Hamas and the "wicked son"

When freedom leaves a bitter taste

Mural in St Kilda, Melbourne. Photo by Tony Lupton

Tonight Jews celebrate Passover, usually described as a commemoration of the Israelites’ liberation from slavery and flight from Egypt. But that’s not entirely accurate. Judaism being a highly textual, highly cerebral religion, the Passover Seder night is an extended — as in, bloody long! — interrogation of what we talk about when we talk about Exodus. It is a strange ritual of curated conversations around the dinner table. The question animating the ritual is: How do we tell the story of Exodus to a new generation?

Talk about meta.

To be frank, in recent years I would have preferred to watch Netflix than do Seder yet again, talk, yet again, about how we were once slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt but now we are a free people and how in each and every generation one is obliged to see themselves as if they had personally been freed from bondage in Egypt.

The irony, right?

There I was assuming the Jewish story was basically over, that Israel had ongoing strife, for sure, but that the Jewish people, certainly in Australia, certainly in the US, had outrun history. That each and every generation would enjoy a more expansive sense of freedom and that the biggest danger facing Jews would be falling so blissfully into the loving embrace of our host countries that we disappear entirely.

As it turns out the ancient Passover scripture gets a new lease of life this year. Perhaps if I hadn’t succumbed to complacency, the resurgent Jew hatred, unleashed within hours of October 7, might not have come as such a shock.

I’m shocked afresh each and every day at the ever more brazen and gleeful ostracism, exclusion and targeting of Jews in the free world.

At Columbia University an academic was hired as a visiting scholar after posting on social media on October 11: “I’m with Hamas & Hezbollah & Islamic Jihad.” In recent days student protestors at the Ivy League institution called for more October 7s against pro-Zionist Jews on campus. In London, police threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man because his presence risked provoking anti-Israel demonstrators.

In Australia, in an episode terribly under-examined in the media, a Jewish uni student called Benjamin Cohen was wrongly accused of being the Bondi Junction mass murderer. The rumour disgracefully made its way into the bulletin of a commercial news station — Cohen is suing. The crucial thing to understand is it’s no random coincidence someone called “Benjamin Cohen” was targeted for the crime. On X pro-Putin and pro-Palestinian accounts amplified the false accusation. On TikTok one user made the subtext overt: “The attacker’s name is Benjamin Cohen IDF Soldier.”

Do I need to labour the maliciousness on display here? The suggestion is that Jews and Israelis, no longer satisfied with confining their “genocide” to the babies of Gaza, are diversifying into the mass-murder of Western civilians. This idea would seem novel only to those unfamiliar with the blood libel superstition where the Jews of medieval Europe were accused of ritually sacrificing Christian children — at Passover.

As to Israel’s war, some of the loudest voices denouncing it as “genocidal” are themselves Jewish and self-consciously so. Many of these same voices are also explicitly anti-Zionist. Of these people the progressive media cannot get enough, which would be fine if only news and opinion editors were equally enthusiastic about publishing dissenting voices in the Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities.

In any case, we can expect many heated conversations around Seder tables tonight. Tablet magazine last night hosted an 11th-hour Zoom session with a rabbi and psychologist to equip American Jews with strategies for managing conflict. (The session was entitled, “Will the Family Still Be Speaking After Passover?”)

But none of this is new: in fact, the Seder’s order of proceedings, set out in a text called The Haggadah, which means “telling” — like I say, it’s meta — ponders how we pass on the story of Exodus to four archetypal sons: the wise, the wicked, the simple and the one that does not know what questions to ask.

The Americans, needless to say, produce sanitised, contemporary interpretations of the text for a cotton-wool generation, re-imagining the four sons as neither simple nor wicked nor clueless nor wise. One rabbi suggests this year one of the four archetypal young Jews is probably a “Palestinian solidarity activist.” When such a child cheers on the murder of Israeli civilians in the name of “resistance” they’re “wicked” in my book.

And like I say, they’re a recurring motif in Jewish history: the child who struggles to acknowledge that the oldest hatred has long masqueraded as enlightenment. Today, Jew hatred is expressed in the ideology that insists all peoples, and in particular the Palestinians, should have the right to control their own destiny, but the Jews alone must remain servile and passive, their freedom dependent on the goodwill of others.

The Jewish child who believes if only Israel didn’t exist their lives would be a delightful, frictionless ride, an unbroken run of appearances at literary festivals and promotion in university faculties, who believes that but for irredeemable Israel the intelligentsia would shower Jews with love and solidarity, well, this child needs to swallow a kilo of bitter herb.

Happy Passover to those who mark it.

Below is an edited version of a piece I wrote last week in The Jewish Independent in response to an editorial calling on Israel to end the war.

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The Jewish Independent has published an editorial calling on Israel to end the Gaza war. The editorial argues Israel’s six-month old war against Hamas is “fundamentally a failure”, as the Jewish state has failed to achieve its two stated aims of returning the hostages abducted on October 7 and eliminating the terror organisation, and in the process has turned Gaza into a human catastrophe and itself into a pariah state. 

To argue the war should continue would doubtlessly strike many decent people as monstrous. But as last weekend’s unprecedented Iranian attack on the Jewish state demonstrates, the Middle East is a volatile place where military and political calculus typically involves weighing the horrific against the unthinkable to arrive at a decision just shy of the apocalyptic. 

At the least, I consider it intellectually limp not to grapple, and the editorial does not, with the cost of Israel ending the war, whatever that means. In recent weeks the Israel Defence Force has withdrawn most of its soldiers from southern Gaza; it is unclear if this signals a shift to smaller, targeted incursions or if the troop pullback is temporary ahead of a large-scale assault on Rafah, where the last half a dozen or so Hamas battalions are reportedly holed up in the tunnels.

