Breathe
By Yuriria Rodríguez Castro
The Hamas attack on the Supernova Festival as the epicenter of the extensive attack in Gaza, is immeasurable not only because of the hundreds of dead in that macabre exhibition of force and terrorist power, but also because of the reaction in the world with demonstrations in favor or against, either from Israel or Palestine, which has provoked the ignorance of affirming that what happened is part of a conventional war, it is a kind of contest, a reality show with two positions, but among the generalized opinion on the supposed "war" there is no unanimous rejection of terrorism.
War and its causes are of the State, whether to defend or seize territory, but the cause of Hamas, like that of many Mexican drug traffickers, is violence without territory, violence not only as a means, but as an end.
That Saturday, October 7, the violent exegesis was grotesque even for terrorism: it was a macabre feast and, as always happens when terrorism renews its actions in order to surprise us, the media began to tell us about the war before it started, seeking a narrative with warlike reasons, some even referred to "war crimes" and the outbreak of a "world war", in addition to other belligerent discourses that lead us to exhausted categories of analysis, since war as such no longer exists, it is extinct as is happening to the State; what we now have is terrorism with warlike nuances: wars have been supplanted by terrorist attacks that demonstrate the exhaustion of the political model of the State. Hobbes' Leviathan is dying.
Seeing what Hamas did in one day, it is inevitable to think that this is what drug traffickers do in Mexico every day: subway tunnels for all kinds of illegal trafficking, scenes of road blockades, hostage taking, videotaped executions, beheadings, dismemberments, rapes, tortures, threats and extortion; it is the daily terrorism that the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has tried to minimize so that the United States does not call Mexican drug traffickers "terrorists"; perhaps the president assumes that we are like the victims of history, something like the Palestinians of Latin America.
With what happened in Israel, the violence in my country is seen in a mirror and, since what is reflected does not favor us, we prefer to cover it up.
What Hamas did does not depend on war or peace: all peaceful agreements could be signed, "hugs and not bullets" could be exchanged between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers, but Hamas would continue to attack. While some internationalists get lost in the clouds of historical discourse, I try to concentrate on the criminal organization of Hamas: the terrorist group that has not respected any agreement, that broke with the Palestinian liberation movement, that weakened the already fragile Palestinian state by betraying its political authorities with the financing of Qatar, Iran and Turkey, governments that have not been questioned in this historical construction of the bipolar conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Terrorist groups have strategic characteristics of operation with which a profile can be elaborated not only focused on psychology, but also on strategy. Some units of attack that we have been able to observe consist of threats, hostage taking, self-immolation, blockades, kidnapping of infrastructure, knife attacks, use of explosives, firearms, ramming with land vehicles, use of attack drones and videos to threaten or to publish executions.
These are some of the strategies of both Hamas and Mexican drug trafficking, which makes terrorism the most influential, topical and learnable violent phenomenon among all forms of criminal organization. The Hamas terrorist group demonstrated that it could attack a civilian target with elements similar to those of ISIS in the Bataclan or the Pulse nightclub, but in an open and mobile ecosystem such as this concert. In addition, he resorted to the strategy of road blockades with dispossession and homicide against civilians, the same strategy frequently used by Mexican drug traffickers to isolate a community under attack. Also, the Islamic extremists penetrated into wild areas to shoot their victims as "active shooters" in a behavior similar to the attacks on schools and communities in the United States, as well as employing guerrilla tactics to encircle and protect the attack from any defensive reaction, in addition to simultaneous targeted attacks by raping, spitting on and murdering women in front of their partners, beheading babies, and all this campaign with the media support of videos with criminal messages of threat and promotion of the joint attack.
All of these terrorist tactics are adaptations of previous attacks that used only one method of attack at a time, with the difference that in this operation they were all used almost simultaneously.
When a terrorist attacks he has two dimensions in mind: a symbolic-political one and a tactical-strategic one. This does not necessarily have to do with a political-ideological conscience, but with a doctrine of terror, which to sustain violence may or may not resort to political and religious propaganda, but may only use them as excuses. Hamas has put both on the geopolitical chessboard, but other groups that commit terrorist attacks, such as the Mexican drug traffickers of the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation (CJNG) or the Sinaloa Cartel, also use the political and religious as a fetish, as a sort of protective amulet for their actions.
Hamas and the war that is not
Rather than explaining terrorism as a provocation or cause of war, I see Hamas as the criminal organization that changed war and turned it into terrorism with some reminiscences of warfare, because already since the so-called Gulf War, it ceased to be a matter of state, and became a platform for terror squads.
One of the difficulties in understanding the transnational terrorism of Hamas lies in the fact that they are movements that oppose the State of Israel but also oppose the consolidation of a Palestinian State, in addition to being sponsored by other States with conflicting interests, which in different geopolitical battlefields may be allies or opponents: "While in Syria Turks and Iranians sponsor two enemy camps, they agree in sponsoring the Palestinian movement in power in the Gaza Strip"[1].
