Yana Slesarchuk: Hamas attacked Israel. Israel is bombing the Gaza Strip. Why is the Kremlin only winning from this?

Pillars of black smoke against a blue sky. People shot dead in their cars. A captured military woman filmed being dragged to an SUV. A gray-haired elderly woman unexpectedly handed a machine gun by a Palestinian fighter for a propaganda video. Hamas has made audacious claims about firing thousands of rockets at Israel and has initiated assaults on the Israeli border, including underground, underwater, and aerial attacks. What's more, even the date they chose to attack coincides with the 50th anniversary of the victorious war for Israel, making it all the more significant. This intense violence, both within Israel and beyond its borders, appears to be part of a brilliantly executed psychological operation with objectives extending beyond Israel alone.

The main question of world experts (that sounded hundreds of times during the day from Israeli screens, newspapers, and social networks), is discussed both in Western Europe and overseas: how the Israeli intelligence, one of the most powerful special services in the world, could fail to anticipate and prevent such a coordinated offensive.

SPECIAL INFORMATION OPERATION

After all, back in 2014, former employees of the radio-electronic intelligence unit, or unit 8200, boasted to a number of Western media that the networks they had developed, allowed them to identify potential informants in the Palestinian Territories. Recruiting has also been done in Israeli prisons for years. So, the inability of the Iron Dome to cope with two and a half thousand rockets at the same time did not surprise any expert, because its relative effectiveness is directly related to the number (usually small) and power (usually low) of the shells fired at Israel, but the inability of the Israeli special services to neutralize such a large-scale operation in a timely manner shocked everyone, including Israel's allies, not to mention its citizens.

There is no Ukrainian who is not familiar with the question "Who demined Chongar?", so it will not surprise anyone here that in a matter of hours Russian-language social networks were filled with the thesis: the government knew full well that Hamas was preparing for an attack, it just kept silent. In any panic situation, it is natural for people to look for rational explanations for why this happened, and this is the most fertile ground for conspiracy theories. We have discussed this with historian and journalist Shimon Briman and he believes that the tendency of people to believe in this version is rooted in legends created (often by Israel itself) about the omnipotence of its special services. In reality, Israel was wary of helping Ukraine in particular because it remembered Russia's connections with Hamas and Iran and hoped that neutrality would help. It turned out that the strategy of neutrality did not work. Russians now openly mock in social networks.

THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE

In the diplomatic language, there are expressions that have been established for years and one of them is that each conflict gives rise to new ones. There are those that have been already openly annoying us since 2014 with their "deep concern". There are those that we have become so used to since the time of the full-scale war that we already accept and take them as is (while we shouldn’t!), let's say "We will support Ukraine as long as it is necessary". Diplomats react to the numerous spirals of the Middle East conflict with similar expressions, one in particular in regards to Israel (which is not always used) sounds like this: Israel has the right to defend itself (by the way, we also often hear it addressed to us). In this way, the country that uses this expression is signaling that Tel Aviv's military response to what happened will not be considered excessive because the UN Charter enshrines the state's right to self-defense in the event of an attack. And now, as long as Britain, Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, and Ukraine - resolutely condemn the terrorist attack on Israel and emphasize that it really has the right to self-defense, while Palestinian militants are still roaming the south of Israel, killing people and taking dozens of hostages - the number of victims, wounded and captured as of this writing continues to rise hourly - Russia calls on both sides to immediately stop the escalation.

And it puts the blame for what happened on the West, which blocked Russia as a mediator in solving the Middle Eastern issue.

A ZERO-SUM GAME

In game theory, a situation where two or more opponents have opposite goals, i.e., where they can’t simultaneously achieve the desired goal, is called a "zero-sum game." For anyone who is not familiar with the history of the Middle East conflict, this expression can be used to describe the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and more broadly, the Israelis and all the Arab states that became neighbors of the newly created state after the Second World War. Canadian historian Neil Kaplan, the author of several books on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, including "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories", calls this long-running conflict "a land dispute with an additional religious dimension", in which each side - for several generations - considers itself a victim. Israel can’t afford to lose, because in this case, it will stop existing as a state. The Palestinians believe the same.

