The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas on earth.  More than 2 million people live inside a sliver of land, just 25 miles long and 7 ½ miles at its widest.  On Saturday morning, 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip broke down the barriers separating Gaza from Israel and engaged in a well-planned and well-executed series of raids involving mass murder, the kidnapping of children, elderly and women; the storming of a music festival to shoot and kill whomever they could find; and rape, execute and slaughter every Jew they could find.  To add to this horror, Hamas terrorists filmed all of this and placed it on social media sites for the entire world to see.

What is Hamas and what are its goals?  Answering these questions requires a bit of historical context.  From 2000 to 2003, violence exploded across Israel in what has been called Intifada II.  It has also been called the “Al-Aqsa Intifada” because in September of 2000, Ariel Sharon, the leader of the Likud Party in Israel, visited Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which incited a massive violent response from the Palestinians.  The violence was dreadful, for it included numerous homicide bombings killing dozens of Israeli citizens.  Seeking to kill or capture the terrorist leaders, Israel retaliated, in what was known as Operation Defensive Shield, by invading Palestinian cities, refugee camps and other terrorist hideouts.  Israel even blockaded Arafat’s compound in Ramallah.  In addition, the new Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, implemented a different strategy, the physical separation of the Palestinians and Israelis.  An immense security fence, and in some sections a wall, was built during 2003-2004—and the terrorist violence and homicide bombings ended.  Further, Sharon ordered the Israeli evacuation of the Gaza Strip, turning it over completely to the Palestinian Authority in the summer of 2005.  In 2006, elections in Gaza were held and Hamas won, but only 44 percent of Palestinians voted for Hamas: “It won the election by a plurality, not a majority.” In 2007, Hamas ousted its rival political party, Fatah, from the strip during a military conflict within Gaza. Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan. Today, Palestinian control of the disputed territory is divided between the Palestinian Authority (the West Bank) and Hamas (Gaza).  The PA continues to negotiate with Israel; Hamas refuses to do so.

Hamas is an Islamist fundamentalist group formed in 1987 as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.  The Hamas charter of 1988 laid out a brazenly anti-Semitic mission. The charter stated: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization 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 Judgment will not come 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.’” As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, noted in 2014, “This is a frank and open call for genocide, embedded in one of the most thoroughly anti-Semitic documents you’ll read this side of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Hamas issued a new charter in 2017, which retains the group’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist but removes some of the boldest anti-Jewish statements from the 1988 version. However, many Hamas officials have espoused equally strong anti-Semitic statements in the years since this new charter was released.  As Russell Moore observes, “Hamas is genocidally evil. They and their co-conspirators are solely responsible for their actions. Whatever our views on Middle East policy, whatever our thoughts on military strategy, let’s not be afraid to say that.”

What are the group’s long-term goals? First, as Isabel Fattal of The Atlantic argues, “what every political party would want in their own country . . . ascendancy and supremacy.”  The historian Arash Azizi told me. “It wants to be the most popular Palestinian party.” Second, Hamas is a member of the Axis of Resistance, Azizi noted. As he explained in The Atlantic “. . .  this unofficial alliance of groups supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran includes Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and several Iraqi and Syrian militias. These groups share key goals, Azizi explained: “the destruction of Israel” and the driving out of all the Jewish people living in the country. Finally, despite the fact that Palestinians “are amongst the most secular societies in the Arab world,” Hamas—a Sunni Islamist party—also wants “an Islamic society.”

Fattal continues: “The group seeks the elimination of Israel as a country—a point of contrast between it and the Palestine Liberation Organization. (The PLO’s official position holds that a Palestinian state could be created in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, though the former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat walked away from American-led negotiations meant to create such a state.) Taken as a collective, Hamas is “a Palestinian nationalist, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, and Islamist organization,” Azizi said. But “like all parties in the world, Hamas is not united . . .  There are certainly parts of Hamas that do not have these more extreme goals.” Some factions, particularly those linked to the devout Palestinian middle class, are “not interested in fighting the Israelis this way, or in alliance with Iran,” he said. “Under the right circumstances, they might even accept, form, and run a state of Palestine without the destruction of Israel . . .  But clearly the faction [of Hamas] that Iran has given a lot of power to is not the latter faction.”

