Like many media outlets, CNN posed the obvious question:
The level of planning that would have been required for such an assault prompted questions about whether Hamas could have done it alone – and if it had help, whether that could have come from its longtime backer in the region, Iran.
I believe it is likely Iran helped in the planning because training paraglider pilots under the radar (in both the literal and figurative senses) would be impossible in Gaza. That said, it now seems possible the idiot EU Ambassador to Gaza inadvertently (at least, I hope so, it isn’t as if this ruse was without precedent!) may have given cover to this endeavour. But the issue of Iranian collusion is moot. It is obvious that such an co-ordinated and resource-intensive attack must have taken years of planning.
“Planning” is the operative word here. Given that it took so much planning and that the response by Israel was entirely predictable, why did Hamas – the government of Gaza – not forward-plan for the so-called “humanitarian crisis” that would inevitably follow? Why did they not stockpile food, water, fuel and medical supplies? Why did they not have a plan in place for the safe evacuation of civilians? Why did they not build air raid shelters? In short, why was no part of this sophisticated and detailed plan concerned with the aftermath of the attack – an attack so savage that it can only have been designed to trigger the most robust response from Israel – or with the impact on the citizens of Gaza?
The answer is obvious: creating a humanitarian crisis was precisely the point of this.
To Hamas, the barbaric killing of Jews was incidental to their greater plan which was to create suffering so great for their own people that they could leverage (a) the “anger” of Muslims worldwide, and (b) the handwringing of the useful idiots in the Western media and charity sector. The useful idiots in the media can’t seem to even grasp that the “Palestinian Medical Authorities” they keep citing are run by the government of Gaza… which is Hamas… a fact that seems to have escaped the halfwits working for the BBC, Sky News, Channel4, CNN, NBC, and the rest.
Hats off to Hamas, it worked.
A fortnight ago, the people of Gaza who usually content themselves with handing out sweets were this time spitting on the bodies of Hamas’s Jewish victims paraded in the streets. Now they are now ululating in despair on the dusty ruins of Gaza City for the global media. Success!
What represents success for Hamas? If not the delegitimising of the State of Israel, an eroding of sympathy for the Jewish state in order to break down support for it and also support for the two-state solution Hamas rejects entirely: they want a Jew-free caliphate “from the river to the sea”. This isn’t speculation; this is precisely what they say in their charter. It is a trans-generational goal. The people living today, or ten years ago, or ten years before that, did not matter. Nor will people – neither Jewish nor Palestinian – living ten years from now if Hamas is still in existence. No lives matter now, ever did, or will in the future: the battle is eternal, but suffering is transient.
The photo credit for this post is from the UN taken almost a decade ago. But the script never changes., does it?
