Winning by Losing – the Hamas Plan All Along?

It simply didn’t make sense, Hamas attacking Israel last October 7^th.

There was no hope Hamas could win militarily and there was the certainty of an appropriately overwhelming Israeli response.

Gaza – and the people who live there – would be torn asunder by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF,) a fact Hamas was very well aware of.  

By every standard judgement metric, this would be seen as a justifiable war:  Hamas started it, Hamas has been killing Israelis on and off for decades, Hamas’ stated intention is the destruction of Israel and extermination of Jews, and the list goes on.  

Not only a justifiable war, but the final and total destruction of Hamas as being the, again, justifiable end goal of the war itself.

The war has seen obvious problems with civilian casualties, though anyone who believes the Hamas/Gaza Health Ministry numbers is willfully deceiving themselves.  In general, the war has gone to plan and Israel is winning.

Then why is there this nagging feeling that, in a very important way, Hamas is actually the winner so far?

It occurs to one that this may have been the point from the start – not to actually win the war but, for some reason, to count on global opinion turning on Israel, even if all of Gaza, whether they want to not, had to play the (very important in Islam) role of martyr.

That public support of Hamas appeared almost immediately – thousands rallying in streets around the world, protestors shutting down airports and all manner of other things and typically getting surprisingly positive coverage in the media.

In California, the Los Angeles Times seems to be crowing about how supportive the Hispanic community has been of Palestinians, explaining that walls and colonial oppression have built those “!Viva Intifada!” bonds of commonality.

And one cannot forget that the daughter of the owner of the Times, a daughter that is notorious for interfering in the newsroom, is a woke rabid Hamas backer.

Incidents on college campuses abound, UC Berkeley is now on Congress’ naughty list for its handling of the blatantly antisemitic tenor of the pro-Palestinian protests, and cities across the state, including eminently livable places like Oakland, have passed meaningless resolutions demanding a cease fire.

The state legislature was even prevented from doing its business for a time by protestors – hint to protestors: shutting down the Legislature every day is not, on its own, a bad idea and would irritate far far fewer people than shutting down freeways.

Why?  It comes down in large part to woke intersectional math.  Israelis have more money and power + Israel stole their land so are colonialists + Israel oppresses its Palestinian population + Israel zealously enforces its border with Gaza, just like apartheid = Israel bad.

It doesn’t matter that none of that is true – Israel is not a colonial interloper (Jews have been there for, well, a long time – Rome subjugated Judea, not Palestine.)  Jews may have more money and power now but, when so many arrived just after World War II, not so much then – they were refugees, just like the Palestinians currently claim to be.  And Israel does not practice “apartheid” in any way – it just has, justifiable considering the number of Palestinians who have killed Jews over the years, tight internal security and borders.

In part to obfuscate the lies at the heart of their support, it appears that pro-Hamas protestors and influencers have been focused on the idea of a cease-fire in the war, the more permanent the better.  

This ignores the fact that Hamas itself has rejected a number of cease fire offers from Israel – another just a couple of days ago – but sounds better publicly than “we want to get back to our old way of killing Jews with truck bombs and suicide vests.”

The cease fire talk is key because the pro-Hamas people and groups know very well that such an event only benefits Hamas.

Thought experiment:  it’s World War II and the Allies are winning – imagine the reaction to cease fire calls then?

You can’t, and Israel is in exactly that same position now. It can destroy a truly existential (word used properly) threat to itself, just as the allies were destroying the existential threat of the possibility of global (actual) fascism.  Anyone saying “stop in Belgium” or “to hell with it, we don’t need to go past Okinawa” would be met with incredulity and properly ignored (at least.)  

The war had to be won and cease fires only benefit the side that is losing. On the battlefield, that is.

But globally and in California and the United Sattes in general, there is almost a daily drumbeat of “Israel bad” information and claims and assertions and, again, lies.

When even the president (or whomever is feeding him prescriptions) openly and actually pretty nastily questions Israel means and motives, a page has been turned.

Few things in DC united more people than support for Israel. But with openly- antisemitic ‘Squad” members being listened to and the Democrats most important demographic (better credentialed, richer, guilt-ridden white people and their kids) unquestionably shifting away from Israel, the politics have become problematic for the Biden administration.

And maybe that was Hamas’ strategy all along: sacrifice thousands of its own people to create a noticeable if not quite yet seismic shift in the relationship between Israel and the United States and other western democracies.

It should be noted that the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas movement seemed to just naturally appear all at once everywhere.  That’s not how things happen – Hamas had to have put things in place, created an infrastructure om which to hang the movement at the very least.

Hamas can also read the newspapers and it saw how the predominant thought line of the culture today – woke lunacy – was going to be on their side, all the way up to members of Congress.

Hamas also knew Bibi Netanyahu is not really very popular at home or abroad.

And Hamas – like so many others – can sense the idea that the continued existence of Israel may not be as pervasive as it once was.

In other words, Hamas “read the room” and took its chance and  – in the sense that Israel is now more internationally isolated than it has been for years – it has paid off, it’s been worth it, not matter how many bodies fall.