Did Hamas merely want to kick-start the statehood process with its barbaric rapes and murders on 1200-plus unarmed men, women, and children on October 7? Not according to a report from Haaretz last week. Hamas leaders had launched the attack expecting to trigger a calamitous and overwhelming conquest of Israel. In fact, they had such confidence in their war strategy that they had already divided Israel into cantons, assigned leadership to them, and made plans for its population under a new Islamist regime.
And those plans will sound very, very familiar to scholars of the last regime that set out to conquer the Jews.
Haaretz’ Shlomi Eldar got the story from the wealthy Gazans that managed to flee from the war Hamas started. Gazans call them “the new Jews” because of their wealth in the midst of their poverty, a rather telling anti-Semitic trope. These elites still make money off of remote black-market sales of staples in the Strip, but the anger must always be turned to the Jews rather than the exploitation created by the Palestinian elite.
But these elites have apparently had enough of Hamas. They told Eldar that their leadership had succumbed to “messianic insanity” to such an extent that they had drawn up new political maps of Israel to distribute political power after the conquest. That was bad enough, but Hamas’ plans for the Israelis that survived might just as well have come from the pages of Mein Kampf:
So detailed were the plans that participants in the conference began to draw up list of all the properties in Israel and appointed representatives to deal with the assets that would be seized by Hamas. “We have a registry of the numbers of Israeli apartments and institutions, educational institutions and schools, gas stations, power stations and sewage systems, and we have no choice but to get ready to manage them,” Obeid told the conference.
That was merely delusional. The next steps recall some of the worst recorded evils in history:
One issue was how to treat the Israelis. “In dealing with the Jewish settlers on Palestinian land, there must be a distinction in attitudes toward [the following]: a fighter, who must be killed; a [Jew] who is fleeing and can be left alone or be prosecuted for his crimes in the judicial arena; and a peaceful individual who gives himself up and can be [either] integrated or given time to leave.” They agreed that, “This is an issue that requires deep deliberation and a display of the humanism that has always characterized Islam.”
More specifically, the issue of a brain drain was discussed. “Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology and civilian and military industry should be retained [in Palestine] for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty, while we paid the price for all this in humiliation, poverty, sickness, deprivation, killing and arrests,” the conference’s concluding statement asserted.
In other words, some Israelis would experience the deeply ‘humanist” experience of Hamas’ Islamism as slaves. Since their property would have already been seized, where would they have gone to live? Prisons or camps, and likely a combination of the two, where they would have been worked to death — and those would only include the Israelis that managed to survive more of the Hamas blood-lust pogroms that would have followed a conquest of Israel.
Can everyone now understand why the Israelis see October 7 as an existential moment?
This account raises a lot of questions, especially given its source. Haaretz is not exactly a right-of-center publication, not even in famously liberal Israel or even in the context of right-left politics there. The right-left split has less to do with economics than it does with the Palestinian issue in Israel, and Haaretz is firmly on the Left.
So why didn’t Eldar’s story about Hamas’ aspirations for enslaving the Jews gain more traction in the global media? For one thing, almost all of it is paywalled. Having read a reference to it this morning at The Free Press and most of the above excerpt on a Reddit thread, I paid a monthly subscription fee to unlock the article, and verified the accuracy of the excerpt.
But other media outlets put important stories behind their paywalls, and still those stories get picked up, reported, and then widely debated. Why didn’t this story, especially consider its war-skeptical sourcing at Haaretz? In fairness, it didn’t even seem to get much traction in Israel, where the fight against Hamas has nearly consensus support in the famously fractious Israeli electorate. Still, the Gaza war has dominated the headlines around the world, and has triggered angry debates here in the US. Wouldn’t knowledge of Hamas’ ambitions be an important element to add to these debates? It certainly would clarify which side wants to emulate the Nazis, and inform any debate over what we can expect as outcomes from a so-called “two-state solution.”
That certainly applies to our foreign policy choices, too. If Eldar can glean this information from Gaza ex-pats in Cairo, our intel services and those of other allies should know it, too. It raises the question as to why we are negotiating with Hamas at all, let alone pressuring Israel into offering them concession after concession while demanding nothing of Hamas.
Keeping this story quiet makes it a lot easier for Joe Biden to pander to the ‘Death to America’ terror sympathizers in Dearbornistan and the radicals of Academia, no? And isn’t the same true for the mainstream media here in the US that has gone all-in on Hamas propaganda and keeps painting Israel as an “occupier”?
At some point, let’s hope Haaretz moves this story outside the paywall, as it has lots of very interesting information on just how much intelligence Israel missed, how Hamas bigwigs alerted family members to get out, and how releasing Yahya Sinwar may have been Israel’s worst mistake in the last 20 years. But when can we expect other media outlets — and our own government — to acknowledge the obvious about Hamas’ evil nature and its genocidal delusions?