Today, Explained - Israel, Hamas, and how we got here

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

This Israel-Hamas war is unlike the ones that came before it, says Haaretz’s Allison Kaplan Sommer. But it was years in the making, says Vox’s Zack Beauchamp. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Friday, the Supernova Music Festival got underway in the Negev Desert, not far from the Gaza-Israel border. And people were still dancing on Saturday morning around 6.30 when they saw paragliders in the sky. Some people kept dancing until they saw rockets, but then the music cut out. And a war began. Hamas militants came to murder, humiliate, and to shatter Israelis' sense of safety. Israel is changing the skyline of the Gaza Strip. Flattening it.

Israel has also cut off Gaza completely. No power, food, and water allowed in. It's a total siege. A brutal new chapter in a seemingly never-ending fight. Coming up on Today Explained. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props,

or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. You are listening to Today Explained. Alison Kaplan-Summer hosts the Haaretz Weekly Podcast. We reached out to her

at her home in Ranana near Tel Aviv to ask how all this began. Well, I woke up on Saturday morning from my husband's phone. He has an application on his phone that will ring if there's some kind of a red alert missile situation in our region. We have apps for that. So first I was woken up by the phone, but we didn't hear anything. And so for a few minutes, kind of went back to sleep and kind of ignored it. We didn't immediately think that there was any kind of an emergency situation. And then five, ten minutes later, we heard an actual siren go off outside the house and we kicked into gear as we have in previous rounds of conflict. We got our daughter out of her room, and we all went down to the reinforced room in our house and waited for the siren to end

and waited for the thudding sounds of some sort of missile collision, either mid-air or something landing. That happened, and that's when we all tuned into the news, and we thought, you know, this was another typical round of air conflicts between Hamas in Gaza and Israel. Tuning into the news, it became very clear that this was a situation unlike anything we'd seen before. Hundreds of Hamas fighters poured across breached border points, smashing Israel's defences, heading to more than 20 communities in a house-to-house search, largely unopposed.

This happening across a wide area, in communities which were clearly part of a targeted plan. Once there, the fighters killed indiscriminately, in the single deadliest day in Israel's existence. And there were also reports that inside adjacent cities, Ashkelon is a major city not far from the Gaza border, Sderot, that there was shooting going on in the streets, that there were Hamas terrorists inside these Israeli cities, and there were battles going on. This was something that we were unfamiliar with, had never seen before,

and didn't even seem possible. The Israeli army has said that at least 50 soldiers have been kidnapped to Gaza. There are reports of 100 and 150 Israelis in total being held in Gaza. That's what Israel's UN ambassador has recently told the media. So this kind of mass hostage situation is something that Israel has never dealt with before and is completely unfamiliar with how to handle. People make a lot of comparisons between what has happened now in terms of military intelligence failure and the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago. It was on October 6, 1973, that the Yom Kippur War broke out. This was October 7, 2023, on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, that this war broke out. But when you talk about hostages and prisoners of war, back then, Israel was in a much better

position because it was dealing with the Egyptian army, which was very organized and operated according to international procedures in terms of who the prisoners of war were, how they were being treated. This was all known, and it is clear that there's going to be a long and exhausting and depressing process of trying to figure out who is being held hostage, where they are. The negotiations are going to involve knowledge of the hostages as well as trying to ascertain their safe return

and the return of bodies of any of those who are killed on the other side in Gaza. This is the great wild card, I think, of the events of Saturday. This is something that Israel has never seen before or dealt with before. And in the hours and even days that followed, give me a sense of how Israelis came to understand how vast this attack was. We understood that it was in so many places, in so many communities, and there is so much confidence in the Israeli military. This is a people's army, right? These are our fathers,

brothers, sons, people we know. There is a huge amount of belief that when there's a problem, the army is there to take care of it. So disbelief increased over the course of the coming hours and unbelievably days when we learned that these people in these communities were locked inside their safe rooms, hearing gun battles going on around them, learning that there were terrorists in their homes, and some of them were sitting and waiting for help for hours and some overnight for days, and people were calling for help, sending pinpoint locations to the authorities of where they were, saying that they needed to be rescued. In many cases that they were injured and no help came and nothing was on the way. This was a huge, huge crisis of confidence in the capability of the Israeli army. That's continuing even right now.

