RUTHFULLY YOURS

One thing that should now be clear is that Hamas is not the only Islamist group intent on destroying Israel. It is just one of several Iran-backed groups – the self-styled ‘axis of resistance’ or ‘ring of fire’ – determined to erase the Jewish State from the map.

Israel is therefore engaged in a seven-front war, fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and increasingly heavily armed groups in the West Bank. And stranding behind all of them is the significant regional power of Iran.

Almost immediately after last year’s 7 October pogrom, these groups started their own military assaults on Israel. On 8 October, Hezbollah fired mortars at Israeli military positions in the Mount Dov region on the Lebanon border (sometimes called Shebaa Farms). Two days later, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which often works in conjunction with Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for an armed infiltration into Israeli territory from Lebanon.

Things could have been even worse. It has since emerged that 3,000 terrorists – most from Hezbollah but some from PIJ – were poised on the Lebanese border to attack Israel. Their goal was to implement a longstanding plan called ‘conquering the Galilee’ to seize northern Israel. Fortunately, Hezbollah hesitated before trying to execute its attack on the north, giving Israel time to mobilise its reserves and prevent even more carnage. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Hezbollah’s plan to attack Israel’s north was the basis for Hamas’s mass attack on the south.

Israel also soon came under attack from the south and the east. By mid-October, the Houthis in Yemen had attempted to launch an aerial assault. A few weeks later, an Islamist militia from Syria launched a drone attack which hit the Israeli city of Eilat. By November, Islamist militias based in Iraq were also mounting attacks on Israel. At the same time, Iran has been pouring weapons into the West Bank in the hope of opening up another front there.

Indeed, since 7 October, Iran has been open about its backing of these Islamist militias. On 17 October, supreme leader Ali Khamenei reportedly told Iranian television that ‘no one will stop the resistance forces’. He mentioned Hezbollah in the north, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran, he said, ‘will coordinate the attack’ on Israel using missiles and drones to create a ‘siege from all sides’. In April, Iran went a step further and directly attacked Israel for the first time with a mass aerial bombardment. This month, it launched a potentially even more damaging ballistic missile attack.

One of the few things that both Israel and its Islamist adversaries agree on is that the ‘axis of resistance’ wants to destroy Israel. Khamenei has, among other things, called Israel a cancerous tumour that must be removed. Both Hamas and Hezbollah declare in their founding documents that their goal is to destroy Israel. And the motto of the Houthis is ‘God is great, death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam’.

These are not isolated statements. Time and again, the leaders of these Islamist movements express their overt anti-Semitism and their desire to see the annihilation of Israel. This is completely in line with a core tenet of Islamist doctrine which holds that Jews are inherently wicked and bent on Islam’s destruction.

Islamism is a thoroughly reactionary political outlook. As Syrian-born German political scientist Bassam Tibi has argued, Islamism aims to make the world subservient to God’s will. That makes it uncompromisingly hostile to notions of democracy, individual rights and popular sovereignty. Islamism also has little regard for the nation state. It aims instead for the creation of a nizam Islami, that is, a new global Islamic order.

According to this totalitarian outlook, the Jews represent evil. Israel has to be destroyed and the power of the Jews crushed as a precondition for Islamism to achieve its goals. This helps explain why such a diverse range of Islamist movements – from Sunni Hamas to Shia Hezbollah – put so much emphasis on attacking Israel.

It also helps us to understand Hamas’s motives on 7 October. Hamas does not define itself as a Palestinian movement, but as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist movement based in Egypt. It sees the destruction of Israel and the slaughtering of Jews as necessary for the realisation of its broader Islamist aims.

Indeed, Hamas’s Islamism helps to explain its callous indifference to actual Palestinian lives. After all, it launched its murderous pogrom on southern Israel knowing that it would provoke a massive response from the Israeli army. Hamas had spent many years preparing the battlefield for precisely this Israeli counter-attack. Central to this preparation was the creation of a truly huge tunnel complex in which Hamas could hide itself below the Gazan population. As I noted back in March:

‘The scale of Gaza’s tunnel complex is monumental. London has a population of about nine million people, who are served by a Tube network of about 250 miles, of which about half is in tunnels, with the rest above ground. In contrast, Gaza has a population of just over two million people. But it is estimated to have about 300 miles of tunnels. So Gaza has about a quarter of London’s population, but about two and a half times the length of its tunnels.’

Notably, civilians are not allowed to shelter in these tunnels. Despite what Hamas apologists claim, it is happy to use ordinary Palestinians as human shields on a massive scale.

Hamas could have stopped the war at any time if only it had surrendered and released the hostages it captured on 7 October. Instead, Hamas leaders have kept going in the knowledge that they have a degree of personal protection. They also know there is a significant audience in the West receptive to the poisonous claim that Israel is engaged in a genocide.

This is a grisly inversion of the truth. Over the past year, it is clear that there’s only one side intent on annihilating a whole people. And that’s the alliance of violent Islamists menacing Israel at every turn. They must not win.

Daniel Ben-Ami is an author and journalist. He runs the website Radicalism of Fools, dedicated to rethinking anti-Semitism. Follow him on X: @danielbenami