RUTHFULLY YOURS

These days, my two favorite bookshops in Paris and London are devoting a full shelf to books on or inspired by Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Storm” October 7 invasion of Israel.

Some of these books offer various accounts of what happened on that day and could be classed as extended reportages of the kind news magazines offered in the good old days of print journalism. The most interesting of these, Trey Yingst’s Black Saturday, which broadens its scope to offer a portrayal of the subsequent war in Gaza. Because the author is a television reporter, his fast-paced reportage often resembles a newsreel. That, however, does not prevent him from offering often deep insights into the mind-sets of the two adversaries.

The October 7 War, by Seth J Frantzman, also starts as a long reportage but quickly evolves into a clinical study of the deeper causes of the deadly explosion of anger and hate. Frantzman tries to put the event in the broader geopolitical context of the struggle for the future of the Middle East, which has been going on since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

The earliest attempt at imposing a shape on the region was undertaken by Great Britain and France, the two colonial powers that as victors in that war shared the chunks of the Ottoman Empire.

The British tried to forge a network of Arab monarchies with a newly minted Arab League as a loose federation. The French imposed a shaky republican system on Syria and Lebanon. Both Mandate powers ultimately failed because with the start of the Cold War, the top billing in that drama had gone to the United States and the Soviet Union. Though the two “superpowers” provided a measure of stability, they too ultimately failed, perhaps because they mistook stagnation for stability.

Frantzman, who has also studied ISIS, deals with the new and current protagonists in the drama, notably the Islamic Republic of Iran. He manages to trace the genesis of the October attack to Tehran’s grand plan for reshaping the Middle East in its own image. The Islamic Republic leaders believe that unless the rest of the Middle East becomes Iranian, it would be their Iran which would be forced to become like the rest of the Middle East.

To that end, Iran’s leaders pursue two parallel strategies: Turning the Arab states into hollow shells used as cover for an Iranian proxy exercising real power, and creating a network of proxies to drag Israel into perpetual war with the aim of its ultimate destruction through psychological fatigue, economic burden and demographic decline.

Frantzman doesn’t say so openly, but his account suggests that the October 7 attack, its unprecedented horror notwithstanding, must be treated as an episode in a broader war that will not end unless the Islamic Republic is knocked out of the deadly game.

Oct 7: The War Against Hamas Through the Eyes of An Israeli Commando Officer is, as the title suggests, an eyewitness account of the war by Captain Elkana Cohen.

The book, endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may be regarded by some as an apologia, which to some extent it is. Nevertheless, Cohen manages to steer away from propagandist temptations to seek sympathy through pathos. And that makes his narrative all the more powerful.

His book offers a rare insight into the Israeli army’s rules of engagement and operational modes, not in theory but in the context of a real and exceptionally challenging struggle. All along, the reader will feel that without saying so, Cohen and his comrades fear that the ongoing struggle may drag them down to the level of bitter hatred established by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar — a level that made even some of Hamas’s own fighters and sympathizers uncomfortable.

The October 7 shelf in the London bookshop also includes Nikolaos Giannopoulos’ Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?: The Right to Resist, which was written before the Hamas attack on Israel but is reissued supposedly to put Hamas’s point of view, albeit indirectly. The author argues that people who feel oppressed have a right to resist oppression and cites a range of examples — from the US War of Independence to the IRA’s long war against Great Britain.

However, it is hard to see how the October 7 attack could be categorized as an act of resistance by freedom-fighters. At that time, Gaza was not under Israeli occupation and was evolving as a semi-independent min-state which, though subjected to harsh and unjust restrictions in some domains, could not be regarded as a colonized entity thirsty for independence. For Hamas, October 7 was a war of choice, not a war of necessity, and its goal wasn’t just to terrorize a real or imaginary foe but to murder as many non-combatants as possible.

Terror is used to persuade or force an adversary into doing something you want or stop doing something you don’t want and sadly, in many instances it works. However, if an act of terror transcends certain boundaries, it could produce the opposite of what the terrorist hoped for. In other words, it is all a matter of dosage.

Without the “Al-Aqsa Storm” raid, no Israeli prime minister, let alone Benjamin Netanyahu, who happened to have hit the nadir of unpopularity, would have dared to launch a total war aimed at flushing Hamas out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon.

Sinwar isn’t the first victim of unintended consequences and won’t be the last either.

In hindsight, it seems that the late leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, understood the importance of dosage in terror and/or resistance.

This is why initially, to the surprise of some, Nasrallah refused to enter the danse-macabre opened by Sinwar.

We may never know what persuaded or forced Nasrallah to abandon his usual caution and join an adventure beyond his control. My guess is that he didn’t jump, but was pushed. Your guess as to who pushed him.

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.

This article originally appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat and is reprinted with some changes by kind permission of the author.