West must realise it’s Hamas who is to blame for the deaths

Hamas is winning the propaganda war.

The death of seven international aid workers in Gaza, including an Australian citizen, is a pivotal moment in global politics and the politics of the Middle East.

We must keep front and centre the dreadful human tragedy involved. These people were not only innocent but heroic, putting themselves in danger to bring relief to distressed civilians in great need.

It was a tragedy for the seven civilians killed, and especially for their grieving families. It’s right that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong give the issue high priority and demand an explanation, and full transparency, from the Israeli government. The Albanese government has said it is not satisfied with the initial explanation from the Israelis. It has demanded a fuller investigation.

It was also a tragedy for the international aid sector. The World Central Kitchen is a reputable charity that works in many parts of the world. It was co-ordinating its activities with the Israeli government, which has an interest in getting aid into Gaza, especially aid carried by a body other than the UN Relief and Works Agency. UNWRA has been demonstrated beyond doubt to have many of its members as active supporters of the Hamas terrorist group. Israel is determined it not have a central role in the future of Gaza.

The killing of the aid workers is also a tragedy for Israel. The Jewish state does not exist in order to kill civilian aid workers. This is entirely against its ethos.

Israel Defence Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi apologised for the killings and said: “The severe incident is the result of a mistaken identification under complex conditions, at night, during a war. This should not have happened.”

He apologised for the killings, as did Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took responsibility on behalf of Israel.

But there was one group for which this was not a tragedy, but a joy; one group for which this was exactly the outcome it had contrived to bring about.

This group is Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organisation under Australian law. It is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Its original charter was drenched in historic, grotesque, racist anti-Semitism. It has ruled Gaza internally as a ruthless dictatorship. There are hardly any Christians left in Gaza. When Hamas took power, it murdered its Palestinian political opponents, including throwing numbers of them off the roofs of tall buildings. It regards Jews as sub-human and has always denied the legitimacy of any Jewish state behind any borders in the Middle East.

It demands that Palestine be free, from the river to the sea, by which it means there should be no Israel at all. On October 7, it attacked Israeli civilian settlements and kibbutz communities not on Palestinian soil but within Israel proper. It murdered, mutilated, tortured, defiled, raped and ritually humiliated every Jew it could lay its hands on.

Its original plan involved racing the 40km across from Gaza to the West Bank, which is why it labelled its operation the Al-Aqsa Flood. It hoped to raise a West Bank uprising that would engage in a similar orgy of murdering Jews. But the Hamas terrorists were distracted and delayed. They came upon the Nova music festival, so many young girls to rape and torture, so many Jews to kill, so many hostages to take. This delay allowed Israeli soldiers finally to intervene and stop that part of the plan. Hamas didn’t get to the West Bank.

But Hamas is delighted at the killing of the aid workers. The death of civilians, Israeli civilians, Palestinian civilians and foreign aid workers, has been a central part of its strategy from the very first day.

The October 7 massacre had several purposes. One was to humiliate and distress, to demoralise, Israeli society. Another was to win prestige for Hamas among Palestinians and in the wider Muslim world as the group most able to hurt Israel.

But the third element of the Hamas strategy was specifically to get a lot of its own civilians killed in order to win the propaganda war against Israel. In this objective, Hamas has been extremely successful.

Hamas, it turns out, has a tunnel network of well over 600km underground throughout Gaza. There are large invasion tunnels to infiltrate into Israeli territory. There are luxurious accommodation tunnels for the Hamas leadership. There are tunnels that contain weapons and rocket manufacturing capacities. Tunnels for hiding prisoners. Tunnels for storing food. And, above all, tunnels for the safe tactical transport and manoeuvre of Hamas terrorists.

But all these military purposes were in a sense secondary to the true political purpose of the tunnels. Like all terrorist groups in history, Hamas operates primarily to win a targeted propaganda war. It seeks military and physical effects, but its real victory or defeat comes in the battle of the narratives.

