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Personally, I don’t understands the tactics or logic of Hamas in attacking Israel as it does, knowing full well that the world’s fourth most powerful military will respond with all its brutal and merciless might to further its own well-stated strategic aims.

On Saturday, we heard that Hamas had attacked Israel by land, sea and air. This sounds a shocking development, until you realise their air campaign would make the biplanes deployed in warfare a century ago look sophisticated.

While the Israeli airforce operates a fleet of deadly F-35 stealth fighter aircraft armed with smart bombs, their avowed enemies used paragliders to clear the 65km long, 6m high fence that surrounds Gaza, and then wreaked havoc, killing over 700 people in the space of just a few hours.

The response of Israel was utterly predictable, immediately launching airstrikes on Gaza, turning entire housing blocks to rubble in densely populated urban areas, obliterating the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of families, while imposing a total siege of the territory, so as to prevent any food, fuel or electricity reaching its residents.

The United Nations say that hundreds of buildings and homes have already been destroyed, displacing over 123,000 people. Hundreds of people in Gaza have been killed and thousands more injured. The humanitarian crisis to follow will be enormous. Israeli spokesmen themselves say that Gaza will feel the repercussions for generations.

Naturally, to my simple mind, the actions of Hamas seem counter-productive where the welfare of the citizens of Gaza is concerned. We could say that they have won a propaganda coup, bringing the cause of Palestine back to the fore, Israel’s asymmetrical response likely to enrage a whole new generation of activists. But at what cost?

Those of us capable of paying attention for the long term will recall that Hamas was created by Israel itself as a means of undermining Fatah and the PLO in the 1980s. Those Israelis involved in funding and supporting the nascent movement in its game of divide and conquer would nowadays say this strategy was a mistake. But sometimes I can’t help but wonder whose interests are they still serving.

In Gaza, Hamas rules with an iron fist, ruthlessly putting down all protest and dissent with beatings, arbitrary arrest, detentions, torture and executions. Journalists investigating corruption have been arrested and sent to prison. Peaceful protestors complaining about hunger and rising prices have been violently attacked. But all of that will now pale into insignificance.

Israel spent the first twenty years of Hamas’ existence directly financing and supporting it, only to spend the next twenty years repeatedly going to war to destroy it. Only, Hamas seems to remain as strong as ever as a military force, periodically rearing its head with an extraordinary display of power, usually at moments of heightened public discontent about living conditions.

To international observers, they become the figurehead of the resistance against illegal occupation. Few outside the region are cognisant of the rumbling restlessness amongst the populations of the region, struggling with poverty, unemployment, homelessness and hunger, tired of the factional infighting of their administrations.

Once more, activists worldwide will throw their weight behind the movement that helped bring about yet more death and destruction on its own citizens. “But what other choice do they have?” comes that fierce rebuke, pointing out that I am not invested in anti-colonial struggles as they are. Left to people like me, they might point out, South Africa would still be ruled by the tyranny of apartheid.

That may very well be true. As is well know by now, I am a simple-minded literalist, who takes the prohibitions of his religion as absolutes. In the codified rulings on warfare of our tradition, there is no allowance for collateral damage, let alone the deliberate targeting of civilians. The definition of a combatant is very clear: even an off-duty soldier is not counted as one.

But to say this in this moment of heightened emotions is pure treachery. Hence the strategy of our leaders, who instead of unequivocally condemning the targeting of civilians, choose to circuitously contextualise the events of the day, taking us back to 2007, or 1983, 1967, 1948 or 1917. Of course there is always context.

Use your search filters to query Gaza or Palestine between 1 August and 1 October alone, and you will learn all that is missing from the reporting of the moment. Then read back over a decade, of the daily experience of the people of these lands: the daily humiliations, the confiscation of their lands, the abuses of their rights, the brutalisation of children, adolescents and the elderly. For a people so oppressed, we might say their restraint is remarkable.

But, alas, their restraint in the face of unrelenting injustice is now all forgotten. The United States has deployed an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean to aid Israel. Nations sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have been neutralised by a brutal attack on festival goers raving in a field. Campaigners for Palestinian rights have been shaken by the sight of infants abducted and held ransom.

Soon enough, the whole of the region will be set alight again, that asymmetrical imbalance of power no longer recalled. Who will remember which is the occupier and which the occupied? Which the oppressed and which the oppressor? Who will recall that innocents exist on all sides? Soon enough, the world will be changed forever.

Tell me it isn’t so.