And the consensus among independent Israeli defence analysts and politicians, including staunchly anti-Netanyahu politicians, is that Israel must, at some point and in some fashion, confront the remaining Hamas formations both, to borrow a phrase from the editorial, for its own sake as well as for any hope of a peaceful future. 

I know this because last month I travelled to Israel on a media trip organised by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council — yes, one of those pro-Israel “junkets” that according to the journalists’ union and many of my colleagues transmutates previously sceptical journalists into lifelong agents of Zionist influence. 

Should Hamas remain undefeated, free to pursue its stated goal of repeating October 7 “again and again,” would the internally displaced Israeli civilians from the border communities of the south feel safe to return to their homes?

The case for persisting with the war is put most persuasively, in my view, by Benny Morris, whose work is invoked frequently, if erroneously, to prove Israel is illegitimate from birth. As one of the “new historians” of the 1980s, Morris unearthed archival material contradicting Zionist myths that Palestinians fled their homes of their own free will during Israel’s War of Independence. To the disappointment of his anti-Zionist fans, Morris brings the same unsentimental clarity to Israel’s current predicament as he did to its foundation story. 

Writing in The New York Times on April 11, he first set out the case against an assault on Rafah, starting with the inevitability of many more civilian deaths among the 1.4 million Gazans sheltering there, and ending with the ratcheting up of tensions to full-scale regional war.

Against this hefty list of worst-case scenarios Morris suggests one that’s worse still: a Hamas victory.

No military action will exterminate Hamas, the editorial argues, “short of an unthinkable genocide against the entire population of Gaza”. Depressing, really, when even a Zionist publication such as TJI parrots the most defamatory of anti-Israel propaganda. Even if, heaven forbid, the IDF were to kill hundreds of thousands more Gazan civilians in a final bid to eliminate Hamas, the mass killing still wouldn’t constitute genocide, whatever the ideologues of the UN and its associated NGOs might say about the matter, because the objective would not be wiping out a people but defeating a fanatical enemy.

Lest this needs saying: should Israel proceed with an operation in Rafah it must devise a viable plan to protect Gazan civilians unless the Jewish state wishes to undermine what’s left of its moral authority and fatally imperil its alliance with an increasingly exasperated Biden administration. 

Such a plan, for instance shifting the population west, would be logistically complex, to put it mildly, although not necessarily beyond the capability of the start-up nation. It may well, as Israel’s unacceptably sluggish approach to the delivery of humanitarian aid suggests, be beyond the political capability of a Netanyahu government beholden to its far-right coalition partners. That, however, is another question. 

“Islamic fundamentalist terrorism has not been fully vanquished anywhere in the Middle East entirely by military means, and Gaza is no exception,” the editorial continues — wrongly. Islamic State in Syria and Iraq was vanquished militarily — certainly not through polite persuasion, anyway. The terror group no longer controls territory, is no longer a state or an army, even if it still carries out isolated attacks.

In a similar vein, Hamas no longer controls Gaza’s north though it persists in insurgent attacks, such as its recent re-occupation of Shifa hospital. Israel, or some other force, will likely have to spend years fighting a counter-insurgency. Acknowledging that grim reality is very different to saying Hamas cannot be defeated.  

I’m not sure when or how we decided that defensive wars, be they in Gaza or Ukraine, had to be short, painless and not really wars at all.

“By continuing the war,” the editorial says, “Israel is only adding to the anger of a new generation of Hamasniks, radicalised Palestinian refugees who experience Israel as an oppressor and believe that October 7 was a justified attack on an enemy to be vanquished by any means necessary.” 

Frankly, I doubt it’s humanly possible for the radicalised Palestinians to be any more “Hamasnik” than they are already.

But the hateful fascism of wartime Germany and Japan, for instance, died with their respective regimes. The argument that the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza will sow the seeds of future hate has more than a whiff of Orientalism, with its romantic evocation of the angry Muslim incapable of insight or self-correction, doomed to nurse rage and resentment down the generations. It is untrue: within years of yet another humiliating military defeat in 1973, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. 

I can’t see a way out of the editorial’s central contradiction, namely, that the prerequisite to peace between Israelis and the Palestinians is the removal of Hamas and yet the cost of removing Hamas militarily is so high as to be prohibitive.

Perhaps negotiators can arrange a safe passage for Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s psychopath in chief in Gaza and his associates to Qatar or Turkey where they can live it up for the rest of their days satisfied in the knowledge they’ve helped tens of thousands of their former subjects attain martyrdom with its attendant conga line of waiting virgins. This would count as a good outcome by the standards of the Middle East. 

But it’s an outcome entirely contingent on the acquiescence of the Hamas leaders in their subterranean headquarters and thus far their strategy of sacrificing their defenceless population so as to heap pressure on Israel to prematurely lay down its arms is going swimmingly. 

This brings me to the 132 remaining hostages, a subject so painful it’s almost unspeakable – certainly, the UN, the NGOs, the Red Cross et-al rarely speak of it. Israel has the power to bring about Hamas’ military defeat and removal from power, but Hamas, by holding captives, has the power to frustrate that aim, which was why they took hostages in the first place. 

We might legitimately worry Benjamin Netanyahu is resisting a hostage deal for fear of collapsing his government although this theory assumes the broader Israeli public supports the editorial’s call to negotiate “a permanent end to the war in exchange for the return of all hostages”. I’m not sure that’s true. In any event, it is nonsensical to demand from Israel an outcome over which it has limited control. It is unclear how many hostages are even alive. 

A better future for Israeli and Palestinian children hinges on the emphatic defeat of Hamas.