The shock attack of Hamas forces from Gaza calls to mind another series of attacks on another high holiday, nearly 56 years ago. That was the Tet offensive in Vietnam, in which the North Vietnamese together with their southern wing, the Viet Cong, struck nearly every provincial capital in South Vietnam plus the American embassy in Saigon on Tet, the lunar new year, at the end of January 1968. I was in Hue, the old Vietnamese imperial capital, and recall the fighting down the street from the marine press center where I was staying.
In the case of Tet, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces fought back successfully, driving the invaders from all the cities and towns they had attacked, killing thousands. The psychological impact on the Americans, however, worked the other way. As the U.S. withdrew its support for the Saigon regime under the cover of a phony “Vietnamization” program, Hanoi rebuilt its forces for the next offensive in 1972 and then for final victory in 1975.
The response to the attacks from Hamas, operating from Gaza — a strip that’s 25 miles long by 7.5 miles across at its widest point, wedged on the Mediterranean between southwestern Israel and eastern Egypt — will be powerful and decisive. A broiling conglomeration of terrorists and malcontents, funded and cheered by Iran, Hamas will suffer tremendously in the coming weeks and months. Tehran, more than 1,100 miles away, cannot do much without risking a regional war in which it would suffer catastrophic losses.
As after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the militants of Hamas will gain a psychological victory among Palestinians by showing what they can do, if only for a brief period. More than 2 million restive Palestinians, confined to an enclave with scant means of support, relying on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for daily survival, feed on bitterness and hatred. Driven from their land and homes by the Israelis in the 1967 war, they will see the invasion of Israeli land, the killing and kidnapping of Israelis, as a “victory,” however short-lived.
In contrast to the U.S. response to Tet, however, the Israelis are not going to lose confidence. Rather than hark back to Tet 1968, it might be better to compare the attack from Gaza to 9/ll, in which planes piloted by Arabs hit the towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people, on Sept. 11, 2001. In the U.S., the universal reaction was to condemn the attack and resolve to fight terrorism in the middle east harder than ever.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, must endure terrific criticism for the initial weakness of Israeli defenses, for the lack of preparedness, but he is not going to waver and succumb to negotiations with the enemy as did the American president, Lyndon Johnson, after the Tet offensive. Nor is the American Congress going to withdraw military aid for Israel, which comes to nearly $4 billion this year — far more than for any other country, with the notable exception of Ukraine.
Unlike the aftermath of Tet, the brutality of the Hamas attacks may galvanize opinion in both the U.S. and Israel. It’s difficult to imagine the recalcitrant, schizophrenic U.S. House of Representatives delaying, much less opposing, aid for Israel. And for sure Israel’s fractious public, divided by those for and against the rightist Netanyahu, will unite in annihilating the forces that swarmed across the ill-defended Israeli borders. There’s a chance that Netanyahu, already under fire from leftists for wanting to strip the judiciary of its power and now for having been unprepared for the attack, will not survive in the post to which he was elected for his third stint as prime minister nearly a year ago. No matter who’s the leader, however, Israel will not cave or compromise.
I got a sense of the fighting spirit of the Israelis in the Yom Kippur War of 50 years ago when I got into Syria as correspondent for the Chicago Tribune covering the war from Damascus. I remember interviewing an Israeli pilot who had parachuted into Syrian hands after his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Wounded, in a Syrian hospital, while a Syrian officer watched, he vowed the Israelis would win the war. As he spoke, Israeli troops were overwhelming the Syrians on the Golan Heights, held ever since by Israel.
Finally, kicked out of Syria for unauthorized interviews with people in nearby villages, I returned to Beirut and then to Jordan, from which I crossed the Allenby Bridge into Israel. The Israelis were already the easy victors in a war that was not of their own making. Egypt and Syria had been foolish enough to challenge Israel, just as the Hamas in Gaza, and the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, are daring to wage a new war against Israel.
One may criticize the Israelis for severely restricting Gaza, making life so miserable for the poor people of that seething enclave, that they cannot escape the hardships of poverty and repression, but the Israelis will withstand their assault, as in four previous wars in the Gaza strip alone and in broader wars against Arab enemies going back to the struggle for Israel’s founding in 1948.
By now the Arab world is not willing to risk getting drawn into a fight that’s not winnable. Israel already has diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors to the east and west, Jordan and Egypt, and is recognized by all but a few predominantly Muslim countries plus North Korea and Venezuela. Iran, which is not Arab, will go on funding both Hamas and Hezbollah, providing arms where possible, but won’t penetrate Israel’s “iron dome” of defense with its own planes.
The Hamas attack on Israel may have caught Israel and the world by surprise, but unlike the Tet offensive in Vietnam, it’s not the beginning of the end. Rather, it may be the beginning of a new beginning.
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.