Scott Ritter: Israel Failing in Global PR Campaign to Demonize Hamas
The latest claim to emerge about Hamas’ deadly border raid on October 7, which killed more than 1,300 Israeli civilians in several towns near the Gaza Strip, is that the Hamas militants were carrying plans for chemical weapons during the attack.
In a broadcast on Sunday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog held up a document he claimed had been found in one of the settlements, across the front of which it says Al-Qaeda in bold white lettering. However, social media users quickly dissected Herzog’s claim, pointing out that the document he is holding is a biography of Ramzi Youssef, an Al-Qaeda member who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people, which was published by Al-Qaeda.
“Israel's trying to undermine any claim to legitimacy that Hamas might have regarding why they carried out these attacks,' Ritter said. "You know, Israel is not winning the PR campaign globally, primarily because of the heavy-handed manner in which they've responded to the attacks. And people, when they dig into the attacks, are trying to make the claim that you can't cite self-defense when you're the occupier. The occupier cannot ever claim a right of self-defense from the occupied. And there's a larger debate going on right now about the history of Gaza, the history of the Israeli occupation, the history of abuse that’s transpired, etc.”
“So what they're trying to do, the Israelis right now, is create a new aspect to this conversation, which is: Hamas is an extension of Al-Qaeda, because I believe the documents in question were Al-Qaeda documents, they weren't original Hamas documents, but rather from an Al-Qaeda playbook. And so, again, as has happened before, they're trying to make a nexus between - the United States did this - where we tried to link Al-Qaeda with [former Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein unsuccessfully because that was a lie. And now we have Israel tried to link Al-Qaeda and ISIS** with Hamas so that it will help, from their perspective, muddy the waters or anybody trying to say that Hamas had a legitimate right to attack Israel on October 7," he explained.
“Then, of course, the chemical weapons, let’s just be straight up on this here: anybody who knows anything about chemical weapons will tell you that somebody carrying a piece of paper from a handbook written by another agency in their pocket does not a chemical weapon make.”
Avoiding an Israeli Civil War
“Remember, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was teetering on the brink of political collapse prior to the Hamas action of October 7," Ritter recalled. "He is a man who is under the shadow of some very serious corruption charges, charges which, again, you're innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but if there was a court of law of relevant jurisdiction who heard the case, he probably be found guilty - and he knows it, which is why he is collaborating with his party in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to change the Israeli Basic Law so that there is no longer a separate-but-equal branch of government called the judiciary, but rather a judiciary that is subordinated to the Israeli parliament. And the Israeli parliament can basically veto any judge that they disagree with. They can impeach at will. So any judge who heard a corruption case against Ben Netanyahu, who allowed it to go forward would be subjected to impeachment, removal. It makes Benjamin Netanyahu literally above the law.”
“Israel was in uproar about this. Of course, his political followers have a line of ‘the judiciary must be subordinated to the people, the will of the people’, which means the parliament. That's their whole fundamentally flawed outlook. There were hundreds of thousands, millions of Israelis who said no, and they were demonstrating in the streets, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Israel was on the brink of a civil war. The Israeli president was speaking about this, saying ‘if you don't think we could go into a civil war, you don't understand what's happening here’. And so Netanyahu was facing political disaster and then this war came. He needs to create a unifying principle, and you can't do that by having honest reflection," he said.
“The last thing he needs or wants or desires is [for] people to honestly reflect on it. Because something horrible happened on October 7, I think we are all in agreement about that. Whether you believe that Hamas had a right to rise up and attack Israeli military targets, that's a separate debate. I happen to believe they should be able to do that. But there's no carte blanche ever for anybody to kill innocent civilians, and a lot of innocent Israeli civilians were killed. And I think it's imperative that Israel, like the United States after 9/11, instead of saying ‘we must exact our revenge’, to sit there and say, ‘how did this happen? Why did this happen and how can we prevent it from happening again?’ But in order to answer that question, you have to define the problem. Israel doesn't want to have that discussion, Netanyahu doesn't want to have that discussion, because the answer is: he is the problem. The right-wing policies of Israel is the problem. Zionism might be the problem.”
“So to prevent this, you have to go into these extremist rallying cries. ‘It's us against them, good versus evil’, when you have to demonize the enemy, because you can't allow people to reflect on the potential legitimacy of what they did on October 7, you must turn them into the devil incarnate: al-Qaeda, ISIS, terrorists, etc. And that's what that's what Netanyahu's doing now. At the end of the day though, it's going to fail because again: you can't solve a problem if you haven’t properly defined it. Israel is refusing to engage in any process and would properly define the real problems that led to October 7,"Ritter said.
*Al-Qaeda and al-Nusra Front (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) are terrorist organizations banned in Russia and many other countries.
**Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other states.