We have planes, we have helicopters, we have tanks, we have everything. And the IDF, for the first couple of hours, it's like we had no army. The IDF doesn't exist. So obviously we have the shock of the attack, but it sounds like we also have a fair amount of shock over just how this happened. At this point, what is your understanding of the answer to that question? How did this happen? How was the Israeli military caught so flat-footed? I am no expert in the Israeli military or military intelligence, but I have spoken inside Haaretz, where I work, with former military correspondents, with someone considered the utmost expert in military intelligence, and they are as stunned, surprised as I am that

there was no detection of any kinds of plans of something on this scale. That is going to be the subject of some kind of major inquiry after the guns grow silent. There will be implications for it, but what everyone across Israeli society is saying right now is we just don't have the time, energy, or bandwidth for asking that question right now. Tell me how Israel is responding. Israel is responding, first of all, in the way that it normally responds, which is to immediately launch a major operation over Gaza from the air.

The might of Israel's arsenal thundered down on Gaza's cities, turning vast swaths of the Palestinian enclave to rubble in retaliation for Hamas's unprecedented attack. Israel's military told people to leave, but many either could not or did not and perished. Massive bombing is taking place. Israel has a bank of targets, Hamas targets, Islamic Jihad targets, which every time that there is a conflict happening, you know, they start to

go down the list. And the other preparation that's going on on a major scale is preparation for some sort of assault from the north, from Lebanon, from Hezbollah forces, suspecting that whatever inspired Hamas to do this at this time, there's a possibility that Iran is involved. It's no secret that Iran, a sworn enemy of Israel, has long provided financial and military aid to Hamas, along with other militant groups in the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. You know, Hezbollah may be joining the assaults, the effort. And so there are major forces going up into the north, reinforcing border towns for a short period. There's no way of knowing for certain it's going to happen, but people feel like it's a strong likelihood. Smoke rises from southern Lebanon after Israeli strikes,

sparking fears of a major escalation on another front. I don't know if you can answer this question, Alison. I don't know if anyone can answer this question, but I have to ask it, so I'm going to ask it. What comes next? Do we have any idea? None of us have any idea of what comes next after something like this. I mean, in any situation, we don't know what comes next, but there's going to be some sort of major change.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it was a lot of sort of saber-rattling and posturing. He says we're going to change the face of the Middle East. I don't know how much he means that, but I do know that Israelis will not rest, will not let their government rest until something major changes and there's a very different configuration of power and force than there was in the past. Alison Kaplan-Summer, Haaretz in Israel. We'll ask why when we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. You're listening to Today Explained. This past weekend, Zach Beecham wrote an article titled, Why Did Hamas Invade Israel for Vox? We asked him the same question this morning. Hamas has been planning this for quite some time, maybe as long as a year, right? It's a militant group in the Gaza Strip, which is a very small area of about 2 million people surrounded by Israel and Egypt, populated by Palestinians. And Hamas has been in charge there since around 2006, 2007. And they're our militant group, terrorist group, that has killed a lot of Israelis,

and Israel has blockaded Gaza, prevented goods from coming in, except to a limited degree, as a means of theoretically degrading Hamas. The problem is, it doesn't seem to have challenged their rule in any way. So Hamas has been in charge for, what, around 16 years now, and Israel has fought multiple wars with them in the past. On the holiest night of Ramadan, more violence on the streets of occupied East Jerusalem. Palestinian protesters threw water bottles. Israeli security forces used stun grenades. There are a variety of different causes of those different flare-ups, but periodically it just seemed like violence would spike,

then it would go back down, with significantly more casualties on the Palestinian side. This man was beaten on the ground in front of us, and then ushered away into the night with no attempt to detain him. But it was the status quo that from the Israeli point of view is something they could live with, even if it's not ideal. This attack that Hamas had been planning for some time completely shattered that status quo. So we came here through a long, long, long road of conflict

