In this new Freee Press article, Matti Friedman, a “Canadian-Israeli journalist and author . . . an op-ed contributor for the New York Times, and columnist for Tablet magazine,” explains how Hamas outfoxed not only Israel, but the whole world. When the October 7 attack happened, and with an Israeli response looming, Friedman says that the world thought, “Well, Gaza is in for it now. They really screwed up.”
But, Friedman says, they did not. In fact, it was the opposite. Friedman’s thesis:
But as I write nearly three months later, with several acquaintances dead in battle and one still held hostage in Gaza, it’s easier to understand what Hamas leaders were thinking. Indeed, it’s increasingly worth considering the possibility that they weren’t wrong.
In many ways, Hamas understood the world better than we Israelis did. The men who came across the border, and those who sent them, may have grasped the current state of the West better than many Westerners. More than anything, they understood the war they’re fighting when many of us didn’t—and still don’t.
Hamas understood how the West could be psychologically manipulated as well as deceived about Hamas’s aims. And all that came from the group’s experience. That the world didn’t understand what Hamas was doing isn’t due to sheer blindness, but also to the West’s ignorance, willful or not, of the Middle East and, in some cases, its dislike of Israel.
Click to read.
Friedman’s article has two parts: what Hamas figured would happen, which turned out to be correct, and how the West failed to understand the real aim of Hamas, which isn’t peace, but getting rid of the Jews in Israel and then, as part of establishing a world caliphate, starting in on Jews everywhere else.
What Hamas figured but the world didn’t. (Friedman’s words are indented.)
Some aspects of Hamas’s success are easy to see, like the behavior of the Western press. After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting.
This may have seemed unlikely in the first few days after October 7, when the shock of Hamas’s barbarism was fresh. But it happened, as we’ve seen in a recent rash of stories containing variations on the claim that this war is one of the worst in history and that responsibility lies with Israel.
Hamas also knew that when faced with heartbreaking images of civilian death, some Western leaders would eventually buckle and blame the Israelis, helping Hamas live to attack another day. It took about five weeks before this happened to Emmanuel Macron of France (“These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. So there is no reason for that and no legitimacy”) and Canada’s Justin Trudeau (“The world is witnessing this killing of women, of children, of babies. This has to stop.”)
And Hamas knew that the international organizations that bankroll Gaza, like the United Nations, having mostly turned a blind eye to Hamas’s vast military buildup at their expense (and, in some cases, on their property), would focus their fury at Israel alone and do their best to blunt the consequences of Hamas’s actions.
All of this shows not a miscalculation by Hamas, but an admirable grasp of reality.
What amazes me is that people knew all this years ago. The incursion of Hamas into UNRWA was well known, as is the presence of Gazan terror tunnels financed by international aid—tunnels under schools and hospitals. This has been known for years, but ignored, as is the UN’s clear bias against Israel. The way that Hamas manipulates the press is also well known, perhaps because the liberal press is willing to be manipulated by a group conceived of as “underdogs.” And it’s also known that Hamas doesn’t care that much about Palestinian civilians, whose deaths are in fact a great way for the terror organization to achieve its aims. As far as it’s concerned, the more Palestinian civilians who die, the easier it is for Hamas to reach its goals.
What’s also well known is how the money given to Gaza and the Palestinian Authority has been funneled off by its leaders for their own personal wealth (or used to build tunnels and buy rockets). Mahmoud Abbas, as well as the Hamas leaders (many of who live in Qatar) are millionaires or billionaires. Even now, a huge amount of the “humanitarian aid” sent to Gaza goes right into the hands of Hamas. We know this, but we ignore it.
Why hasn’t the world objected? Why hasn’t the UN produced any resolutions condemning Hamas, Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority? (There are plenty of UN resolutions that concern Palestinians, but most are directed against Israel.) The only explanation is dislike of Israel and Jews, and that means anti-Semitism. How else can you explain it?
Finally, Friedman calls out the West for blithely ignoring Hama’s real goals.
What Hamas wants.
