Is Israel Doing Just What Hamas Hoped It Would Do?
I was in NYC last week. I was in a lot of Ubers and a lot of taxis. Most of the drivers were unaware that anything had happened between Israel and the Palestinians. Never heard of it. A few had though. One taxi driver who took me to meet my sister at Vincent’s in Chinatown/Little Italy, was right on top of it. I asked him if his accent was Israeli. He laughed and said he was born in the Dominican Republic but had lived in New York for over 30 years, since he was 9. And the Israeli accent? He had once worked in Ratners (RIP) and asked me if I had ever been there. I took my first aide trip there with Bill Graham and some of the guys from the Jefferson Airplane in the mid-1960s. The driver loves the Airplane and once tried mescaline.
He told me he thinks the Mossad knew about the Hamas attack and let it happen so they could use it as a pretext for either genocide or just destroying Hamas. Plausible… but I floated another idea— that Hamas is luring the Israelis into a trap. He thought that was plausible too. By then we had arrived at Vincent’s.
Two days later I saw that Hussein Ibish, a brainy American journalist born in Lebanon, had written a similar theory for The Atlantic, Israel Is Walking Into a Trap— Storming into Gaza will fulfill Hamas’s wish.
“It’s a trap,” he wrote. “Hamas’s ruthless and spectacular attack on southern Israel last Saturday was many things: an atrocity, a display of militant ingenuity, and a demonstration of the weakness of Israeli intelligence and defenses… It may even have been the single most brutal act by either side in the 100-year-old conflict. But above all, it was intended as a trap— one that Israel appears about to fall into. Hamas’s leaders and their Iranian backers have a conscious strategy. Like almost all other acts of spectacularly bloodthirsty terrorism, Hamas’s assault on southern Israel was designed to provoke an emotional and equally or even more outrageous response by the targeted society. Hamas and Iran are attempting to goad the Israelis into Gaza for a prolonged confrontation— which is to say that the intended effect is precisely the ground assault Israel is now preparing in order to root out and destroy Hamas as an organization, kill its cadres and leadership, and destroy as much of its infrastructure and equipment as possible.”
Hamas surely would not have meticulously planned its audacious assault without also extensively planning a response to the hoped-for Israeli counterattack on the ground. The Israeli military will likely encounter a determined insurgency in Gaza. After all, Israel has had control of the land strip from the outside, but not on the inside. Israeli dominion over Gaza’s coastal waters, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum, and all but one of its crossings, including the only one capable of handling goods, has made Gaza a virtual open-air prison— run by particularly vicious inmates but surrounded and contained on all sides by the guards.
Hamas evidently decided to destroy that status quo, which was no longer serving its interests. The Islamist group also hopes to seize control of the Palestinian national movement from its secular Fatah rivals, who dominate the Palestinian Authority and, more important, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people. Hamas has never been a part of the PLO, in large measure because it is unwilling to accept the PLO’s treaty agreements with Israel. The most notable among these is the Oslo Accords, which included recognition of Israel by Palestinians but no Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state or a Palestinian right to statehood.
Hamas is attempting to seal the fate of Fatah, and maneuver to eventually take over the PLO and its international diplomatic presence, including United Nations observer-state status and embassies around the world. By taking the battle directly into Israel, claiming to be defending Muslim holy places in Jerusalem by branding the attack the “Al-Aqsa Deluge,” and hopefully breaking the Israeli siege of Gaza, Hamas seeks to belittle Fatah and demonstrate the primacy of its policy of unrestrained armed struggle over the PLO’s careful diplomacy.
Moreover, Hamas and its Iranian patrons want to block the diplomatic-normalization agreement that the United States has been brokering between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a deal poses a danger to Hamas because the benefits of its “significant Palestinian component” would have accrued to Fatah in the West Bank, at Hamas’s expense. For Iran, the agreement would be a major strategic setback. Should Israel, the most potent U.S. military partner in the region, and Saudi Arabia, Washington’s most financially powerful and religiously influential one, normalize and build cooperation, Tehran would face an integrated pro-American camp. American partners, including the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan, would effectively ring the Arabian Peninsula, securing control of the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf through their three crucial maritime choke points: the Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandab Strait, and the Straits of Hormuz. Saudi-Israeli normalization would largely block Iran’s regional aspirations in the short run and Chinese ambitions in the more distant future.
