What were they thinking? Hamas and Netanyahu have yet to explain

 

Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Credit: Flash90

By James M. Dorsey

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What were they thinking?

It’s a question both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist government have yet to answer.

Hamas and the Netanyahu government’s generic justifications of the carnage created by the group’s year-old October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s ferocious response, including the Palestinians’ right to resist occupation and Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ do not cut the ice.

In a twist of irony, Hamas and the Netanyahu government mirror one another in their imagery of the other, their inability and/or refusal to formulate realistic goals, and their off-the-charts cost/benefit analysis of the war.

As a result, Hamas and the government maintain a long-standing, debilitating fixture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which hardliners and maximalists sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, reinforce each other.

 

Gaza’s devastation

More than a year into waging war at a horrendous human cost, particularly for Palestinians, both Hamas and Israel see Gaza as a zero-sum game, with neither party able and/or willing to produce a roadmap of how to get from A to B that stands a chance of being accepted by the other.

There is a good reason neither is able to do so. To do so would require acknowledging realities that neither Hamas nor the Netanyahu government is willing to accept.

Those realities start with recognising the other as human beings and national entities with equal rights rather than Hamas’ vision of all Israelis as illegal settlers and Israel’s assertion that all Gazans are complicit in the group’s October 7 attack.

The portrayal of the other as combatants without exception encourages dehumanisation and demonisation, creates an environment that enables war crimes and inhibits the formulation of goals that ultimately can lead to an equitable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So does the notion that the other only understands force.

PLO fighters blow up hijacked airliners at Jordan’s Dawson airfield in 1970. Credit: Homeland Security Digital Library

To be sure, the sad fact is that violence has served a purpose.

With Israel refusing to entertain Palestinian national rights, it took the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s violence in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to force the international community to focus on Palestine.

So did Hamas’ October 7 attack, even though its brutality and the targeting of innocent civilians violated international law that applies as much to resistance groups as it does to states.

Hamas killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians and non-combatants, in the attack and kidnapped 250 others.

A deep-seated Israeli belief that the Arab world would never accept the Jewish state, irrespective of whether it recognises Palestinian national rights and withdraws from lands occupied during the 1967 Middle East war, fueled the utility of violence.

 

Golda Meir visits troops. Credit: IDF Spokesperson

A just-released recording of a Cabinet meeting in November 1973, weeks after the 1973 Middle East war, illustrates an Israeli frame of mind that focused on projecting military strength rather than perceived weakness by seeking negotiated solutions.

It’s a frame of mind that shapes Israeli policy more than 50 years later, not only towards Palestine but also, most recently, Lebanon and groups like Hamas, the internationally recognised Palestine Authority, and Hezbollah.

"I'm afraid I won't get to see it. True peace. When they say 'peace' – is this the peace that we mean?” asked then Prime Minister Golda Meir.

Ms. Meir’s question is more relevant than ever with a prime minister and government in office that seeks to achieve peace by using disproportionate force to destroy Israel’s enemies and impose its will.

“We need to see ourselves as mobilized for the long run, I don't know how long. But it's not a matter of days... As long as there is no peace, there is war. And war can come to the fore at any moment... It's impossible to have both war and normal life,” Ms. Meir added.

Major General Shmuel Gonen, the head of the military’s Southern Command, chipped in, asserting that “the conflict between us and the Arabs is religious and not nationalist, and therefore, I do not think it is possible to solve. This needs to be the starting point in negotiations with them.”

Military intelligence chief Elie Zeira agreed. “We mustn't live with illusions about the possibility of our living in this region in peace in return for selling a few dunams. There is no chance of this,” Mr. Zeira said.

A government inquiry held Mr. Zeira accountable for failing to anticipate the Egyptian and Syrian preparations for the 1973 war. Mr. Zeira was forced to resign.

Source: Facebook

Half a century later, the facts speak for themselves. Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt and 1994 deal with Jordan have withstood the test of time, as have the Jewish state’s more recent normalisation agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco.

Nevertheless, Israel utilises its lack of trust in negotiated solutions that involve compromise to justify the de facto annexation of the West Bank, a dehumanising and repressive occupation of Palestinians, and its total disregard for international law, institutions, and public opinion.

The lack of trust mantra also allows Israel to ignore and reject any suggestion of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that does not amount to a surrender and acceptance of Israeli dominance.

As a result, both Israel and Hamas pursue maximalist goals that threaten to turn Palestine into a forever war that saps the strength of Israelis and Palestinians and threatens regional Armageddon.

“Pursuing military action in the absence of a coherent political goal has created its own momentum and its own dynamic,” said Middle East scholar Yezid Sayigh.

Israel’s “current political-military strategy is emerging, but it’s not one that was pre-thought-out or pre-determined. It’s emerging in the course of waging conflict. It’s driven by Netanyahu’s narrow, parochial, domestic political calculations, driven by messianism and, frankly, the fascistic and often genocidal outlook of his more extreme right-wing partners,” Mr. Sayigh added.

More than a year into the war, Israel has failed to achieve its war objectives: the destruction of Hamas, the return of Hamas-held hostages, and ensuring that Gaza no longer can serve as a Palestinian resistance launching pad.

Israel has significantly degraded Hamas militarily but failed to destroy the group. Instead, Israel and Hamas are locked into a game of whack-a-mole that is likely to turn into a long-term guerrilla war in Gaza as well as the West Bank.

In the latest incident, Israel this week reentered Jabalia in northern Gaza for a third time, asserting that Hamas had regrouped in the town and refugee camp after the withdrawal of Israeli forces. As of this writing, three soldiers were killed in the fighting,

Similarly, negotiations rather than military operations have freed more than 100 of the 250 people kidnapped by Hamas and other militant Palestinians on October 7 of last year.

Many Israelis fear that by refusing to accept realities on the ground, Mr. Netanyahu has effectively abandoned the remaining hostages to their fate.

A historian of the Palestinian armed struggle and former Palestinian peace negotiator, Mr. Sayigh is no less scathing in his analysis of Hamas, whom he describes as “delusional”

Mr. Sayigh said he was grappling to understand “why Hamas paid so little attention to the question of ensuring that its fighters inflicted minimal damage on civilians in Southern Israel… I…can’t for the life of me work out whether any sort of plan was made or whether (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar and (military commander Mohammed) Deif simply didn’t care or were quite knowingly and deliberately pursuing maximum shock effect through the targeting of large numbers of civilians.”

Mr. Sayegh went on to say, “The question that remains for me is, if Hamas’s goal was to break the logjam and to force Israel to pay attention to the Palestinian situation and to engage, meaningfully, with Palestinians, then it should have been really clear from the start that it was doing this in order to kick-start or revive the two-state-solution process... There needed to be much clearer asks, much clearer goals, and this needed to be matched by an iron discipline in terms of making sure its fighters understood that there had to be no excessive harm to civilians.”

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.