Americans expected Osama bin Laden to be
found in a cave in Afghanistan. In reality, he was living comfortably in
a military town in Pakistan under the protection of local authorities.
Similarly, Israeli hostages, including the four who were rescued last
Saturday, have come home telling stories of being kept captive in
“civilian” households.
Many in the West fundamentally
misunderstand what Islamic terrorism is. It’s not a “fringe group of
extremists,” as politicians and the media describe it, but an ethnic and
religious movement. The religious values of Islamic terrorists are
universally shared by the vast majority of Muslims, while the ethnic
ones ground Islamic warfare in the interests of specific clans and
families.
Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood
and has a widespread base of support across the Muslim world, which is
dotted with branches of the Brotherhood. But its ethnic power base is
also grounded in the key clans and families that control Gaza. That is
why Hamas still retains the support of the majority of the Muslim
colonists currently occupying Gaza. It’s also why those same “civilians”
held Israeli hostages prisoner and could be trusted not to inform on
them.
The latest Palestinian Center for Policy
and Survey Research poll shows that 71% of Gazans support the Hamas
atrocities of Oct. 7, and 56% expect Hamas to win the war. Some 62% in
Gaza are happy Hamas’s performance during the war, and 59% want Hamas to
stay in power.
That’s because they are Hamas and the terror group is also them.
The “Palestinian” myth is that the Muslim
colonists occupying parts of Israel are the “indigenous” people. The
reality is that they were Arab settlers who arrived with and after the
Islamic conquest of Israel. Some, like the notorious Husseini clan,
which produced Hitler’s mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, were relatively
recent arrivals. The most powerful and wealthiest of these large
families took control of urban areas, as the Husseinis tried to do in
Jerusalem, and became a vital part of the Ottoman feudal order, serving
as mayors and muftis. When the Ottomans were defeated, the clans fought
to reclaim their power with movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, also known as Hamas.
Hamas is an ideological Islamist movement,
but its control over Gaza depends on these large families. That’s why
the idea that most people have that Hamas is a fanatical movement that
exists apart from ordinary people and can be fought and defeated apart
from them is wrong.
That’s also why so few of the hostages
have been rescued. Like the recently rescued four, the hostages are
largely dispersed among “civilian” clan families across neighborhoods
controlled by them. These families are formally civilian households, but
many of their members are affiliated with Hamas. Rather than being an
army whose members belong foremost to Hamas, they are more like the
mafia and belong foremost to their extended clan, and choose to lend
their support to Hamas.
It’s not just that Hamas uses human
shields, which it certainly does, it’s that its infrastructure depends
on clans whose adults provide fighters, and whose women and children act
as human shields for the greater glory of the clan and Islam. The same
clans that will kill teenage girls for violating family honor will also
serve up even younger children as human shields for honor.
There is no way for Israel to rescue its
hostages without going into dense neighborhoods under the control of the
clans to get them out. And that will lead to firefights and “Black Hawk
Down” moments. Clan members, who never identify themselves as such,
will cry that they were massacred. And foreign leaders and the media
will condemn the deaths of “civilians.”
Defeating Hamas without civilian
casualties is impossible because the Islamic terrorist group not only
operates among civilians but is rooted in the society of Gaza. The clans
that run Gaza, that provide the manpower that controls UNRWA
institutions, and that are the mainstays of Hamas are also the large
families that dominate the businesses, cultural and religious life in
Gaza.
There’s no meaningful distinction between
civilians and Hamas. Some clans reject Hamas authority and Israel has
tried to solicit some of them to run Gaza. For now, with few results.
The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq had similarly depended on
swaying certain clans, elders and warlords into abandoning Al-Qaeda or
the Taliban, with very temporary success.
Eventually the Taliban or Al-Qaeda,
rebranded as the Islamic State, returned. And some of the same men we
had armed and trained turned their guns on us. It is an almost
inevitable outcome of counterinsurgency (COIN). When bringing democracy
to the Muslim world fails, Westerners begin competing with jihadists for
the support of the clans, only to be stabbed in the back.
The jihadists have the Quran on their
side. To Muslims, their terrorism will always be more righteous than our
fumbling efforts to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage.
Appealing to moderates or promising a better life will not win their
support. On the contrary, it only infuriates the imams in their mosques
and the influential clan leaders into opposing us.
Instead, we must reckon with the reality
that there are few civilians in Gaza or the Muslim world generally. And
those who legitimately are civilians should be measured by their deeds,
not their clothing. In a culture where terrorists in the field don’t
wear uniforms, where large families have sizable stocks of weapons, and
where children are taught to kill and die, the externals don’t matter.
There are no civilians in Gaza. The vast
majority of the population supports Hamas or some Islamic terrorist
movement. Only a tiny minority opposes Islamic terrorism and wants
peace.
The distinction is not between soldiers,
terrorists and civilians, but enemies and non-combatants. Israel and
Western nations should stop thinking about civilians, a concept that
does not apply in a battlespace where terrorists wear street clothes and
entire neighborhoods are controlled by clans that hide hostages in
plain sight, and think about enemies and neutrals.
An enemy is anyone, regardless of clothing or sex, who is aligned with Islamic terrorists.
Every poll continues to show that the vast
majority of those in Gaza are aligned with the enemy. And if that were
not the case, the war would have long since ended once locals informed
the authorities of where the hostages are and where the remaining Hamas
terrorists are set up.
Israel is not just at war with an
organization, but with an enemy culture. As is most of the world,
whether it chooses to admit it or not. The war is not defined by what
they wear, but by what they think. As long as human shields, female
suicide bombers and child soldiers abound, the war cannot be fought by
treating civilians as noncombatants while hunting elusive terrorists.
The only way to defeat an enemy is to fight him as he is, not as we would like him to be.
It would be a far cleaner and neater war
if Islamic terrorists fought like conventional armies. They do not. And
it is time to fight them on their own terms instead.
Hamas can’t be defeated by waiting until
its terrorists take off their civilian clothes and put on uniforms.
Hamas are the civilians. They are the ones holding the hostages. The
only way to free the hostages and defeat the terrorists is to destroy
the terror culture in whatever form it takes.
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