The fol­low­ing arti­cle was writ­ten by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin, and was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished by ABC Reli­gion and Ethics.

A ‘Calculus of Death’: Hamas’ Propaganda War in Gaza

Alex Ryvchin
ABC Reli­gion & Ethics
May 23, 2018
Con­trary to reports attribut­ing the clash­es on Israel’s bor­der with Gaza to the open­ing of the Unit­ed States embassy in Jerusalem, the large-scale gath­er­ings and attempts to breach the bor­der began in earnest on 30 March.
The under­ly­ing moti­va­tion has been plain­ly stat­ed by the Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship in Gaza: to “remove the tran­sient bor­der” between Israel and Gaza, in the words of Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sin­war, and to achieve a Pales­tin­ian “return” to “all of Pales­tine,” accord­ing to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
These objec­tives were sup­ple­ment­ed with instruc­tions to kill and abduct Israeli civil­ians and sol­diers in the Israeli bor­der com­mu­ni­ties.
Pales­tini­ans claim a “right of return,” not into a future Pales­tin­ian State, but into Israel, for up to 7 mil­lion descen­dants of Pales­tini­ans dis­placed dur­ing Israel’s war of inde­pen­dence 70 years ago.
The num­ber of Pales­tini­ans alive today who were per­son­al­ly dis­placed fol­low­ing the inva­sion of Israel is esti­mat­ed at around 30,000. The con­cept of hered­i­tary refugee sta­tus in per­pe­tu­ity for those who were nev­er per­son­al­ly dis­placed is unique to the Pales­tin­ian cause and is claimed by no oth­er peo­ple.
Veiled in the lan­guage of human rights and inter­na­tion­al law, the “right of return” is con­cerned with nei­ther law nor human rights. It has long stood as a euphemism for the oblit­er­a­tion of any autonomous Jew­ish pres­ence in the Mid­dle East by turn­ing the Jews into a minor­i­ty in their own nation­al home, and replac­ing it with a twen­ty-third major­i­ty Arab state.
While the march has pre­dictably been framed – and vir­tu­al­ly uncrit­i­cal­ly accept­ed – as a peace­ful, pop­u­lar demon­stra­tion, noth­ing hap­pens in Gaza except at the direc­tion of Hamas. And noth­ing done by Hamas is for peace­ful pur­pos­es. It remains, open­ly and unashamed­ly, com­mit­ted to the anni­hi­la­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple and their nation-state. The com­plete absence of any demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions in the Gaza Strip, let alone any civ­il soci­ety with the free­dom or capac­i­ty to orga­nize a demon­stra­tion, means that any pub­lic gath­er­ing occurs only at the behest of Gaza­’s Islamist rulers and in keep­ing with its strate­gic inter­ests.
To be sure, the major­i­ty of the tens of thou­sands assem­bled at the bor­der did not engage in vio­lence. How­ev­er, fac­ing squads of Hamas fight­ers armed with grenades, bombs and guns, embed­ded among the mass­es of non-com­bat­ants, Israel deployed its forces. It attempt­ed to pre­vent breach­es of the bor­der with crowd con­trol mea­sures such as rub­ber-coat­ed bul­lets and tear gas, and in response to the numer­ous attempts to bomb or infil­trate the bor­der fence, it used live rounds.
The major­i­ty of the dead have been named by Hamas as its oper­a­tives. The wid­ow of a mem­ber of the rival Fatah fac­tion killed near the bor­der left no doubt as to the respon­si­bil­i­ty for the vio­lence: “The lead­ers are send­ing young men toward the bor­ders. The peo­ple are the vic­tims.”
Writ­ing for Bloomberg dur­ing the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, the Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Jef­frey Gold­berg observed:

“Dead Pales­tini­ans rep­re­sent a cru­cial pro­pa­gan­da vic­to­ry for the nihilists of Hamas. It is per­verse, but true. It is also the best pos­si­ble expla­na­tion for Hamas’s behav­ior, because Hamas has no oth­er plau­si­ble strate­gic goal here.”

Alan Der­showitz had made the same obser­va­tion a few years ear­li­er when he referred to the “cal­cu­lus of death” adopt­ed by Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ists. Dead Israelis con­sti­tute a suc­cess. While the high­er the civil­ian death toll on the Pales­tin­ian side, the more effec­tive the ensu­ing pro­pa­gan­da against Israel. In oth­er words, death on either side serves the inter­ests of the ter­ror­ists. The well-doc­u­ment­ed use of human shields by Hamas, the deploy­ment of child sol­diers, and the use of minors to goad Israeli sol­diers in the West Bank as Pales­tin­ian par­ents record on their iPhones from a safe dis­tance, are all out­growths of this for­mu­la­tion.
There is a fur­ther com­po­nent to this macabre equa­tion that is essen­tial to its suc­cess: the sup­port of the West. To suc­ceed, the strat­e­gy of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ists depends on a com­pli­ant press that will pub­lish hagio­graph­ic ren­der­ings of “resis­tance” and hero­ism, a sym­pa­thet­ic civ­il soci­ety of NGOs and activist church­es that will run cam­paigns based around the Pales­tin­ian nar­ra­tive of vic­tim­hood, and a hol­low Unit­ed Nations to issue reflex­ive con­dem­na­tions, and car­ry out politi­cized fact-find­ing mis­sions and inquiries which nev­er fail to accuse Israel and excuse the Pales­tini­ans.
This lat­est esca­la­tion has fol­lowed the same pat­tern. Hamas, which exer­cis­es absolute rule in Gaza, orches­trat­ed a con­fronta­tion with Israel that once again has “no plau­si­ble strate­gic goal” beyond achiev­ing cru­cial “pro­pa­gan­da vic­to­ries.” Such is the cal­cu­lus of Hamas. Like all autoc­ra­cies, it views its peo­ple to be whol­ly dis­pens­able, fod­der on the path to a glo­ri­ous vic­to­ry. It is adept at exploit­ing the sym­pa­thies of the West, while revil­ing the West­ern val­ues of which that sym­pa­thy is borne.
As long as Hamas can rely on West­ern audi­ences to imbibe images of young chil­dren march­ing on a bor­der, with­out ques­tion­ing at whose cal­lous insti­ga­tion that child has been sent forth and for what pur­pose, Israelis and Pales­tini­ans are des­tined to move from one bout of vio­lence to the next.
Alex Ryvchin is the co-CEO of the Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry. His new book is The Anti-Israel Agen­da: Inside the Polit­i­cal War on the Jew­ish State.
Image Source: ABC RELIGION & ETHICS / MAHMUD HAMS / AFP / GETTY IMAGES