between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas. But ultimately, it seems that Hamas was, for reasons that are not yet fully clear, trying to break the status quo as it comes between Israel and Gaza. of Israel. But let's talk about the people in power right now. What has the Netanyahu government's policy towards Gaza and the West Bank been up to this point? The basic goal of the sort of broad center of the Israeli public is security. They want to be safe. They want to be free from terror and be able to live their lives as a very wealthy, first world advanced democracy. The Palestinians create a significant problem for that because in the West Bank, they functionally maintain an autocratic military rule over the Palestinian population. Cold and cramped, this is the only way for these Palestinian workers to leave the occupied West Bank to get to their jobs in Israel. It is the same thing every day. This is not a life.

In what country in the world does this take place? It only happens to us Palestinians here because of the occupation. And in Gaza, there's an enclave controlled by an anti-Semitic militant group that hates Israel and wants to destroy it that they have to pen in. So the question is how you handle those things. Netanyahu, who's a very right-wing leader, has chosen an aggressive posture designed not just to maximize security, but to prevent the formation of any kind of Palestinian entity that could even come to a two-state agreement with Israel that could lead to something that could functionally lead to the end of Israel's territorial ambitions in the West Bank. Netanyahu attempted to mobilize his hardcore base with two stunning promises. He will not support creation of a Palestinian state, and he will continue to

construct Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. And so in order to do that, he has pursued this very, very complex policy dance that has involved deepening Israeli control over the West Bank, in part by allowing for settlement expansion, and in Gaza, both restricting the flow of goods and blockading it to prevent Hamas from arming itself, but also shoring up the foundations of the group, allowing some money to flow in, for example, in order to essentially make sure that it's not going to lose power.

It seems bizarre and counterintuitive if you care about security. But if you're Netanyahu and you really believe that Israel is best served by staving off the world's push for a two-state diplomatic solution, it makes sense that you see Hamas as kind of an ally because you point to them and you say, we can't negotiate with them. It's this horrible situation where extremists on both sides benefit from the other's existence. This is not the most responsible government in Israel, and in fact, maybe one of the most irresponsible in the country's history. It's helpful to look at some of the concrete things that are being said. So Defense Minister Yoav Galan by the way is one of he's one of the more responsible members of the current

israeli government has said this after the attack quote unquote i have ordered a complete siege on the gaza strip there will be no electricity no food no fuel everything is closed we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly i mean this is a violation of the law of war. Israel has cut off electricity, fuel, and water supplies to one of the most densely populated territories in the world. Hospitals are overwhelmed and unable to function without basic services. As far as I understand it, you can't just cut off electricity, food, and fuel for an entire civilian population. And the use of the language human animals is terrifying. I mean, this is eliminationist language. This is talking about justifying killing by dehumanizing

your opponents. What happened to us is complete destruction. We are the Al-Bawab family and there were 150 people in this building. All of my family's homes have been destroyed. And when you start talking like that, I mean, things get really dangerous. Entire apartment buildings, homes, schools, and even a mosque weren't spared in the airstrikes. That's how Hamas talks about Israelis. And look what they just did, right? Look at the mass slaughter of Israelis that they engaged in. The tenor of rhetoric coming from the current Israeli government about what they're about to do in Gaza to add on to over 15 years of deep, deep, deep, deep pain for the Gazans inflicted by

periodic wars and the Israeli blockade. I mean, I just shudder to think what's going to happen to innocent people in Gaza and innocent Israelis. If the Netanyahu government isn't seriously considering a two-state solution, what have they been seriously considering? Have other deals been on the table? There is no other deal that is acceptable to both Israelis and Palestinians. Basically, there are three potential solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first is two states living side by side. The second is a one-state solution in which Israel incorporates both the Palestinian territories and dissolves

