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‘We’ll Be Seen as Losers if We Don’t Complete the Job:’ Israeli Historian Benny Morris Addresses the War Against Hamas
Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza. Photo: IDF via Reuters
“I dislike Benjamin Netanyahu intensely; he’s a crook,” the Israeli historian Benny Morris said, when asked about the future direction of the present war triggered by the pogrom executed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. “But he’s right that the war should continue until Hamas is crushed, if only because around the region, we will be seen as losers if we don’t complete the job.”
That observation about Israel’s prime minister, offered during an extensive telephone interview with The Algemeiner on Thursday, underlines the near impossibility of neatly slotting Morris’ views into any particular camp. One of Israel’s leading public intellectuals, who is a Cambridge University graduate, a former professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the author of the seminal study The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, first published in 1988, Morris expresses opinions associated with the left at one moment, and with the right in the next. Ideological partisans might regard this as a contradictory; more flexible thinkers, perhaps including Morris himself, would see this as a net positive, reflecting both the Middle East’s complexity and the futility of reducing national and political conflicts to mere slogans.
For Morris is an opponent not just of Netanyahu and the right-wing coalition gathered around him; he remains, in principle, a supporter of the two-state solution as well as a longstanding critic of Israel’s presence in the West Bank. On the other hand, he doesn’t articulate any faith in the willingness of the Palestinian factions to reach a permanent settlement with Israel, and he believes that the true villain of the piece is the Iranian regime, which this week has again been trumpeting its ability to assemble a nuclear weapon, and which continues to support terrorist organizations committed to Israel’s destruction, from the Houthi rebels in Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“What is certain is that Iran has forged with its proxies a circle around Israel, an alliance of anti-Israeli and anti-western forces,” Morris remarked. “Above and beyond all of this is the Iranian nuclear threat, which is certainly on the minds of Israelis, and also on the minds of American leaders and generals. This is the main threat, way beyond the threat posed by Iran’s proxies.” He makes no secret of his view that Israel should neutralize Iran’s nuclear ambitions as soon as possible. “It’ll be more expensive to do it later,” he argued. “If the Iranians acquire a nuclear arsenal, the region will probably come under Iranian domination.”
Morris is a little more sanguine when it comes to Israel’s other adversaries in the region. The conservative Arab Gulf states, some of whom signed up to peace treaties with Israel through the so-called “Abraham Accords” of 2018, will continue, according to Morris, balancing their need to pay “lip service” to the Palestinian cause with the imperative of retaining the protection and goodwill of the US, still Israel’s main ally. “Without America, countries like Bahrain or Qatar risk being dominated by the Iranians,” he said.
Turkey — the focus of of Morris’ 2019 book, The Thirty Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities 1894-1924, co-authored with his fellow historian Dror Ze’evi — is similarly unlikely to escalate tensions with Israel on the military front, even as its Islamist leadership engages in a fresh round of political demonization of the Jewish state. “Turkey, like Russia, is a dictatorship with the trappings of democracy,” Morris said. “They hold elections, but these are meaningless.” He nevertheless regards Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a shrewd operator who makes strategic calculations, despite his evident detestation of Israel. “Turkey has other axes to grind — the Kurds, northern Syria, potentially Iran, so they have had the sense to remain outside the conflict,” he said. “I think that will continue.”
Further afield, Morris doesn’t see a significant threat from US rivals China and Russia, at least not immediately. “China is not in the game at all. China is interested in expanding in the Pacific Rim,” he said. Given its military backing for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad during that country’s torrid civil war, Russia is a more likely candidate for involvement in the Middle East, but Moscow is for the time being hampered by its ongoing aggression against Ukraine as well as the robust sanctions imposed by western powers. “The situation [for the Russians] is not as it was during the Cold War,” Morris said. “Today, they are not as involved and their interests are not as bound up.”
With the US maintaining its role as the leading outside power in the region, talk of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been revived, causing tensions between Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden’s Administration. Morris believes that a Palestinian state alongside Israel is theoretically the correct solution, but he doesn’t see a “roadmap” — the phrase much used by successive US administrations in their peacemaking efforts — for getting there.
