More than 1,000 are dead in Israel, including more than a dozen U.S. citizens, following a massive campaign of brutal violence by the Islamist terror group Hamas.
Officials from across Israel have condemned Hamas’s atrocities as a 9/11 moment. There’s little reason to doubt that the new war between Israel and Hamas will carry all of the geopolitical consequences that such a comparison merits.
Key among those consequences is the possibility of a new era of state-sponsored Islamic terrorism.
The United States is sending munitions and other equipment to Israel and moving a carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean to support embattled Jerusalem.
White House officials say that there are no plans for the United States to have direct involvement in the new war. The carrier group is there as a warning to other nations to not engage in the fight.
That warning alone, however, underscores what makes this moment different in scope and severity than all of the previous bouts of violence between Hamas and Israel.
Israel is on the precipice. Violated by Islamist terrorists, it’s also surrounded by nations that could choose at any moment to support those terrorists should they feel it would overwhelm and, ultimately, destroy Israel.
‘ISIS-Level Savagery’
There’s no doubt among officials that something fundamental has changed.Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, has promoted the absolute destruction of Israel for more than 30 years.
There were attacks—wars even—but those rounds of violence always underscored a certain understanding between Israel and the Hamas terrorists that détente was the norm. Peaceful coexistence, however distant a thought, was a possibility.
The similarities between Hamas’s new war and the barbarism displayed by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in recent decades suggest something different, however—something darker and more lasting.
It’s a difference that the United States is all too aware of.
One senior U.S. defense official told reporters on the condition of anonymity that the Pentagon was aware of “ISIS-level savagery,” which sets this conflict apart from all of those that came before.
“I want to differentiate this from other times we have seen conflicts between Israel and Hamas in Gaza,” the official said.
“This is different. It’s unprecedented. Hamas militants going across Israel, murdering children in front of their parents, massacring with indiscriminate violence [at] music festivals, burning down entire houses while families sheltered in their bunkers.”
Indeed, the gore left by Hamas doesn’t look like the usual exchange of rockets at night.
It took the Israel Defense Forces nearly 48 hours to regain control of the territory that Hamas so abruptly invaded. What they found has rattled many Israelis to their core.
There was the dance party where Hamas terrorists reportedly murdered more than 250 young people, raped girls among the carnage, and took others hostage to be used as bargaining chips or else killed in propaganda videos disseminated online. Then there were the seniors, executed in the street while waiting at a bus stop. Elsewhere, whole families were burned alive in their homes while attempting to shelter from the chaos.
That barbarism has shifted the perception of the threat in Israel.
No longer is Hamas something to be considered an occasional threat to peace and stability. It’s something more existential and weighs more heavily on the minds of many Jews.
Yigal Carmon, founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute think tank, laid bare that threat.
“This is how the Einsatzgruppen, extermination squads affiliated with the Nazi army, operated. They captured Jews in cities, villages, and streets, and killed them,” Mr. Carmon told the Israel edition of The Epoch Times.
Iran Likely Coordinating Attacks on Israel
Few experts or policymakers believe that Hamas could have conducted such an attack on its own.In all, more than 1,000 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. They used drones to attack and black out Israeli observation towers, received massive cyber support from abroad, and already have launched thousands upon thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel.
Many fingers point to Iran, whose Islamist regime has called for the destruction of Israel for decades and who’s engaged with China and Russia in a broader campaign to undermine and displace the current rules-based international order.
“There is a guiding hand behind all of this, and it is Iran,” Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, said during an Oct. 9 talk.
Mr. Doran said that Iran seeks foremost to destroy the normalization of Israeli–Saudi relations, which began with the Trump-era Abraham Accords.
The Biden administration largely terminated Trump-era policies regarding Iran, choosing to eliminate some sanctions and resurrect Obama-era policies aimed at using negotiation to convince Iran to not build nuclear weapons.
That effort culminated in the release of five American prisoners from Iran in September when the Biden administration released more than $6 billion in frozen assets back to Iran.
To that end, Mr. Doran said that the United States must hold Iran at real risk if it’s to stop Hamas’s war on Israel from engulfing the whole Middle East in chaos.
“If we’re concerned that American support for Israel is going to flag over time, we can rest assured that the feeling in the Islamic world is going to become embittered,” he said.
“It’s very important to the United States that [Israel] be seen to be victorious. Because if these terrorist outrages are seen to deliver to Hamas and to Iran victories, then we are just inviting more and more of the same, and sooner or later, it’s going to be involving American forces directly.”
US Working to Contain Lebanon Threat
Fears are also growing that a sustained attack from Lebanon to Israel’s north could stretch the embattled nation’s resources thin and, in turn, draw in further support from jihadists across the region.To that end, Hezbollah, a terrorist organization in Lebanon, is launching rockets into northern Israel as Hamas terrorists attack from the southeast.
A larger attack from Lebanon could bring Israel’s worst fears to life, according to Can Kasapoglu, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank.
“The nightmare scenario for Israel has always been a multi-front war,” he said.
“We shouldn’t exclude any scenario that involves the Lebanese Hezbollah element seeing an opportunity and capitalizing on an opportunity.”
To that end, Mr. Kasapoglu said that even small attacks could have an outsized impact, as they would draw away Israeli military resources that could otherwise go to confronting Hamas in Gaza.
The aforementioned U.S. defense official likewise acknowledged a concern about containing the threat from Lebanon, saying that the United States is working to prevent the violence from spreading.
“We are deeply concerned about Hezbollah making the wrong decision and choosing to open a second front to this conflict,” the official said.
Saudi Arabia: The Wild Card
Saudi Arabia, which has long sought to assert itself as the most powerful nation in the Middle East, is undoubtedly the wild card in this conflict.Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said that Hamas’s attack was intended at least in part to undermine the budding Saudi relationship with Israel.
“The Saudis were a target,” he said.
“I think it’s clear that an effort to undermine the normalization dynamics [is] underway in the region. The Iranians have been clear about that, and Hamas, obviously, doesn’t stand to benefit from the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”
On that point, however, Mr. Cook noted that the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia was never well received by the people of Saudi Arabia but was pursued by national leadership for its own reasons.
The continuation of normalization will thus largely depend on how brutal Israel’s reprisal against Hamas in Gaza is and how that response affects public opinion in Saudi Arabia.
“It wasn’t that long ago that there were telethons happening in Saudi Arabia in support of Hamas suicide bombers,” Mr. Cook said.
Qatar, China Jockey for Advantage
Two more powers linger on the skirts of the conflict, and both maintain fraught relationships with Israel and the United States.Thousands of miles away, China’s communist leadership is likewise seeking to capitalize on the chaos.
To that end, the regime’s apparent support for the Hamas terrorists appears less about peacemaking and more about garnering influence in the Middle East by stoking radical Islam against the West.
With so much at stake and so many players jockeying for influence and power, there’s no path forward for Israel that doesn’t carry a great deal of risk.
How Israel measures that risk, and how the United States supports it in the process, may decide whether the whole Middle East erupts again in theocratic violence.
Too much force in Gaza, and Israel will be the target of radicals seeking retribution for perceived wrongs. Too little force, and it will be targeted again and again for its perceived weakness. Either way, there’s little doubt anywhere that this new war will decide much more than the fate of Hamas.
