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The Terrors of Ideological Warfare in Israel and Gaza

By Walter Donway

October 26, 2024

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At about 3 p.m. on October 17, 2024, in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, a training squad of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spotted three armed men leaving a building and opened fire. When one fled into the building, they lobbed a tank shell after him. Only the next morning did IDF, to its astonishment and to Israel’s enormous relief, identify the body as that of 62-year-old Hamas chieftain, Yahya Sinwar.

Just over a year previously, on October 7, 2023, a cross-border assault by Hamas and related Islamic jihadist groups murdered some 1,150 Israelis and wounded 7,500 in military bases, but mostly in their homes and at a concert—raping, burning, and beheading some—and took some 250 hostages, including 30 children. Since that assault, Israel intelligence services and military units, with help from the United States, had prioritized hunting down Sinwar.

He coordinated some two years of Hamas “calm” with Israel to disarm suspicions, a tactic that succeeded well in lulling Israeli intelligence.

Sinwar, above all others in the designated terrorist organization, Hamas, had led planning for two years for a murderous foray into Israel that would gun down, mutilate, rape, and kidnap Israelis of all ages. He coordinated some two years of Hamas “calm” with Israel to disarm suspicions, a tactic that succeeded well in lulling Israeli intelligence. He negotiated repeatedly with Iranian forces and with Hezbollah, Iran’s designated terrorist organization in Lebanon. His hope was for coordinated attack on Isreal by the three forces, all “franchises,” offshoots, of the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt in 1928. In the end, Iran and Hezbollah would not join the attack but committed to resist Israel’s response to the terrorist attack.

It was all about ideology, a commitment now a century old to modern day militant Islamism.

It was all about ideology, a commitment now a century old to modern day militant Islamism, to conversion or extermination of all Muslims not committed to the strategic view that nations anywhere in the world not converted to Islam were zones of warfare. No target of the Brotherhood became more urgent than the Zionist state in the heart of the Middle East on territory once Muslim (as part of the Ottoman Empire and then as a British protectorate).

 

Yahya Sinwar: The Classic Ideologue

Born into this conflict in October 1962, in the legendary Khan Yunis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, was Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar. His family had fled or been driven from Ashkelon during the 1948 war launched against Israel by the Arab world when Israel, endorsed by a vote of the United Nations, declared statehood. Poor, often hungry, the temporary refugees became permanent, mostly fed and otherwise supported by the United Nations. Most Arab nations declined ever to take these refugees, unwilling to lessen the conflict with Israel, instead invading or otherwise attacking Israel in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006.

An intelligent young Palestinian man, even in this bitter encampment and breeding and recruiting ground for Islamism, had a choice. For example, Israel offered all Palestinians full Israeli citizenship and rights, including religious tolerance. (The U.N. decision had proposed a state of Israel and a Palestinian state, a proposal which the Palestinian leadership and the Arab world rejected in favor of war.)

Yahya attended the Islamic University of Gaza, receiving a bachelor’s degree in Arab studies. By age 27, as a result of his first involvement with the Palestinian cause, he had earned four life sentences in an Israeli prison. Sinwar murdered Palestinians (reportedly with his bare hands, a machete, and a kaffiyeh) whom he suspected of collaborating with Israel—and then orchestrated the abduction and killing of two Israelis soldiers. Sinwar’s killing of suspected collaborators with Israel gained him the nickname “The Butcher of Khan Younis.”

History has demonstrated that ideology is among the most powerful, persistent, potentially transformative forces in the human personality. Philosophically, it may be defined as a set of beliefs that influence how we understand and act in the world. Today, we tend to limit “ideology” to the political realm, but an ideology also may focus on the economic, social, religious, or cultural. It is apparent that not all ideologies are held for purely epistemic reasons (that is, reasons proceeding from knowledge and logic), but often are based on “practical motives,” such as nationalism, religion, ethnicity, racism, and personal power.

Among the first examples of the terrors of ideological warfare were the religious sectarian wars of the 17th century attendant upon the Protestant Reformation, wars that killed more Europeans relative to population than WWI or WWII. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Marxist ideology in the form of socialism and communism led to more deaths of “class enemies,” “bourgeois peasants,” “capitalist exploiters,” “capitalist wreckers,” “landlords,” and the “middle class” than any previous or subsequent war or epidemic or natural catastrophe. Nazi ideology, proceeding from a long tradition of anti-Enlightenment German “idealism” (ideas as the fundamental reality)—and translated into German ethnic nationalism—systematically, deliberately, and on an industrial scale destroyed millions in Europe, including the Holocaust.

