If the scriptwriters of Fauda, the Netflix drama about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, had devised an episode like this, the producers would have dismissed it out of hand. Multiple armed Hamas and Islamic Jihad units breaking out of Gaza, perhaps the most physically enclosed territory in the world, with bulldozers, pick-up trucks and paragliders which they used to overfly a fence riddled with electric sensors and pour into Israeli civilian towns, kibbutzim and army bases would have seemed too incredible even for fiction.
But then the real-life aftermath would have been deemed too horrific to depict: the killing, wounding and abducting of Israeli civilians as well as soldiers, with a death toll of over 700 and counting, among them some 260 mainly young people who had been at an all-night rave in the Negev desert. The dragging of civilians of every age, from children to the very elderly, back across the border as hostages. By any stretch of the imagination, this is a hideous war crime, made no less of one by the thousands of civilian Palestinian casualties created since 2000 by Israel’s armed forces, many in Gaza itself.
Until Saturday, which some Israeli officials are calling “our 9/11”, no armed faction had initiated such a ground offensive or risked the kind of overwhelming vengeance on themselves—but therefore inevitably on Gaza’s civilian population—that Israeli ministers are now eager to exact. The violence now threatens long-held assumptions about the sustainability of Israel’s approach to the Palestinians, including its 56-year-old occupation.
It has realised the deepest fears of Israelis, especially those living close to Gaza’s border—fears that most experts had deemed unrealistic even before the colossal failures of the intelligence services and military to see the operation coming and then to quell it with the required speed when it did. Some of those failures resulted from a belief that Gaza—and Hamas—would remain quiet while the main focus of Israeli military activity needed to be in an increasingly unstable occupied West Bank. This belief remained deep rooted in the Israeli establishment in recent weeks, despite renewed protests on the Gaza border over the continuing effects of an economically crippling 16-year blockade and a cut to the tens of millions of dollars Qatar pays each month to keep Gaza from total implosion.
So why did Hamas take this unprecedented and murderous action? On Saturday, Hamas leaders emphasised what they saw as the recent “desecration” of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound—Haram al-Sharif to Arabs, the Temple Mount—by far-right Israeli settlers who prayed on it in apparent violation of a long established status quo. But the operation must have been planned months ahead. A more widely canvassed explanation, that it was an attempt to forestall ongoing negotiations towards a US-Israel-Saudi deal, was reinforced in hints from the Hamas leadership.
Many Palestinians way outside the ranks of Hamas have feared that such a deal would remove one of the last potential pillars of support in the region for the Palestinian state that the world has long said it wants. Where Riyadh once insisted that such a state was a precondition of recognising Israel, all the signs from Saudi’s ruler Mohammed Bin Salman are that it no longer is—and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already boasted of overcoming a Palestinian “veto” on such an accord. That said, Hamas would be rash to assume that such a deal could not be advanced even after the weekend’s events.
What has been challenged, however, is the comforting view among many Israeli politicians, Netanyahu included, that the conflict can be indefinitely “managed” without need for political resolution. According to the anti-occupation Israeli veterans group Breaking the Silence, that delusion is now “collapsing before our eyes.” The group, which has wholly denounced the “unspeakable” Hamas attacks, may or may not be right in suggesting that the task of making Israeli citizens inside Israel safe has been compromised by the ever expanding West Bank settlements (judged illegal in international law), and the accompanying need for the military to protect their 450,000 Jewish residents. But it is now that much harder for politicians of the right to argue that “containing” Palestinians in a situation where they lack the civic, political and economic rights their Israeli neighbours take for granted guarantees Israelis the security that a political solution would not.
For that lesson to be absorbed, a major rethink not only by the Israeli political establishment but by the governments of its western allies would be required. There is no sign of such a thing, as Netanyahu makes a concerted—and apparently successful—diplomatic effort to secure backing for Israel to use massive force in Gaza, almost regardless of the potential cost in civilian Palestinian lives.
The presence inside Gaza of what the armed factions claim is 130 Israeli hostages greatly complicates that project. Israel has already been bombarding Gaza, and its Jewish supremacist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich reportedly told a weekend cabinet meeting that a retaliatory onslaught on the territory need “not take the matter of the [Israeli] captives into significant consideration”. Certainly, the bombardment has been relentless. And on Monday, defence minister Yoav Gallant announced a devastating total blockade of food, fuel and electricity supplies to the Strip.
In these extraordinary circumstances, predictions are foolish. But with Israel also now facing a renewed threat from the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah on its northern border, the situation has rarely looked more dangerous. US national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s already notorious remark earlier this October, that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” no longer holds water. If it ever did.
