The war has lasted a month. Far longer than the Six Day or the Yom Kippur wars that made modern Middle Eastern history. And, at least for the Palestinians, far more destructive in terms of death and displacement than even the failed Arab invasion at the birth of Israel in 1948. That aimed at expulsion of the Jews, or worse, and resulted in what is known universally in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe — Palestinian refugee statelessness. At this point, we can begin on their own terms to assess who is winning. And the answer is up until recently one might have said Hamas. But not anymore.
Hamas, as it began operations on that dazzling October morning, had a theory of victory. Not once, even in 1948, had Palestinian forces, unlike Egyptian or Jordanian ones, overrun a Jewish community. Their commanders believed that if this could be achieved at scale — occupying, at least temporarily, the farming kibbutzim which envelop the strip — the myth of Israeli invincibility would be shattered and their national cause, fading away, would be put back on the agenda. In this, from the very first hours, they succeeded brilliantly.
Palestinian history, from Deir Yassin to Sabra and Shatila, is written in massacres, and on that morning Hamas accomplished a horror exceeding even that grisly pantheon. But this is where their theory of victory fell short. Believing so firmly, so deeply in the symbolism of this, they seem to have misjudged what it would mean for their allies, for the rest of the Arab world, and even other Palestinians. Hamas was counting on the event, and what it anticipated as Israel’s enraged, Samson-like reprisals, detonating the whole Middle East.
Neither Hezbollah nor Iran have joined the fray, nor has the West Bank erupted, or other regimes fallen
However, at this hour, neither Hezbollah, nor Iran, have meaningfully joined the fray, nor has the West Bank erupted in intifada, let alone have the regimes in Egypt or Jordan been toppled in revolution. The hope that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, speaking from Beirut, might join the fight in a widely trailed speech last week seemed to die when its content — best summed up as “Iran has nothing to do with this” — seemed aimed at the two US air carrier groups sent to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Hamas is fighting, if not completely abandoned — Hezbollah is exchanging fire with the IDF, pinning down armies in a border war, and Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen are firing missiles — but without the allies it needed to win. And by win, that is to entangle Israel in a multifront war, devastate it by rocket fire from Lebanon, and ensure it could not undertake the kind of ground invasion it is now in Gaza, forcing it into humiliating armistices before the next round. This has not come to pass, and in Gaza itself, it would appear that Hamas has been unnerved by how rapidly Israel has encircled Gaza City and how light its casualties are so far.
Hamas imagined itself like Saladin, the warrior spearhead of an Arab army, poised to deal a shattering blow to what they see as the Crusader state in the Levant. But, tragically for the Palestinian people, Hamas was in fact operating like a suicide bomber — senselessly blowing itself up, taking down thousands of civilians, with no viable strategic end.
The United States, for now — though this might change as things evolve — has decided to let the Israelis destroy Hamas’s armed wing in Gaza while laying down various red lines about its future. These include no forced displacement of its inhabitants outside the strip, no reoccupation, no reduction of territory, and no future blockade or siege. Through the bombardment and the fog of war, the Americans are trying to explore various futures for Gaza where some kind of international force takes over before the return of the Palestinian Authority. Egypt, for now, has refused.
What Washington wants is far from guaranteed. But the irony is that should President Biden and Bill Burns, the CIA director now touring the region, achieve their objectives the situation in Gaza will have been radically transformed. And the two-state solution put back on the agenda again. But all of this would have been to the advantage of Hamas’s hated rivals, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which it views as corrupt collaborators, reconciled to living with Israel.
This is the tragedy of any suicide bomber: blinded by fury and rage, enticed by martyrdom and rumours of paradise, he never sees beyond his own death. Not only are the pain and the misery of his explosion beyond his view, but the strategic consequences of his blast are things he simply cannot see.
