The especial horrors of Asymmetric Warfare

Some thoughts about the Israel-Hamas War.

What is going on in Gaza is horrific, isn’t it, and opinions regarding where the ultimate blame lies are sharply polarized. So, wisely or not, I thought I’d do my own bit of exploration into some of the origins of it all.

On Wednesday 4th June 2025 fourteen members of the United Nations Security Council voted in support of a demand for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

In addition to a ceasefire, the draft resolution demanded the “immediate and unconditional lifting of all restrictions” on the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza, calling for safe and unhindered access for UN and humanitarian partners across the enclave.¹

The US, which is one of the five permanent members of the council with special powers, squashed the resolution by casting its veto.

Was that a right or a wrong outcome?

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“The first casualty when war comes is truth.”

That statement is attributed to the Greek playwright Aeschylus, who bestrode the stage in the first century BCE. So the truth of the idea that war initiates untruth can hardly be said to be new. But when it comes to the matter of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the validity of the cliché must surely be being tested and proven in the most extreme ways possible.

First, some basic points.

On 14th May 1948 the modern incarnation of Israel came into being. During the previous night Tel Aviv was attacked from the air by Arab forces. Immediately thereafter, the country was attacked by Arab armies from Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. But Israel prevailed.

So, the country was born into conflict, and the pressure did not ease, as is attested by the battles that followed, including, but far from limited to, the Six-Day War (June 1967) and the Yom Kippur War (October 1973).

Despite the fact that Israel has been subjected to continuous assault - (including, for example, the firing by Hamas and other groups of more than 20,000 rockets into Israel since 2005 ² , it continued to build the only democracy in the region.

Why, then, do so many people show such hatred towards Israel?

I know, I know, ancient hatreds are everywhere and those concerning the Jewish people are as old as recorded time, all too often based upon ancient superstitions and prejudices that are simply ridiculous … and dangerous.

Consider, for example, the fact that it is only a few days ago that the French declared officially that a posthumous promotion will be granted for Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who was wrongly accused of treason in … wait for it … 1894!

Better late than never, may be, but was it really necessary to take more than 130 years to tangibly acknowledge the wrong in this way?

But let’s get back to Israel but, first, making a brief diversion to Canada. Why? Well, it was there, in Ottawa, on 27 May 2025, that King Charles III of Britain delivered a speech in the Canadian parliament that started with these words …

Honourable Senators, Members of the House of Commons,

It is with a sense of deep pride and pleasure that my wife and I join you here today, as we witness Canadians coming together in a renewed sense of national pride, unity, and hope.

I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation.

… and then let’s just hop due south for a moment to remind ourselves that as recently as 2nd March 2025, at the start of the annual Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles, the proceedings commenced with these words:

We gather in celebration of the Oscars on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam and Chumash peoples, the traditional caretakers of this water and land. We honor and pay our respects to indigenous communities here and around the world.

So, might we perhaps get an introductory acknowledgement for the Jewish people regarding their long-standing presence in the area where Israel is situated?

No chance, it seems. The same courtesies as those provided for the North American tribes don’t seem to apply to the peoples of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (on that land from at least as far back as the mid-second century BCE) and the subsequent kingdoms of Israel and Judea. At least, so far as many are concerned.

Quite the opposite in fact. As we are all aware, many Arabs take the view that the creation of modern Israel involved a monstrous crime against the 700,000 or so Arabs who were on the land up to the mid-twentieth century. So much so that they label the founding of Israel ‘The Nakba’ - The Catastrophe.

Territory AND Ideology.

From schooldays, I remember being told that there are two main types of warfare, territorial and ideological, and that the ideologically-based variants generally produce the most violent and hard-to-resolve situations.

Much more recently I read the analysis of Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian gentleman who is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.

Among his many books - and Professor Dabashi is a prolific and fine writer - is one titled Shi’ism ³ . It provides a history of the Shi’i sect of Islam which is the choice of around ten per cent of all Muslims. The other, larger group is Sunni.

The original disagreement that divided the two groups centred on the issue of who should be the rightful successor to follow the Prophet Muhammad. The Sunnis believed that the successor should be chosen by consensus whereas the Shi’as believed that the choice should be passed down through Muhammad’s bloodline, starting with his cousin Ali. Here’s how Dabashi puts it:

… Shi’ism was born (not just politically but metaphysically) when its very first imam, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was murdered by an assassin, and when Ali’s son, the Prophet’s grandson, the supreme heroic figure of Shi’ism, Imam Hossein ibn Ali, and his companions were massacred in Karbala.⁴

So, Shi’ism was born out of violence and Dabashi goes on to argue that this has left Shi’ism with a complicated ongoing dynamic, a central paradox whereby, when it fights for freedom it is successful but the moment it achieves that success it is doomed to failure. As Dabashi puts it, “its inherited paradox of success-in-failure and failure-in-success”⁵.

