As the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom against Jews in Israel approaches, Israeli forces keep making progress in dismantling the Nazi-like group, while dealing blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The goal of both Tehran-financed groups is to destroy Israel, kill Jews or drive them from the region.
Backed by the reactionary bourgeois-clerical regime in Tehran, Hamas thugs attacked Israel last Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 people, wounding thousands and kidnapping 251 hostages. The thugs raped, mutilated and murdered dozens of women. This was the largest anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust during World War II. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah hailed it as a “heroic operation.”
The next day Hezbollah began daily drone and missile attacks on northern Israel in “solidarity” with Hamas. Israel has responded by targeting Hezbollah combatants, rocket launchers and arms depots.
Israel Defense Forces have dealt blows against Hamas, decimating its rocket launchers, killing key commanders and destroying more and more of its tunnels in Gaza. The IDF has announced that its troops are now prepared to operate inside Lebanon, to create conditions for the return of 55,000 Israelis evacuated from northern Israel after Hezbollah’s airstrikes.
The Wall Street Journal reported that top Joseph Biden administration diplomat Amos Hochstein met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv Sept. 16 to insist that they not escalate the conflict.
The next day nearly 3,000 Hezbollah’s operatives in Lebanon and some in Syria were wounded when their pagers blew up. It’s widely believed that Israeli agents had found a way to plant explosives in the pagers before they were delivered. Al Jazeera journalist Faisal al-Qassem called the attack a “significant pre-emptive strike” that was “similar to Israel’s attack on the Egyptian Air Force before the Six-Day War.”
As always, the U.S. rulers’ concern is not Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews, the Israelis evacuees in the north, or the threat that Hezbollah could launch its own “Oct. 7” pogrom. Their concern is stability for the political interests of the U.S. capitalist rulers and the profits they reap from oil and maritime trade.
Reflecting the line of the White House that Israel should end the war against Hamas, the New York Times and other liberal bourgeois media have written scores of articles blaming Netanyahu more than Hamas for the lack of a cease-fire and hostage deal.
In a Sept. 12 interview, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate long-term cease-fire, something that would leave Hamas intact. She laid out plans for a postwar Gaza without ever mentioning the name of Hamas.
Washington turns a blind eye to the Jew-hatred that is at the heart of Hamas’ existence and which guarantees more pogroms as long as Hamas is able. The reactionary group began as an offshoot of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, which like its mentor, Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, collaborated closely with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
This Nazi-linked history of Hamas is of little interest to the Times. It treats Hamas as if it is a popular — but brutal — “liberation” organization. That is the line of the Sept. 17 Times article by Adam Rasgon titled “Hamas Is Surviving War With Israel. Now It Hopes to Thrive in Gaza Again.”
Prettying up Hamas
The article, based on an interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in his home in Doha, Qatar, was published just a week after the release of a video of the underground chamber where six Jewish hostages were murdered in cold blood by Hamas and had been kept there at least for several weeks. There was not enough room in the narrow tunnel for the hostages to stand up. There was no toilet, no fan, no lighting. The body of Eden Yerushalmi, one of the six, weighed only 79 pounds.
The remaining 70 or so hostages still believed to be alive are likely in similar conditions.
But there is no indication that the Times asked Meshal what justification there could possibly be for taking hostages, for keeping them in those conditions, for murdering them, for raping and mutilating women.
The article doesn’t once mention that Hamas is opposed to Jews and Arabs living together in peace and that its central goal remains destroying Israel. The group built hundreds of miles of tunnels, but not one bomb shelter for the people of Gaza before it started this war, knowing Israel would respond.
The article quotes Meshal saying, “My responsibility is to fight and resist until liberation.” But what liberation is Meshal talking about? Hamas does not raise any demands to advance the rights of Palestinian workers or farmers in Gaza or anywhere else. Hamas is hated by many in Gaza, who feel freer to speak out since Hamas has been weakened.
For Hamas, Palestinian working people are nothing more than human shields and potential “martyrs” it can use to win public sympathy and funds along the road to imposing its brutal version of Sharia law.
The Times knows this. Just the week before the interview with Meshal it published an article titled “How Hamas Uses Brutality to Maintain Power.” For the first time the paper painted the broad picture of Hamas’ use of Palestinian civilians as human shields — what the Times calls “embedding in civilian areas,” of violent attacks on anyone who disagrees with them, and growing opposition to its dictatorial rule.
“Those launching rockets and firing bullets from civilian areas don’t care about civilians,” one Gaza resident told the Times. “If you want to fight Israel, you should go do that. But why are you coming to hide among civilians.”
Inside Israel, where 21% of the population is Arab — and Jews and Arabs belong to the same unions and often work side by side — Hamas has little support. Arab citizens and residents of Israel face discrimination and unequal treatment from the capitalist government. In response, they fight for equal rights, not the elimination of their fellow Jewish workers.
Biden puts pressure on Israel
Not to be outdone in justifying the Biden administration’s constant pressure on Israel, the Washington Post featured Rabbi Lonnie Kleinman, a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace, in a Sept. 13 article.
Kleinman focuses her ire, not at Hamas for slaughtering Jews, or using Gazans as human shields and placing its command posts in schools, mosques and apartment buildings, but at Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace, like the Times and the Post, is unwilling to tell the truth about Hamas’ and Tehran’s goal of destroying Israel and killing Jews.
Many on the liberal left justify their stance by repeating that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”
Tell that to Jewish students attending a welcome brunch sponsored by Hillel, a Jewish student group, at a Kosher restaurant near Baruch College in New York Sept. 3.
They were surrounded by members of Students for Justice in Palestine who chanted “All Zionists are racists,” and “Dogs off campus.” The thugs blocked the doorway, held photos of murdered babies in the students’ faces and hit a Hillel staffer. One thug formed his fingers in the shape of a triangle, the symbol Hamas uses to denote a military target.
Some in the mob shouted at a Jewish-looking couple walking down the street, “You ugly ass bitch! Go back to Brooklyn!”
The mobs’ action underscores the fact that fighting Jew-hatred is not just a question in the Middle East, but key to advancing the interests of working people everywhere.