author’s note: why this book?

I never aspired to be a journalist, but on Saturday, October 7, 2023, Black Sabbath, as we in Israel have come to call it, I became a war correspondent of sorts, deeply embedded at the front: Although the Hamas/Palestine Islamic Jihad army had invaded from Gaza and occupied Israeli communities in the south, all of Israel had come under attack. Rocket fire scorched the skies far and wide and marauders streamed into the countryside.

For the first hundred days of the Gaza War, I wrote a daily update describing developments as we experienced them here. These reports were intended for relatives, friends and colleagues abroad who wanted to be informed of events covered in only cursory fashion by the newspaper and broadcasts to which they had access. My updates drew from a broad range of sources, Israeli, regional and international, to provide a deeper portrayal of what was transpiring at the front and in Israel generally. Over time, my mailing list lengthened. People hungered to learn all I could tell them. They knew that the picture they were receiving from the media was both partial and increasingly skewed.

Gradually, I became aware that the War had spread to a more distant front, a global one. It was playing out at academic institutions, television studios, town hall meetings, corporate board rooms, government offices and UN headquarters. Powered by social media and the instantaneity of images and texts that spread “news,” hearsay and plain lies without attribution, verification or context, increasingly militant voices were supplying a steady stream of vitriol peppered with memes and dog whistles meant to delegitimize Israel and stigmatize Jews everywhere.

My age precluded my playing a role in the fighting — as my son and son-in-law were called to do. But as an Israeli born and educated in the Diaspora with well-honed research skills and decades-long knowledge of the Middle East, I reasoned that my contribution would best be made on the rear front, fighting the disinformation campaign whose purpose is to sully Israel and make it a pariah in world public opinion. Such campaigns have long been launched against us, but as the fighting progressed it inflated to fearsome proportions. Facilitated by well-funded, well-connected allies of Hamas/PIJ, their information war was being pumped up to full volume and playing fast and loose with both historical and current facts. While Hamas/PIJ’s efforts to overrun Israel had failed, their confederates abroad sought an alternate victory: To blame us for the travesty.

One can be critical of governments, as I am of mine. Questioning, even protesting, government policies and positions is legitimate, particularly at a time when people everywhere are contending with political disorder and self-serving leaders. But the most vociferous voices opining about the Gaza War seek to deflect criticism and blame from the leaders of the Islamic Resistance and the armies they deploy. Make no mistake: These actors are not, to understate matters, advocates of peace and coexistence. Though they may present themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause, that cause is instrumental to a larger project based on exclusion and supremacy, conquest and domination. The most strident voices conceal these aims by adorning them in the vernacular of decolonization, liberation and social justice, although they mean nothing of the kind.

Well-meaning people seeking a better world have been recruited to the “cause,” unaware that behind it is a clear and determined agenda that does not square with their own values. That the underlying project seeks domination and conquest in the name of radical religion, jihad, as is articulated clearly in Hamas/PIJ’s Arabic-language material, is discreetly and deliberately excluded from rally press releases and speakers’ biographies. Yet, in the manifestos, proclamations and instructional manuals for tunnel fighters and rocket launchers that Hamas and their allies issue, the truth is as clear as day.

The stream of images and sound bites flowing from Gaza should appall anyone of conscience. The toll absorbed by civilians held as human shields by the Hamas/PIJ (and in Lebanon, where Israeli forces are now encountering arsenals and rocket launchers positioned in tunnels beneath villages and in family homes) has been enormous. Similarly, years of rocket fire and terrorist attacks exclusively targeting Israeli civilians, should disturb observers no less.

Following the events of October 7, 2023, we Israelis could no longer justify leaving our civilians in harm’s way. We entered Gaza to remove a clear and present danger. To their everlasting disgrace, the jihadis had no qualms about leaving their people utterly vulnerable on Gaza’s surface, while they burrowed in their subterranean armored netherworld of tunnels, oblivious to the needs of the population they purported to represent and disinterested in constructive nation-building.

To obscure their folly, Hamas/PIJ’s allies abroad trumpeted the narrative that Israel is at fault for the tragedy foisted on the people of Gaza. Thunderous voices rose in sustained crescendo contending that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide. From this, the prime movers of the campaign pirouette, deftly promoting the notion that Israel is guilty of original sin, a foreign transplant built on the remains of Palestine and bent on the destruction and subjugation of the Palestinian people. If that is true, then Israel must be uprooted and the Zionists, read Jews, must be duly cancelled, eradicated. For supporters of jihad, this is a zero-sum game.