Apart from the facts that both Israel and Shi’ism emerged out of violence, and that Israel has subsequently thrived as an open democracy (21 per cent of its population are Arabs) whereas Shi’ism seems still to struggle with its “inherited paradox”, what, you may ask, has it to do with the current struggle between Israel and Hamas? After all, Hamas is a Sunni Muslim-based organization.

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I go back to Dabashi to try to find some sort of answer to that question. Writing not long after yet another Israel-Hamas battle, in December 2008 and January 2009, when the Israelis attempted to stop the constant barrages of rockets that were being fired at them, I find this:

The fact that a powerful Shi’i guerilla organization in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and the state apparatus of a Shi’i nation-state (the Islamic Republic of Iran) were actively involved in helping out the overwhelmingly Sunni and in fact Christian Palestinians defend their homeland against colonial occupation is now the defining moment of what Shi’ism means and does in the context of its geopolitics of convictions, commitments, sentiments, and solidarities. … I intend to map out the manner in which an emancipated Shi’i politics has now yielded to the possibilities of a renewed syncretic cosmopolitanism, predicated on a state of asymmetric warfare in three major and a number of subsidiary sites of contestation. In Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, with the non-Shi’i sites of Palestine and Afghanistan as the catalytic forces of everything positive and progressive that might happen in the interlude, Shi’ism is now poised to embrace its renewed, syncretic, and cross-sectarian cosmopolitanism on an asymmetric battlefield of its history. (My emphases)

Wow, I know, that block of words takes a bit of getting ones head around - or, at least, that was my experience. But, given that it makes some major claims and coming, as it does, from a leading academic, it seems to me to be rather important to fathom. It’s why I highlighted three terms …

1. Colonial Occupation

Aha! Colonialism, eh? One of the supposedly unspeakable crimes that the West has imposed upon the world. I wonder what, among many other examples, the Ottoman Empire was all about then?

So that’s why the Jewish people have not been welcomed back to their ancestral homeland, is it? No acknowledgement, here, that we’re back in the ‘unceded territory’ or ‘the ancestral lands’ of the Jewish people, the twelve tribes of Israel. No mention of that first iteration of Israel, or Judea, or Canaan, or the Kingdom of Judah. No, in this instance, for some reason, it’s suddenly all down to Colonial Occupation.

Palestine and Afghanistan are grouped with Iran, Iraq and Lebanon as …

… sites of combative contestations between Shi’ism and a U.S.-led globalized politics of intervention, occupation and domination …⁶

This at least explains why, for several decades, Iranians have decried the U.S as The Great Satan. And I presume that, since the time Dabashi wrote this, the West has extricated itself entirely from Afghanistan, that country must now be a place of peace and love, and joy and hope? Some hopes.

The key takeaway from this reference to Colonial Occupation is, of course, that Hamas is just part of the issue.

2. Syncretic Cosmopolitanism

Professor Dabashi, it seems to me, thinks that the way multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism have been promoted up until now really is nothing more than the U.S. pushing liberal market principles on everyone across the world, primarily for the benefit of the U.S. itself.

He may be right. As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that, after the collapse of the USSR in 1990/91, the time of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, there was a Western elite belief that the way was open to, so to speak, a McDonald’s and Coca Cola on every street corner around the world

Whereas, syncretic cosmopolitanism is - how shall we say? - a supposedly far less biased form of multiculturalism where everybody is free to follow their traditions and values wherever in the world they choose, all rubbing along happily alongside one another in a world of citizens of the world.

My problem with this is that I think it is equally impracticable: citizens of the world and all that jazz; very Rousseau; entirely misunderstanding the nature of human cultural development and need.

And, anyway, how might it work when the founding raison d’être of Hamas (an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) includes the following?

It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror. ⁷

So much for syncretic cosmopolitanism in the Middle East, then!

Hamas also rejected any prospect of peace or coexistence with the state of Israel. “Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.” ⁸

Anyway, it’s wider than that, isn’t it? In addition to Hamas, I can’t quite envisage the Iranians agreeing to a ‘Hey guys, let’s all just do our own thing!’ policy any time soon.

