October 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s response

On Saturday 7^th October 2023, militant members of Hamas, a ‘Sunni Islamist political and militant organisation currently governing the Gaza Strip of the Palestinian territories’ (Wikipedia), launched a rocket and ground force attack on various military and civilian targets inside Israel. Israel has responded with air strikes on military and civilian targets in Gaza and is preparing a ground force attack to eliminate Hamas, with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stating that every Hamas member was ‘a dead man’. At the time of writing, five days after the attack, the number of people that have died in the conflict is reported as reaching the 1,200 mark in Israel and 1,100 in Gaza. In both cases, these figures include military and civilian people: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67047034, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/12/israel-hamas-war-gaza-hospitals-casualties

I am not going to discuss the pros and cons of this conflict other than to say it was inevitable and that until the world’s senior leaders – political, industrial, religious and military – can collectively devise a solution to the ‘Israel-Palestine Problem’ that is acceptable to all players, the probability of further conflict will remain high.

Headlines critical of BBC’s use of militant instead of terrorist

Words and their direct and hidden meanings interest me in all this. The BBC has come into heavy criticism for insisting on referring to Hamas fighters as militants (those who engage in warfare or combat) instead of terrorists (defined below). Just about everybody else whose comments on the conflict have been reported has unequivocally described the Hamas fighters as terrorists. The BBC’s highly-respected World Affairs Editor, John Simpson, has defended the BBC’s decision, saying:

‘Government ministers, newspaper columnists, ordinary people – they’re all asking why the BBC doesn’t say the Hamas gunmen who carried out appalling atrocities in southern Israel are terrorists.

The answer goes right back to the BBC’s founding principles.

Terrorism is a loaded word which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.’

Terrorism is a loaded word. Is John Simpson right? In my opinion, yes. There are many definitions of the word ranging from Google’s Oxford Language’s simple ‘the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims’ (Oxford Languages) to the more complex UK’s Crown Prosecution Service’s:

‘The Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism, both in and outside of the UK, as the use or threat of one or more of the actions listed below, and where they are designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public. The use or threat must also be for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

The specific actions included are:

• serious violence against a person;
• serious damage to property;
• endangering a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the action);
• creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; and
• action designed to seriously interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

The use or threat of action, as set out above, which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism regardless of whether or not the action is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public.’

I suspect there are a whole bunch of definitions halfway between the simple and the complex definitions above, but the point is a terrorist is a bad guy. Osama bin Laden was a terrorist. Mohamed Atta and his 9/11 associates were terrorists. Anders Breivik was a terrorist. Salman Abedi was a terrorist. Those who belonged to Black September and carried out the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Berlin were terrorists. Was Hitler a terrorist? Possibly, but such was the magnitude of the violence he unleashed in Europe and elsewhere that he was branded by the name of his political party: a Nazi.

So, is Hamas a terrorist organisation, and are its members terrorists?

According to Wikipedia’s article on Hamas, the answer is that some world organisations and governments say yes, some say no, and some sit on a very precarious fence. Those who say yes include the USA, Canada, UK, EU (except Norway), Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel. Those who say no include Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Russia, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, China, Syria, Brazil, and the United Nations. And those who, for one reason or another, alternate between a qualified yes or no, or make no statement, include Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

There is no doubt that what the Hamas militants did last Saturday in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, at the Supernova music festival in Re’im close to the Israel-Gaza border, and elsewhere in Israel, was horrific and brutal. But despite the Geneva Convention’s attempts to establish rules of conduct regarding humanitarian treatment, acts of atrocity happen. The history of rebellions, uprisings, revolutions and wars is littered with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Look at Srebrenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Bucha (Ukraine), Mo So (Myanmar), Chenna and Tigray (Ethiopia), Tokhar (Syria), Omagh (Northern Ireland),… The list of massacres is long, very long.

I conclude that John Simpson’s BBC’s justification for using the word militant rather than terrorist is correct given the BBC’s founding principle of impartiality. What he’s saying is that it depends on who you are, where you are standing, and what you believe in. To some, Hamas is a terrorist organisation whose members are terrorists; the bad guys. To others, Hamas is a resistance movement whose military members are resistance fighters, a term that carries positive connotations of heroism, bravery and sacrifice; the good guys. (In 2011, in a televised discussion with an American Public Broadcasting Service interviewer, Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, referred to Hamas as a resistance movement.) But, in both cases, the generic description of militant (or fighter or combatant) fits what both terrorists and resistance fighters do. Whether the means by which they do it justifies the end is your decision, not the BBC’s.

(^_^)