WILLIAM HAGUE
Hamas has set a trap that Israel must avoid
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Iranian-backed attacks are a desperate attempt to halt growing collaboration with Saudi Arabia and the UAE
William Hague
Monday October 09 2023, 5.00pm, The Times
Hamas rockets fired from Gaza City are intercepted by the Israeli Iron Dome defence missile system
Hamas rockets fired from Gaza City are intercepted by the Israeli Iron Dome defence missile system
EYAD BABA/AFP /GETTY IMAGES
How Hamas managed to launch a brutal terrorist offensive without any foreknowledge inside Israel’s formidable intelligence services will be the subject of inquiries and soul-searching for years to come. To pull off such a feat will have required absolute secrecy among a tiny leadership group, giving last-minute orders to their followers and working only by word of mouth. But it also needed complacency and distraction in Israel’s leadership.
The intense political divisions in Israel made these attacks opportune, and the approach of a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia made them urgent. Mossad officers might be blamed for missing the signs but Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet should have been on alert for something like this.
While the question of how this happened will be a preoccupation, it will also be vital to understand why it happened. Why launch an indiscriminate assault on a vastly superior military power? Why expose the two million Palestinians in the crowded space of Gaza to Israel inevitably trying to crush Hamas and restore order? Why, as well as murdering hundreds of defenceless young people at a rave, parade dead bodies as evidence of the atrocities?
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The answer is that their objective is uncontrolled rage. It is to make Israel lash out in a way that starts a conflagration. To start a war so intense that it spreads, igniting an explosion of violence in the West Bank and bringing in Hezbollah from Lebanon in the north, with Israel fighting on multiple fronts. To see so many Palestinians killed that the Israelis lose the moral high ground of defending themselves against mass murder. To use the fate of hostages, with maximum cruelty, to intensify a frenzy of hatred whenever that seems to be abating. To halt the creeping collaboration between Israel and Arab states. Essentially, to bring down the ceiling on the whole region, including themselves and the people for whom they claim they are fighting.
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The comparison many have made with 9/11 is valid, not only because the shock to Israelis that they are so vulnerable is akin to how Americans felt when the twin towers fell but also because the objective is the same: to wreck everything, to provoke overreach and misjudgments from an enraged enemy. It is not a strategy to make life better for Palestinians or to give them their own state. It is a howl of rage, an act of desperation by Hamas cheered on by an Iranian leadership who can see that the Middle East is moving quickly in a direction they do not like and are struggling to prevent.
Most western governments are stressing in their statements that Israel has the right to defend itself against terror. That is absolutely right. At the same time, they all know that it will require great wisdom on the part of Israel’s leaders to deliver a counterattack that rebuilds their country’s security, deters further attacks, kills the perpetrators and recovers most hostages without falling into the trap of doing what Hamas intended.
The Israelis have some of the most sophisticated armed forces in the world but will need an equally sophisticated political strategy to accompany them. Ultimately 9/11 led the West into Iraq, consuming our strength and dividing our politics, which most of us now recognise was a mistake. Israel will need to do better than that.
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Many other commentators stress that these events are a reminder of the case for a two-state solution — Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in sovereign states. But the cold reality is that the last chance for this has probably passed. In 2013, when John Kerry became the United States secretary of state, I was among many who urged him to throw himself at negotiating a two-state solution. It is to his immense credit that he did so. He talked with Netanyahu no fewer than 375 times, made 40 visits to Israel and 34 in one year to the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. No one could have tried harder. He failed because of Israel’s steady building of settlements on the West Bank and divided leadership among Palestinians. There was no trust then between the two sides and there is even less now.
Most of the world has given up on such a solution and that includes a great many Arabs. Capitals such as Abu Dhabi and Riyadh can see the global economy changing quickly. They are determined to be at the forefront of it, transforming their societies and linking up their huge wealth with innovation, high-tech security and, most recently, artificial intelligence. That means they want peace around them, to stay ahead of Iran and to co-operate with Israel. The Palestinian cause that was central to their foreign policy for decades is becoming just one of many concerns, to be balanced against other priorities. Much of the Middle East is moving on.
Evidence of that can be seen in the hundreds of thousands of Israeli tourists who have flocked to Dubai. Since the Abraham Accords brought normal relations between Israel and several Arab states, trade and technology links between them have boomed. The UAE looks set for $10 billion of bilateral trade with Israel by 2027. These two countries are working together on cybersecurity, defence systems, banking, healthcare, education and agriculture. An Emirati energy company owns a stake in Israel’s Tamar gas field.
In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia has come to the brink of joining the accords, opening the way to similar co-operation between Israel and the Arab world’s leading power. A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable — the nation whose king is Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques sending an ambassador to Israel and promoting trade and investment between them. Now, it has become an imminent prospect — and one that is of grave concern to an Iranian leadership which partly sustains a strategic rivalry with the Saudis by maintaining hatred of Israel.
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The shocking terror launched by Hamas has to be seen in this context: of a region that is shifting away from them and their patrons in Tehran. While they will have many motivations — loathing of Israel, antipathy to moderate Palestinians, the opportunity to spring a surprise — their predominant and immediate need is to bring chaos to a region that is progressing without them.
For now, they will have forestalled the Israel-Saudi deal. Whether they can trigger a wider war is in the balance. But in the longer term, if Israel can judge the right response, the forces driving a new geography of power in the Middle East are likely to prove more powerful than this terrible violence. It is no consolation to those caught up in it but nevertheless likely to be true — that this is no strategic masterstroke by Hamas, more a desperate move to fend off a future that is rapidly leaving them behind.