“The problem is that the occupation is immoral and bad,” he said. “It was forced upon us, but we didn’t do enough to get out of it.” Meanwhile, in the wake of the Hamas atrocities, Israelis have become hardened. “The Israeli public is staunch in its desire to destroy Hamas and pay them back for what happened,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of revenge, it’s understanding that without that, Israel will appear weak.”
As Morris explains it, the dilemma for Israel revolves around how to withdraw from the West Bank without turning it into a Hamas stronghold. Israel has been able to weather two decades of rocket and missile attacks from Gaza, but similar salvos from Ramallah, which is just a short drive from Tel Aviv, would amount to an “existential threat,” Morris said. “In the West Bank, there is no way of assuring the benign nature of a Palestinian state,” he said. “The want all of Palestine. That’s the essence of the problem.” Additionally, Morris has little faith in international guarantees, citing Hezbollah’s refusal to move its armed forces north of Lebanon’s Litani River, as part of a broader disarmament process envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of Aug. 2006, as an example of the difficulty of implementing compromises that are not enforced.
“The sense among Israelis is that, along with the rapes of Oct. 7, Israel itself was raped,” Morris said. “The world didn’t seem to care about that, and there was an instant rise in antisemitic abuse and anti-Israel rhetoric even before the military response.” The political context is also changing, he observed. “The further away the western world gets from the Holocaust, particularly the younger generations, they less they know and care about World War II,” he said. At the same time, “Islam contains a large antisemitic element” that stems from the bombastic accounts in the Qur’an of the battles in the seventh century between the Jewish tribes of Hijaz and the prophet Muhammad and his followers. “There’s this inherent anti-Jewish element that’s been reinforced by Israel’s existence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” Morris said. “Israel is an innovation in that sense — a Jewish state projecting power at the Muslims. That was not the situation for 1400 years since the rise of Islam.”
Israel’s future moves in this environment will be largely determined by its government. Morris does not believe that elections, which are not due for another three years, will be called early, blaming that on the “combination of crooks and cowards supporting Netanyahu.”
New elections will be elusive because those Knesset members supporting Netanyahu fear the loss of their seats, Morris said. “Most liberal and left Israelis would love to see an election now, and if one was held, Netanyahu would lose large,” he stressed. “But he’s not going to resign, and his allies aren’t going to abandon him.”
Morris is an admirer of Biden, whom he regards as “an old-style real Zionist who admires and respects Israel but doesn’t like Netanyahu.” He dreads the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House following November’s critical election. “I don’t trust Trump further than I can see,” he said. “He has no morals and he doesn’t care about Israel as [Bill] Clinton and [George W.] Bush did.” Asked about Trump’s decision while in office to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Morris was cynical, asserting that the “embassy should be in Jerusalem, because it’s Israel’s legitimate capital. So that made sense, but it didn’t turn [Trump] into an Israel-lover.” A Trump victory in November would be “very bad for Israel,” he emphasized.
Benny Morris will feature on an online panel titled “Hamas and the Origins of Islamic Antisemitism” sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on Monday, Feb. 26. To register for this event, please click here.
The post ‘We’ll Be Seen as Losers if We Don’t Complete the Job:’ Israeli Historian Benny Morris Addresses the War Against Hamas first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Keith Siegel, Yarden Bibas, Ofer Kalderon set to be released Saturday from Gaza
Philissa Cramer reports for JTA. Look for more updates from The CJN after Shabbat.
An American Israeli and a high-profile young father are among the latest hostages set to be freed from Gaza, in what will be the fourth release during the current Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Keith Siegel, Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon will be released on Saturday, Hamas told Israel on Friday. The three men are among 33 hostages whose release was required under the current deal, out of 98 held before the deal’s start earlier this month.
Siegel, 65, is the oldest American-Israeli hostage. A North Carolina native who moved to Israel as a young adult, he was abducted in his own car from Kibbutz Kfar Aza with his wife Aviva during Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Aviva was released after 51 days in a temporary ceasefire in November 2023 and has advocated for him since, wearing a T-shirt daily with a photo of him on it.