3. Asymmetric Warfare

To cap it all, Dabashi actually states that the methodology being employed by, among others, Iran and Hamas, to get their way is asymmetric warfare.

Asymmetric Warfare - does that term imply something less awful than, say, Total Warfare?

If you think it does, I’d suggest, you are wrong. Here’s what Google serves up as its initial definition of the term:

Asymmetric warfare, often referred to as "asymmetric engagement," describes a conflict where opposing forces have significantly different military capabilities, strategies, or tactics. It's characterized by a weaker adversary leveraging unconventional means to counter a stronger opponent, sometimes involving irregular tactics, guerrilla warfare, or even terrorist attacks.⁹

Where does this lead? Well, it is surely fairly obvious that, for “a weaker adversary leveraging unconventional means to counter a stronger opponent” there must be a tendency to think that all bets are off, that “anything goes” and “victory at any cost” is permissible.

An extreme interpretation might even lead to an aggressor doing unspeakable things with “irregular tactics” such as putting military assets actually in or close to hospitals, schools and civilian homes. Perhaps, even, not just doing it on an odd occasion but doing it intentionally to the maximum extent possible?

Why? Because, in asymmetric warfare, as far as the weaker (in terms of weaponry) adversary is concerned, a dead civilian is an asset - an emotional and promotional asset.

Is this the case with Hamas? Yes.

In fact, Hamas takes even this hideous idea to an extreme because they oversee an ‘educational’ system that sets out to inculcate two particularly awful ideas in their populace:

One: They are implacably devoted to the concept that Jews are their eternal, irredeemable enemies.

Two: They promote the idea that death is preferable to life; that this life is a precursor to an infinitely more wonderful afterlife and that, therefore, martyrdom is to be valued more highly than life itself.

To progress their “irregular tactics” Hamas has, as we all know, diverted vast sums of money that were intended for the development of civil society in Gaza into the construction of hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and weaponry to assist their asymmetric engagement.

The roots of Hamas (founded 1987) are in the Muslim Brotherhood (founded 1928) by Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949). So far as the members of Hamas are concerned the actions noted above, and more, presumably were authorized by Hamas’s original 1988 charter. In that document, the opening paragraphs included this:

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). ¹⁰

To be fair, Hamas issued an updated charter in 2017 that moderated the language somewhat:

Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise (the Balfour Declaration), on recognition of a usurping entity and on imposing a fait accompli by force.

Palestine symbolises the resistance that shall continue until liberation is accomplished, until the return is fulfilled and until a fully sovereign state is established with Jerusalem as its capital.¹¹

Is that more comfortable?

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I stand with Israel

My ruminations on this topic lead me to conclude that Israel has no option other than to try to rid the world of the curse of Hamas.

Does Israel sometimes overstep the mark? Probably. It isn’t perfect. Nobody is. But it is engaged in a wholly noble battle against an unspeakable enemy. And it almost certainly does more than any other combatant in modern times to protect against civilian casualties.

To conclude, here’s a reminder of the truly strenuous efforts that have been made, over the past decades, to try to bring about a settlement to this whole issue. And right up to today, well-meaning Western politicians talk about a two-state solution when the Hamas charter finds no room for such a settlement.

Bill Clinton was President of the United States from January 1993 to January 2001. He tried hard to broker a solution. Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), who was Palestinian leader at that time, commended Clinton’s efforts. Clinton, in his memoir, says that he responded to Arafat’s praise as follows:

I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.¹²

Bill Clinton talks about it here.

I’m sure we’d all say that the Israel-Hamas issue is one of the most important political challenges in the world today.

For us Westerners, it is arguably the most important issue because the entire basis of our civilization is founded on activities and actions stemming from Athens and Jerusalem two and three millennia ago.

Peace. Shalom.

Thanks for reading.

1. US vetoes Security Council resolution demanding permanent ceasefire in Gaza, https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164056

2. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+rockets+has+gaza+fired+at+israel&oq=how+many+rockets+has+gaza+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyBggBEEUYOTIICAIQABgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMggIBBAAGBYYHjIICAUQABgWGB4yCAgGEAAYFhgeMggIBxAAGBYYHjIICAgQABgWGB4yCggJEAAYChgWGB7SAQkxNDYwNmowajSoAgCwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

3. Hamid Dabashi. Shi’ism (2011)

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Doctrine of Hamas. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas

8. Ibid.

9. Google search for Asymmetric Warfare, 05 June 2025.

10. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/hamas.asp

11. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full

12. Bill Clinton. Citizen (2024)