The Players of the Gazan “War” and Their Strategies: Part One: the Terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah Victor Davis Hanson
Hamas
Hamas was quite clever in lying to the IDF, Mossad, and the Israeli government that it was finally resigned to fostering its own internal development. Its guest workers inside Israel—sometimes 20,000 a day—supposedly were emissaries of goodwill and would spike prosperity in Gaza. Hamas talked of its rivalries with the Palestinian Authority and for a bit quelled its eliminationist rhetoric—as if it was useful to Israel to play off Hamas against Abbas and the West Bank. Again, all a clever ruse as it crafted a plan to kill more Jews in any one day since the Holocaust.
So meanwhile for a year Hamas planned and trained, likely with the Iranians, to stage a mass-murder raid into Israel—at peace, during the holidays, early in the dark of morning, and ironically to be staged 50 years almost to the date after the similar surprise attack on Israel that had started the Yom Kippur War. Hamas in other words would then brag it had done more damage to Israel in a single day than any other terrorist organization in history.
So the overall killing strategy of Hamas was clear enough. Send 2,000 gunmen through the wall, via the air, and at sea to murder unarmed Jewish civilians, and butcher and mutilate them to such a savage degree that the murderers would either so shock the Israelis by their inhumanity that the Israelis would be stunned into concessions, or the inhuman butchery would at least suggest to the world that only premodern people so oppressed could be capable of such animal-like cruelty. That is, the world would eventually blame Israel for reducing Palestinians to such a state of bestial despair.
Then the Hamas killers and their tag-along opportunistic civilian counterparts would retreat with Israeli captives, the more elderly, young, and vulnerable the better. So the second part of the strategy was to leave the mutilating behind, get safely back to subterranean Gaza to hide the captives in their network of tunnels, and then either use them as shields to deflect retaliations or to swap some children and women for Hamas killers jailed in Israel or threaten to kill them all unless the IDF relented and stood down—or all that and more.
In the unhinged Hamas mind, a stunned Israel would become so demoralized that it could xerox the murderous sprees a “million times” over until Israel was judenrein, “from the river to the sea.”
As a fallback position, if the IDF really did go medieval on Hamas, then a Hamas in hiding planned to double down on its use of Israeli captives and its own Palestinian human shields in hopes of greater collateral damage: show the corpses on live TV and Western campuses worldwide erupt in protest to pressure Joe Biden to call off the IDF (cf. his tepid record on the world stage since January 2021).
Biden perhaps worried about the small, but decisive, Arab vote in a purple state like Michigan, and himself inherently weak, would then pressure Israel to “pause” and “get over” their dead and not “turn the world against” them.
Barring even that, if Hamas still could not stop the Israeli response, if world opinion did not bolster the Hamas cause, then there was always Iran and Hezbollah that could up their surrogates’ attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria to demoralize a post-Kabul American military command.
Or at least that seems the current strategy, without much Hamas consideration that it may have sorely miscalculated. Their satanic brutality is galvanizing Israel and its supporters abroad to unchecked defiance and a steely determination to wipe out Hamas.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah runs Lebanon and has far more men and materiel at its disposal than does Hamas. It may have more short-range, guided rockets on hand than any force in the world. And more importantly as a Shiite terrorist organization, Hezbollah is far closer to the reptilian brain of it all, Iran.
So as far as Hezbollah’s role: 1) it watches and waits, blusters then denies, shoots rockets then stops, threatens then backs off, always trying to thread the needle to save its Islamic point-of-the-spear street credentials while not getting into an existential war with either Israel (cf. Beirut ca. 2006) or the U.S. Sixth and Fifth Fleets.
Yet if Israel soon ends Hamas beneath Gaza City, Hezbollah will likely keep out of the war on the rationale that an Israeli (or U.S.) response would treat Beirut to something even greater than its last conflagration of 2006.
But if Israel is forced to pause or hesitates, Hamas regroups, the media runs 24/7 with the Palestinian collateral damage videos, October 7 becomes a distant memory, the campuses and Western streets heat up, then Hezbollah may up their rockets into Israel, on the theory Israel is now shackled, the West is neutered, and there may not be a strong enough response to stop its showers of rockets on Tel Aviv.
Hezbollah could also launch 50,000 nocturnal rockets at the American carrier group off its coast; it will not, of course, unless it concludes that the U.S. is stuck permanently into the inert Kabul/Chinese balloon mode and would not retaliate to a hit on its assets.
In sum, Hezbollah sees an opportunity: its Sunni rivals in Hamas will do the dying, it will claim it relieved pressure off Hamas by lobbing daily rockets into Israel, but not enough to prompt a war that might level Beirut.
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