Commentators are comparing the Toofan Al-Aqsa offensive by Hamas against Israel with the 1973 Yom Kippur event, when a coalition of Arab armies led by Egypt and Syria, overwhelmed Israeli forces. But that was a war led by state-sponsored armies, whereas the latest attack on Israel has been carried out by a small armed group which operates from Gaza, a tiny Palestinian enclave bordering the south western edge of Israel. Yet, well-equipped with both armaments and military intelligence, the Hamas soldiers were able to break through the well-guarded Israeli barriers, outfoxing its much-lauded spies, and enter Israeli territory to unleash an extra-ordinary offensive. The exploits that they carried out on Israeli soil on a single day – killing more than a thousand people, abducting citizens to keep them as hostages – amount to what one can describe as invasion of Israel, a slap on the face of its right-wing anti-Palestine government led by a xenophobic Benjamin Netanyahu.
While condemning the horrendous acts of atrocities committed by Hamas on common Israeli citizens, and extending sympathy to the families of their victims, we should also reiterate that the Netanyahu-led government of Israel does not deserve an iota of sympathy. It was he who had been following an aggressive policy against Palestinians in the West Bank. All through the weeks preceding the October 7 massacre, Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians almost every day, and aided Jewish settlers to oust them from their homes. These events enraged the Palestinians, and Hamas, in order to give voice to their pent up anger, as well as to bolster its militant image among them, retaliated by invading Israel and carried out an operation on its soil that caught world-wide attention.
Historical parallels – and differences
If we have to seek past historical parallels for the Hamas operation, we need to go back to the 1960s. The style of the Hamas offensive is reminiscent of another offensive that took place way back on January 30, 1968, in a place far away from Gaza and Tel-Aviv. It was Vietnam. On that day, the North Vietnam backed Communist-led NLF launched a massive attack against the US-propped up puppet regime in South Vietnam – which came to be known as the Tet offensive. Breaching South Vietnam’s military border barriers, they entered and carried out simultaneous attacks on the official and army establishments of that state’s provincial capitals and twenty five airfields. Fighting was especially fierce in the old imperial capital of Hue. Later, a bomb planted by the NLF exploded in one of Saigon’s liveliest nightclubs, killing three and injuring six. Hamas appears to have followed the same model of the Tet offensive – even to the extent of raiding nocturnal entertainment spots, as evident from its attack on a super-nova music festival and killing of some hundred Israeli teen-agers who were enjoying the show.
But the similarity ends there. While the Communist soldiers of the NLF solely targeted South Vietnam’s military, and not its common citizens (barring that single incident of the bomb explosion in a Saigon club), the Hamas soldiers went on a massive spree of killing thousands innocent Israelis including women and children, and abducting the survivors to be used as hostages in order to bargain with Israel. In an ironical twist to their strategy, their indiscriminate rocket attacks also killed a group of their own folks from Gaza. When they bombed a Jewish kibbutz of 700 people on October 7, among the victims were ten farm workers from Gaza, led by 53-year old Barawi, who were employed by the kibbutz to grow pomelos – a sweet citrus fruit in its farm. (Re: The Economist, October 14, 2023)
We must ask Hamas, how many among those they killed were Israeli soldiers ? Did Hamas, by its assault, succeed in crippling the military infrastructure of Israel ? Evidently not – as apparent from the Israeli army’s vicious retaliation against Gaza by bombing its citizens, whom the Hamas administration there has failed to protect. So, has the October 7 offensive ended up in a Pyrrhic victory for Hamas – gaining temporary global publicity (through reports of its mass killings), but in the long run inviting far more devastating consequences for their own people in Gaza ? As the present Israeli retaliation indicates, Tel Aviv is bent on a vicious genocide of the Gaza population by its air raids and ground offensive.
Besides, by their murderous misdeeds during the October 7 operation, they have alienated large sections of the people all over the world who have been supporting the cause of the Palestinians all these years, including those of Palestinian origins. Even President Mahmoud Abbas of the PLO-led Palestine Authority that rules the West Bank in a statement released on October 15 said that “Hamas’ policies and actions do not represent the Palestinian people,” adding the significant comment: “…the policies, programmes, and decisions of the PLO represent the Palestinian people as their sole legitimate representative, and not the policies of any other organization.” (Re: Reuters). People from the Palestinian diaspora abroad have come out in the open, condemning the Hamas. One of them is Gigi Hadid, a famous American TV personality, who has her roots in her homeland Palestine, being born of a Palestinian-Dutch marriage. She has expressed her anguish in a movingly written statement: “I have deep empathy …for the Palestinian struggle and life under occupation… (but) The terrorization of innocent people is not in alignment with and does not do any good for the `Free Palestine’ movement. …The idea (of terrorization) … has fuelled a painful, decades long cycle of back-and-forth retaliation (which no innocent civilian, Palestinian or Israeli, deserves to be a casualty of) and helps perpetuate the false idea that being pro-Palestine = anti-Semitic.” (Quoted in Hyderabad Times, October 12, 2023). I think, these few sentences succinctly sum up the dilemma that has plagued the Palestinian liberation struggle all through its history.
