How Hamas Infiltrated the Minds of the West

A British police officer is in hospital with significant injuries. A protester against the war in Gaza threw a glass bottle and hit the police officer in the face. How did we reach a point in our society where someone is willing to face four years in prison on behalf of a genocidal terror group in a country 2,000 miles away?

 

Be in no doubt. They might portray themselves as “peace marches”, but they are directly supporting the war aims of Hamas. Their only objective in this conflict is survival and they aim to do that by leveraging international pressure to force Israel to the ceasefire negotiating table. Their means of doing this are through outrage farming: making civilian collateral damage inevitable, then weaponising the images of that damage to generate outrage in the West. This post explores the disinformation and manipulation techniques on display and their KGB origins.

 

Hamas has created a situation in Gaza where collateral damage to both civilians and infrastructure is built-in to the war as a key feature. From their perspective, it is both guaranteed and desirable. It is not so much a strategy of human shields as one of human sacrifice.

 

They have designed a military strategy around civil infrastructure. Their arms depots, headquarters and storage facilities are all in civilian buildings: schools, hospitals, mosques, universities, domestic houses. And then there is the Gaza Metro: 500 miles of tunnels, some reaching 15 stories deep; longer than the length of the London Underground. Before this war, Gaza had more hospitals than Paris. Each one of them was connected to Hamas’ tunnels, providing ventilation, access and power supply. To destroy the tunnels, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have no choice but to destroy the buildings above them.

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This is entirely designed as a defensive strategy by Hamas. Israel had no option but to retaliate after 7th October, 2023. 

 

The West fails to understand the scale of the trauma this inflicted on Israeli society. I only really understood it myself after visiting Kibbutz Be’eri in April. My moment of realisation was in walking in the soot inside one of the houses burned by Hamas. The damage to the bodies was so bad that archaeologists were called in to help identify remains. In walking in the soot, it was likely that I was stepping on the ashes of incinerated human bodies. 

 

I am not Israeli. If it affected me so strongly, that is magnified tenfold in Israeli society: so tightly knit that almost every one of the 10 million people who live there knows somebody directly affected by 7th October. It is a generational trauma. Israeli society demanded a military response. This is where Hamas’ strategy paid dividends.

 

They knew the damage that would be caused by Israel’s defensive retaliation. They demanded that damage. They were ready to weaponise the language of the oppressed Left: “genocide”, “apartheid”, “slaughter”. Hamas knew Gazan civilians would die; they wanted them to die; they wanted pictures of it to stoke outrage in the West to place pressure on Israel, in effect, to allow them to get away with 7th October scot free.

 

It is a strategy of outrage and emotion. These things are impossible to defeat with reason. Urban war looks horrifying in any circumstances and that horror is doubled when the civil city is the target by design.

 

All urban warfare is ur-war: the distillation of its most horrifying aspects. In spite of IDF attempts to move civilians to safety, evacuating more than 1 million people from Gaza City and over 900,000 from Rafah, civilians as human sacrifice shields will inevitably die. Hamas were ready with cameras to stoke worldwide outrage.

 

But why were Western audiences so receptive to Hamas’ narratives? For that, we must look to the late 1960s when, according to former KGB agent Ion Mihai Pacepa, Yasser Arafat took the USSR lead for operations against Israel. This is the time the term “Palestine” came to international prominence. 

 

KGB disinformation tactics are legendary: control of the press in foreign countries; outright and partial forgery of documents; the use of rumours, insinuation, altered facts, and lies; use of international and local front organisations; clandestine operation of radio stations; and the exploitation of a nation’s academic, political, economic and media figures.

 

Arafat weaponised all these techniques in support of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, on Moscow’s direction. He created a sympathetic base in the Western political Left and gave them a vocabulary. It is no coincidence that Jeremy Corbyn turned up at The Hague on the shoulders of South Africa’s lawyers. 

 

And with Hamas taking Arafat’s lead, we see every aspect of that Soviet KGB disinformation strategy ongoing in the West to this day. The press and media are manipulated by false reports. Facts are altered, casualty numbers exaggerated, atrocity photos staged and faked, and civic institutions, especially universities, undermined by financial investments from states backing Hamas, such as Qatar. Front organisations like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign recruit the duped in their tens of thousands to march in London in support of Hamas’ war aims. 

 

This is how we reach a situation where someone is prepared to go to prison in the UK for bottling a police officer, in the name of “Free Palestine”. It is the fruit of a decades-long information war that Israel is unable to counter. The tragic deaths of civilians and the manufactured outrage it creates are Hamas’ very own Iron Dome.