Israel Vs Hamas: Take A Cue From Sri Lanka’s Experience
By: Reshmi Dasgupta
It is time Hamas surprises Israel— and the world—again, this time not in an unpleasant way, of course. It should release all living Israeli hostages and come clean on all the ones that have perished in the past seven months. That would leave Israel with no justification to continue with its new assault on Rafah and little reason to keep up its brutal military pressure on the rest of Gaza too. That is the least Hamas can do for the civilian Palestinians there.
And yet this is something that Hamas has never mooted; nor does this seem to have been assertively suggested by anyone either. In the ceasefire deal brokered by Egyptian and Qatari mediators last week, Hamas negotiators just insisted the truce must mean an end to Israel’s war on its cadres even though it will not release all the hostages that still remain in its clutches. Why should Israel agree to such a skewed deal, seven months into its counter-offensive?Anyone with ‘skin in the game’ will realise that with Israeli hostages now ominously being described merely as “dozens” by the Qatari news outlet Al-Jazeera, Israel is unlikely to let Hamas off the hook. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can only follow through on Israel’s aim stated at the start of its counter-offensive after the October 7, 2023 attack: to totally “defeat, disarm and dismantle” Hamas. And that means even more civilian deaths. Even with the Palestinian toll now well above 34,000 and rising, Hamas does not appear to think it is time to let the rest of the Israeli hostages go even though they are the reason Israel gives to justify its relentless onslaught, turning a blind eye to the death toll and increasing international pressure. Does Hamas think the thousands of women and children killed in the counter-attack are worth it because now their cause is getting unprecedented international support?The truth about how Hamas pulled off the attack with such bloody precision may cost Netanyahu his job. But Hamas knew Israeli retaliation would be inevitable and unrelenting as the Netanyahu government— whether unforgivably negligent or criminally complacent—would seek to redeem its credibility by wiping out the force that dented Israel’s image of invincibility. That would put all Palestinians in Gaza in in mortal danger. Still, Hamas went ahead with it.
It made no move to evacuate people, including kids; instead, gambling on a high stakes’ strategy, it remained embedded deep within residential areas. Its cadres operated amid the devastation, death and despair, still keeping “dozens” of Israeli hostages out of reach or rescue. Moreover, the way Israeli hostages were greeted with jeers and kicks by locals in Gaza indicated support for their actions too if not tacit acceptance of the consequences of Hamas’ gambit.
As pro-Palestinian—a euphemism for antiIsrael, anti-Jewish—sentiment spreads in the west, Hamas now has good reason to believe that its high-risk, shock-and-awe gambit to instigate international pressure to help achieve its goal has succeeded. A violent separatist group can say it has been able to channel naïve fervour for “justice” in its favour, overturning the nearly eight-decade-old, post-World War II western consensus against antiSemitism.Sitting in their hideaways far away from the carnage and suffering in Gaza, the Hamas top leadership must consider their October 7 attack and the resultant ‘achievement’ well worth the extreme collateral damage wrought on the Palestinians, the very people they claim to be fighting for. The implicit message in this ‘success’ for similar terrorist and separatist outfits plotting the same path elsewhere—and the countries in their crosshairs—is alarming.
Indians above a certain age, may recall a seemingly endless circle of violence and ethnic hate in Sri Lanka, where the Hamas-like Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged a war that spanned generations, for a separate homeland—Eelam—on the island. They had a charismatic and brutal leader in V Prabhakaran, besides many eloquent ideologues who fanned out in US and Europe, steering the discourse and putting the Sri Lankan government on the backfoot.Back in 1985, the LTTE had raided the area around the revered Maha Bodhi tree, killing 146 people including monks, nuns and children in an incident now known as the Anuradhapura massacre. There was a predictable bloody backlash against civilian Tamils in the northern provinces by ‘civilian’ Sinhalas and the Sri Lankan Army. This set off a two-decade cycle of deadly LTTE attacks and brutal Army retaliation. The similarities with Gaza and Israel are obvious.The then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi made a tragically unsuccessful effort to resolve the issue first by airdropping supplies to Tamils in Jaffna (then under siege by the Sri Lankan Army) and later by sending a ‘peace-keeping’ mission in 1987 to end the violence. Not only did the Indian Army lose lives in someone else’s civil war, Rajiv Gandhi himself was assassinated by vengeful Tamil Tiger operatives while on the campaign trail in 1991.
Indian soldiers had realised to their horror back then that there was no dividing line between “terrorist” and “civilian” in Sri Lanka’s troubled north. Women and children were committed to the ‘cause’ and as likely to attack government (and peacekeeping) forces as trained Tamil Tigers. Therefore, eliminating LTTE definitely portended a high civilian toll, and not merely because the latter were used as shields. Human rights groups ignored that fact.
The Sri Lankan government had different approaches to the Tamil separatist issue depending on the exigencies of the parties in power. But neither coopting the Tamil Tigers with money nor internationally brokered ‘negotiated settlements’ worked. Like the current Egyptian-Qatari mediations for Hamas, talks with LTTE collapsed repeatedly and in the meantime, Sri Lankabased Tamil terrorists continued to attack and kill Sinhalese civilians and troops.
But when in 2006 LTTE ended a Norwegianbrokered ceasefire by declaring ‘war’, the Sri Lankan government finally decided to destroy it. The difference between that and the current Israeli action against Hamas is that the Sri Lankan authorities based their strategy on a long, in-depth assessment of LTTE’s vulnerabilities—especially its rising difficulty in getting new cadres and arms— rather being goaded again into a retaliatory attack like Israel. It combined that analysis with an economic, diplomatic, intelligence and communication offensive to back its military response. To cut a long story short, it spruced up the Army, isolated the LTTE from its popular base and convinced war-weary Sri Lankans about the probability of neutralising it. And then proceeded to implacably hunt down LTTE cadres and destroy their bases with focused military action— and some Indian and US help too. Some 34 per cent of the casualties were ‘civilian’ by the time the action to ‘disarm and dismantle’ LTTE finally ended in 2009—far less than when the West waded into Iraq, where the non-combatant toll was 67 per cent of the total. There was outrage over the Sri Lankan Army’s “brutal” actions against “innocent Tamil civilians” and accusations of human rights violations. Sri Lanka did not back down, because its very future was at stake. Nor did LTTE, to its detriment.Maximalist positions on both sides of a battle for existence can obviously never lead to peace. The lesson in this bit of south Asian history for Israel, Hamas and the “concerned” world at large is manifest. Unless Hamas learns from LTTE’s mistakes and shows its bonafides by releasing all hostages, Israel cannot possibly back down from its deadly ‘disarm and dismantle’ goal either. Then there cannot be any lasting end to violence. Is that a prospect anyone wants?