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What Hamas Wants

(Atlantic) Yair Rosenberg - In October 2014, Vanity Fair published an investigative report on a sophisticated plot by the Islamist terror group Hamas to kill and kidnap Israelis on the Gaza border using underground tunnels to infiltrate nearby civilian enclaves on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. The operation had two goals: "First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip." But the tunnels were gradually detected and blocked. On Oct. 7, Hamas executed something quite like the attack on the Gaza border that it had planned all those years ago. Successive Israeli governments and security officials spent recent years lifting economic restrictions on Gaza, granting thousands of work permits for Gazans, and transferring hundreds of millions of Qatari dollars to Hamas in exchange - they thought - for relative quiet. But it turned out that Hamas wasn't being pacified; it was preparing. The group was less committed to national liberation than to Jewish elimination. What Hamas did was the explicit fulfillment of its long-stated objectives. The question is not why Hamas did what it did, but why so many people were surprised. Journalists like me failed to take Hamas' overt anti-Jewish ethos as seriously as we should have. Many got Hamas wrong. But they shouldn't have. Again and again, people say they intend to murder Jews. And yet, century after century, the world produces new, tortuous justifications for why anti-Jewish bigots don't really mean what they say - even though they do.
2023-10-17 00:00:00
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