What Hamas wants

I spent four years in Jersualem, 2005-2008, covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After I left, I largely disengaged. For nearly eight years I didn’t even visit, even though most of my family lives in Israel. I’d gotten so disillusioned with the failures of the peace process, as well as with the inability of journalism to make any difference. I could barely pay attention to the news from the region; it was like Groundhog Day all the time.

In recent years I even came to think it might be a good thing that Israel and Palestine had receded somewhat from the headlines. I’d often felt that the media’s intense coverage achieved little more than to give the extremists a larger stage. Sure, the official peace process was dead and with it any hope of a serious Palestinian state, but it also meant the Israelis and Palestinians were stuck with each other; maybe, just maybe, more pragmatic and lasting forms of coexistence could start to emerge in the background. (Don’t ask me how; it was clearly wishful thinking.)

So when I woke up on Saturday to the news of Hamas’s attack on Israel, my first thought, other than my relatives and friends (they’re alive), was: “What can Hamas possibly gain from yet another round of rockets?” As the death toll mounted and the extent of the infiltration and the number of Israeli hostages became known, it became clearer that this was an attack of a completely different magnitude.?Hamas does indeed gain a lot tactically in the short term: those hostages give it enormous leverage, and the scale of the intelligence failure has shaken Israelis’ faith in their security establishment to its foundations.

All the same, Gaza Palestinians will pay a terrible price—one that Hamas knowingly levied on them. Israel will surely not stop until it has hunted down and killed all the movement’s leaders and militants, and in the tight geography of Gaza this means massive civilian casualties and unimaginable destruction. So again, what does Hamas really gain?

(First, a caveat: other people are far more expert on Hamas than I am, and I haven’t reported on the region in years. So take this analysis with as much salt as you like.)

I think the answer stems from something I was repeatedly told when I reported from there: Hamas, like its parent organization the Muslim Brotherhood, plays a very long game. And to me these latest attacks suggest that the long game is to make Israel’s existence in its current form untenable: not by defeating it militarily, which Hamas and its allies cannot do, but by the jiu-jitsu move of using Israel’s own security mindset and military strength against it.

In attacking with such force, Hamas gave the lie to Israel’s belief that in “disengaging” from Gaza in 2005 it had washed its hands of the territory. That belief was always delusional; you can’t keep two million people locked in a small sliver of land, control everything and everyone that goes in and comes out, and think things will stay stable. But even after the initial war is over it’s hard to see how Israel can now maintain its security without taking more direct control of Gaza once more, at great cost to itself as well as to Gazans. That will make Gaza into even more fertile ground for the Hamas leadership’s successors.

Perhaps this will finally be the event that pushes Binyamin Netanyahu out of power where endless corruption scandals and his dismantling of democratic checks and balances have not. The cardinal sin of an Israeli leader is to fail on security.?But if he does go it probably won’t be a net positive. Hamas’s attack is only likely to bolster the more extreme and antidemocratic factions who will push for even harsher measures against Palestinians both in Israel and the occupied territories and for less governmental accountability to the law and to human rights.

I think this is ultimately what Hamas wants: for the “Light unto the Nations” to collapse into a black hole of moral and institutional decay, consumed by war and abandoned by the more liberal Israelis who made it into a miniature economic and technological superpower. For that long-term goal Hamas is willing to sacrifice its own militants as well as any number of Palestinian and Israeli civilians. That’s why it launched what seems like the ultimate suicide mission.

None of this, to be clear, is to excuse Israel for perpetrating more than five decades of brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. That created the conditions in which Hamas thrived; indeed, in the 1980s Israel gave Hamas’s antecedents wide latitude to operate in Gaza as a counterweight to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah/PLO. Israel is reaping what it sowed. Unfortunately, what it sowed is a foe that thinks in decades, not months or years, and can therefore play the Israeli state like a puppet.

(Image by duncan cumming on Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)