In press coverage, including countless articles I wrote myself in my years working for the international press, the Palestinians are said to be seeking an independent state and freedom from Israeli rule. The Palestinian Authority, affiliated with Fatah, is portrayed as the more responsible actor in Palestinian politics, but Hamas still appears in the context of the same story and the same shared goal.
But this isn’t what Hamas, an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, says about itself. They don’t portray their war as limited to one of Palestinians against Israelis, and in Arabic don’t necessarily use the term “Israel” or “Israelis.” Hamas explicitly understands itself as part of a war that is religious in nature and global in scope, one in which the enemy is the Jews.In this war, they understand themselves to have many allies across the world.And here, too, it’s quite clear they’re right.
Reasonable Western people—the kind of people who grew up in friendly cities under the Pax Americana of the late 20th century, as I did—always tended to see fragments of the broader war and not the whole picture. We might have noticed a spray-painted swastika here, an anti-Israel boycott there, a synagogue shooting by a Pennsylvania gunman, a Molotov cocktail hurled at a Montreal school, the odd statement from former leaders of countries like France (“heavy financial domination of the media and the worlds of art and music”) and Malaysia (“Jews are ruling the world by proxy”). But the tendency has been to see these all as unrelated data points, rather than an illustration of the disturbing fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world, perhaps billions, believe themselves to be in conflict in some way with Jews.
The original 1988 Hamas Charter, which you can see here, is explicitly antisemitic, calling for the extinction of the Jews and even citing the Tsarist forgery of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which posited a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Actually, it’s the Islamists like Hamas who want to run the world, turning it into a Muslim fiefdom. Here’s a quote from the first Hamas Charter:
Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Read that again.
And now the view of Jews as oppressors, fostered by wokeness and the DEI movement, has led to Israel’s permanent demonization (by “Israel,” I mean “Jews”). From Friedman:
The movement became savvy enough to water down its charter a few years ago, but its leaders have remained honest about their intent. “You have Jews everywhere,” one former Hamas minister, Fathi Hammad, shouted to a crowd in 2019, “and we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing, with God’s will.”
. . . My experience in the Western press corps was that sympathy for Hamas was not just real but often more substantial than sympathy for Jews. In Europe and North America, as we’ve now seen on the streets and on campuses, many on the progressive left have arrived at an ideology positing that one of the world’s most pressing problems is the State of Israel—a country that has come to be seen as the embodiment of the evils of the racist, capitalist West, if not as the world’s only “apartheid” state, that being a modern synonym for evil.
And this statement by Friedman is very smart, noting the persistence of antisemitism in different guises, a phenomenon that Douglas Murray has called “shapeshifting”:
Jews could no longer officially be hated because of their ethnicity or religion, but can legitimately be hated as supporters of “apartheid” and as the embodiment of “privilege.” The pretense that this is a critique of Israel’s military tactics, or sincere desire for a two-state solution, has now largely been dropped.
And so the historical affinity of blacks and Jews, on prominent display during the civil rights movement of the Sixties, has dissolved, for blacks now fall into the “oppressed” class while “white adjacent” Jews are seen as oppressors:
This explains incidents like the striking momentin 2021 when the Hamas military commander Yahya Sinwar told a VICE reporter, “I want to take this opportunity to remember the racist murder of George Floyd.” Palestinians, he said, suffered “the same type of racism.” Sinwar is a fundamentalist sociopath responsible for the carnage in Israel on October 7 and for the resulting catastrophe in Gaza, as well as the murder of several Africans caught in the attack. His statement was echoed in a call by Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan the same year: “What they are doing to the Palestinian people is what they continue to do to our Black brothers and sisters here.” The word “they”was striking at the time. The two of them clearly understood themselves as being part of the same struggle.