Not all ideology is destructive. On the contrary, for better or worse, it is essential to civilizations. Ideology is ideas. Ideas rooted in reality, demonstrated and defended by reason, were the legacy of Eighteenth-century Europe, the Age of Enlightenment (called then “The Age of Reason”), to Western civilization (and in some cases beyond). The crucial elements of Enlightenment ideology are reason, a focus on an objective reality, logic and scientific method, and tolerant and open discussion of all ideas. The test of reason, observation, and experimentation must be applied to all ideas. Tolerance for disagreement, dissent, advocated peacefully. Individualism as opposed to inherited status (class), race, ethnicity, nationality, and in opposition to all theories of society as a collective entity (the German Volk, the proletariat, the favored sect, the “believers,”). And “universalism,” the ideology that all men are created equal.[1]

The foremost twentieth-century philosopher of the Enlightenment, Ayn Rand, defined political ideology as “a set of principles aimed at establishing or maintaining a certain social system; it is a program of long-range action, with the principles serving to unify and integrate particular steps into a consistent course. It is only by means of principles that men can project the future and choose their actions accordingly.”[2]

Islamic ideology, however, is as far from Enlightenment ideas as is Marxism and Nazism.

Islamic ideology, however, is as far from Enlightenment ideas as is Marxism and Nazism, and the young man who entered an Israeli prison to serve four life sentences was already an Islamic ideologist, his views unshakably rooted in faith. For the 22 years that Sinwar served, he gained a command of Hebrew, studied Israeli history, and studied Israeli military doctrine and strategy. He became known as dominating, with powerful outside influence, the relentless pursuit of “collaborators.” He continued to coordinate their abduction and that of Israeli soldiers. From prison, Sinwar was one of the co-founders of the security apparatus of Hamas. At the same time, he carefully translated Hebrew autobiographies of former Israeli intelligence (Shin Bet) chiefs into Arabic, enabling his fellow inmates to study how Israel dealt with terrorism. He viewed himself as a specialist in the history of the Jews. He told fellow inmates: “They wanted prison to be a grave for us, a mill to grind our will, determination and bodies. But, thank God, with our belief in our cause we turned the prison into sanctuaries of worship and academies for study.” He wrote a novel he finished in 2004, entitled The Thorn and the Carnation, about his life and the Palestinian cause. It was confiscated by guards, but one copy survived and was recently published in English.[3]

It has been pointed out that “By the time Sinwar was released in 2011, the door for peace had both opened and closed, and he had witnessed none of the most transformative events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…. In the early 1990s the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel concluded the Oslo Accords, which set out a peace process for the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The process was derailed by suicide bombings by Hamas….”

In the annals of ideology, Sinwar, impressively intelligent and ambitious, is not the exception but the rule. With vastly different ideologies and on vastly different levels of influence, of course, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Maximilien Robespierre, perhaps Vladimir Lenin (not Stalin), Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh (my own personal favorite example), and others were driven to study, endurance, and super-human persistence by an early love affair and enduring marriage with an ideology.

Rand commented that the two crucial “weapons” that attract followers, including sometimes men with the highest potential, to an ideology are “intellectuality and idealism.”

Ayn Rand commented that the two crucial “weapons” that attract followers, including sometimes men with the highest potential, to an ideology are “intellectuality and idealism.” About the collectivist ideologies of the twentieth century, she wrote: “Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud….”[4]

It is not that commitment to ideology, even when motivated by ideas and ideals, automatically makes a given individual a hero—although it may make that individual, for a time, an effective, potent force. It is when commitment to an ultimately irrational ideology becomes an end-in-itself and an imagined future (e.g., a “worker’s paradise”) justifies any present sacrifice, that self-justification and power-seeking dominate the “idealist” and millions may die as a result.  And rationalizing the use of force and murder against men and women who have violated no one’s rights, but are only in the way of an ideology, becomes an evil to which historian Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, devoted chapters on Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, entitled: “The Devils.”

 

The Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood: Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis

Sinwar articulated clearly that Israel—the “Zionist entity”—must be eradicated, wiped from the earth, and replaced by a Palestinian nation. The same idea in almost the same words has been expressed by Iranian leaders. It is, in fact, a core ideological commitment of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” Hamas said in its first statement in the late 1980s….

Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It has called on members of the other two Abrahamic faiths—Judaism and Christianity—to accept Islamic rule in the Middle East. ‘It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror,’ it decreed. Hamas also rejected any prospect of peace or coexistence with the state of Israel. “Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

The Ideology and the Plan

The New York Times reported on discovery by Israeli forces, in the Hamas tunnel network, years of records in detail of meetings of Hamas, without exception attended and led by Sinwar, to plan the October 7 attack on some 21 Israeli communities. The murders and attendant outrages and hostage taking (Sinwar was notably sensitive to potential prisoner exchanges) would provoke Israel into an attack on Gaza that would cause extensive civilian casualties—ensured by Hamas’s military presence in schools, hospitals, apartment complexes, and U.N. faculties. The eventual scale of the civilian casualties would attract worldwide attention via the media to the suffering and victimization of Gaza. It would draw Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon into the battle for the Islamic cause. The longer the conflict, the more casualties and suffering, the greater the sympathy for Hamas and the condemnation of Israel.

All of this was articulated again and again in two years of planning. When the time came, Sinwar and the Hamas leadership managed to prolong the fighting, Sinwar eluding the manhunt again and again for more than a year as Israeli retaliation caught up with leader after leader in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon. During this time, the anticipated Israeli attacks, reported daily worldwide by the media, claimed a total of some 45,000 Gazan lives (both civilians and Hamas fighters, which Gazan reports would not distinguish), far more injuries, and the displacement eventually of some 2.3 million people (most of the population of Gaza ). The Oct. 7 attack on Israel invited war, and the people of Gaza have escaped none of the attendant catastrophes of war.

The deaths, displacements, suffering, and ruinous destruction, however, were not a problem for Sinwar; they were his intended means. The end, the guiding value, of his Islamist ideology was the eradication of an alien religion that was occupying the tribal lands of Islam. Some commentators have hastened to call the Israel-Hamas conflict a “religious war,” but Israel’s primary motivation is not ideology but national survival.

Founded and settled on Western European principles of human rights, democratic politics, religious tolerance, and market economics (with an initial strong socialist bent), Israel’s politics have also been shaped by a far narrower Zionist ethnic-religious ideology and, more recently, religious fundamentalism. These have proved compatible with the preservation of a Jewish state that at the end of 2023 had some 1.8 million Muslim residents (18 percent of the population, an increase of 35,000 from 2022). All religions are tolerated under Israel’s laws. Of the ancient Jewish populations throughout the Middle East, the largest today outside of Israel and Turkey is in Iran, where some 9,000 Jews remain despite daily chants of “Death to Jews.”

By the time Sinwar succumbed, at last, reportedly wounded but defiant, his plan was a success. There was much formal support for Israel among governments, but demonstrations against Israel swept cities and campuses in America. Western, economically prosperous, militarily powerful, self-assertive Israel was victimizing poor, third world, politically militant but defiant Gaza. Even the most supportive governments almost from the beginning called upon Israel to stop bombing Gaza, stop hunting down Hamas militants and their leaders—including all who committed the Oct. 7 attack—and enter into a ceasefire. Israel, led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, declared that Hamas, long committed to destroying Israel, had now acted unmistakably on that ideology and therefore must be permanently removed from the Palestinian leadership, and that all who participated in the planning of the October 7 massacre and who held the hostages must be killed.

 

Prospects for A Non-Islamist Palestinian State

Government leaders, especially US President Joseph Biden, have rushed to declare that this Israeli “victory” now opens the door to a ceasefire, peace, a “two-state solution ….” In fact, Biden began this mantra in the weeks immediately after October 7, and in his first visit to Israel went out of his way to emphasize “Palestinian rights.” Hamas declared immediately and predictably that with Sinwar’s death, Israel had not “won.” There would be no peace, no hostage release until Israel withdrew permanently and released large numbers of Palestinians from prison.

The impact of the death of an ideologue of the caliber of Sinwar should not be minimized. But the problem from the beginning has been that Islamic Jihadist ideology is driven throughout the Middle East by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the energy driving the entire network is Islamist ideology. (I cannot recommend highly enough The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death by Cynthia Farahat, Simon & Schuster Bombardier Books, 2022.

Islamism comprises many political ideologies. Broadly, the word is reserved to mean Islamic ideas giving rise to a political-social system. What this means in practice, however, becomes clear from listing the leading Islamist movements, most spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood since 1928: al-Qaeda, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Iranian Revolution’s velāyat-e faqīh system of government, The Saud dynasty’s Wahhābism in Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Hamas and Hezbollah are relatively recent Islamic-Jihadist movements.

Much of the Brotherhood’s aggressive force is channeled through Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen.

