How Indians Can Appreciate The Meaning Of The Hamas Attack

The 15-year anniversary of the 2008 terror attack on Mumbai can provide a perspective on the significance of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, one that Indians can appreciate like few others.

In 2008, ten gunmen launched an unprovoked raid on several civilian targets in Mumbai and murdered 164 people, including 147 civilians. The attacks have left a deep and lasting trauma on the Indian national psyche.

Hamas’s attack involved at least 1,500 gunmen breaching a legitimate international border and slaughtering more than 1,300 people (bodies are still being found and identified), of which around 1,000 were civilians, including countless elderly people, women and children.

This means the Hamas attack involved more than 100 times as many terrorists and six times as many victims as in the 2008 Mumbai attack. Try to imagine the mayhem that would have ensued if 1,500 gunmen, and not ten, had entered Mumbai on that day. Now consider that while Mumbai’s population was around 10 million at the time, the population of the area attacked by Hamas is around 100,000. This means that roughly 1% of the area’s population was murdered (one of the attacked communities lost 10% of its population). That would correspond to the Mumbai attack causing an unimaginable 100,000 casualties.

Please take a moment to appreciate the scale of this. Recall the shock, fear, disgust, shattered sense of security and anger that gripped India on November 27th, 2008. Now multiply it a hundred fold. You will start to get a sense of the depth of the trauma this attack has inflicted on the Israeli psyche.

The comparison cannot stop with this cold arithmetic. It also extends to the degree of savagery involved. There was evidence that the Mumbai attackers tortured and disfigured some of their victims. But even that does not come close to the horrors enacted by Hamas, which included the large-scale murder and burning of infants, the torture of parents in front of their children, abuse, rape, the kidnapping of 200 people to Gaza, and other untold evils proudly documented by the terrorists. Can you imagine how you would feel if the Mumbai terrorists would manage to abduct thousands of civilians and carry them back in their boats to their hideouts in Pakistan? It sounds too absurd to contemplate, but this is what Israel has been going through.

It goes further. Imagine now that Mumbai was not part of a nation with a geographical extent of 3 million square kilometers and a population of more than one billion, but just a small state of its own. Imagine also that Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, the organization that perpetrated the Mumbai attack, was not based within Pakistan, but was running its own state-like entity right on the border of Mumbai. And if you can stretch your imagination any further, imagine that on the night of November 26th, 2008, it had also fired more than 2,000 rockets into Mumbai civilian neighborhoods. Imagine further that Lashkar-e-Tayyiba had thousands more terrorists, and an enormous remaining supply of weapons, explosives and rockets, which it could use at any time to launch additional attacks on Mumbai.

One more thing. If you can handle making this nightmarish scenario any worse, imagine that on the other side of Mumbai, another similar state-like entity was run by a similarly murderous terror organization that has openly declared its intention to conduct similar attacks,

except that it had ten times the terrorists, weaponry and rockets of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. And that immediately after the Mumbai attack, both of these organisations would begin firing a continual barrage of rockets at Mumbai. And, of course, one element that Indians will also find very familiar is that both of these organisations are backed, armed and financed by a repressive regional power with abundant resources that is obsessed with hatred for your country as its main driving force.

This seemingly unimaginable situation is what Israel is contending with in reality since October 7th. Hamas on one side, and Hezbollah on the other, both preparing for such attacks for years and openly declaring their appetite for more, and both firing rockets into Israel continually since October 7th.

So when you judge what Israel has or should be doing in the coming days, weeks and months, please, just keep this perspective in mind as you try to evaluate Israel’s response.

The loss of innocent life on both the Israel and Palestinian side is equally tragic. No one innocent life is worth more or more regrettable than another. And it is legitimate to discuss the merit or justification of Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Hamas targets within densely populated neighborhoods of Gaza. But using symmetrical language to condemn the killing of Israeli and Palestinian civilians last week can mask a cowardly or cynical attempt to draw a false and dangerous equivalency between the acts of Hamas and those of Israel. It is brutally simple: First, Hamas’s civilian victims were intentionally and deliberately targeted, just like those of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. In contrast, the innocent Palestinians tragically killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza are never targeted intentionally. They are killed because the real target of these bombings, Hamas terrorists, hide in civilian neighborhoods, deliberately and cynically using them as human shields, as a matter of strategy. Second, Hamas launched its barbaric attack without any direct provocation, and it is at best naive to believe they have anything to do with any legitimate Palestinian cause or driven by Israel policy. Hamas has as its explicit long-term agenda the destruction of Israel, and has resorted to rampant terror attacks whenever Israeli-Palestinian negotiations seemed to be making headway. Israel is attacking in retaliation for these horrific attacks. The purpose of the Israeli  policy is neither vengeance, nor ethnic cleansing, but to make sure Hamas can never again carry out such atrocities, and to deter Hezbollah and any other militants from doing so in the future.

The Israeli public was heartened and grateful to see India taking a strong and unequivocal official stand in response to the October 7th Hamas attack. We feel that few understand us like Indians do. Unfortunately, other voices are also heard in India, some of which cheer Hamas’s attacks, while others seem unable to appreciate the depth of its savagery, and prefer the comfort of neutrally worded and at best, symmetrical statements in response. Disturbingly, this includes statements by major political parties. Nothing can justify such morally blind positions. Certainly not narrow minded politics.

The author is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University.

Published on: Monday, November 27, 2023, 03:56 PM IST