Undoubtedly the year’s biggest religion-news story will be the events of this past weekend: The Oct. 7 massacre of hundreds Israeli civilians by the terrorist group Hamas and the soon-to-be war in the Middle East that could unfold on multiple fronts.
Scanning the coverage, I am seeing that many people are asking. “What is Hamas’ end game?” They know that Gaza will almost certainly be ripped apart in retribution. A group doesn’t do this kind of carnage unless there’s some massive overarching reason behind it all — something linked to a core belief.
One core belief has to do with the superiority of Islam and the need for Israel’s eventual destruction, which you can find in the opening paragraphs of the founding charter of the Hamas movement. Israel has been trying to appease the mentality behind this document for 75 years in the hopes that Hamas would become less jihadist.
The world now sees where that hope led.
A second core belief centers on Al Aqsa, the Dome of the Rock complex in Jerusalem, the point from which Muslims believe Mohammed magically transported one night from Mecca. It is the third holiest site in Islam, after Mohammed’s grave site in Medina and of course Mecca. The goal is for Al Aqsa to, symbolically, cover all of Israel.
Even though this whole narrative is laced with religion, it took awhile for professionals in the major news media to get there. I didn’t see Al Aqsa mentions until Sunday, when someone thought to dig up quotes from the Hamas military chief, Muhammad Deif. The importance of the below quote can’t be over-emphasized.
As the Times of Israel noted:
Here lies a part of Palestinian thinking and discourse that many of Palestine’s Western defenders ignore, both because it’s a hard sell to Western audiences and because they don’t really understand it themselves. Palestinian “resistance,” as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work.
As he announced the start of Saturday’s attack, Hamas military commander Deif said it was meant to disrupt a planned Israeli demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And when Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh called on Saturday for “every Muslim everywhere and all the free people of the world to stand in this just battle in defense of Al-Aqsa and the Prophet’s mission,” he meant just that, that the fight was over holy things, over Islam’s redemptive promise.
This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel.
There was no planned demolition of the mosque — anyone with the slightest knowledge of realities on the Temple Mount knows the destruction of Al Aqsa would bring on World War III. Nevertheless, Deir called the invasion “Al Aqsa Storm” to make sure his listeners got the point.
As this link points out, Al Aqsa has been a flashpoint for months, with more Israelis openly praying on the Mount in violation of a decades-long (unwritten, I believe) agreement that Jews would pray at the Western Wall below while Muslims prayed on the mount above. But in 2021, Israel began allowing Jewish groups to quietly pray on the Mount and by this year, tensions were getting worse and worse.
As this Al Jazeera piece relates, Israeli police were firing rubber bullets at Muslim worshippers on the Mount during Ramadan last April and attacking worshippers inside the Qibli Mosque (another structure on the Mount) itself. At least 400 Palestinians were arrested. So, things were at a boil back then over an escalating list of Palestinian grievances on what they saw as Israel erasing the few rights they enjoyed.
Something else happened this past week to further inflame Muslim sentiments, something I saw unreported in the Western press. But in The New Arab, the text ran as follows:
More than 800 Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem on Thursday morning under the protection of Israeli forces.
Rabbis, heads of settlement associations, and far-right university lecturers were among 832 people who forced their way into the religious site compound, a source in the Islamic Endowments Department in Jerusalem told The New Arab's Arabic sister site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
OK, this is second-hand information, but in the Internet age that matters little:
Israeli forces imposed severe restrictions on Muslim worshippers entering Al-Aqsa and those under 60 were prevented from accessing the site.
Atop this post is an Al Jazeera video illustrating what Arabs are saying is the true situation near the Temple Mount.
Obviously no one thought the violence last spring would lead to Saturday’s attacks; at least no one on the Israeli side. But leaders of Hamas had reached a breaking point and, if the Wall Street Journal is correct, they began reaching out to Iran on ways it could make ordinary Jews pay dearly. Six months later, almost to the day when the confrontations began on Al Aqsa, Hamas attacked.
Just before they did so, there was one more thing. I discovered this report from Al Jazeera English about “hundreds” of mostly young Israeli settlers “storming” the Al Aqsa complex. Al Jazeera showed a crowd of what looked like mostly male students entering a gate into the complex — but I wouldn’t exactly term their leisurely pace as “storming” the area.
But Hamas clearly saw this as a desecration. Searching about, I am seeing reports on this in the pro-Palestinian media but nothing in more Western outlets. Were these events real or not and, if so, was this the Israelis’ idea of a Sukkot week tour? If (repeat “if”) hundreds of “settlers” –- or whoever they were –- were allowed into the Al Aqsa complex, who approved that?
I really have not seen anything in-depth done on the Al Aqsa factor and who lied to the Arabic-speaking public about a supposed Israeli attempt to overtake or demolish the area. Why avoid this crucial religious fuse on the bomb that is the Middle East?
There are more religion angles — including the above tweet about a topic dear to my heart: The charismatic prophets who can’t get anything right about world politics. Check out evangelist Benny Hinn’s video on Israel being on the cusp of a major time of peace.
Also, Israel’s enemies definitely have a thing for anniversaries (50 years after the October 1973 attack by Israel’s enemies during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement) and the Jewish holidays. Saturday’s attack was on the holiday of Simchat Torah, a holiday marking the public reading of the Jewish scriptures. It is at the end of Sukkot, a week-long holiday also known as the Feast of Tabernacles.
As analysts –- mainly in the West -– try to figure out why Hamas mounted this attack, some mention has been made of them wanting to head off a future agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
One of the best wrap-ups I’ve seen to date appeared in The Free Press and addressed this specific point.
What happened most recently was that an emerging Saudi-Israeli peace agreement began to take shape — which would have offered a potentially powerful counterweight to Iran’s ambitions to regional hegemony. Needless to say, the Iranians don’t like that.
Iran’s thinking seems to have been that if the Hamas attack was brutal and deadly enough, the Israelis would have no choice but to strike back extra-hard in Gaza, generating thousands of photographs and videos of destroyed buildings, dead bodies, and crying children that will inflame the so-called “Arab Street,” making it impossible for the Saudis to publicly ally themselves with Israel and leaving Iran in control of the region.
There’s not only the antisemitic element in play, there’s the Sunni/Shia rift that’s just as deadly.
Regarding a Saudi-Israeli peace — well, guess we can’t have that. This Time magazine piece makes a strong case as well for the attack being an Iranian ploy to throw off any Israeli-Saudi unity. The enmity between Shia (the Iranians) and the Sunnis (the Saudis) goes back 14 centuries.
When it comes to the Middle East, the bottom line is always religion.
Not sometimes. Always.
Reporters will not go wrong following that angle, no matter where it leads.
FIRST IMAGE: The flag of Hamas.