This is a column I hoped never to write. The terrible truth is that Hamas has already won its Gaza war. Israel, the victim of the massive October 7th pogrom, has, by a brilliantly Satanic sleight-of-hand, been turned into the oppressor. The current killings in Gaza by Israeli forces were intended all along by Yahya Sinwar, the designer of that original pogrom. The evil beauty of the Hamas attack was that all Israel’s possible responses had already been anticipated by Sinwar, including his own death and martyrdom. While he posthumously revelled with his seventy-two virgins, Israel would assuredly become an international pariah, no matter what it did, regardless of the far greater truth that for decades, the world has watched in silence as from Morocco to Yemen, Arab governments and insurgents have killed their fellow-Arabs by the many tens of thousands.
Two concepts underlie Israel’s existence. One is to give the world’s Jews a homeland, the other to ensure any further Jew-killers would be hunted down and killed. The Hamas operations twenty-two months ago, which slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and captured hundreds of others, were a studied re-enactment of an Einsatzkommando massacre of Jewish civilians and the seizure of others as slaves in Eastern Europe in 1941-2. Indeed, had it been possible, Sinwar would probably have added Zyklon B to this carefully-staged theatre, for Hamas is a tribute-band to the ultimate Jew-exterminator. October 7th thus became the most brilliant yet most comprehensively evil military achievement since Heinz Guderian’s crossing of the Meuse eight-five years ago last May led to Hitler’s capture of most of western Europe’s Jewry. It is one of the great moral absurdities of the 20th Century that Guderian was not hanged at Nuremberg.
Sinwar, almost uniquely amongst Palestinians, understood the Israeli psyche. A fluent Hebrew speaker and a dedicated killer – he liked strangling his victims – he knew the frailty of Netanyahu’s cabinet, with its dependency on freakish right-wing racists whose opinions are detested by most Israelis. The most conspicuous of these (and Sinwar’s ace of trumps) is Israel’s Minister for Finance, Bezalel Smotrich. The liberal Israeli newspaper Haretz recently quoted Smotrich: “There are no half-jobs,” he said of Gaza. “Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total destruction. ‘Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of of Amalek (Israel’s enemies) from under heaven. There is no place for them under heaven.'”
“Plain and simple,” interpolated Haretz. “Total destruction. There is no room for interpretation.”
Smotrich is both Minister for Finance and the unofficial minister for illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, where “illegal” often means “violent”. Such a creature should barely merit a seat in any democratic assembly, yet he is nonetheless an influential member of the Cabinet. Moreover, his opinions are not an unprecedented extreme, but a continuation of a brand of Zionism that was founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the core belief of which was that Israel should be a purely-Jewish land from the Jordan to the sea. Adherents of this creed have included Avraham Stern, whose unashamedly-terrorist gangs were responsible for many murderous bomb-attacks on Arab civilians in the 1930s, and after his assassination by the British, for the massacre in the King David Hotel. Veterans of Lehi – as Stern’s followers termed themselves – were later instrumental in founding Unit 101 of the Israeli Army, which in the 1950s was responsible for atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Egypt and Jordan, causing the Israeli government to dissolve it. Two veterans of Lehi/Unit 101 later became prime ministers of Israel: Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, with both of them in old age seeking an accord with Palestinians. And both – as was almost the entire Israeli political establishment – were systematically hoodwinked and betrayed by Yasser Arafat and the PLO.
Whenever Israeli right-wingers have sheathed the steel and sought moderation, they have been deceived by the Palestinian leadership. This includes Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, whose single electoral mandate was last renewed twenty years ago. Indeed, in terms of their moral contempt for both Israel and their own electorates, Sinwar and Abbas have much in common.
