Double “Black Date” for Democracy: 7 October
Early on the morning of 7 October 2023, several thousand rockets were fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip, followed by the infiltration of over 2,500 Hamas militants into the state by land, sea, and air. This marked the beginning of Hamas's invasion operation, "Al-Aqsa Flood," which was essentially a large-scale, well-coordinated terrorist attack against the civilian population of Israel’s border regions.
Hamas militants attacked a dozen border kibbutzim and the city of Sderot. Around 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered, including the killings of several hundred participants in music festivals near the border zone with the Gaza Strip. More than 200 people, including small children, were taken hostage. "Al-Aqsa Flood" became the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust and one of the biggest Palestinian terrorist acts in history.
Moreover, on 7 October 1952, in Leningrad, a man was born who will undoubtedly be cursed not only by Ukrainians and European citizens but also by his own people – the current president of Russia, dictator, and war criminal Vladimir Putin.
There is, of course, no direct connection between these two events. The only symbolic date the Islamist leaders had in mind was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. However, with their attack on Israel, Hamas indirectly did Putin a great favour.
To begin with, the Hamas attack and the escalation of the Arab-Israeli war that followed sharply shifted the focus of the international community from the war in Ukraine to events in the Middle East. The terrorist attack and Israel's subsequent military actions in the Gaza Strip allowed Putin to intensify pressure on the front, taking advantage of delays in arms deliveries from Ukraine's allies. The ultra-right Trumpist Republicans in Congress, in turn, used the Palestinian terrorist attack as a pretext to scale down military aid to Ukraine, allegedly to redirect resources to support the "US’s strategic ally in the Middle East" rather than Ukraine, which they argue cannot defeat Russian military power anyway.
The beginning of Israel's war with Hamas and Hezbollah also affected rising oil prices, which played into the hands of the Putin regime, whose main revenues for waging war come from hydrocarbon trade. Finally, the 7 October terrorist attacks put negotiations on normalising relations between Tel Aviv and Riyadh on hold for a long time. Their economic union, along with India and the EU countries, and the work on establishing the "India-Middle East-Europe" (IMEC) transport corridor would have significantly impacted the entire Middle East. Israeli President Isaac Herzog commented on this separately during his speech at the 60th annual Munich Security Conference (MSC).
The terrorist attacks in Israel exposed another problem, this time within Western society. The noticeable rise of leftist sentiments among citizens in Europe and the US has led to some Western opinion leaders, influential celebrities, student groups, and prestigious European and American universities unequivocally supporting "peaceful Palestinians and Gaza residents," who allegedly suffer from Israel’s "genocidal imperialist policies."
The rise in antisemitism and anti-Israeli sentiments resulted in riots, protests, and even pogroms in some Jewish neighbourhoods in Europe. These events sadly highlight one thing: having reached the "plateau" of economic and social stability, Europe has forgotten the tragic lessons of World War II, falling prey to the populism and manipulation of those politicians who clearly serve the interests of Putin and his dictatorial partners – Iran and China, who are interested in destabilising the Western world. The vulnerability of Western democracies to the manipulative methods of dictatorial regimes is no longer just an alarming signal but a prelude to the fact that the tragedies of the Second World War may repeat themselves.
As historian and publicist Tony Judt wrote in the afterword to his book Postwar:
"If we want to remember in the future why it was important to build this particular Europe on the ruins of Auschwitz’s crematorium, only history can help us. The new Europe, united by the signs and symbols of its horrific past, is an extraordinary achievement; but it will always remain tied to that past... The European Union may be an answer to history, but it can never replace it."
What Hamas terrorists and their puppet masters in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran, who are behind them, did not foresee was the asymmetric response of Israel, which is systematically eliminating the top members of the military-political leadership of terrorist groups, as well as the perseverance and bravery of the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who are inflicting colossal losses on Russian occupying forces on the front lines.
As for Vladimir Putin, at 72 years old, he has indeed achieved "impressive" results, having transformed the Russian Federation into an international pariah, a corrupt and aggressive dictatorship, after 25 years of rule, unleashing the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II, and earning the status of a war criminal by decision of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
One can only hope that before the second date in the Russian dictator’s biography, marking the end of his life, Ukraine and its European allies will manage to put an end to the aggressive genocidal war of the Russians and force Russia to fully answer for the numerous crimes committed during the invasion of Ukraine.