“Key to understanding Hamas is the fact that its goals and those of the Gazan people are not necessarily in alignment. The Gazan people live under an Israeli blockade, backed by Egypt, that severely restricts the movement of goods and people in and out of the region; under Hamas rule, Gazans have reported repression and arbitrary arrests, and Human Rights Watch has chronicled what it calls systemic abuse on the part of Hamas in Gaza. In recent years, Gazan citizens have shown growing discontent with Hamas’s policies. According to The Times of Israel, a 2022 poll found that 53 percent of Gazans agree at least somewhat that Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction; a 2022 Palestinian public-opinion poll found that 71 percent of Palestinians believe there is corruption in Hamas institutions. “We have no idea” how much of the population of Gaza Hamas represents, Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told me, because “there have not been elections there in decades. They’re not a unifying national movement.”

Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic adds another dimension to what Hamas did in its raid into Israel—further undermining the “rules-based order,” which was founded “in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored . . . Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so . . . The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes.  In fact, killing civilians is the “new normal,” Daniel Henninger contends.

• “In Ukraine, Russia has once again used artillery, cruise missiles, and drones, including Iranian drones, to hit an even wider range of civilian targets: houses, apartment buildings, churches, restaurants, ports, grain silos. Just last week, Russian missiles hit a shop and café in the small village of Horza, killing more than 50 people. This kind of strike had no conventional military justification. The point is to create pain, cause civilian deaths, and sow disruption—nothing else. Russian propagandists praise the destruction and call for more: ‘We should wait for the right moment and cause a migration crisis for Europe with a new influx of Ukrainians,’ one of them told a television talk show.”
• “Hamas is not a sovereign state, but it has the full backing of Iran, a sovereign state, and funding from Qatar, a sovereign state . . . On Saturday, Hamas launched what appears to have been a well-planned, well-organized attack, designed to spread civilian terror and create chaos. Hamas deployed missiles and drones, including kamikaze drones of the kind used now in Russia and Ukraine, as well as teams of men with guns. Although they hit a few military outposts, they also murdered more than 200 people at a music festival, chased down children and the elderly, and in some towns went from house to house looking for people to murder. They abducted young women, beat them unconscious, and dragged them across the border, a war crime that is as old as Homer’s Iliad.”
• “The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have—and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.”

What are the likely results of Hamas’s genocidal evil?  How will the world order be affected?  How will it change Israel and the Middle East?  Several initial observations:

1. The cause of the Palestinians have suffered immeasurably.  The idea of an independent Palestinian state as a viable vison for the future is dead.  Walter Russell Mead is certainly correct when he observes that there is “no prospect that any Israeli government of any party would embrace this cause now . . . Thanks to Hamas, the goal of Palestinian independence is further off than ever.”  No Israeli can honestly believe that Palestinians will live in peace with Israel if they get a state of their own.  As long as there is Hamas, that belief is now dead!  Israel will never cede control of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
2. Hamas has lost the right to rule Gaza.  “It must be dismantled and disarmed, and neither Israel nor its neighbors can permit the group to return to power.”  Mead suggests that “The establishment of a new Palestinian governing authority for the territory linked to Fatah, closely guarded by Israel and Egypt, and funded by the Gulf states would perhaps be the best outcome for all concerned, but the war mist be won before peace can be built.”
3. The United States and the larger West must come to terms with the genuine and persistent threat of Iran.  Mead:  “Iran is determined to destroy the Jewish state and to banish American power from a region that remains vital to the peace and prosperity of the world.”  America must recommit itself to the Middle East and end its rather blatant attempt to appease Iran.  As Gerard Baker maintains, “The appeasement of Iran by the Obama and Biden administrations has bolstered the conditions by which Tehran exerts its power—in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. “  FDR once said of Hitler, “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.  There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.  There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.”  Mead refers appropriately to Winston Churchill’s counsel to Neville Chamberlain after his appeasement of Hitler at Munich:  “You were given the choice between war and dishonor.  You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”  Iran directly or indirectly was responsible for the funding of and strategic advice to Hamas for what happened in October.  The line in the sand has been clarified.  America must change its course of action towards Iran.
4. Finally, just a brief comment about the importance of the Middle East in terms of Scripture.  The Bible keeps our focus on the Middle East:  It connects three continents—Europe, Asia and Africa.  It is where God made an unconditional covenant with the Jewish people—His covenant people.  It is where His Son lived His 33+ years, and where He died on Calvary’s cross.  It is also where His Son will return to establish God’s kingdom on earth. All of the prophecies associated with the Second Advent will occur in the Middle East.  These dastardly events remind us that no matter what else is happening in our world, the Middle East remains the vital center of God’s program.

See Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic Daily, www.theatlantic.com (9 October 2023); Anne Applebaum, “There are No Rules” in www.theatlantic.com (9 October 2023); Russell Moore, “Moore to the Point” www.newsletter@e.christianitytoday.com (12 October 2023); Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal (12 October 2023); Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal (13 October and 9 October 2023); and Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (10 October 2023).