A truthful depiction of the conflict is that Zionism and the Palestinian national movement are mirror images of each other: Both nations are deeply rooted in the Land of Israel/Palestine and are fated to share it. This, however, does not square with the jihadi program promoted by Hamas/PIJ and their confederates in the Axis of Resistance under the patronage of the ayatollahs in Tehran. On October 7, 2023, Hamas literally set out to reach Jerusalem, hoist their banner atop the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and proceed to impose their totalitarian, fundamentalist vision on the rest of the Middle East and beyond. This is not speculation: They Want It Darker documents this vision. And these are not mere words: Hamas/PIJ finds inspiration in the other components of the Resistance Axis, which have seized the dysfunctional states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen in the hope of emulating the dystopia erected by the ayatollahs in Tehran: The Islamic Republic of Iran. They are diligently promoting similar endeavors in Africa and Asia.

In the century since the Ottoman Empire collapsed and foreign powers pounced on the vacuum it left in the Middle East/North African region, creating states with nonsensical borders while installing loyal elites or recruiting existing ones to further their aims, pandemonium has been the rule. The interplay between rival superpowers, the imposition of conflicting ideologies by “revolutionary” regimes, and regional power struggles have continuously plagued the peoples living here. Yet, according to the narrative pedaled by those rejecting coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians, which is the central tenet driving Hamas and its allies, this complex, layered tragedy is reduceable to a single cause: the existence of Israel, a tiny state with a small population in a vast geostrategic region.

Israel, by this telling, is the source of all that plagues the Middle East, from Gaza City to Damascus, Baghdad to northern Yemen, Khartoum to Tunis to Sudan. Incredibly, given the absurdity of this claim, it has sold well to progressives and reactionaries too lazy to do their homework or uncaring of the facts. It is preferable to portray Israel as a war-mongering nation that simply decided one October day to invade and decimate Gaza on a whim and a year later, to viciously attack Lebanon merely to satisfy its bloodlust. Our hostages disappear in this narrative. There is no mention of our displaced tens of thousands, our killed and wounded. The years of rocket fire, terrorist attacks at home and abroad and unremitting hostility and threats are of no consequence. The job at hand is to cast Israel as a brutal warmonger, thereby inverting the cast of characters in this woeful passion play.

For these reasons, I have devoted the past months to building a fact-based, heavily-researched account of what precipitated the Gaza War and continues to power it, and the background of the conflict, too often misrepresented or ignored, yet vital to understanding the underlying realities.

I have undertaken this work to counteract the disinformation machine that has exploited fissures in societies around the world and recruited anger, redirecting it at Israel and the Jewish people, in the service of insidious aims. Those responsible have seized the Palestinian cause as a battering ram to vilify Israel, stealthily manipulate public opinion and advance an agenda that anyone who values pluralism, democracy and tolerance should utterly fear to the marrow of their bones.

These words are being written at a time when the War has spread to Lebanon and following an October 1, 2024 Iranian attack during which a fusillade of more than 180 ballistic missiles targeted Israel. Due to Israel’s storied aerial defenses and the help of allies, most of these were intercepted. But Iran had aspired to do far greater damage.

Iran’s reprisal for the loss of some of the Resistance Axis’s leading operatives (Hamas’s Ismail Haniyah, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and most of his high command, and a high-ranking officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) failed to cause any real damage to Israel — although the strategic danger posed by Tehran’s radical regime remains and must not be underestimated. The assault took place the night before Rosh Hashanah eve, the start of the new Jewish year. The people of Israel celebrated the arrival of the New Year with hope and determination, which is not, of course, what the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guards had hoped for: They were hoping for a darker scenario. They will get one, but not the one they sought: In a region where the balance of power is based on deterrence, an Israeli counterstrike, though it is not clear what form it will take and when it will occur, is certain and regrettably ordinary Iranians may suffer as a result of the regime’s latest misadventure.

I note this to underscore that the current situation is dynamic and what I relate now will surely need to be updated: Given the subject, this is necessarily a work in progress. Accordingly, this note and Chapter One, which we publish on this website in advance of the book’s full publication, will surely undergo revision prior to the publication of They Want It Darker: The Gaza War and Its Backstory in book form.

So, too, there may be revisions in the book’s structure. While the first four chapters have been drafted and the others planned, changes may become necessary. However, the book’s contours will generally conform to the following:

Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Hamas, Jihad and the History of Palestinian Rejectionism
Chapter Three: The Axis of Resistance: An International Project of Islamic Extremism
Chapter Four: Empires, Colonialism and the Contemporary State System in the Middle East: A History of Turmoil and Rage
Chapter Five: Commandeering International Bodies, the Justice System and Aid Agencies for the Rejectionist Cause
Chapter Six: Subversion in Jerusalem: How Domestic Extremism Became a Strategic Threat to Israel
Chapter Seven: Seizing Hearts and Minds: Cancelling Israel at the Speed of Light Through a Specious Narrative
Chapter Eight: Conclusion: Israelis and Palestinians in a Perilous World.

At a time of deadly fighting when literally thousands of missiles crisscross the skies, the only way to dissipate this darkness is by casting light on it. My objective in writing They Want It Darker: The Gaza War and Its Backstory is to do just that.

Mevasseret Tzion, Israel

October 14, 2024