Hamas has been extraordinarily successful in establishing its narrative, that the conflict is Israel’s war in Gaza, in particular Israel’s assault on civilians in Gaza.

Hamas, which is pledged to a specific and religious extremist interpretation of Islam, always wanted Israel to be forced to kill civilians, even unintentionally. The tunnels are central to this. Hamas has purposefully placed its tunnels, and its most important command and logistics centres within the tunnels, underneath hospitals, schools and other civilian establishments.

This meant that in order to get to Hamas, both its terrorist fighters and its essential tunnel infrastructure, Israel had to go through civilian buildings on the surface. Even with the greatest possible effort to minimise civilian casualties, this meant it was certain that Israeli forces would inadvertently kill some civilians.

So here is the simple sequence of Hamas’s deliberate strategy to get Israeli, Palestinian and international civilians killed. Hamas murders Israeli civilians in as grotesque, ritualised and sadistic a manner as possible. This forces Israel to engage a military campaign to destroy Hamas’s military capability. That guarantees that a substantial numbers of Palestinian civilians will be killed. This, Hamas rightly calculates, will trigger first Islamic opinion, then Western international opinion, to condemn Israel. This humanitarian tragedy will also ensure the presence of large numbers of international aid workers and, from Hamas’s point of view, with a bit of luck some of them will be killed and then the world will turn on Israel with even greater ferocity.

This will force Israel to end its military campaign in Gaza before Hamas is effectively destroyed, thus handing Hamas a huge victory over Israel, albeit at the cost of ­horrendous civilian deaths, deaths Hamas is responsible for, and has designed right from the start.

Among the Albanese government’s many statements condemning Israel over the past few days, Penny Wong declared: “Let’s not beat around the bush. We know who is responsible here.”

By this she meant the Israeli Defence Forces and the Israeli government. But Wong is 100 per cent wrong. It’s not Israel, but Hamas, which is not only responsible for these deaths but designed the circumstances exactly measured to produce deaths like this.

It’s notable that neither Albanese nor Wong had anything like this strong a reaction to the death of Galit Carbone, the Australian woman Hamas murdered intentionally as part of the October 7 atrocity, as they did about the ­Australian woman killed in a tragic accident by Israel.

The dark implication in much of the commentary has been that Israel kills civilians on purpose. There is no evidence for this. In one terrible case, Israeli soldiers killed two fellow Israeli soldiers, hostages they thought were Hamas terrorists. In split-second decisions of war, in life-and-death desperation, soldiers make mistakes. There is an immense double standard in the condemnation that Albanese and Wong have brought to Israel.

Allied battles in Falluja and Mosul had much higher civilian death rates than the Gaza conflict.

In the Australian engagement in Afghanistan, for example, our soldiers tragically and unintentionally killed civilians. There are few politicians, indeed few men, I admire more than Andrew Hastie, the Coalition’s defence shadow minister. For a book I wrote a few years ago he told me of the tragic and terrible time in Afghanistan when he called in a strike on the enemy. There was a mistake and the strike hit two innocent Afghan children. It was the worst moment of Hastie’s life. He took his soldiers to try to assist the boys medically, then in time spoke at length to their families. Like the Israelis, he took responsibility.

Australian soldiers have been involved in tragedies like that in war many times. In Afghanistan, on more than one occasion, Americans mistakenly bombed Afghan weddings. These were mistakes, tragic mistakes. They weren’t intentional murders. In the Western intervention in Libya in 2011, when Britain was the leading European NATO participant, there were frequent cases of friendly fire. Yet the essential moral purpose of the NATO mission, to prevent Colonel Gaddafi from slaughtering his own people, was not called into doubt because of these tragic accidents.

So here is how the contemporary centre-left in Australia seems to interpret friendly fire incidents. If Australia’s military accidentally kills a civilian in the midst of conflict, it’s a tragedy; if the Americans do it, it’s an accident that demonstrates their hubris and lack of precise knowledge; if the Israelis do it, it’s obviously a war crime.

