Hamass appalling attack has exposed an Israeli government with no plan for resolving its countrys greatest challenges.

Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been at war with the Palestinians all his political life. Occasionally he has genuflected towards the notion of Palestinian statehood. That was entirely tactical. Netanyahus contempt for the idea that Palestinians might aspire to what many others regard as a birthright a nation of their own has never wavered.

Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamass recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assaults surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a total system failure on Israels part. Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for a ragtag band of terrorists to beat the mighty Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, was hubris an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israels two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, the most extreme ever, downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls the worlds largest open-air prison Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

_Haaretz_journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping. Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there.Haaretzeditorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as the IDF provided security for every settler whim.

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahus finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be erased. This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a pogrom. A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrichs comments as irresponsible repugnant [and] disgusting. Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.

Last August, Netanyahus far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his familys right to move around the West Bank is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israels nominal partner in any peace process.

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for_Foreign Policy,_ commented recently that Netanyahus various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas who wanted to negotiate while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israels destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahus policy to nearly topple the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamass sense of impunity and capability. Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the_Wall Street Journal_that Hamas, to my great regret, is Israels creation.

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israels inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights. Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a strong reaction around the Arab world. President Bidens whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamass military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamass embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israels bombardment 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 suggested that the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces Major General Ghassan Alian declared that Human animals must be treated as such There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell. Israels President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. Its absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup dtat.

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamass rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the_New York Review of Books_Fintan OToole wrote that Hamass knowing provocation of Israels wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemys. That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its atrocious war crimes. He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marless claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was poorly briefed.

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval complete siege of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas sins.

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 IsraelGaza war, parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages. Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israels main cities. Even if that doesnt happen, the question of what now? only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price.

Original article first published in Inside Story on 19 October.