And so it’s Israel against the world, largely because Hamas has been savvy enough to manipulate the press, funnel off money for terrorism, and even infiltrate the UN, which has all but turned into an arm of Hamas. But the West has allowed itself to be manipulated, for all these machinations have been known since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. The Israelis knew much of this, but they depend on the goodwill and help of the world, which is incurious, ignorant, or willfully ignorant, probably because they just don’t like Israel because it’s the homeland of the Jews. This is why Israel is conducting this war largely on its own, though the U.S. is giving ever-waning help. But Israel will pursue Hamas until they deem it wiped out, for they know that its existence is predicated on wiping out the Jewish state and its inhabitants.
What a world of difference there is between the two Friedmans: the NYT columnist Tom Friedman, who’s bought into all these myths and whose analyses of the war are both wrong and risible, and Matti Friedman, who’s covered the story for years and knows his onions!
I didn’t used to toss out accusations of antisemitism lightly, as it’s a charge of bigotry. But I can’t explain the attitudes above, and the way the world and the UN regards Israel, without thinking that there’s a big dollop of Jew hatred behind it.
” …. thinking that there’s a big dollop of Jew hatred behind it.”
Yes. This is real. However, “Jew Hatred” is embedded in, subsumed under, an overarching hatred.
Marxism.
World intellectuals have a smear of MarxGood over everything. It stems from a perverted form of altruism, a kind of empathy gone rotten. It is not simply a feeling of sharing hurts and injustices. No. It has been weaponized into a general excoriation of The West, of secular Enlightenment values, and of anyone or any nation not collapsing before the facts of objective reality in which no one chooses to be born, no one is automatically given a living, life is hard, and we face the likelihood that we will die into oblivion. Marx resents those who acknowledge this, shrug, and sally forth anyway!
Jewish culture in essence is firmly of The West. It “might be” a religion, but it is a worldview of hard work, education, success, personal responsibility, individual striving, private property, and freedom*. Marx hates this. He has taught the world to smear it, and extol victim culture instead. Thus, the Woke diaspora.
And so the ignoring and the delaying and the excuses to not defend Israel with praise as a self-made first world nation in a sea of tribalism.
*Zionism started out as socialist. It didn’t work. Whoops, it has turned into capitalism. Israel is a great capitalist nation.
Personally I see it as just another manifestation of the ever-present dichotomy between oppressed “people of color” who are always innocent and at worst act out in aggression justified by their grievances, and the evil oppressors who are not “people of color” and who, even if no actual malice can be found, are nonetheless creating and sustaining pervasive ‘systems of oppression’ with structural and systemic bigotry. And Jews don’t count as people of color, no matter how much they try to distance themselves from “whiteness”.
Ironically, I think this worldview was disproportionately promoted in US academia by Jews themselves.
There’s also the recent importation into the West of tens of millions of Muslims who help pull Western policy in an anti-Israel direction.
I read Matti Friedman’s piece with interest. It’s indeed true that Hamas benefited from latent antisemitism and global anti-Zionism, and from the historical hatred and distrust of Jews. Hamas rightly anticipated that Israel would retaliate vigorously and that civilian casualties would be horrendous and widely reported. Hamas positioned civilians forward in the line of fire as human munitions to ensure that very outcome. (The phrase “human shields” is too benign a description.) All of that is true, and the world is responding to the casualties in the way that Hamas anticipated.
On the other hand, it’s hard to say whether Hamas planned for and anticipated the world’s response in its disgusting totality. Yes, Hamas was strategic but, at the same time, Hamas was lucky. Only in retrospect can one construct the argument that Hamas had the response all figured out in advance.
Israel itself probably had as good an understanding of Hamas as anyone, yet it didn’t anticipate October 7. Hamas and Israel even cooperated in some areas, and the Israelis thought that they could maintain the status quo by “mowing the grass” on occasion and hoping for the best. They were wrong. That something would happen to upset this cycle was inevitable, I suppose. It was just a question of what would happen and on who’s watch.
Ultimately, Israel’s complacency allowed Hamas to advance to the point of establishing an underground bunker-state capable of attacking Israel. Instead of mowing the grass, Israel should have long ago plowed up the entire field. But they didn’t. Why not? Probably for the same reason that we are witnessing now: global condemnation.
