Some background to Hamas's riots

Elan Journo, author of the upcoming book What Justice Demands: America & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, offers some relevant background to understand what you see in the news from the Gaza border.

Israeli citizens, he argues, have a legitimate right to self-defence, which the Israeli Defence force is protecting. Just like us, acknowledges Journo, "Israel has flaws and shortcomings. Yet, also like our society, it protects the freedom of individuals."  So on the one side you have this semi-free society trying to protect itself and its citizens, on the other an Iranian-backed organisation calling for martyrdom of its own people in yet another bid to throw Jews into the sea and, as Hamas leader Yahya Shinwar said recently, to "swarm across the border and tear out their hearts."

Fundamentally, regional hostility toward Israel reflects the ideological currents of the Middle East. Now at the vanguard of that hostility are the jihadists, who Iran has long inspired and funded; Iran also has backed Hamas and Hezbollah, both notorious for suicide attacks, in several wars on Israel. The Tehran regime, which has sought nuclear capability, has long glorified martyrdom in the path of Allah.

This is whom, imperfectly perhaps, the Israeli Defence force is protecting Israeli citizens.

This conflict has been going on for decades, even centuries. But like most things in the Middle East, this ongoing conflict was radically altered in 1979. [Quick quiz question: what happened in 1979?] Prior to this, the opposition was more secular than religious:

For decades, Israel's regional adversaries were neighbouring regimes — mainly Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq — and the Palestinian movement, which those regimes sponsored. Ideologically, these adversaries often justified their desire to liquidate Israel in terms of Arab nationalism or Palestinian nationalism. Leading the charge against Israel initially was Egypt's military dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a self-styled prophet of Arab nationalism; that ideology was a nominally secular blend of socialism, fascism and brute authoritarianism, infused with Islamic tropes and allusions. By the close of the 1960s, however, the spearhead became the Palestine Liberation Organisation (which Nasser instigated and funded) led by Yasser Arafat.
    Then, in 1979, the Islamic revolution toppled the government in Iran. It galvanised the Islamist movement across the world, while the appeal of Arab nationalism waned. The new Iranian regime embodied the ideal of a totalitarian society shaped by Islamic religious law. Iran eagerly proclaimed itself the leader of a global jihadist cause; it made that ideal appear realisable, and the path of jihad as practical.
    The Islamists had a different, more compelling justification for reviling Israel: They sought to liquidate that free society, not in the name of realising an exhausted dream of Arab "unity" or an authoritarian Palestinian homeland, but in the name of the sacred duty to serve Allah. They denounced Israel as an infidel regime on land that must belong to the pious.
    The aftershocks of Iran’s revolution energised Islamist groups, and notably so within the Palestinian movement. The best known of these is Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), whose founding document explains that, "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad."
     While Arab regimes inched back somewhat from the anti-Israel vanguard, the Islamists marched forward. In Lebanon, Iran helped create an Islamist force called Hezbollah, which has attacked and waged war against Israel. Within the Palestinian community, Hamas eclipsed the nationalist factions that had led the Palestinian movement for decades, winning a 2006 landslide election and then seizing control of Gaza. Hamas and other Islamist Palestinian groups received Iranian funding and military hardware, enabling them to wage war against Israel from within Gaza in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014.

That said, both today's Iranian proxies and the nationalists before them have more zero interest in maintaining Palestinians' problems than than they do in in seeing them remedied. For them, Palestinians' grievances are on an ongoing casus belli justifying every outrage they instigate, while Palestinians and their children, for them, are almost literally public-relations cannon fodder.

The Islamists, like their nationalist predecessors, invoke Palestinians’ grievances related to Israel's founding and ongoing policies in defense of their cause. But that’s a dishonest ploy. Properly defined, there are some actual wrongs to be addressed, but these cannot explain the longstanding hostility toward Israel, nor justify the violence against it.
    The larger truth is that Arab regimes, the Palestinian movement and the Islamists do not care about the lives of Palestinian individuals who they claim to be avenging; they have exploited that community, indoctrinated many of them and exacerbated their suffering. Neither the Islamist "solution" — a theocratic Iran-backed Palestinian regime — nor the dictatorial regime of their rival factions could solve any actual problems.

Thus, for them, seeing Palestinians martyred with Israeli bullets is a victory, a media triumph, and the very public deaths almost an end in themselves.

That said, however, while its defensive options are admittedly very few, the Israeli response seems from this distance to play into their hands:

With Netanyahu & Likud in power, there’s very little Iran needs to do aside from sit back & watch. "

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