So Hamas for domestic Palestinian reasons and Iran for regional strategic ones decided to set off an earthquake that would at least postpone such a reckoning. Iran and Hamas are counting on Israel to attack Gaza with such ferocity that the international sympathy of the past week toward Israel, even in the Arab world, evaporates quickly and is replaced by outrage at the suffering inflicted on the 2 million residents of Gaza. Those civilians have already been cut off from electricity, water, food, and medicine, all of which are controlled by Israel. Existing supplies will quickly dwindle as Gaza and its inhabitants are pounded from the air. Israel appears prepared to inflict many thousands of civilian casualties, if not more. It has adhered to a doctrine of disproportionality for deterrence predating the founding of the state: Jewish militias embraced it when dealing with the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, and at no stage since have more Jewish civilians been killed than Palestinian ones, with the ratio usually closer to 10 to 1 than 2 to 1.
Israel appears poised to fulfill Hamas’s intentions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed retaliation that will “reverberate for generations” among Israel’s adversaries. The Israeli general Ghassan Aliyan warned, “You wanted hell— you will get hell.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” None of these speakers made any effort to distinguish between Hamas militants and the 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The “human animals” comment is telling. For decades, and especially in recent years, the people of Gaza have indeed been treated like animals. Perhaps not surprisingly, guerrillas emerging from their ranks indeed acted like animals when they attacked southern Israel. So now Israel will triple down on the dehumanization and collective punishment of all of these “human animals.” Tehran couldn’t ask for more.
Hamas and Iran hope that Israel will refuse to return to the status quo ante and will instead institute a prolonged ground occupation of Gaza, declaring that Hamas can no longer be allowed to pose such a threat. But Gaza, they trust, will be a slaughterhouse for Israeli soldiers, both during the immediate incursion and over time as the anticipated insurgency gains its footing.
…Unfortunately, in the efforts to eliminate Hamas, which cannot be done by force, and to ensure that such a threat can never be allowed to reemerge, which is equally impossible so long as the occupation continues, Israel seems ready to jump right into the briar patch.
At the time of the 1973 surprise attack (the Yom Kippur War), Prime Minister was far, far more popular than Netanyahu is today. But the surprise was blamed on her and after it was beaten back, her coalition suffered severe electoral losses and she resigned. Netanyahu was already despised by half the electorate and he has been more credibly blamed for the Hamas incursion than Meir was. His days are probably numbered-- and, unlike Meir, if he loses his grip on power, he's likely to go to prison on corruption charges.
The first poll to have come out since the attack shows support for Netanyahu crumbling. If elections were held now, his threadbare coalition would collapse to 42 seats and opposition would jump to 78-- the second-worst results for Likud since 1961. 10% of the electorate switched from Netanyahu to Gantz, in just one week. Yesterday, he was criticized for sowing panic on Friday night when he suddenly announced late in the evening that he would make an imminent televised address to the nation— unheard of on a Sabbath— and then delivered an address with no urgent content, obviously designed to allay criticism that he has not been seen with the families of the dead or hostages. Worth mentioning— Channel 13, Israel’s Fox News, polls every 7-10 days, and slants the results in Netanyahu’s favor, consistently. They haven’t released a poll in three weeks.
And on a very related topic... Two AIPAC darlings in the House, Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Greg Meeks (New Dem-NY) came up with a resolution granting unconditional support to Israel's war on Gaza— with nary a word about Palestinian civilians. J Street-- not AIPAC, J Street-- is telling Democrats that if they don't co-sponsor it, they can forget about endorsements. So far just 13 Dems have resisted: AOC, Rashida, Ilhan, Jamaal, Cori, Summer, Ayanna, Delia, André Carson, Al Green, Melanie Stansbury, Gwen Moore and Bennie Thompson. Sad.
Worth considering: Thomas Friedman's missive from Saturday about Israel out-crazing Hamas. He postulates that the attack by Hamas was “designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.” He wrote that Hamas acted now because “it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind. So Hamas essentially said, ‘OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.’ Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.”