Commentary on What is Happening In Israel/Gaza/Hamas Conflict

For a .pdf of this post, click here.

On October 7, as massacres were ongoing in southern Israel, Foreign Affairs magazine interviewed the veteran Mideast diplomat Martin Indyk. Although he said he was “in shock,” he sketched a prescient forecast, saying:

…I fear that Hamas’s intention is to get Israel to retaliate massively and have the conflict escalate: a West Bank uprising, Hezbollah attacks, a revolt in Jerusalem.

This was the cold calculation behind the bloodbath, and Hamas soldiers were carrying it out and live-filming it as disciplined troops, not enraged mobs waging a pogrom, as Gilbert Doctorow wrote:

The Western reporting has provided a wealth of material for those who would denounce the Hamas fighters as “sub-human.”  However, considering the great sophistication of the Hamas methods to overcome Israeli technical devices at the border and the wall itself intended to prevent such a raid from the enclave, considering the 5,000 or more missiles sent by Hamas into Israel that overwhelmed the “Iron Dome” Israeli defenses, it is unreasonable to speak of the executions and hostage-taking as spontaneous or expressions of raw anger by Arab youths.  No, it had to be planned in advance and handed over to disciplined fighters for implementation with a certain military objective in mind: namely to provoke the Israeli government and draw it into the lair of urban, guerilla warfare in Gaza.

In the same vein, a friend of mine referred to the October 7 attack as Hamas’s “Here I am!—come and get me!” attack.

If Israel is foolish enough to launch that ground invasion of Gaza, what will its troops find there? Hamas will have laid its preparations for that invasion at the same time—and with the same sophistication and cunning—as its preparations for the total surprise of October 7. Former CIA officer Larry Johnson compared the coming battle for the 141-square-mile Gaza Strip with the battle for the 9-square-mile island of Iwo Jima in 1945:

Why do I bring up Iwo Jima? Because the Gaza Strip is ripe with tunnels and bunkers designed to protect Hamas fighters from aerial bombardment. Just as the United States Navy decimated the surface of Iwo Jima, Israel can flatten the dwellings and office buildings crowded into Gaza. But the U.S. Navy failed to destroy the Japanese force hiding below the surface with the naval fusillade. The U.S. Marine Corps had to land on the beaches and fight a bloody month-long battle to clear the island.

I think Israel is looking at the equivalent of fighting the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Gaza Strip. Only instead of a month-long effort, this battle would likely endure for at least four months—perhaps longer. And Israel will suffer massive casualties.

The Purpose Behind the Purpose

Many analysts believe that the purpose of Hamas’ October 7 butchery was to force a greater focus on the Palestinian question into the ongoing negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, mediated by Washington—or perhaps to put an end to those negotiations. Now there are probably Hamas leaders who believe that—but would that warrant the slaughter of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Gazans as their enclave is reduced to rubble? The purpose behind the purpose, the purpose of the stringpullers behind Hamas, is exactly the wider war which Martin Indyk indicated above. And if it is allowed to start, that war would likely spread beyond the non-state actors he listed, to bring in regional nations or even the United States, whose Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group is in or heading towards the area now.

At least, the crazy calls for US retaliatory strikes on Iran have quieted a little for now. Hamas, which is a name assumed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, is in no way a puppet or client of Iran. The Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, is a hyper-violent Sunni secret society totally opposed to Iran’s Shi’ism, although the two have alternately been in and out of tactical alliances over recent years. There are Israeli claims that Iran is providing Hamas a subsidy of $100 million per year. If that is true, it is a fraction of their subsidy from the Brotherhood’s sheikhdom of Qatar.

But what is the Muslim Brotherhood really? To begin to understand that, naïve Americans must wake up to the way in which British imperialism has manipulated Middle Eastern factions, tribes and nations against one another without interruption for over two centuries. (British imperialism is the same thing that President Trump refers to as “the globalist financier class.”) It was the British who drew up the borders of the contemporary Middle Eastern nations, just as they drew up the borders over which India and Pakistan fought at the time of their independence in 1947. The entire Jewish-Arab struggle has been managed by British imperialism, dating from the Palestine Mandate of 1920, up through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) of today.

The Muslim Brotherhood, in turn, has been a bloodstained tool of British imperialism since its formation in Britain’s protectorate of Egypt in 1928. It fueled Arab-vs-Jewish provocations for the British in the inter-war period, participated in British efforts to topple Nasser in 1967, helped Brzezinski build the Afghan Mujaheddin in the 1980s, and helped prepare 9/11 under British-Saudi sponsorship in 2001. (And Benjamin Netanyahu is far from the first or only Israeli leader who has been suckered into subsidizing and supporting it.)

British imperialism is brewing up a new war, as it has done so many times in the past. What is the objective? Perhaps, as Lyndon LaRouche often said, it is that “If you’re losing the chess game, overturn the chessboard.” If Donald Trump returns to the Presidency in 2025, that empire stands to lose its control over the United States, and thereby begin its rapid retreat into irrelevance. Perhaps it hopes that war can change that fate. In any case, these aspects will probably become clearer over the coming days.

What can we do to stop it? As Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said about the Ukraine war, “Bring back Donald Trump.” President Trump says rightly that this would never have happened if he were President—and as President he can put a stop to it.

Until then? We must stop being suckers! See through the evil plot and expose it! Mercilessly mock the neocons, whether Democrats or Republicans, who would drag us into another war, whatever the pretext.

As Larry Johnson wrote,

Israel is totally justified in its outrage over the slaughter of Jewish civilians last weekend. But there are other dynamics at play that, if not properly managed, could spin out of control and embroil the world in an unnecessary war. Instead of laying the foundation for a war with Iran, the United States should be working with Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt to pour oil on troubled waters.