanians have taken to the streets across the country to protest on a daily basis and the government’s major concern is that this feared mass displacement into Jordan would be economically ruinous, where the new demographic reality of Jordan becoming the de facto Palestinian state would almost certainly destabilise the political order, which has historically privileged Jordanians of non-Palestinian origin.

And finally, in this brief overview of how Israel’s war on terror is exacerbating fault lines old and new, we have the renewal of the civil war in Syria.

With the fall of Haleb (Aleppo) to Turkey-backed Syrian groups and al Qaeda linked groups like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Turkey’s influence in the region has risen greatly while complicating prospects for reconciliation between Erdogan and Assad.

For Israel, Iran’s wish to rush arms to Syria which no longer has Hezbollah to fight alongside it, will be met (IS being met) with a clear deterrence by Israel which will not allow an arms build-up so close to its border, arms which may be used against it now that Assad has fallen.

It remains to be seen if Turkey’s Sunni Muslim Brotherhood affiliated militia(s) or Iran’s Shia IRGC and local Shia militias will win out in the end and what will be its implications for Iraq, Lebanon and Syria and for a weakened Iran itself.

In Gaza, Yahya Sinwar dreamed of, and planned for, a huge Middle East conflagration and chaos.

It’s happening.

Just not in quite the way he envisaged.