Today, Israel has no choice but to endure the condemnation in order to save the country.
I am sure Hamas expected this response, and the attendant antisemitism plus sympathy for the Palestinians. But I can’t shake off the idea that they were still incredibly stupid to think that any significant benefit would come (by their lights) from this attack. This will wind down, eventually, and Israel will be pretty much where it was and the Jewish people will still thrive throughout the civilized world.
To me, what they did was no more savvy than how Charlie Manson thought that murdering a few rich white people would spark a race war.
Somewhere I read recently that it is not rational for ordinary people in western countries to feel affinity for Israel to the point of being natural military allies because our cultures have very little in common. It goes beyond the religious observation that Judaism and Christianity reject each other’s central tenets to say that “they” really aren’t like “us” at all, so why the bond, when anti-racism and decolonialization ought to be where our hearts are? I thought this was absurd, especially when I listened to Bari Weiss’s interview with Maya and Dvir Rosenfeld, survivors of the massacre at their kibbutz who are now looking after their orphaned twin nephews. You can’t listen to these two good people without feeling a bond with them.
https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/ff9961fc/miracle-in-hell-the-baby-twins-who-survived-a-massacre
Matti Friedman’s piece shows the evil forces that try to put a wedge between “us” and “them”. Non-Jews everywhere but especially in western countries that can actually help Israel need to keep their governments’ feet to the fire and not let them listen electorally to those who want to see Israel destroyed. The battle in Canada (not that we matter) is already lost at least until the next election, given our Prime Minister’s shameful capitulation to Islamists in the Liberal Party’s base and their Marxist fellow-travelers who control the narrative in much of our media. Those who live in more useful countries must keep up the fight and prevent your governments from being manipulated.
If Israel falls, we’ll be next. Don’t kid yourselves.
Totally Leslie. Canada seems (and I’m no expert) to have gone off the rails in a REALLY nasty way. Like NZ.
I bought a few Israeli flag t-shirts a month ago and wear one every day here in Chelsea (gay, rich, liberal area of Manhattan). Every day somebody gives me an attaboy or compliments it.
As I say to them: “This isn’t a Middle East real estate squabble, it is civilizational.”
The changes in this Post Modern/DEI era are profound. I don’t remember any marches for Al Qaida here after 9-11, nor were there “Pro Ayatollahs” marches after/during the hostage crisis of 1980. Yet there’s no difference of importance between the parties. And NOW there’s a terrifying Pro-Hamas contingency. Which is aligned with the whole poisoned racist DEI enterprise I notice at every turn.
I’m writing an article now about the insanity of the 2 state solution. I’ll post it here.
My recent one about “Why don’t the other Arabs let the Palestinians in..”
https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/
D.A.
NYC https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Canada has in fact gone off the rails. Completely.
Leslie, I think this article will interest you alot…..and yes, from 2014.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guide
(Note how well it tracks to what, and how, is being reported today.
Plus ça change . . .
Thanks.
I think this is quite correct. Westerners seem to have a belief that surely what Hamas really wants is peace and prosperity for Palestinians–and that’s not AT ALL what they are interested in. What they want is jihad, to slaughter of all of the world’s infidels, and hopefully die in the process so they can go directly to paradise. This is a religious idea that cannot be reasoned with, cannot be compromised with. We in the West have a hard time believing that they could really be serious about that, because it’s an insane idea. But they ARE serious about it–deadly serious–and if you don’t accept that, you render yourself incapable of understanding the nature of the threat they pose.
For those who don’t already follow Sam Harris’s podcast, he has done a series of episodes since October 7 that are enormously clarifying about all of this: Episodes 338, 339, 340, 341, 343, and 344. A few hours of listening to these, and you’ll understand the true situation far better than the “Free Palestine” mobs ever will. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes
+1 Robert. Sam’s take on this is the very best use of one’s time and I quote them in my own column.
D.A.
NYC
Do the hundreds of thousands of “Pro-Palestine” protesters know or care that what they do is embolden Hamas? And that Hamas is a terminal parasite on Palestinians?
