RUTHFULLY YOURS

I wish I could be optimistic about Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas in the aborted war, but I am more pessimistic than ever.

I’ve been a pessimist from the start. As Rich Lowry and I have discussed on the podcast, that’s because I’ve never believed Israel’s stated war aims were either politically feasible or reflective of on-the-ground reality — which is much worse than Israel or the Biden administration is willing to acknowledge.

Israel’s principal stated objective is to destroy Hamas. It has analogized this to the Trump-era American objective of destroying ISIS. There is something to this comparison. Contrary to his extravagant rhetoric, Trump did not actually destroy ISIS — it still exists and is a menace wherever it rears its head. Trump did, however, eviscerate ISIS’s capacity to hold territory as a de facto sovereign. This was a significant achievement. (Whether it was accomplished constitutionally is an interesting question.) Yet we shouldn’t overstate the achievement, because (a) terrorist organizations are more effective in pursuing their core competencies of insurgency and sneak attacks than in trying to govern territory, and (b) ISIS is a rebel sect broken off from al-Qaeda, which remains a major challenge, so ISIS would inevitably either fold back into al-Qaeda or rebrand as some new terrorist group — since what catalyzes jihad is the regional predominance of sharia-supremacist ideology, not any particular, transient organization.

The situation with Hamas is similar, and in some ways more vexing.

It was never going to be possible for Israel to “destroy” Hamas. Its leadership flits between Qatar and Turkey. Even if we assume that Israel will hunt down these leaders, as it did the terrorists who killed its athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, that will take a very long time; plus, assassinations carried out in foreign countries (especially hostile ones, such as Qatar and Turkey) would trigger their own perilous consequences.

More to the point, Hamas is not Israel’s main opponent. It is, instead, a proxy of Iran that enjoys effective alliances with Erdogan’s regime in Turkey (our “NATO ally,” which continues threatening to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza) and Qatar (our “major non-NATO ally,” which is a Muslim Brotherhood regime and thus a lifeline for Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch). Wiping out Hamas in Gaza would only marginally and temporarily reduce the Iranian threat on Israel’s Gazan border (and there is always the danger that it could intensify the threats on Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank — in the latter, the Palestinian prisoners Israel has released in exchange for hostages are already stirring up trouble).

Furthermore, Hamas won’t be that hard to replace. This is where Biden’s delusional portrayal of the Palestinian territories (and the administration’s mulish insistence on a “two-state solution” that the Palestinians reject and thus Israel cannot abide) rears its head. The notion that the Palestinians are a peace-loving people who should not be conflated with Hamas is laughable. Hamas is less a ruler than a reflection of the Palestinians — a young population marinated in Brotherhood indoctrination and all the scripturally rooted Jew-hatred that implies.

As I’ve recently outlined (e.g., here and here), Hamas was established during the First Intifada and instantly became successful because it was closer to Palestinian sensibilities than the Arafat-led PLO and its Fatah party. Hamas was elected, not imposed on Gaza, and it would be elected in the West Bank if Arafat’s successor, “President” Mahmoud Abbas, allowed elections. It is silly for commentators to suggest that Hamas is unpopular with Palestinians when, right before our eyes in Western cities and campuses, we see unabashed Hamas support — not just “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations but agitators sporting Hamas regalia as they chant Intifada slogans. Hamas has been strongly backed by the international Brotherhood since 1987. It has always had a deep pool of young male supporters to draw on.

My point here is not to dismiss Israel’s combat operations as inconsequential. At least in northern Gaza, the IDF has destroyed the physical infrastructure on which the jihadists depend to carry out their eliminationist war. Israel’s warriors have killed thousands of trained Hamas fighters (it is impossible to say with precision how many). It is not easy to replace trained and vital fixed assets. Israel has deeply damaged Hamas’s current capacity to hold territory as a ruling regime. The jihadists’ state sponsors will not, any time soon, be able to reconstitute what’s been lost — even allowing for their above-discussed capacity to raise the threat level at other flashpoints on and within Israel’s borders.

But will Israel even be able to realize the aim of eliminating Hamas as a ruling regime? Here’s the New York Times yesterday:

American officials have told the Israelis that any coming military operations should not hamper the flow of power and water or impede the work of humanitarian sites such as hospitals and U.N.-supported shelters in south and central Gaza.

Obviously, President Biden knows that Hamas commandeers international-aid deliveries and conducts its operations in and under humanitarian sites, including hospitals. Hamas’s cooperative relationships with U.N. officials are notorious. How can Israel conceivably root out Hamas if the Biden administration is going to micromanage, and undermine, its capacity to fight Hamas where Hamas is? And after Biden officials pressured Israel to refrain from commencing combat operations in northern Gaza until corridors could be set up to move non-combatants to the south, is the administration really now going to take the position that Israel must avoid attacks that could cause population displacements?

None of this makes strategic sense. But it makes perfect, if cynical, political sense.

For all the right things Biden has said (more in the immediate aftermath of October 7 than recently), he has not been willing to face down his base’s robust, raucous opposition to Israel (especially as October 7 recedes in time). For Biden, then, Hamas’s barbaric taking of hostages — including toddlers, women, and the elderly — has been a focus-shifting godsend.

From a military standpoint, Israel should have been able to pound its enemy until the hostages were unconditionally released. But for emotional reasons (and influenced by Jewish history and mores), the possibility of recovering at least some of the hostages has been permitted to supplant military objectives. This was a political boon for Biden: It gave him an opportunity to push for ever-lengthening pauses in Israel’s military campaign, which has tamped down the grousing from pro-Hamas Democrats. As Biden has seen the domestic political benefits of this as we head into an election year, his administration’s rhetoric (and, consequently, the media coverage) has evolved: Now, the uber-objective is the return of the hostages; fading into the mists of diminishing memory are who took the hostages, the savagery that attended these abductions, and the fact that Israel is paying for innocents — at a 3-to-1 premium — by freeing convicted Palestinian terrorists and violent criminals.

Now, when the president and his advisers speak hopefully, it is about whether they can pull off a grand deal that could result in the release of all the hostages and a permanent ceasefire. In fact, toward that end, Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, has been in Qatar for talks with Hamas’s patrons since Tuesday, and he will soon by joined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The Times reports that the Biden administration’s goal is a ceasefire “until all of the hostages are released.” According to Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, there are currently about 161 hostages (146 Israelis, mostly men, and 15 other nationals — including as many as eight or nine Americans).

Consider the logic of this. If there is to be a ceasefire until Hamas decides to release the last of the hostages whom it kidnapped (often after raping and killing their relatives), then it is Hamas, not Israel, which gets to decide when fighting will resume. Meantime, every day Israel’s combat ops are suspended, the Biden administration — urged on by congressional Democrats who are feeling their base’s heat — puts more conditions on how Israel must conduct itself if it wants to maintain American support. Simultaneously, Israel must continue springing three Palestinian fighters to go back to the jihad for every hostage Hamas deigns to release. In the interim, Hamas is given more time to set traps for Israeli soldiers and fortify its positions in the humanitarian sites that Biden has admonished Israel to avoid hitting.

Even if it were politically and psychologically possible to resume a war under those circumstances — a war that many of Israel’s erstwhile, post–October 7 sympathizers would blame Israel for if crushing combat resumed after a long pause — how could Israel realistically win under these strictures?

I ask the question to remind us that, unless and until Israel’s enemies are decisively defeated, the thrum of eliminationist war and the periodic surges of jihadist terror will continue.