The Qassam Brigades and "the return of heroism in the age of technological war"

On the 50th day of the Al-Aqsa Flood, the temporary ceasefire begun for the prisoner exchange has become, after fifty years of Israel's barbaric attacks, which mean nothing other than impotence and rout, the sign of a new rout. The scenes witnessed during the prisoner exchange gave the whole world an opportunity to compare the Qassam Brigades with the Israeli occupation force. It was seen once again that a significant portion of the prisoners Israel was forced to release were children who had been detained at tender ages and cruelly deprived of living their childhoods. The Palestinians had been wearing out their tongues for years trying to tell this, and had been unable to tell anyone.

Take, for example, the story that one of those released was only 12 years old and had been imprisoned for five years. The occupying power is as much the murderer of childhood in its most innocent and most beautiful form as it is a child-killer. Every Palestinian prisoner Israel is forced to release has his story come to light immediately, even if he tells nothing. Those detained at a young age, torn for years in prison, under all kinds of torture, from their families, their homes, their schools, their childhoods, are now people who have grown up. They are children who suddenly grew up through the torture they saw and the oppression they lived through. On the Israeli side of the prisoner or hostage exchange, it is seen that Israel cannot rise beyond the standing of an organization more immoral and more lawless than the most immoral terrorist organization.

By contrast, every prisoner Hamas releases turns, quite the opposite, into a tremendous promotional legend for Hamas and the Qassam Brigades. The treatment of the prisoners is evidently not merely a matter of their own accounts, nor the exceptional conduct of one or two individuals. Not one or two, but all of the prisoners were treated with care and with principles observed. This is precisely the picture of the superior morality of Islam being applied to the letter, never abandoned even in a state of war. The way every Israeli handed over parted from the Qassam Brigades as one parts from a friend produces images straight out of films. By their very bearing and behavior, they themselves proclaim that they were treated as kindly as possible while held captive and were subjected to not the slightest vexation, torture, or even an unkind word. With these scenes Hamas adds victory to its victory, while with this incident too Israel suffers rout upon rout.

Let us recall once again the famous observation of Herbert Marcuse, one of the members of the Frankfurt School, whose stories about Zionism and even about their serving as rapporteurs to the CIA have come to the fore these days: in wars where a highly technological defense industry is decisive, there is no place for heroism. There is no place for special conduct. Only the power and capabilities of technology determine the fate of wars. As a tiny community of people with the most limited means in the world, against armies that have the world's highest technological power, with the US behind them, the Qassam Brigades have absolutely thrown this thesis into the trash too, just as they buried many other things under the flood they raised with their superior heroism.

What they displayed on October 7 as they tore through and pierced the iron domes was without doubt a unique example of heroism. Hamas pierced through the iron dome that a pessimistic resignation, born of the world's having submitted to oppressors and of the belief that this oppressive order was now unchangeable, unconquerable, and impossible to overthrow, had turned into a dominant atmosphere.

After that, over 50 days, with the steadfastness they showed against the immoderate, lawless, immoral attacks of that awakened giant, they displayed a separate example of heroism every day. The skill, courage and valor shown by the Qassam soldiers, hunting down like partridges, with relatively very simple weapons and explosives, those tanks of legendary high technology in the ground assault on Gaza, was the most concrete manifestation of heroism.

That they ended by forcing Israel to be the one to request the ceasefire is without doubt a victory in itself, but it is a victory whose effects will spread in waves across the whole world. The pessimistic-nihilistic atmosphere, which sees no possibility of change against the oppressive order of not only Israel but, through it, the whole Zionist-capitalist world, will also have been shattered by the heroism Qassam displayed. Let no one doubt that this effect will set off new waves of change and revolution all over the world, first and foremost in the Islamic world.

But the nobility, courtesy and dignity Qassam displayed in releasing each prisoner during the exchange also showed that its heroism is not coincidental, not a one-time thing, and has roots peculiar to heroes. While making plain in every bearing and every word that the roots of this nobility lie in Islam, they were also proclaiming the sublimity of Islam to the whole world through the eloquence of their conduct. In this way they erase the distorted images that the Islamophobia industry has for years tried to spread with products like ISIS, and put the true face of Islam in their place.

Israel, meanwhile, has been losing from the start, sinking the more it flounders, and sinks a little more with the prisoner exchange. Ahmed Mansour, one of Al Jazeera's strong names, says we are a lucky generation whom God has enabled to see His miracles with our own eyes. We thought we were a defeated generation, but thank God we have become a generation of victory and honor. We proudly commemorate the victories a small group has won against the world's mightiest armies.

In the Second World War Hitler razed many cities in Europe and Russia to the ground, but he came out of the war defeated, killed himself, and left his country mortgaged to the victors for decades. Even if Netanyahu, like Hitler, destroys Gaza, he too is doomed to come out of this war defeated, and at least politically he must commit suicide and go to the dustbin of history as one of history's greatest war criminals. His resorting to such destructive force today and hurling angry threats will not save him from this inevitable end.