“Dad is coming!” Aviva Siegel shouts in a video the family posted on Friday after hearing the news that her husband was on the list for release. Siegel’s mother died during his captivity.
Bibas, 38, is the father of the only children who remain in Gaza and appeared in a hostage video in November 2023 that showed him responding to being told that his wife, Shiri, and sons Ariel and Kfir had been killed. Israel has never confirmed Hamas’ allegation that the mother and young children were dead, but has said there are “grave concerns” about them and did not insist on their release prior to that of living men.
This week, Israel demanded that Hamas “clarify” the status of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir, who were abducted separately from Yarden and have become global symbols of the crisis; it is not clear whether that has happened or will before his release.
Kalderon, 51, was abducted with his two children from Kibbutz Nir Oz. Sahar, 17, and Erez, 12, were released during the November 2023 ceasefire after 52 days in captivity. Their mother, Hadas, was a prominent voice for mothers of the children abducted on Oct. 7 and has continued to advocate for her ex-husband, a dual French-Israeli citizen.
After the three men are released, there will be 79 hostages remaining in Gaza, of whom at least 44 are confirmed to be dead—36 whose deaths were announced before the current ceasefire, and eight who are among the 33 whose release was negotiated as part of the current deal.
The post Keith Siegel, Yarden Bibas, Ofer Kalderon set to be released Saturday from Gaza appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Hamas Confirms Death of Terror Chief Mohammed Deif Months After Israeli Strike
Picture said to show leader of Hamas’s military wing, known as Al-Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif in a location given as Gaza Strip in this handout picture released on Jan. 7, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas officially confirmed on Thursday that its military chief, Mohammed Deif, was killed during the Gaza war, almost six months after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported his death.
Deif, the architect of Hamas’s military capabilities, is believed to have been one of the masterminds behind the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — which sparked the Gaza war.
Abu Ubaida, a Hamas spokesperson, also reported the deaths of Deif’s deputy, Khan Younis Brigade commander Rafa Salama, as well as senior operatives Marwan Issa, Ghazi Abu Tama’a, Raad Thabet, Ahmed Ghandour, and Ayman Nofal.
According to the IDF, Deif was killed in an airstrike in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on July 13 of last year.
Following weeks of intelligence assessments, Israeli authorities gathered evidence to confirm Deif’s death before publicly announcing it in early August.
“IDF fighter jets struck in the area of Khan Yunis, and … it can be confirmed that Mohammed Deif was eliminated in the strike,” the military said. “His elimination serves the objectives of the war and demonstrates Israel’s ability to carry out targeted strikes with precision.”
At the time, Hamas neither confirmed nor denied Deif’s death, but one official, Ezzat Rashaq, stated that any announcements regarding the deaths of its leaders would be made solely by the organization.
“Unless either of them [the Hamas political and military leadership] announces it, no news published in the media or by any other parties can be confirmed,” Rashaq said.
In November, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Deif, as well as for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Deif is believed to have collaborated closely with the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, managing military operations and coordinating with the group’s top commanders throughout the conflict.
After Deif’s assassination, then-defense minister Gallant posted an image on social media praising the Israeli military’s accomplishment.
“The assassination of mass murderer Mohammed Deif — ‘Gaza’s Bin Laden’ — is a major step toward dismantling Hamas as a military and governing entity, and achieving the war’s objectives,” he said.
The post Hamas Confirms Death of Terror Chief Mohammed Deif Months After Israeli Strike first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘A Bad but Necessary Deal’: Five Members of His Family Were Murdered — Today, Their Killer Walks Free
Oran Almog, right, addressing the UN Security Council next to Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon on July 25, 2017. Photo: Screenshot
While the release of three Israeli hostages on Thursday brought relief and elation across Israel, it also triggered a wave of mixed emotions, especially among victims who saw the terrorists responsible for their suffering set free. One of them is Oran Almog, who was just ten years old when a Palestinian terrorist disguised as a pregnant woman blew up the restaurant he was in, killing five members of his family and leaving him blind.