Much of the Brotherhood’s aggressive force is channeled through Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen; but the point of this long spear pressed into Israel’s side is Hamas in Gaza. Accordingly, Israel’s view is that the first step is to destroy Hamas as an organization, but Hamas is only the current nexus of the Islamist attack against Israel. Islamism in general utterly rejects a two-state solution. But if such a state were created, how could an Islamist government be prevented from taking power?

On November 20 of last year, Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a co-founder of Hamas, delivered a surprise speech at the United Nations denouncing Hamas. In the late 1990s, Yousef, now 45, went from Hamas leader to vocal critic and, in a total transformation, began to work covertly with Israeli security services, exposing and thwarting numerous planned terrorist attacks by Hamas. He appealed to his father to abandon the “monster” he had helped to create.

In his speech, including to astounded Hamas delegates, Yousef sought to reveal the “true face” of Hamas, which he characterized as a genocidal death cult commitment to violent extremism and its impact on the region. Offering insights into the inner workings and ideologies of the group, in his speech and in his book, Hamas Son, he has excoriated the brutally ideological “education” or indoctrination forced on Palestinian children, inculcating them with Islamist-directed Jihad, hatred of Israel, and the glory of death for the cause.[5]

These are the young men who on October 7, with shouts and howls of glee, killed Israelis of all ages, stripped and raped women, kidnapped children and grandmothers. After months of training, Hamas and related forces barraged Israeli military and civilian targets with rockets and drones, breached the borders, and raced into Israel:

Fierce fighting ensued. The bases are attacked with grenades, rocket launchers and automatic weapons, as numerous Hamas propaganda images later showed…At least fifty soldiers were killed in Nahal Oz, including many unarmed women….

At around 7am, the first images showed Hamas vehicles and fighters in the streets of Sderot, a town of 30,000 inhabitants…. Two vans of Hamas fighters indiscriminately killed people in the streets….

At the same time, several kibbutzim bordering the Gaza Strip were attacked…In the Be’eri kibbutz, the massacre lasted almost seven hours. Its thousand or so inhabitants suffered the deadliest attack on a single community on October 7.

Residents of Be’eri were methodically slaughtered, the attackers going from house-to-house for their victims. In all, 101 civilians were killed, along with 31 security personnel, and 32 people were taken hostage….

The largest massacre of civilians took place at the Supernova music festival, near the Re’im kibbutz, where 3,000 people had gathered… several armed Hamas commandos arrived by air and road. People were told to flee the scene on foot, some tried to escape across the fields. The attackers targeted them indiscriminately. Some 364 people were massacred…44 people attending the festival were taken hostage….

These were not Hamas fighters; they were young men trained for months in what they would do. The earmarks of youthful exuberance are everywhere: in the treatment of girls, the yells, the posts to social media and emails, the torching of locked rooms, the looting, the wild chases of fleeing victims. The BBC has seen and heard evidence of rape, sexual violence, and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks:

Several people involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of those killed in the attack told us they had seen multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.

Police have privately shown journalists a single horrific testimony that they filmed of a woman who was at the Nova festival site during the attack.

Video testimony of an eyewitness at the Nova music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.

In one video, the woman known as Witness S mimes the attackers picking up and passing the victim from one to another.

“She was alive,” the witness says. “She was bleeding from her back.”

She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim’s body during the assault.

“They sliced her breast and threw it on the street,” she says. “They were playing with it.”

The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues.

“He penetrated her and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn’t even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.”

These were the products of the relentless, “horrible” indoctrination of Palestinian students in Islamism’s “genocidal death cult” denounced by Mosab Yousef.

That these young Palestinians were educated to rejoice in killing for an ideology—that they were sent to murder any and all Israelis in an undeclared invasion with no remote reference to rules of war—that their leaders sent them to do this with full knowledge that Israel would stop at nothing to hunt them down—and what that would mean for the already struggling civilian population of Gaza, including many who had voted for them…these are the terrors of ideological warfare.

 

 

Notes

[1] How philosophers Change Civilizations: The Age of Enlightenment” by Walter Donway (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, 2024)

[2] “The Wreckage of the Consensus” in Capitalism: The Uknown Ideal by Ayn Rand, et.al. Signet: New York, 1967.

[3] The Thorn and the Carnation by Yahya Al-Sinwar was published by Tasq Company on March 13, 2024, but was available before that from various sources. Under public pressure, Amazon stopped offering the book.

[4] “The Cashing-In: The Student Rebellion” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand, et. al, Signet: New York, 1967.

[5]Son of Hamas: Mosab Hassan Yousef. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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