It is too easy to blame the US for its (largely) unconditional support for Israel, when a prime factor in the creation of the Hamas-PLO duopoly over the Palestinian people has been the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNRWA created and then administered the Palestinian refugee camps which have become Permanent Anger Academies. Over ten million Germans and Indians – Hindu, Muslims and Sikhs – were displaced in the post war-violence of 1945-48, yet with the assistance of the UN High Commission for Refugees, these have been successfully resettled and integrated in their new countries of residence. But the 600,000 displaced Arabs of 1948 – or rather their 5.5 million “descendants” – remain in refugee camps where they have been brainwashed by UNRWA-run hot-houses-of-hatred into seeking vengeance against the Zionist “colonialists”. Hamas, first (and last) elected in 2005, has spent twenty years indoctrinating the minds of the Palestinian young even more thoroughly than Hitler managed for Germany through the mere dozen years of his reign.
However, any prospect of Israel achieving a meaningful peace and rescuing its few surviving hostages – perhaps twenty of them – would simply vanish with a re-annexation of Gaza. Seizure and occupation was tried before and failed, and if Israel embarks on a quasi-Smotrich solution – the eviction of the population of Gaza and its replacement by Jewish settlers – the Abrahamic accords and peace with Jordan and Egypt will fall asunder, and probably bloodily. Egypt’s President Sisi has already denounced Israel for its “war for starvation, genocide and the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.” Meanwhile, Egypt is negotiating a huge gas-purchase from Israel worth $35 billion. However, if Israel’s brutal operations in Gaza continue, more than that contract will vanish, for they will certainly relight Arabist fires across the region. Though the people of Egypt are deeply attached to a historically-Coptic country of the Nile and Luxor, with its five thousand years of antiquity, they also hear the siren call of Mecca and a language imposed on them by Arab conquerors in the 7th Century. The latter would probably triumph should Israel decide to ethnically-cleanse Gaza.
Such a dreadful operation would also cause Israel to lose moral credibility everywhere, not least internally, as Israel’s large Bedouin and Druse populations – whose status as equal citizens is greatly prized by their Jewish compatriots – could become alienated and angry. The zeal with which Israeli Druse soldiers answered their country’s call after 7/10 might gone unnoticed elsewhere, but it was greatly appreciated by Israeli Jews, who are nonetheless bitterly divided over the issue of Gaza. Some follow Smotrich, and others agree with General Assaf Orion’s opinion: “Every military operation…has the rule of diminishing returns. At some point, great success meets growing resistance. The costs rise and the benefits are lower. In Gaza, we are way past that point.”
A divided Israel is what Sinwar both sought and has achieved, and the more Israel seems to succeed against Hamas, the more enemies it gathers. As Robert Pape recently reported in Foreign Affairs: “In January 2025, US officials revealed that … Hamas had recruited around 15,000 new fighters since … 2023, more than making up for the 11,000 to 13,000 losses that (it) had suffered.”
Nor is the rise of Hamas confined to Gaza. As Pape reports, “The shift toward Hamas is particularly acute in the West Bank, where support for Hamas has more than doubled.”
Worse still, Palestinian approval of armed attacks against even Israeli civilians, yes, civilians, has risen from 48 per cent in 2023 to 59 percent today. Israel is thus obediently following a path carefully prepared for it by Sinwar, with Smotrich – who now denounces Netanyu’s moderation – helping to navigate Israel towards perhaps irreversible ruin. The end-product will probably be variously different renditions of Hitler’s Final Solution, and all leading to a common and bloody Gehenna. This Hebrew term is derived from the Valley of Hinnom, where children were once sacrificed. In the perception of much of the world, Israel is now creating a Gehenna in Gaza.
As both a friend and admirer of Israel, I truly believe that this tragic pilgrimage towards a collective catastrophe must stop immediately, even at the price of Hamas visibly and triumphantly surviving. Otherwise, the flames of hatred will gather momentum within Arab hearts in the West Bank, Jordan and Egypt. Quite simply, a tactical defeat for Israel is preferable to a strategic moral rout. For Sinwar has won this battle. He got what he wanted: Namely the embittered division of Israel and the destruction of Gaza. The next stage of Sinwar’s plan is an attempted reconquest of Gaza by Israel and the consummation that is Gehenna. Let Rudyard Kipling have the final word:
“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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