The Israeli government has released documents its forces captured in Gaza that provide further proof Iran’s capitalist rulers and the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon — despite their denials — were centrally involved in the yearslong preparations for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, murderous pogrom against Jews in Israel.
As Israeli forces strike more blows against Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel is heading to a showdown with the reactionary capitalist regime in Iran. Tehran’s training and financing of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — and its moves to acquire nuclear weapons — threaten the existence of Israel, the only unconditional refuge for Jews anywhere in a world where Jew-hatred continues to raise its ugly head.
Hamas thugs killed 1,200 people in its pogrom a year ago, wounded thousands, took 251 hostages and raped and mutilated dozens of women. It was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in World War II.
Israeli forces have pushed Hezbollah away from Israel’s northern border, finding weapons stores and tunnels throughout southern Lebanon that the reactionary Islamist outfit had prepared for carrying out its own pogrom.
Israeli officials showed the New York Times minutes from 10 Hamas planning meetings that include details of the group’s consultations with Iranian and Hezbollah officials.
The documents make clear that a central aim of Hamas’ assaults on Israeli military bases near the Gaza border a year ago was to remove any obstacle to it brutalizing and killing as many civilians as possible. Among the files reviewed by the Washington Post was a 36-page computer slide presentation created in 2022, laying out other possible targets, including shopping malls, a skyscraper in Tel Aviv and passenger rail stations.
The documents include letters to Tehran asking for $500 million on top of what the Iranian regime had already given Hamas, along with more training and equipment. “We promise you that we will not waste a minute or a penny unless it takes us toward achieving this sacred goal” of destroying Israel, a June 2021 letter to Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei signed by Hamas officials says.
Central to Hamas’ plan was fooling the Israeli government into believing that Hamas had changed and now “wants life and economic growth” for Gazans.
To create that false impression, Hamas scaled down attacks and asked the Israeli government to grant more permits for Gazans to work inside Israel. Hamas knew that the people of Gaza would pay a deadly price from an Israeli counterattack, but that was a key component of its strategy — the creation of a new levy of “martyrs.”
Hamas’ goal: Kill the Jews
Improving the life of Gazans has never been part of Hamas’ program. Its founding covenant states that “the Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews).” Hamas’ political continuity goes back to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, in the 1930s and ’40s. Al-Husseini, a close collaborator with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany, helped to set up a Muslim unit of the SS. He asked Nazi officials to prevent Jewish children in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria from going to Palestine, demanding they be deported to Poland, where the Nazis had set up death camps.
Facts described in a new book by Ha’aretz reporter Lee Yaron, 10/7: 100 Human Stories help to answer those who still harbor illusions that Israel should negotiate with Hamas and its backers to find a “diplomatic” solution. While she says the Israeli government shares responsibility for today’s conflict, the facts she presents are telling.
Hamas targeted ‘peace activists’
Before Oct. 7, Yaron notes, Kibbutz Be’eri members routinely “volunteered to transport Palestinian patients to Israeli hospitals and annually donated thousands of dollars to families in Gaza.” Many of its residents were “peace activists” and opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hamas deliberately targeted them. One in 10 residents of Be’eri was murdered or kidnapped Oct. 7. That includes the killing of 74-year-old Vivian Silver, a leader of Women Wage Peace.
One of the key reasons Tehran orchestrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom was to disrupt the “Abraham Accords,” the establishment of diplomatic and economic relations with Israel by the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and Kosovo in 2020 and 2021. Tehran and Hamas feared that Saudi Arabia was about to join the accords and recognize Israel.
The accords increased the possibilities from different countries and nationalities to travel, meet each other, and act together to defend their common class interests. This is anathema to Tehran and Hamas.
The documents released by the Israel Defense Forces show that Hamas urged Tehran and Hezbollah to directly join the attack on Israel. But they held back.
What really concerned Tehran is the growing opposition among working people in Iran — among Persians, as well as oppressed nationalities, including Kurds, Baluch, Azerbaijani and Arabs — to the bourgeois clerical regime and its attempts to extend its reactionary influence and military positions throughout the region. That’s the biggest brake on the regime.
Despite pressure to support Tehran’s war moves, retirees, teachers, miners, oil workers, nurses and others have been taking to the streets to demand higher wages and pensions and better job conditions. Some recent actions have included slogans denouncing the regime’s “war mongering.”
Tehran “fired 181 ballistic missiles on Israel” on Oct. 1, the Wall Street Journal noted, “and a day later President [Joseph] Biden was already telling Israel what it shouldn’t do in response.” While Israel shot down most of the missiles, some penetrated the country’s missile defense systems, damaging hundreds of homes and businesses and demonstrating the Iranian rulers’ ability to inflict death and destruction on the Jewish people.
From the start of the war in Gaza, the U.S. government has pressed Israel to agree to a cease-fire — without dismantling Hamas to prevent future pogroms — and to back off from pushing Hezbollah away from the Israeli border.
The U.S. rulers’ concern is not the survival of Jews in Israel, but “stability” for U.S. imperialism’s own economic and political interests, including the push by the Biden administration to advance its relations with the rulers in Iran.
The White House claimed Oct. 15 that Netanyahu has agreed not to target Iran’s oil industry or nuclear sites — for now. According to press reports, in exchange Washington is sending a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system — THAAD — to bolster Israel’s defenses from Tehran’s airstrikes.
But Netanyahu also issued a statement saying, “We listen to the American government’s thoughts, but will make our final decisions based on Israel’s national security needs.” This is especially true concerning the regime in Tehran, which threatens Israel’s existence.
That same day Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken threatened to cut off some military aid to Israel unless it reverses what they called the “deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.”