Another zero-sum game is the international agenda. What is on the front pages of the world press? What is being discussed by voters in each of the countries that joined the coalition to help Ukraine last year? If we look at this process from the Russian perspective at a time when the Kremlin desperately needs to freeze the conflict and force Kyiv to negotiate (signals about this have repeatedly come from Russia since this summer), then there is no better way to achieve this goal than to remove Ukraine from the agenda - just switch the world's attention to another conflict. Even if you forget that representatives of Hamas, which Russia has actually never declared a terrorist group, are regular guests in the Kremlin, a new war in the Middle East is extremely beneficial to Putin.

A STRIKE ON THE ALLIES

Although the United States was and remains a key partner of Israel - without its financial and military support of this aid, the very existence of Israel would be under threat - the Americans have radically different points of view on the Middle East conflict, and this is manifested in Tel Aviv's communication with various US presidents. For example, during the time of Barack Obama, these relations deteriorated noticeably, because, according to his own statements, he tried to "open a new page" in relations with the Muslim world, demanded that Israel adhere to the concept of "two states for two peoples", criticized Israeli buildings in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank (which was supposed to be ceded to the Palestinians) and tried to force Israel to return to the 1967 borders. Netanyahu, who was also prime minister back then, responded by saying that Obama was delusional and sharply criticized the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Another year later, the United States, for the first time in forty years, did not exercise its right of veto in the UN Security Council during the discussion of a resolution that would condemn Israeli construction in the West Bank - so the resolution was adopted.

Under Trump’s presidency, the relations between the two countries warmed up a lot, because the Israeli diaspora gave him a lot of votes and donations, so it was during his term that the American embassy in Israel moved to Jerusalem, which caused riots among Palestinians, who consider the city their own.

Now Biden is at the start of a new election campaign. And so it happened that a noticeable part of his voters actually support the Palestinians. In American universities, there is now a popular view on the struggle of the Palestinians as an indigenous population with the consequences of colonialism - people who arrived later and therefore must yield. So the modern, equipped with the latest technology Israeli army gets way less sympathy than the poor population Gaza Strip - and Hamas has been taking advantage of this for years, placing its launchers closer to hospitals and schools. Therefore, every retaliatory blow from Israel, no matter how accurate it may be, takes dozens of peaceful lives and again causes condemnation.

Therefore, the President of the United States is now between two fires. Both by supporting and not supporting Israel, he will definitely face criticism, both from Republicans and from his own democratic camp.

It will also not contribute to the focus on aid to Ukraine.

GLOBAL WAR

The military wing of Hamas, which during the day actively distributes videos of abuse of civilians and soldiers, which we deliberately will not give links to here, boasts of attacks on more than fifty locations, among them - the Israeli military base in Raim. Hamas claims that they have collected enough hostages to negotiate the release of all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons. There are fears among military observers that Hamas might be using the hostages in attempts to avoid attacks on the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military so they can’t conduct a full-fledged military operation there. This situation keeps only escalating, and so does the indignation within Israel. After all, the terrorist attack was carried out at the most convenient moment of political instability, when large-scale protests were gathering against the newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was going to rewrite the constitution in a way convenient for himself, in order to save himself from prosecution. Iran and Hezbollah are watching closely and ready to engage in full-scale war if they see a chance of success. Therefore, at the cost of one successful terrorist operation, the world is now one step closer to a global war in the Middle East, the likes of which the current generation has not yet seen. It will take more than one day to understand the reasons for the biggest failure in the history of Israel's security services because such a large-scale, coordinated operation had to be planned for weeks and Hamas managed to prevent any leaks. And now it is not essential whether Russia played an active role in its preparation - in any case, it will gladly take advantage of the consequences.