Do they even know this equation? BTW, How would you respond to this:
“The fact that there are non-Jewish Palestinian Israelis with prominent positions of power in Israel proper does not debunk charges of apartheid. The U.S. had black congressmen in the 1950s at the same time Alabama’s lunch counters and schools were segregated.”
https://twitter.com/lhfang
That priming of the Western world in favor of the Palestinians was done in good part by Bibi’s right wing government and the action of the settlers. They were doing immense harm to the reputation of Israel. People looking in from the outside for a few years prior to Oct7th were swayed against Israel due to the suffering of the Palestinians compared to the Israelis.
For me, the barbarism of Oct7th turned things and I think that Israel needs to decide for its own through how much blood they are willing to wade.
I know of enough people that look at the situation and conclude that the Palestinians were never given a fair shake and thus their attacks are an attempt to disrupt the suffocating status quo. Chalking that up to antisemitism is a mistake in my view.
Sorry, but the UN and world were not sympathetic towards Israel well before Netanyahu became prime minister. And when he wasn’t PM it wasn’t as if the world became favorable towards Israel. UN resolution after UN resolution against Israel was passed when he wasn’t PM.
And, pardon me, what about all the terrorist attacks suffered by the Israelis–I guess those don’t count as “suffering”. Oh, and I forgot, do you not attribute the suffering of the Palestinians to Hamas or the PA, which rejected peace deal after peace deal while lining the pockets of terrorists. It is not Israel but the PA and Hamas that is largely responsible for the “sufferings of the Palestinians.”
It seems that you are sympathetic with the people who blame October 7 on the fact that the Palestinians were never given a “fair shake”, or at least you don’t condemn them. If that’s true, it’s reprehensible.
And did you not read the Hamas charter, or realize how Palestinian youth are taught to hate Jews from their earliest schooling? You think that the Hamas attack, and all the terrorist attacks on civilians by Gaza were caused by oppression rather than hatred of Jews? That the Israelis forced Hamas to improverish and oppress their own people so they could build terror tunnels and provision them? That the Jews forced Abbas and Hamas to become billionaires by appropriated humanitarian aid?
I’m sorry, but no, the Palestinians have largely their government, their rejection of a two-state solution, and their determination to wipe out Israel for their sufferings.
Oh, you seem to forget that Gaza WAS GIVEN TO THE PALESTINIANS by Israel in an effort to make peace. Then they elected Hmamas and the whole area went to hell. (If there was no terrorism, there would be no “blockade”. To me it reads like you are ignoring the whole history of the region because you are hellbent on blaiming the war on Israel.
With all due respect, you are putting words in my mouth and constructing a straw man.
I have not excused Hamas with even a single word, nor have I assigned any blame to Israel for causing the war, nor have I blamed the IDF for their conduct. War is bloody and the IDF will have to spill blood and it is on Israel to decide how much they are willing to spill. Even a justified war can have serious consequences for a society.
I also did not specify the suffering experienced by either party, just that from the outside the Palestinian suffering was more visible. Live in a prosperous and free society that gets hit by terror attacks or live in abject poverty under an authoritarian regime? I’d wager most people would choose the former, with chances of getting killed in a terror attack being below 1:100.000 per year during the relative lull of attacks in the early 2020ies.
Let’s talk about the “fair shake”. Land needs to be split between two populations. What is fair? I’d suggest that in modern times, one would look at the number of people in each population and distribute the land accordingly. When I look at population numbers for the former mandate territory (e.g. on Wikipedia), the Jews at best were at parity with the Muslim Arabs. Looking from the head count, a 50:50 split of the land would still be favorable for the Jew and yet they got much more. From this perspective, returning Gaza means very little, since giving land that is disjunct from the rest and the land total is still vastly in favor of Israel.
I want to clarify: I do not hold that view, but I can accept, that this is a reasonable perspective to take, especially when you are an Arab.
