By Irving Wallach
He set Jews on other Jews and unleashed settlers on Palestinians. He weakened Israeli democracy and encouraged Hamas to attack it. The buck stops with Bibi.
October 7 was “a day of infamy”. Until that day it was inconceivable that Roosevelt’s words after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could again ring true. I was transported back to that other October day, October 6, 1973, day one of the Yom Kippur War. It was the other time in living memory that an attack on Israelis shook Israel and Jews around the world to their core.
That other time when Jews around the world feared for our present and our future. Fifty years and a day later, the cruel ironies of 1973 had rung forward in time to 2023. Their echoes haunt Israelis and Jews of a certain age just as their truths ring in the minds of those living in the present.
What a horrible month. What a horrible war, not that any war is not horrible but this one is so much worse. It started in utter barbarism by Hamas, ostensibly in the name of Palestinian resistance. I am unable to accept, I cannot accept that this mass murder of innocent families and young lives should be depicted as an act of resistance, no matter how much I support a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
And while I love Israel as the Jewish homeland, l despise Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. I condemn the brutality of the extremist Israeli settlers and the denial of Palestinian freedom.
However, I accept that Israel has the lawful right to use military force to defend its citizens against Hamas. That is not a pretty picture but reality rarely is, even more so in view of Hamas’s infamous modus operandi to embed its political and military infrastructure within and underneath the residential and civilian fabric of Gaza. The other Gaza Hamas reality is that the Strip is so densely populated that it is difficult, if not well-nigh impossible, to hit a military target without collateral civilian casualties.
That the people of Gaza are human shields for Hamas is fact, not cliché. Hamas governs Gaza to further its ideological and religious aims, largely focusing on conservative Sunni Islamism and confrontation with Israel. In its 17-year rule of Gaza as a one-party state, Hamas has diverted unknown millions of aid dollars into missiles, tunnels and bunkers instead of the development of Gaza and the betterment of the lives of the Palestinians living there.
From here, however, there has been a set piece tragedy which we have seen in every Gaza conflict since 2008. In each conflict there have been attacks of increasing ferocity from both Hamas and Israel. The Hamas murders on October 7 killed more than 1400 Israelis, largely civilians, and were the greatest number of Israeli deaths in a single Hamas attack. Then there are some 230 Israelis held as hostages. However, over the years the Israeli counter responses to Hamas attacks have been accompanied by an increasing number of collateral civilian casualties.
The result? Each Gaza conflict has repeated the same pattern. Hamas attack, followed by Israeli response, and large numbers of Palestinian deaths, particularly large numbers of Palestinian civilian deaths. In fact, collateral Palestinian civilian deaths have become a feature of IDF responses inside Gaza.
Of course, this is not news, as Israel and the world have for years known of Hamas’ cynical use of Gaza as a giant human shield. Yet, and in very different ways both Israel and the world have echoed the cynicism of Hamas. Despite increasingly heavy Palestinian civilian deaths, Israel has simply called Hamas’s bluff. In each Gaza conflict Israel has resorted to its well-worn script, in which the IDF has attacked Hamas targets planted within non-military areas, such as apartment blocks and mosques, knowing there will be some if not many Palestinian civilian deaths.
The world has responded by largely blaming Israel exclusively for these civilian casualties. The world has accused Israel of war/humanitarian crimes while largely ignoring that it has been Hamas which has used and violated the neutrality of apartment blocks, mosques and hospitals for its operations.
As far back as 2007, the US Public Broadcasting Service reported that Hamas had built a command centre under the al-Shifa Hospital. In 2010 The Washington Postreported the use of civilian installations by Hamas. To date, Israel maintains it has not targeted a Gaza hospital.
Yet the world has chosen to turn its back on these vulnerable Palestinian civilians by failing to effectively call out Hamas for creating this situation. Israel has refused to allow itself to be deterred. And Hamas continues to play its lethal game using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
However, we cannot point to Israel’s right to self-defence while saying little or nothing about mounting collateral Palestinian civilian deaths and casualties. Similarly, we cannot pass over Hamas’ horrific role in starting and continuing this war, and in using the innocent Gaza civilian population as human shields.
I believe that we, as Jews, are in danger of losing or seriously compromising our basic humanity in our rush to defend Israel’s right to self-defence. In the aftermath of the naked inhumanity of October 7, the sense of outrage among Jews has overpowered so many of us. We seem to have forgotten that Gaza and its civilian population has itself been a hostage of Hamas for so many years. Yet in the face of Palestinian civilian deaths, some have simply turned their backs, others have covered their eyes and ears, while others have evaded the moral reality.
