Thinking about the war between Hamas (short for "Islamic Resistance Movement") and Israel as the Jewish state, a major problem for the people of South Africa in understanding this conflict is that a great majority of the people have no understanding and no history of religious war. Up to now, there has been no religious conflict and no religious oppression in South Africa, which fortunately has a history of religious freedom. There have been no signficant religious political parties.
Yet Hamas is a religious political party, in the same way that Islamic State and al-Qaeda are religious political parties as well as religious military organisations. And of the three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Islam is both the most recently formed in terms of history, and also the religion which was most fundamentally formed in terms of war. There is no equivalent in the Talmud or the Four Gospels to direct instructions in the Qur'an, such as those stating "Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them", and "Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you" (The Koran, Penguin, tr. N.J. Dawood, 1977. Surah, or chapter, 9, "Repentence", verses 73, 123. Pages 328, 333).
ANC government has no understanding about religious war, and is supporting Hamas in the same way it keeps quiet about the current killing by Islamic jihad of innocent people in Nigeria, Mozambique, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and other states in Africa, in addition to Hamas's deliberate pogrom against Jewish civilians in Israel on 7 October.
Yet religious violence is an African issue. There is no other way of understanding the killing of 41 Christian worshippers in St Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo city in Nigeria on Sunday 5 June last year. They were killed by Muslim jihadis because of their religion. Tribal differences and differences in producing a living - as between herders and city dwellers or farmers - are secondary, since the same kind of religious massacres are being carried out by Muslims in other countries.
The essence of the current war in the Middle East is that the people of Gaza are Muslims while the people of Israel next door are mainly Jews. The Jews lived for centuries in a wide area around Jerusalem long before Islam was born in Arabia in the first half of the 7th century, 600 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, a Jew, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
After the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, Arab Muslims under the command of Abu Ubayda besieged Jerusalem beginning in November 636, leading to the submission of the city to Caliph Umar in 637 or 638. (Historians are not sure of the exact year). After this Arab Islamic conquest, Jews have continued to live in Jerusalem over the subsequent 14 centuries.
As a religious party, Hamas was created with a charter published in 1988 which stated:
"'The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews'."
No major political party in South Africa has ever spoken like that.
This led Hamas, as a dictatorial one-party state in Gaza, to invade Israel as its neighbour state on 7 October with the deliberate intention of killing as many innocent Jewish civilians, of all ages, as it could.
Hamas knew, and planned, that this terrible provocation would make the Israel Defence Forces invade Gaza. It prepared for this over 15 years by building concrete-shielded tunnels inside Gaza, all leading to the borders with Israel. These military tunnels were deliberately constructed underneath civilian city buildings, including under hospitals and schools.
This war system, over the so-called "Gaza metro", was deliberately constructed by Hamas so that in order to protect itself, Israel would have to destroy the tunnels - though this inevitably meant that large numbers of Gazan civilians would be.killed.
There is a direct conflict here between the way in which citizens of London were able to hide in tunnels of the city's tube communication system during the air force blitz by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, while for Hamas its war tunnels were protected only by the homes of Gaza's civilians.
This was an evil choice by Hamas as a military/political/religious organisation, because instead of its military protecting its civilians, the tunnel system was built so that civilians protected the military.
Israel was left with no choice - either surrender to Hamas's tunnel attacks and a future war inside Israel, or take military action to defeat Hamas which inevitably meant large scale civilian casualties in Gaza.
Hamas made its fellow Gazans its own sacrificial victims, so it can kills Jews just as Islamic State in Nigeria has been killing Christians.
Hamas is conducting its strategy on the basis that, if we exclude Egypt from the Middle East as a North African country, there are about 300 million Muslims in the Middle East, with Israel the only non-Muslim country in the entire region, with less than 6 million Jews. Like Hitler, Hamas would love to see a mass Muslim extermination of such a tiny Jewish minority.
I am trying to see this problem in military, political and religious terms. In the history of the ANC, the military strategy of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola never had to deal with a problem like this.
It is an urgent issue for South Africans to discuss, and learn.