Yet, while Thursday’s release of Sami Jaradat — the mastermind behind the October 2003 massacre of Almog’s family — was a deeply personal blow, the return of hostages remained a necessary step, he said.
“That the terrorist who killed my family will find himself free is deeply painful, heartbreaking even,” he told The Algemeiner. “But at the same time, I know that even today — especially today — I must set aside my personal pain and focus on the significance of this deal. And the significance is clear. We are getting our hostages home, and that is the only thing that matters.”
Almog’s father, Moshe Almog, his younger brother, Tomer, his grandparents Admiral (res.) Ze’ev and Ruth Almog, and his cousin, Asaf, were murdered when the suicide bomber, Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old lawyer from Jenin, managed to get past the security guard of the Maxim restaurant — jointly owned by a Jewish Israeli and an Arab Israeli — and blow herself up. Sixteen other people were also murdered in the attack, among them four children. Almog lost his eyesight, and his mother, sister, and aunt were among the 60 injured Israelis.
“Sami Jaradat’s continued imprisonment will never bring my family back, but his release can bring the hostages back home alive,” Almog explained.
Emotional meeting between Agam Berger and her family at Beilinson Hospital in Israel. Photo: Haim Zach (GPO)
Almog knows firsthand what it means to be on the receiving end of a hostage-prisoner exchange.
Just two weeks after marking the 20th anniversary of the Maxim restaurant attack, another tragedy struck his family. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists brutally murdered Nadav and Yam and abducted Chen, Agam, Gal, and Tal from the Almog-Goldstein family in Kfar Azza.
Fifty-one days later, in November 2023, they were released from Hamas captivity in a temporary ceasefire deal.
Under the current ceasefire agreement reached earlier this month, Hamas will release a total 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, according to the terrorist group. In exchange, Israel will free over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom were serving multiple life sentences on terrorism offenses. Thursday saw the release of three Israelis — including IDF surveillance soldier Agam Berger, 20, and civilians Arbel Yehoud, 29, and Gadi Mozes, 80 — and five Thai nationals, who were working in Israeli kibbutzim when they were abducted.
“This is a bad deal, very bad, but the alternative is that much worse,” Almog said. “We must look ahead, put today aside, and recognize that releasing prisoners serves a greater purpose.”
However, Almog expressed hope that Israel would move toward a more decisive and uncompromising approach in its fight against terrorism.
“I sincerely hope that as a country, we will have the wisdom to decisively thwart terrorism,” he said, emphasizing the need to break free from the ongoing cycle of prisoner exchanges.
“I don’t want us to find ourselves trapped in a cycle of releasing terrorists, only for them to return to terror, and then repeat the process again and again,” he added.
Almog has previously addressed the UN Security Council, urging action against the so-called “pay-for-slay” scheme, in which terrorists and their families receive monthly stipends from the Palestinian Authority. The terrorist behind the murder of Almog’s family received $3,000 a month while behind bars, making him almost a millionaire by the time of his release.
Still, Almog concluded with a deeply uplifting message for the returning hostages, confident that they would have a chance at a good life, drawing from his own experiences since the terror attack.
Oran Almog. Photo: Facebook
After his release from the hospital, he began a long rehabilitation process, culminating in third place at the World Blind Sailing Championship with Etgarim, a nonprofit founded by disabled veterans and rehabilitation experts, and supported by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ). He was chosen to light a torch at Israel’s Independence Day ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the state and, despite his disability, insisted on enlisting in the IDF, serving in an elite unit. Today, he is a managing partner at a financial technology fund, works with Etgarim, and shares his story globally through lectures.
“I know the hostages will be able to return, to live, and to live well. With enough support — and a great deal of willpower — it is truly possible to rebuild life, even after the deepest catastrophes,” he said.
The post ‘A Bad but Necessary Deal’: Five Members of His Family Were Murdered — Today, Their Killer Walks Free first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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