its Jewish character by granting all Palestinians the right to vote and citizenship. And that's basically the end of Israel. So that's a non-starter for Israel and could potentially lead to significant amounts of ethnic violence. The third solution is basically similar to the second, except Palestinians are not granted the right to vote and are not considered citizens. This is the favored solution of the Israeli far right, which includes significant elements of Netanyahu's government, and it would amount to apartheid, right? That's what it is. And it's one that we have been creeping towards, right? The status quo is not exactly this, because there's no formal annexation. Some far-right

members of Netanyahu's government have been pushing for, and the government even itself attempted to implement at one point before backing off, thanks to incentives from the U.S. and Arab states. So you had a right-wing government that was slowly, over the course of time, by expanding the size of settlements in the West Bank, by keeping up the Gaza blockade, by keeping Palestinians divided, was pushing the country towards a one-state apartheid solution. That's where we were headed right now if things didn't change. From 2021 to 2022, it looked like there might be some kind of possibility for change. Israel had a new government that contained elements from the right all the way to the left,

including an Arab party that had dethroned Netanyahu and his far-right allies. And it looked like they might have been moving towards, in theory, something that would be better than the status quo. The problem is that coalition itself was divided between different groups that have very, very different views of the Palestinians. And so they couldn't really take any action on that policy. The coalition fell apart. We got Netanyahu back with an even more right-wing government. So it's hard to know for certain, but tell me what we can be sure that Hamas was responding to. We all have some theories, and there are some things that are in their public statements, right? So the best or sort of clearest causal pathway for

this has to do with conflict in the West Bank. Land for blood and blood for land. These huge Israeli enclaves in the West Bank, illegal under international law, make a future Palestinian state virtually impossible. So, for the past several months, tensions between Israel and West Bank Palestinians have been heating up considerably. Basically, there was an ongoing cycle of violence. The settlers, Israeli settlers, emboldened by the far-right government that was encouraging them and supporting them, have been engaging in a series of atrocities against Palestinians at the West Bank, killing them, burning their houses, scaring them, seizing their land, etc. There have been retaliatory responses by Palestinians and also independently launched attacks on settlers from Palestinians, which then leads to settler retaliation on its own. So it doesn't really matter who started it. It just escalates, and it's happening under a condition in which settlers feel like they can act with impunity.

This has led to Israel having to redeploy significant troops to the West Bank, and they have been conducting bloody raids, which have then infuriated Palestinians and sparked retaliation on its own. Settler violence against Palestinians is now increasingly common. So you get an exceedingly violent situation going on there where things look like they're getting worse. And this means two things. First, Palestinians are angry and angry at Israel, which gives Hamas an opportunity to capitalize by showing itself to be the force of resistance to the Israeli occupation. And second, and crucially, it means the Gaza border isn't defended in the way that it typically is because Israel's pulled so many of its active duty forces into the West Bank. Gunshots echoing through the Jenin refugee camp, smoke billowing into the sky. The Israel Defense Forces launched their largest West Bank operation in two decades, since the second Intifada, or uprising, in the early 2000s.

So that means Hamas has an opportunity. And one of the things that you hear, there's a very good piece in the Washington Post about this, is empty guard towers and military posts that were unmanned at the border. Because people were doing things to secure settlers and their activities in the West Bank. It's a striking failure of the Israeli government for basically stoking this kind of conflict in the West Bank and the current government's policy. And for Hamas, it was this golden opportunity to breach the border. And that's what they did to horrible, horrible results. So it has to do really, I would say, more than anything else, with both the state of anger and frustration among Palestinians,

which is not new, it's been going for a long time, but has spiked, and also with the vulnerability on the Israeli side and the political chaos inside Israel, which has distracted it and led to Israeli defense officials warning publicly, repeatedly, that security was being endangered by the government pushing confrontational domestic policies at home that were dividing the population against itself. So it's this kind of perfect storm. Zach Beecham is the author of the forthcoming book, The Reactionary Spirit. You can also read him at Vox.com.

Our show today was produced by Halima Shah and Abishai Artsy. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Llewellyn, mixed by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.