On the other hand, the success of the Vietnamese Communist-led Tet offensive in 1968 (which was a direct challenge to the US army deployed there) won plaudits not only from anti-war activists all over the world (who had been protesting against US atrocities in Vietnam), but also galvanized the contemporary anti-imperialist movements in West Asia, Latin America and South Africa, whose fighters drew inspiration from the courage demonstrated by the Vietnamese freedom fighters. More importantly, within the US itself the Tet offensive led to a rethinking among the American peace activists who began urging for US withdrawal from the messy war in Vietnam. During the next decade, through a combination of its continuing military successes and diplomatic negotiations with the US (which backed a puppet regime in South Vietnam), the Vietnamese Communists ultimately succeeded in unifying their hitherto divided homeland on April 30 , 1975, by marching into and occupying Saigon. Can we expect Hamas to achieve such a victory over Israel by re-capturing the Palestinian territory from Tel-Aviv’s occupation ?
The parallels – US response to the 1968 Tet offensive and Israeli response to the 2023 Toofan Al -Aqsa.
If we stretch the search for parallels, we find that Israel today is retaliating against the Hamas offensive in the same way as the US did in 1968 to counter the Tet offensive. Netanyahu while launching air-raids on Gaza thunders that he will reduce it to a rubble. He is sending his foot soldiers to Gaza City to hunt out the Hamas leaders who are based there, and forcing the citizens of north Gaza to evacuate – on the plea that it wants to protect them from any casualty that might happen during the Israeli ground offensive. The forcible displacement of some one million population has evoked world-wide protests. Whether Israel can destroy Hamas is a question that is hanging in mid-air. But in the meantime, it is targeting the common citizens of Gaza, who are being made to pay the price for the Israeli military’s humiliation by Hamas.
Netanyahu’s rhetoric echoes the then US President Johnson’s infamous threat in 1968 to bomb the Communist North Vietnam and reduce it to the Stone Age. Johnson followed up his threat by massive air raid bombings in North Vietnam. Netanyahu’s actions in the present case of Gaza also follow the same pattern – militarist rhetoric followed by air raids and invasion on ground. But what was the outcome of Johnson’s bombing raids ? Despite deaths of hundreds of innocent Vietnamese citizens and heavy NLF casualties, the Communist guerillas kept on fighting and regained territories. This compelled the US to recognize the failure of its aggressive policies, and to agree to a meeting with North Vietnamese representatives in Paris on May 10, 1968, following which the US bombing of North Vietnam was halted. The détente between the US and North Vietnam was further accelerated by President Nixon’s decision to steadily withdraw US combat troops from South Vietnam (who were engaged in fighting the NLF) all through 1969 and 1972 (the last US ground combat unit being pulled out on August 11, 1972). This was followed by the signing of the Paris Agreement on January 27, 1973 by the USA, South and North Vietnamese governments, and the NLF. The agreement provided for a ceasefire, withdrawal of foreign troops, and eventual reunification of Vietnam. It took another two years for the NLF to implement those provisions and reunify their country in 1975. Thus, despite Johnson’s bluster, ultimately it was the Vietnamese Communist fighters who won the war and succeeded in uniting the two divided parts of their country into a single state.
Coming back to the present conflict in West Asia between Hamas-led Palestinians and US-supported soldiers of Israel, the question looms over the war clouds – will Hamas be able to re-enact in its own birthplace in Palestine, the final victory that the Vietnamese Communists achieved in their country ?
The tortuous trajectory of the Palestine liberation movement – from socialist and secular origins to Islamic religious terrorism
Unlike the Vietnamese liberation movement which was cemented by a common ideology that bound together nationalism and Communism under the enlightened leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Palestinian struggle for a separate state had undergone several phases of differing ideological orientation. It first took a firm organized shape in 1964 with the founding of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). The PLO imbibed the militant socialist and secular ideology of the guerilla movements that at that time were sweeping South East Asia, Latin America and South Africa. Over the next several years, it drew into its fold the various armed Palestinian groups that were fighting Israeli occupation – Yasser Arafat’s `Fatah,’ the Communist-led Palestine People’s Party and other outfits.