Acknowledging that Palestinian civilian deaths have been caused by – yes, caused by – IDF attacks on Hamas is not an admission of moral equivalence between the IDF and Hamas. It is an acknowledgement of the tragedy of this war (and all wars) in which we know that innocent people are killed. It is an acknowledgment of the humanity of Palestinians. Indeed, such an acknowledgement would be the death knell and real face of defeat for Hamas.
But there are other villains who bear responsibility for this cycle of Gaza conflicts. Hamas has been in power since 2007. Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel for almost all that time, since 2009.
Netanyahu has been the architect of Israeli policy on Hamas and Gaza, including the blockade of Gaza. He has been the guiding hand of IDF responses to Hamas for more than decade. His philosophy has been twofold. First, talk loud and act tough but only as far as minimising Israeli, and certainly not Palestinian, civilian casualties.
Second, weaken the Palestinians by playing divide and rule between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. If the choice be between the PA and Hamas, act to weaken the more moderate PA and its President Mahmoud Abbas. In recent years, Netanyahu has even permitted funding to flow to Hamas from Qatar.
As for the events of October 7, it is too easy and too cheap a shot to simply label Netanyahu as the present-day Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister in 1973, and Moshe Dayan her defence minister, both of whom in October 1973 missed the flashing signs of imminent Egyptian and Syrian attacks.
Netanyahu’s failure in October 2023 was not merely a dereliction of duty by taking his eye off the ball. Allowing Netanyahu to label his failure as a failure of Israeli intelligence is just his classically convenient blame-shifting exercise.
Netanyahu’s failings leading up to October 7, 2023, are far more insidious and destructive. His culpability lies not only in his disregarding the omens of imminent Hamas danger.
From the earliest days of 2023, in the wake of his election win and return to office as PM, Netanyahu glimpsed a possible way out of his “crime-minister” problems. It began with his decision to bring into his government Bezalel Smotrich (Finance Minister) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) two extremist nationalists, advocates of the occupation and proto-fascists. Netanyahu was more than ready to accommodate them. To stay in the prime ministerial chair Netanyahu was more than happy to reinvent Israel as an illiberal democracy in the image of Erdogan’s Turkey or Orban’s Hungary.
Ironically, Netanyahu had no problem with either of these wannabe tin-pot dictators in his cabinet and as his role models thanks to their denunciation of non-Orthodox Jews and attack on any Israelis who dare to criticise their government.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak is the latest prominent Israeli to note that Netanyahu is on borrowed time. How long can he evade his day of reckoning with the Israeli people? How much longer can the man without shame remain as prime minister?
The 2023 scenario has been front-page news all this year. For months there have been huge demonstrations against plans to neuter the Supreme Court. Netanyahu’s government loosened the restraints on extremist West Bank settlers, who were freed from the previously already weak bonds on their attacks on Palestinians. As the year wore on, it was clear that Netanyahu had brought Israel to a previously unknown and dark place.
Israel’s democracy is now under threat. The lunatics were in charge of the asylum. The fabric of Israel’s fractious but vigorous society was straining at the seams. Yet Netanyahu ignored all the warnings from military heads and Shin Bet of the wider and fundamental dangers to Israel. Instead, he accused them and opposition leaders of being traitors while he flirted with incompetent fascists.
Responsibility for October 7 goes all the way to the top. How can Netanyahu blame everyone else for the attack when he encouraged Hamas to seriously contemplate it? He deliberately divided Israel and set Jews on other Jews. He unleashed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich on the country and settlers on Palestinians.
Yet this pair of self-seeking fascists are utterly missing in action during this crisis. While his government was utterly pre-occupied with their attempted “coup”, Netanyahu left Israel open to attack and did nothing to defend Israelis.
As for Hamas and Iran, all they have to do now is retreat to their bunkers and tunnels and watch the people of Gaza be killed by Netanyahu’s revenge in his effort to portray himself as a strong leader at the helm of the ship of state.
In the meantime, we watch as Israel’s normalisation with the Arab world and a Palestinian state pass by and out of sight. Hamas’s terror is its smouldering memorial. Or perhaps, instead, we could call to mind that, in the years after that bleak October of 1973, there came an enduring peace with Egypt and Jordan. In place of the bloodied dove, perhaps a phoenix could rise from the ashes. Could October 7 and the deaths of all the innocents, in a similarly perverse manner, be the precursor of a different reality for Israelis and Palestinians?
Irving Wallach is a Sydney barrister. Over the years he has been an honorary officer and executive member of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, and a board member of Mount Sinai College and Moriah College. Irving was president and a founding board member of the New Israel Fund Australia.
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