Israel is not ‘saving western civilisation’. Nor is Hamas leading ‘the resistance’ | Kenan Malik

‘Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.” So proclaimed France’s pre-eminent liberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy as Israeli tanks drove across the border and its war planes bombed villages in the south and residential districts in Beirut. “There are moments in history,” he exulted, when “ ‘escalation’ becomes a necessity and a virtue.” For Lévy, it is not just Lebanon that Israel is liberating, but much of the Middle East, too.

Lévy is not alone in rejoicing at Israel’s spreading military offensive. For many, Israel is waging war, not merely in “self-defence” but, in the words of president Isaac Herzog, “to save western civilisation, to save the values of western civilisation”, a claim echoed by many of its supporters. And the destruction of Gaza, of its hospitals and universities, and the killing of 40,000 people? And the 2,000 people killed in Lebanon in a fortnight, and the fifth of its population displaced? Collateral damage en route to saving civilisation.

I should not need to say this but, as it has become commonplace to portray anyone criticising Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon as supporting Hamas or Hezbollah or celebrating the slaughter on 7 October last year, let me say that what Hamas did was barbarous, and that, as I wrote at the time, “Hamas represents a betrayal of Palestinian hopes as well as a threat to Jews”. The same can be said of Hezbollah.

And yet, until 7 October 2023, the prime minister of Israel, and much of his government, was far more supportive of Hamas than I was or would ever wish to be. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Benjamin Netanyahu told a Likud meeting in 2019. “To prevent the option of two states,” observed former Israeli general Gershon Hacohen, who for years backed Netanyahu’s policy, “he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly, Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

Israel’s support for Hamas goes back decades, an “attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative”, as a senior CIA agent told UPI more than 20 years ago. So successful was this strategy that Hamas swept to power in Gaza in 2006, and the Palestinian Authority was cut in two, with Hamas controlling Gaza and Fatah the West Bank.

In recent years, the Times of Israel observed, “Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018”, while practically turning “a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza”. On 7 October, it added on the day after the slaughter: “The concept of indirectly strengthening Hamas went up in smoke.”

Hamas was responsible for the butchery of 7 October. But Israel had helped nurture it for the explicit aim of denying Palestinians a state. And now, in the attempt to undo its previous work, it has laid Gaza to waste. Israel has to enforce “another Nakba [catastrophe]”, Hacohen insists. “The Gazans have to be expelled from their homes for good.”

Yet, however cynical it may have been, there was nothing exceptional about Israel’s strategy. For decades, western governments sought to exploit Islam to help pursue their political ends, from the funding of international jihadists to drive out the Red Army in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of 1979 to secular France encouraging the building of prayer rooms in factories, regarding Islam, in the words of Paul Dijoud, immigration minister in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s government, as a “stabilising factor which would turn the faithful from deviance, delinquency, or membership of unions or revolutionary parties”. Such policies often created a space in which more radical Islamist movements could flourish. We are still living with the blowback from this strategy.

Netanyahu’s aim in expanding Israel’s wars, and in threatening to turn Lebanon into another Gaza, is not to “liberate” anything or anyone but to maintain control, internally and externally. The lessons of previous invasions of Lebanon – in 1978, 1982 and 2006 – should be clear enough. On the first two occasions, Israel invaded to confront the Palestine Liberation Organisation, on the third to try to eliminate Hezbollah, which had emerged, with Iranian backing, in response to the 1982 invasion and occupation. Each invasion was marked by considerable bloodshed – including, in 1982, the massacre of up to 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shia in two Beirut refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, by Israel’s allies the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia – and nothing that anyone could call “liberation”.

There is a deeper issue here, too. In modernity, the historian Ronald Schechter wrote, “Jews became good to think [with]”, a comment echoed by David Nirenberg who, in his classic history of “Anti-Judaism”, similarly observed that “modernity thinks with Judaism”. What they meant was that the symbolic roles imposed on Jews became a means of addressing wider social issues. “The ‘Jewish Question’ ”, Nirenberg wrote, is not “simply an attitude towards Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging with the world”.

This use of “the Jew” as a means of making sense of the world is most true, of course, of antisemitism. For antisemites, belief in mythical Jewish power explains the evils of the world. It is true also of many strands of philosemitism, a term coined originally by antisemites but which has come to be used more widely to describe the views of those who have particular admiration for the Jewish presence in the world.

And, increasingly, it has become true of perceptions of Israel, which, too, has acquired a symbolic status on both sides of the debate. For many of those hostile to Israel, the state has become totemic of many of the ills of the modern world. For supporters of the Jewish state, it is an especially moral nation, carrying the burden of defending civilisation against barbarism. The one view leads to the celebration of Hamas’s murderous assault on 7 October as “resistance”, the other to viewing the destruction of Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon as a necessary defence of western values and of “civilisation”.

If 7 October was an act of “resistance”, and if the destruction of Gaza and the brutalisation of Lebanon can be dismissed as essential steps towards a more civilised world, then I suggest we need to rethink what we mean by “resistance” and “civilisation”.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk