Tomorrow 7 October marks the first anniversary of the surprise attack launched by Gaza’s Hamas against Israeli settlements close to the Gaza Strip. The attack resulted in destruction, death, and Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. Early on after the attack, some in the Arab World rushed to draw comparisons between that strike and the one launched by Egypt’s armed forces 50 years earlier on 6 October 1973. Back then, the Egyptian army and air force waged an attack against the Israeli army that had been occupying the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal for six years since it defeated Egypt in the Six-Day War in June 1967. The 6 October attack in 1973 was absolutely unexpected by Israel; it took the country by storm on the political, intelligence, and military levels.
Egypt succeeded in an epic crossing of the Suez Canal and in breaching the sand and concrete “invincible” Bar-Lev Line built by the Israelis on the Canal’s east bank; achieving thus not only a legendary victory for Egypt and its leadership, but also restoring the honour and dignity of the Egyptian people and army after the 1967 humiliating defeat. The Egyptian army made headway in Sinai till a ceasefire was announced on 24 October 1973; the arduous negotiations that followed allowed Egypt to regain Sinai in full and sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.
The rush to compare Hamas’s strike on 7 October to the Egyptian army’s strike on 6 October 1973 was thus a hollow comparison, since it reduced the entire matter to the element of surprise, missing all assessment of the objectives behind the strikes and, more importantly, the results achieved. Taken from this perspective, Egypt’s 6 October 1973 attack and Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack cannot be wider apart regarding the difference between them militarily, politically, and in strategic outcome. Whereas Egypt was able to fully recover its lands while suffering no losses in civilian lives; the Hamas attack led to a retaliatory Israeli war that is yet ongoing with no end in sight. The war has led to huge loss in life and unbearable misery caused by injuries, Israeli-inflicted starvation, and one of the ugliest, most horrendous destruction seen since World War II. The fighting evolved into human genocide and ethnic cleansing committed by Israel against defenceless Gaza Palestinian civilians. It is getting harder and harder for the human conscience to fathom the profit and loss calculations made by Hamas when it planned its strike, especially given that it knows full well Israel’s capacity of launching vicious retaliatory strikes that go far beyond the size or severity of any attack by Palestinian resistance; this has been proven time and again throughout the decades-long Israeli Palestinian conflict. Time alone will tell whether the Hamas attack was the result of some conspiracy between Hamas and Israel’s Mossad as some conspiracy theorists say, or was a disastrous miscalculation on the part of Hamas.
Those sceptical of conspiracy thought are invited to produce a logical explanation of the procrastination and stalling that has extended over the last six months regarding two pivotal matters. The first concerns conciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; had this been achieved it would have given the lie to Israeli claims that a two-State solution is unachievable while the Palestinian parties concerned are in conflict within themselves. The second matter needing explanation is why Hamas has been impeding a ceasefire agreement and an exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners at a time when the number of civilian victims and injured is constantly on the rise.
During the last year, I took it upon myself to refrain from presenting my own opinion, or even the opinions of Egyptian and Arab intellectuals regarding the unfolding events in Gaza and their aftermath, lest we be accused of siding with the Palestinians to the detriment of the Israeli viewpoint. Instead, I diligently followed and presented opinions expressed by Jewish, American, and European analysts. Today I present an opinion expressed by the American Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss; he is also the spokesman for the worldwide religious group Neturei Karta, founded in Jerusalem in 1937 as an offshoot of the Aguda movement which was opposed to the secular orientation and nationalism of political Zionism. Headquartered in the US, Neturei Karta does not recognise the State of Israel. Following are excerpts from a statement made by Rabbi Weiss.
“We have a message of this nakba day. For this 75 years of occupation, we want the world to know that what is being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, the oppression, the subduction, the terrible cruelty, is not in the name of our religion. Because we are Jewish and because we are true to our religion, we are in total opposition to the existence of the Zionist State of Israel. I quote ‘the Zionist State of Israel’ because it is Zionist, it’s not Jewish. Judaism in the Torah forbids Jews to have our own sovereignty, our own entity since the destruction of the temple.
“We are also forbidden to kill or to steal; the whole concept of taking this land from the Palestinian people is totally unethical and is contradictory to my religion of Judaism. Jews have always from day one stood up against this Zionist entity. We as Jews continue because we are true to the Torah… We want the world to know we are in solidarity, we are together with the Palestinian people in their suffering. And we hope and pray to God constantly for the total end of the occupation.
“We want the world to know that the Zionist movement is not a Jewish movement; it was a political material movement created by heretics and they simply try to incorporate our religion in order to intimidate and silence people and call them antisemitic if they stand in opposition… Antisemitic is supporting the State of Israel, it is a cause of exacerbating antisemitism by having this occupation. It is a cause of bloodshed of the Palestinians and Jews alike, it is the cause of the oppression of not only the Muslims and the Christians of Palestine but of the Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Jews staying in Palestine lived there prior to the State, they have lived and continue to live till today, and demonstrate daily and get brutally beaten and arrested.
“This is the sad story of this terrible nakba; it is a tragedy, a calamity… And God with His compassion, should bring a speedy removal of the Zionist State of Israel, so we can once again live together in harmony: Jews and Arabs as we had for all these hundreds and hundreds of years, so Jews could show their gratitude to Arab and Muslim countries for their embracing of Jews and giving them a home.”
Watani International
6 October 2024