Albanese and Wong have extended no reasonable benefit of the doubt to Israel over motivation. The Albanese government is the first Labor government in our history to be dominated by the socialist left, including Albanese and Wong themselves. They are pragmatic and generally sensible people but their whole ideological formation is inclined to accept the meta-narrative that Israel is inherently wicked and even illegitimate.

The Albanese government has been extremely uncomfortable in the support it has felt it had to give to Israel in the wake of the October 7 atrocities. Albanese had no interest in visiting Israel. Wong visited eventually but pointedly refused to visit the site of the Hamas attacks, as though there were something aesthetically unacceptable about a modern narrative in which Israelis are plainly the wronged party.

As I say, Hamas, like all terrorist groups, is waging fundamentally a propaganda war, a war to establish its narrative in the popular mind. The Western media, and now even the Albanese government, even as they condemn Hamas atrocities when asked about them, are unwittingly co-operating in this Hamas endeavour.

Terrorists win through the public impact of their theatrical violence. Even if it’s condemned, the violence can still have the desired effect.

Take a couple of examples from history. In 1968, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive against military and civilian targets in South Vietnam. It was, militarily, a comprehensive disaster for the Viet Cong which was effectively destroyed as a military force as a result of its defeat. Seven years later, South Vietnam did fall to the communists, but not to the Viet Cong. Rather, South Vietnam suffered a completely conventional military invasion by the regular armed forces of North Vietnam.

The Tet Offensive for a time even seemed a political defeat for the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong savagery, especially the massacres they conducted in Hue, did convince millions of South Vietnamese of the barbarism of the communists. But the sheer savagery of their fighting, and the ferocious counter-measures needed to defeat them, demoralised the American public and began the process of its withdrawing even logistic and economic support for the South.

For the last few years of the Vietnam War, South Vietnam fought effectively on its own without American, much less Australian, combat troops. But the terrorists had succeeded in making their cause deeply unpopular in the West.

Al-Qai’da was unable to repeat its 9/11 atrocity against America, but it did produce the polarisation it wanted and subsequently recruited hundreds of thousands of Arabs and North Africans to its cause and worldview.

Terrorism succeeds only against a liberal society because it motivates all the exquisite moral horror at violence in a liberal society to create a reaction not against the terrorists, but often also against their victims and opponents, who are seen as somehow provoking the terrorists, somehow providing the “root causes” of ­terrorism.

On October 7, 1200 Israelis were murdered, many after gruesome rape and torture, and some 250 were taken hostage. A proportional number of casualties in the US would be well over 40,000. In other words, the impact of October 7 on Israel was much more than 10 times that of the 9/11 al-Qa’ida outrage in the US, when some 3000 people were killed.

But unlike the US, Israel is surrounded by powerful enemies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the mullahs’ regime in Iran, dedicated to its destruction. Yet at least for a couple of years we had no trouble entering imaginatively into solidarity with the Americans. That imaginative identification was a good thing. John Howard rightly invoked the ANZUS alliance in solidarity with the US. Albanese couldn’t even be bothered visiting Israel. The Jew-hating atrocity was not even finished before Wong was urging restraint on Israel.

Neither Albanese nor Wong has any truck with anti-Semitism. But this atmosphere of toxic and ­relentless hostility to Israel has a great deal to do with the legacy of anti-Semitism, the world’s oldest and most despicable hatred, which still infuses so much of Western thought. Part of it has to do with the presence of large Muslim voting blocs in Sydney and Melbourne. Almost all the big Western nations have experienced large-scale inward Muslim immigration. Without exception, these populations are anti-Israel and any inflammation in the Middle East therefore furnishes squalid electoral rewards for politicians willing to beat up on Israel.

But the more important factor is the general ideological drift in Western societies, especially universities. Part of the post-modern, critical theory world view is that the West, including all Western societies, is inherently evil. This is despite the presence of democratic government, generous welfare states and the rule of law.

