Responding to terror

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2023 (738 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dark days indeed.

On Saturday, the Hamas organization launched a massive attack on Israel, one calculated to deliver savagery on unsuspecting citizens. A music festival attacked with hundreds killed, ordinary citizens kidnapped, others indiscriminately killed. Women raped, children taken from their homes.

It is a horrendous chapter in a long history of violence in the Middle East, with more than 900 Israelis killed and more than 2,400 wounded.

There are only so many words in an editorial, hardly enough to do more touch on a Middle Eastern history that is complex, nuanced and so involved that it would take chapters to explain.

Because of that, these few words summarizing such complexity may well cause anger — perhaps from all sides.

Hamas, to be clear, is recognized by the Canadian government as a terrorist organization, and the group’s actions certainly constitute terrorism.

Deliberately choosing to attack, rape, and murder unarmed civilians — as well as kidnapping civilians to hold as hostages — more than deserves that label. Threatening to kill hostages on live broadcasts — which Hamas has done? Equally so. In a declared war between nations, many of such actions would constitute war crimes.

Equally reprehensible is celebrating rape as a tool of war, or cheering on deliberate violence against unarmed civilians. By either side.

Some might choose to use history to try and legitimize Hamas’ actions: it in no way does. Has the recent behaviour of the Israeli government increased the political temperature in the region? Absolutely.

But that is no justification whatsoever for Saturday’s attack.

It’s understandable that there will be ongoing retaliation by Israel — no one could sit by and suggest that an armed invasion across a country’s border, targeting innocent people, should be tolerated. For Israel, this is a matter of protecting its very existence — and the sheer brutality of the Hamas attack will invariably harden the resolve of Israelis to root out Hamas wherever they are.

At the same time, that retaliation has to be proportional and has to be designed to directly target the attackers and Hamas — and not indiscriminately harm ordinary Palestinians, many of whom do not support Hamas or its actions.

It’s hard to believe that anyone in Gaza is to be spared the effects of that retaliation at this point, when Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza… There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

The UN says more than 187,500 Gaza residents have been displaced, and, as of Tuesday, 830 people have been killed in Gaza — and that number is steadily growing.

It is a shocking scale of losses and misery. With the Hamas attack taking place while the war in Ukraine continues with its own examples of horrendous abuse of civilians by Russian occupiers, it’s hard not to believe that we aren’t teetering towards an era of dangerous global instability.

It feels unsettling, and it’s hard not to believe that some countries and groups are deliberately taking advantage of the broad-ranging international instability to further their own causes.

But some things remain true.

Violence spawns violence, and revenge begets revenge.

That is the case on all sides, and it has been that way throughout humanity.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.” He’s right about that — but it’s not new.

Unfortunately, the one thing you can clearly say about the history of the Middle East is that the past is already reverberating through generations.

And that has certainly helped to lead us to the place where we find ourselves now.