Among the groups which joined the PLO, was the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). Its founder was a charismatic Palestinian Christian Marxist politician, George Habash. He was to play a major role in the Iiberation movement – one of his achievements being the hijacking of an airplane in September 1970, in a bid to rescue a Palestinian hostage held by Israel. Born in 1926 in a Palestinian Christian family, he grew up to be a major leader of the guerilla war against Israeli occupation. He used to be described by Palestinians as the `conscience of the Palestine Revolution.’ He was inspired by the contemporary Cuban revolution, as he acknowledged many years later in an interview with the American journalist John K Cooley : “We held the (Che) Guevara view of the revolutionary human being.”
The very fact that a Christian Palestinian was welcomed by the PLO testified to the secular credentials of the liberation movement in those days. It is a far cry from the fanatic religious rhetoric and acts by the Islamic Hamas that has taken over the leadership of the Palestine liberation struggle today. How and why did this transformation take place over the last four .decades – from the 1960s to the 2020s of today ?
The Palestine liberation movement, led by the PLO that united all secular and socialist forces, suffered a fracture in 1989. That year, a separate group of Palestinians who had got together under the Islamic religious umbrella called Hamas (an Arabic term meaning zeal), tried to usurp the leadership of the movement by a spectacular act of abducting and killing two Israeli soldiers. Earlier in August 1988 it had issued a manifesto declaring Palestine as an Islamic land, which needed to be liberated through the Islamic military tactics of `jihad’ by Muslims only – an objective that was totally at variance with that of the PLO’s long struggle.
The global context of the rise of Hamas
Over the next decades, Hamas managed to gain support among large sections of Palestinians by appealing to their religio-nationalist sentiments, projecting Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO President of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, as a weak leader who was betraying the cause of Islam by compromising with the Zionist Israel. He had signed the Oslo agreement which allowed the formation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and opened up possibilities for a two-state solution – an Israeli state living in co-existence with a Palestinian state, each carving out their respective territories. Hamas reject.ted the two-state proposal, and called for a jihad to liberate the entire area of Palestine. This was followed by years of violent clashes between the the followers of Abbas and Hamas. Finally around 2007, the PLO government in the West Bank managed to oust the Hamas guerillas from its territory, while Hamas succeeded in defying the Palestinian Authority by occupying Gaza and establish its authority there.
It must be remembered that Hamas was founded in 1987 – some eight years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran in December 1979 under Ayatullah Khomeini. After Khomeini’s capture of power in Iran, the 1980s saw a reversal of political trends in the Muslim world of West Asia, and later in Afghanistan. The secular nationalist tradition in the political sphere – represented by leaders like Nasser, Arafat and Leftist parties – was pushed back by a strident and aggressive neo-Islamic campaign that insisted on orthodox practices and intolerance of other religious faiths. This campaign was sponsored – and financed – by Khomeini across West Asia all through the 1980s. Within Iran, the first step that Khomeini took was to ban and destroy the Communist Tudeh party – which had led the struggle against the oppressive royal Pallavi regime all through the years, when Khomeni was living abroad in safe and comfortable surroundings. It was only in February 1979 that Khomeini returned to Iran, when the Pahlavi regime was on the verge of collapse being brought down by the Tudeh party-led resistance. In a clever move, Khomeini assumed the leadership of the anti-Pahlavi struggle and set up the Islamic Republic declaring himself as the Supreme Leader in December 1979. During the next decade, he spread the message of Islamic fundamentalism and funded various groups in West Asia which were fighting US hegemony in their countries. Thus the anti-US movement, which till then had been traditionally dominated by secular and Leftist forces, was usurped by Iran-backed Islamic militant groups. Hamas was one such group, spawned by Khomeini’s ideology. It is not surprising therefore that Iran today, ruled by Khomein’s successors, has come out with full-throated support for the October 7 Hamas operation.
The future of the Palestine movement
No armed movement can survive without mass support. In the 1970s, the Vietnamese Communist fighters succeeded in unifying all sections of the population in their war against the US. Their victory demonstrated to the world that a weak force could defeat a mighty super-power, if their combatants were ideologically motivated. Their ideology was of an inclusive nature that embraced people of all faiths, and adhered to the values of socialism and secularism. It is this ideology which rallied all sections of the Vietnamese society which led to their victory.
If we turn to Palestine today, what ideology is influencing its people ? We find them divided between loyalty to the Gaza-ruled Hamas and the PLO-ruled West Bank. The Islamist fundamentalist Hamas has sown seeds of dissension in the Palestine liberation movement, by its irresponsible and reprehensible acts. Is there any hope of the restoration of the tradition of secular and socialist values in the long struggle of Palestinians for their own state ?
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