Western societies in this view are not democracies with problems and shortcomings, they are, at their root and in their essence, racist, sexist, class exploitative, homophobic and above all colonialist.

Although it is grotesque, there is a certain ideological coherence in the radical end of Aboriginal activism teaming up with the extremist end of Palestinian activism. Under the rubric of contemporary identity politics, everyone is designated as a villain or a victim, not on the basis of their actions but on the basis of their ethnic identity. Palestinians and Aboriginal Australians are always victims in this telling.

More importantly, Israel and Australia are illegitimate colonialist, settler societies, so have no right to exist in their modern forms.

This mindset has penetrated Western universities and in some bowdlerised form many media organisations such as the BBC, and our own ABC.

The ABC’s coverage of this whole tragic conflict has been relentlessly hostile towards Israel, often inaccurate, not remotely balanced, absurdly naive in accepting Hamas claims and relentlessly cynical about Israel. This in turn conditions public sentiment, which is growing increasingly hostile to Israel.

Let’s take a couple of examples. Almost every Western media outlet relies on Palestinian stringers who are either supporters of Hamas, or must operate under Hamas rule and pressure. BBC journalists have been dismissed when this has come to light.

Similarly, every piece of footage filmed in Gaza, unless under Israeli escort, is done so under effective Hamas supervision. Everyone routinely quotes the figure that there have been 32,000 people killed in this conflict. Certainly there have been a lot of people killed and that is an appalling tragedy. But 32,000 is a Hamas figure, from Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health authorities. Hamas is the psychological, moral and political equivalent of Islamic State or al-Qa’ida. Would anyone accept Islamic State figures as authoritative?

Statistical analysis of the figures shows they are nonsensical. For a month they increased by almost an identical number every day, as though there were no variation in the number killed. To add the claimed numbers of women and children dead to the certain numbers of Hamas fighters dead would mean, statistically, that the IDF killed no non-combatant men. ABC employees were enraged at their staff meeting that Hamas-provided figures could be treated with scepticism similar to the scepticism routinely applied to anything Israel says.

But Israel is a democracy with a robust internal contest of ideas and interrogation of facts. Hamas is one of the most extreme and bloodthirsty terrorist organisations in the world. How can anyone put them on the same footing?

Mainstream Jewish community organisations are barely heard on the ABC. But a new Jewish organisation, with a minuscule membership and no credibility, will lead a news bulletin if it is denouncing Israel. The ABC only likes Jews who detest Israel.

The ABC has absolutely no interest in the nuance of Israeli opinion that supports the military operation in Gaza, even if Netanyahu himself is increasingly deeply unpopular. Thus Gideon Levy, a far-left Israeli journalist who hates his government and assigns the lion’s share of the blame for all regional ills to Israel, enjoyed a devoted and uncritical interview of more than half an hour on Radio National’s Late Night Live, and then in another interview dominated an allegedly straight ABC news channel broadcast. The ABC likes Israelis who hate Israel. Where is the matching ABC interview of an Israeli journalist like Ehud Yaari, who is critical of Netanyahu but supports the military action and understands the need to destroy Hamas. Yaari has had an illustrious journalistic career, has lived in many parts of the Middle East and knows the region intimately, but he doesn’t suit the ABC narrative.

The ABC routinely implies, as do Albanese and Wong, that the chief obstacle to a Palestinian state is Israeli intransigence. Yet Hamas has always rejected the existence of a Jewish state, and on at least four occasions Israel has made generous, good-faith offers to create a Palestinian state that the Palestinian leadership has rejected each time. This is lavishly detailed in the memoirs of Clinton administration officials, for example. Yet the presentation is always that Israel has somehow stood in the way of an ­obvious and just solution.

Israel is losing support in the West, and that has grievous implications not only for Israel, but for the West. Hamas is winning this propaganda war, to the detriment of all human welfare. The chief enemy of Hamas is not Israel. The chief enemy of Hamas is the truth. Yet the truth has few friends in contemporary Western intelligentsia.