Reflections on Israel’s New Existential War

By Victor Davis Hanson

There have been plenty of terrorist attacks on Israel. A dozen or so conventional wars of various magnitude have been waged against the Jewish state. And more often there have been mixtures of both.

Yet never have hundreds of gangs of black-clad murderers carefully planned to swarm Israel, with an agenda to pull random Jews out of their homes and off the street, murder them, and toss their bodies in the street.

In fact, the closest parallel to the sort of methods Hamas is now embracing is something close to the Rwanda 1994 mass killing, when swarms of Hutu militia killers launched a preplanned murder spree against thousands of Tutsi civilians.

Note one common theme of these horrific videos of the murdering of young women: the bloodthirst of the Gaza crowd. There appears a natural desire of everyday Gazans to video the mutilations, an embrace of the spitting on the doomed, a frenzied effort to mutilate the dead—and the absence of a single Gazan objecting to the group murder of a civilian.

Hamas did not act out of the ordinary, but in sync with its people. In truth, there is something so terribly wrong in Gaza that the United States should keep as far away as it can from such barbarity—and hope that it too feels the same about America and keeps to itself.

So again why did Hamas mount such a long-planned and multifaceted assault on Israeli towns, public buildings, soldiers, and civilians?

The invasion was not so much a surprise attack, in the conventional Pearl Harbor sense, as a carefully calibrated land, sea, and ground effort at mass killing and hostage taking. It was designed to execute noncombatants, grab Jews for bargaining leverage, and to shock Israelis through their pre-civilizational desecration of the bodies of the dead.

It targeted first a youth concert near the border, on the theory the cowardly killers could gain maximum media traction and Arab solidarity by sensationally butchering and kidnapping helpless adolescents. Will the murderers in the weeks ahead transfer their killing zeal to attacks on the IDF? They will soon have their long desired and ample opportunity to showcase to the world their bravado as they face real soldiers and not unarmed elderly and youth.

Apparently, the Palestinians in their now ISIS role also thought their descent into even greater barbarity, rarely witnessed in even the most savage parts of the world, would shock Israelis into assuming some sort of collective fetal position, with hands over their ears screaming, “make all these demons just go away.”

If so, Hamas sorely miscalculated.

The sheer horror of their methods, and the cowardice shown by focusing on teen-aged girls and children rather than the IDF, will have the exact opposite effect, both in Israel and worldwide.

Israel now knows there is no living with a precivilizational Hamas. It must destroy it, permanently block off Gaza from itself, and adopt a strategy of chronic disproportionate response from now on out.

In such a change of strategy, Israel will have the backing of most of the civilized world and its own people, since there is no other choice once Hamas has adopted its campaign of death. We will likely see things in the next month that no one has anticipated, and yet the Israeli response will be in the eyes of most of the world long overdue.

In other words, few will pay any more attention to the Squads of the world, or the radical Jew-haters of the Western Left, or the Democratic-Socialists of America who cheered on the killing. They are now revealed on the side of death for death’s sake and cannot be reasoned with.

We are not yet 80 years out from the Holocaust. Yet here again we witness black-clad cadres of special killer units trying to round up Jews and execute them on the spot. There is one strange difference though between the current Hamas SS cadres and their spiritual forefathers in Nazi Germany.

Between 1941-45 America fought to destroy the SS and its hired local death squads. But in 2023, the Biden administration has restored hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority and to Gaza under Hamas, despite the commitments of both to the destruction of Israel and the mass killing of Jews—and regardless of the warnings of its own State Department.

That too will change, as there will soon be zero American support for giving one more cent to any Palestinian “organization.”

Why the attacks now? Other than the usual reasons the Palestinians slaughter Jews—envy, the easy preference to destroy others than to create a successful modern state of their own, ethnic and religious hatred—the timing and methods of this particular killing spread were predicated on some particular catalysts.

Palestinians wanted to stop any rumored rapprochement between the Gulf monarchies—their traditional purse strings—and Israel, by forcing the issue of Arab solidarity in times of “war,” especially through waging a gruesome attack aimed at civilians and encompassing executions and hostage taking. They wished to force, for example, the Saudis to endorse their mutilation of corpses or else to be seen as sell-outs to the “Jews.”

Iran is the likely driving force in prompting the war. Its greatest fear is a Sunni Arab-Israel deal that would finally transcend the anti-Semitic and ethnic hatred that now resides most prominently in Palestine and Iran.

In addition, Arab forces only achieve success against Israel in surprise assaults during an Israel holiday. So the current attack was timed 50-years after the October 6, 1973 beginning of the Yom Kippur War. They struck during Simchat Torah, coming at the end of a weeklong Jewish celebration of Sukkot. And yet despite the iconic date, Hamas caught both the sophisticated intelligence networks of Israel, the United States, and the West in general completely unaware.

Did Hamas think Hezbollah and Iran would join in? Will they? If one believes their rhetoric they will; if one believes that they do not wish to experience what will likely follow in Gaza, they will not.

For the time being, after all, there are now zero restraints on Israel for the first occasion perhaps in its history. Few other than the international relations major AOC or a bigot in the American State Department will call for proportionality, an immediate ceasefire, or an Israeli stand down.

Hamas may also have reckoned that recent Israeli turmoil and mass street protests over proposed reforms of the Israeli Supreme Court had led to permanent internal divisions and thus a climate of domestic distraction if not an erosion of deterrence.

True, there was something eerie about the Israeli left’s opposition that extended to the politicization of IDF recruits. This propensity to commit collective civilizational suicide is now toxic in Western society, from Sweden to America. But in a frontline state like Israel it could prove fatal–as Hamas apparently also reasoned.

Let us also be candid, the Biden administration has contributed to the notion that Hamas was a legitimate Middle-East player. It fueled the perception that the U.S. was backing away from its traditional support for Israel—to the delight of Hamas—based on inexplicable policies.

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