I personally think, that Israel was formed in its current borders in a time when might made right and fought for their land. The Jews had an ancient claim, founded their state, where attacked and over the course of those wars conquered the land. That was how it was done in the 40ies through 70ies. I think it is a bit hypocritical to talk around that fact and to construct narratives of righteousness around the founding and expansion of the state – but every nation is guilty of that.
So I can see and understand the perspective, that Palestinians were not given a ‘fair shake’, since without clear communication of “We took this land in a war you Arabs started, so deal with it” the proposed two-state solutions measured against the head count of Jews and Arabs were lopsided. Someone holding this perspective also doesn’t have to support Hamas or blame Israel. Barbarism such as the Oct7th cannot be justified by territorial dispute.
It’s amusing how you render your own opinions by saying that they’re from “people looking in from the outside” and “enough people conclude.” You have answered none of my criticisms, including the many “fair shakes” that the Palestinians were given, and that were rejected. As I said, the “suffering of the Palestinians” is largely self-inflicted by their rulers.
Finally, your knowledge of how to divide populations is completely ahistorical: a headcount of people in the Mandate of Palestine in 1947 is misleading and cannot be taken as a basis for land division. Mandatory Palestine, created as a “Jewish National Home” was supposed to be a place to house persecuted Jews of the world – quite a few million (it was some 16 millions in 1920 when the League of Nations made this binding decision). The British not only cut off 78% of the “Jewish National Home” (today’s Jordan) but also cut down Jewish immigration while opening wide doors to Arab immigration to the remaining 22%. According to all statistics many more Arabs than Jews immigrated to this 22% of British Palestine than did Jews. And, of course, the British idea with creating Transjordan (later Jordan) was to have an Arab state totally Jew-free, and a Jewish state with a large minority of Arabs – but a Jewish state “from the river to the sea”.You wrote yourself about all the peace proposals (division of the remaining 22%) which Arabs rejected. The Arabs never wanted to have ANY Jewish state, no matter its borders, anywhere in the Middle East. Jews were to remain dhimmis on the mercy of their Arab overlords or were to be killed.
With all due respect, your “two state” solution iignores all this. Finally, your putting your own views in the mouths of “others looking on” is not convincing. One example:
“People who look at the situation”. Not you, of course! And Hamas’s attack on October 7 was due to attacks due to repression instead of anti-semitism? Here you clearly give your view, which is that Israel had it coming because they oppressed Palestinians. This discussion is over, and you’d be well advised not to try to continue it. The distinction between “your view” and “a reasonable perspective” is not clear, but “your view” becomes clear when you say that Hamas’s attack wasn’t due to antisemitism, when it is, as stated in their charter, clearly their aim.
October 7th shattered the illusion among some liberals—some—who thought that antisemitism was largely found in the fringe far right rather than in many people and powerful institutions of the left. Hamas always knew better. Natan Sharansky also has it right: “Progressives who divide the world into ‘oppressors’ and ‘the oppressed’ are not our allies.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/our-false-partners
I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens observation that religion poisons everything. Islam has been at war with either Christians or Jews or both together for a thousand years. What hope is there for peace?
Islam doesn’t think much of detoxified atheists, either, and not just Jewish atheists. We’re all infidels who must be converted or killed. Sounds like an asymmetrical poison to me.
So true Leslie and something I have been aware of long before” new atheists” etc. Exposure to the islamist environment from military service at by todays standards a very young age taught and convinced me that this religion in particular was/is very dangerous and this view has never wavered even though often thought of by the ignorant as an anti muslim zealot. I pushed back years ago at uncontrolled immigration from muslim countries to no avail and the situation now makes the “fifth column” a real and existential threat reality. One recent UK politician, name cannot recall, said “it will come to it where we have to fight them on the beaches”
Idiot politicians, the likes of the silly boy Trudeau are as much of a threat,
Israel is the only country on this planet that understands this problem and believes it and my support for them and all the worlds Jews remains ever constant. Islamist theocratic countries the likes of Iran will happily crisp the planet in the sure and unwavering belief that they will end up in paradise.
The west needs to wake up!