Much of the confusion is caused by not understanding that this is not a war, it is still terrorism extended in warlike days, proof of this is the hostage crisis, which ten days after the attack led the Mexican government to "negotiate" the release of two Mexican nationals, Ilana Gritzewsky and Orion Hernandez.
To understand Hamas as a criminal organization on the fringes of the bipolar Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we suggest considering the following points:
Hamas by October 7, 2023
- The Palestinian movements from which Hamas originated were not originally religious, but secular and political.
- Hamas does not come from the Palestinian Islamic current marked by the war, but from the Syrian refugee camps, from where it emerged at the end of 1987.
- Hamas does not defend the Palestinian cause, in practice it is the most radical and anti-Palestinian of the Palestinian movements: it has broken with the currents of revolutionary terrorism and with the Palestinian political authorities, and has even ignored the agreements signed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Hamas ideology and behavior: similar to drug trafficking in Mexico
- Hamas carries out a multiple attack for the simultaneous strategy of October 7 in Gaza. This attack ushers in a new era in the strategies of transnational terrorism with the use of all its technological and past attack resources, brought into a single offensive action.
- Hamas is a terrorist movement that seeks "social cleansing" through dawa (social welfare), so it is more similar to the self-defense groups in the Balkans and the criminal drug trafficking groups in Mexico that call themselves groups of order and social cleansing, but in practice commit more serious crimes than those they claim to pursue.
- Hamas is a movement sponsored by the "Shiite Brotherhood" of Qatar, Iran and Turkey, who are antagonistic in the dispute over Syria, while acting as allies in Gaza. Other secondary alliances have been Egypt and Libya.
- Rather, it seems that Hamas terrorism has taken the handbook of Mexican drug traffickers, especially "clean" groups such as Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana and the CJNG itself.
- Hamas is among the few terrorist groups with the capability and stated intention to use biochemical weapons in future attacks.
- Hamas is, with ISIS and Hezbollah, the terrorist group with the largest global presence.
- Hamas has a large subway communication network (tunnels), as do Hezbollah and drug trafficking groups in Mexico.
- Hamas and the Mexican drug trafficking group CJNG agree on the use of drones to attack with explosives.
- Hamas knows how to make explosives and has the potential to train other criminal groups such as mercenaries and transnational drug traffickers.
"Our Hamas or your Jalisco Cartel".
The news broadcasts spread the speculations and possible global impacts of the conflict, but the information only produces entropy and does not clarify anything, it only contributes to make what happened seem more distant, less relevant.
In Latin America, the connection with terrorism of jihadist groups such as Hamas and Hezbolah comes from their links with the guerrilla and drug trafficking, especially in the use of explosives, where, according to information from a confidential source, Hamas has been the reference point for Mexican drug traffickers. And the coincidences are not random: just look at the network of tunnels that Hamas built in the Gaza Strip compared to those built by drug traffickers on the border between Mexico and the United States, but also inside Mexican territory.
Meanwhile, like many in my country, I take comfort in knowing that I can still feel, since many no longer even feel violence:
"Pain has been considered as the result of exceeding the upper threshold of intensity in all orders of stimulation. This view is the product of a rational interpretation of the fact that pain generally appears when the upper threshold is to be exceeded"[2], so pain is something not necessarily social, but organic, situational, even circumstantial, but when it comes out of itself and is observed in others, or when it interacts to the point of being shared or even imposed on others, the pain of others described by Susan Sontag arises: "Who are the 'we' to whom these shocking pictures are addressed? That 'we' would include not only the sympathizers of a rather small nation or a stateless people fighting for their lives, but those who are only outwardly concerned - a much larger collective - about some execrable war taking place in some other country. Photographs are a medium that gives "reality" (or 'greater reality') to issues that the privileged or the merely unscathed may prefer to ignore.
It is then that I look at a still taken from a video of a CJNG hostage execution in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and I recognize something of Hamas in the way these young men died while being filmed: the members of the group give a machete to one of them to kill the others if he wants to survive, he stops being a victim for a moment and we can see how he cuts the throat of another who is handcuffed. "It's our Hamas, or it will be the other way around, Hamas is their CJNG", I think when I see this image.
Still taken from the video published by the CJNG on the narco's blog, two months before the attack perpetrated by Hamas in Gaza.
Bibliographic references:
[1] Kepel, G., The prophet and the pandemic. De Oriente Medio al jihadismo de atmósfera, Alianza, Madrid: 2021.
[2] Simondon, G., Sobre la psicología (1956-1967), Cactus, Buenos Aires: 2019.
[3] Sontag, S., Ante el dolor de los demás, Punto de Lectura, Madrid: 2003.
Dr. Yuriria Rodríguez Castro is one of the few specialists in terrorism prevention and criminal intelligence analysis. She is a recognized consultant and trainer on criminal phenomena such as mass and serial killings. The second edition of her book "El terrorismo transnacional y del narcotráfico en México: el concurso de delitos o cuando el narcotráfico tiene un comportamiento terrorista" (Transnational terrorism and drug trafficking in Mexico: the competition of crimes or when drug trafficking has a terrorist behavior) recently appeared. Methodology for Criminal Profiling" and "General Theory of Violence" are forthcoming.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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