On October 7 more Jews were killed in a single day than at any time since the holocaust. To all the Hamas apologists, I want you to think about that. That is almost 1,000 Jews killed in one day. These were not soldiers or policemen. These were women and children, teenagers at a peace music festival, an elderly Holocaust survivor and so many others. Children kidnapped. Girls raped then butchered. Hamas is not trying to hide their crimes. They are posting it all on social media for all to see.
This is not the moment for a history lesson on the tragedy of the almost 75-year Palestinian-Israeli conflict, nor for criticism of the Netanyahu government (as one can read in the Israeli daily Haaretz) for stoking the fires by pandering to the ultra-Orthodox and settler movement, nor indeed for the catastrophic failure of Israeli intelligence and the military in doing the one thing they are tasked to do: protect the Israeli people. This will all come later.
The first question is: who is behind this attack? Hamas, we know, does not recognise the right of Israel to exist. That is in their charter, even though in 2005 Israel gave up Gaza in a land for peace deal. Notwithstanding that, Hamas then used this land not to build a peaceful thriving community but as a base to launch further attacks on Israel. To date, these have been disorganised and somewhat random. But what we saw on October 7 was on a scale and organisation that would indicate they did not do this alone.
This was, in fact, an Iranian attack on Israel carried out by Hamas. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard planned, funded and facilitated the execution of this attack. They provided the arms, the training and the intelligence. President Joe Biden, a strong supporter of Israel, unwittingly helped finance this attack by sending Iran $6 billion in recent weeks in a misguided deal that borders on criminal negligence. One cannot negotiate with terrorists or terrorist regimes. The West never learns.
The second question is, why now? There are two answers to this question. The first is that Iran feared a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Abraham Accords have led to a peace agreement between the Gulf states and Israel with the exception of Saudi Arabia. MBS, the Saudi leader, was on the cusp of signing this agreement. Such an agreement would provide a strong counterweight to Iran’s regional ambitions. Iran’s solution was to inflame the Arab street by facilitating such an enormous attack on Israel that Israel would have no choice but to strike Gaza hard. This in turn would generate thousands of images for social media of dead Palestinian women and children and burning buildings in Gaza with the effect that it would be impossible for MBS to sign a deal and publicly ally Saudi Arabia with Israel. This is precisely what has happened with MBS calling off the deal this week.
The second answer to this question is that Russia wanted to distract US attention away from supporting Ukraine. Putin has manipulated the extremists in the Republican Party to try to block support for Ukraine. The US Government has been in gridlock in the past two weeks over funding for Ukraine and the ousting of the Speaker of the House. What better way than to throw a spanner in the works by having Israel attacked and forcing a choice between funding for Ukraine or funding for Israel, the US closest ally in the Middle East? Putin and Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, over the past several weeks have been meeting with the Head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the political leadership in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas, as well as Kim Jong Un of North Korea.
What we saw on 7 October was not simply another chapter in the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the manipulation of Hamas by an unholy alliance of three dictators: Putin, Khamenei and Kim Jong Un – or, simply put, an Axis of Evil.
(Smoke billows from a boat after a strike by Israel on the port of Gaza City on October 10, 2023 | Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
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