Is Israel winning its war with Hamas?

Not in the classic von Clausewitz sense of the word, because the purpose of war is to achieve a political end-state. What is the political end-state Israel hopes to achieve?

Israel wants to remove the Palestinians from Gaza. We know that; everyone knows that.

But that hasn’t happened, and after three years of relentless brutality, Israel is no closer to success than it was on October 8. They’re still stuck at Square 1. So, where’s the political end-state? Where’s the victory?

But what about Hamas? Is Hamas winning its war with Israel?

Yes, Hamas is winning its war with Israel for the simple reason that Hamas is achieving its strategic objectives which will lead to a political end-state. Keep in mind, we’re not talking here about the horrible price that is being paid by the Palestinian people. We realize that most of Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland and that hope is nowhere in sight. But that’s not the issue we’re addressing. We have narrowed our focus to the question of whether Hamas is achieving its objectives. That’s what we want to know. But, in order to do that, we have to identify what those objectives are.

Fortunately, we have the text of a speech by Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar (that was delivered on December 14, 2022) in which he presents Hamas’s strategy in the simplest of terms. Here’s what he said:

“Within a limited period of months—which I estimate will not exceed one year—we will force the occupation to face two options: Either we force it to implement international law, respect international resolutions, withdraw from the West Bank and Jerusalem, dismantle the settlements, release the prisoners, and ensure the return of refugees, achieving the establishment of a Palestinian state on the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem; or we place this occupation in a state of contradiction and collision with the entire international order, isolate it in an extreme and powerful manner, and end its integration in the region and the entire world, addressing the state of collapse that has occurred on all fronts of resistance over the past years.” Arab Center Washington DC

So, what does Sinwar’s statement mean?

First of all, it tells us that he’s a realist who had no expectation of beating Israel militarily. That was never a serious consideration. The IDF is much too powerful.

Second, his intention was not to terrorize or kill Israeli civilians or “push Jews into the sea”. Those claims are basically propaganda aimed at demonizing Hamas.

The strategy, quite simply, was to incite an Israeli overreaction in order to show the world the true face of Zionism. That was the goal, and a careful reading of the text above proves that that was the goal.

So, did Israel fall into the trap and overreact?

Of course, they did, in fact, the polling shows that majorities everywhere reject the idea that October 7 provides a legitimate justification for the destruction of Gaza. No one is buying Israel’s threadbare excuse that October 7 gave them a greenlight to flatten the entire 25-mile strip.

So, Sinwar anticipated Israel’s reaction?

He not only anticipated it; it was integral to his overall strategy. Like we said, he knew he couldn’t beat Israel militarily, so he had to create a situation where Israel beat itself. And he did that. He revealed the dark heart of the occupier and steadily garnered more support for the Palestinian cause. That’s called ‘winning’ in my book.

So ask yourself this: Have Sinwar’s predictions come to pass? Is Israel more “isolated in an extreme and powerful manner”?

It is.

Has the threat of “regional integration” been put “on hold”?

It has.

And is Israel facing a “state of collapse that has occurred on all fronts”?

Not yet, but we are still in the early rounds of this conflict. But by any metric, the trajectory of global public opinion suggests that Israel’s soft power is eroding by the day. The country is more politically isolated than anytime in its history, and more and more people are expressing their horror at the criminal behavior of IDF troops operating in Gaza. Check out this comment by British actress, Juliet Stevenson who speaks for many of us:

We’ve been watching something out of hell. It’s like something out of hell.

Atrocities. Crimes against humanity. War crimes.

And it’s all been filmed. We’ve all been able to see it. And I know many people have chosen to look away, because it’s unbearable, but I haven’t been able to do that. I didn’t think there was a choice to look away. I thought, if it is happening, you have to witness it. And, if that’s unbearable, well, you have to find a way of dealing with it because the Palestinian people are dealing with it.

Juliet Stevenson, British actress, How can the world watch this happen?, X

This is the uphill battle that Israel faces, the fact that people have been drenched in the dreary imagery of genocide for over three years. These are images that don’t go away, and they reshape one’s view of the perpetrators. You can’t unsee a child being targeted and deliberately killed by a sniper or masses of starving people being mowed down by machine guns as they try to gather food for their starving families, or young soldiers celebrating the implosion of schools, hospitals mosques and universities. Israel has even excavated more than a dozen Palestinian graveyards in an attempt to erase every trace of the native population. It’s sick! No one has ever seen this type of sadistic violence before, and it leaves an impression. It brings back memories of Abu Ghraib and the horrific abuse of Iraqi fighters who were tortured and tormented by twisted American servicemen. The photos were circulated widely in the global media causing huge reputational damage to the United States. But –to the point– Every day is Abu Ghraib in Gaza. Every day some new atrocity, some new abuse, some new horror. And people wonder: How can any people be so lacking in empathy? How can they be so devoid of humanity. This is pure nihilism drowning in oceans of blood. And it never stops.

In their hubris, Israeli planners think they can tweak their information programs and remove the stain of genocide. They think that aggressive messaging on social media, pro-Israel podcasters, and glitzy advertising campaigns they will eventually change hearts and minds and garner public support for the Jewish state. But all the polling data shows the exact opposite. Israel’s public approval is in freefall and there’s no sign of a turnaround. People have made up their minds. They’re shocked to the core by the routine cruelty that soldiers dish out gleefully on a daily basis. We’ve all seen enough. We’re done.

And all of this is Sinwar’s doing. He tore the mask off Zionism and showed the bloodthirsty creature behind.

We’ve all been told that “Zionism is a political and nationalist movement that supports the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.” But the only people who accept that definition is the Zionists themselves. Everyone else bases their conclusion on what they see, and what they see is mountains of carnage amid acres of rubble. That is what the world sees, and that is what they call Zionism.

Will Israel’s cheery social media “influencers” change that reckoning? I don’t think so. I don’t think they can.

(But we’ll leave that question for some other time.) What we need to understand is Sinwar’s strategy had dual aims. On the one hand, he wanted to expose the face of Zionism that Palestinians have experienced for the last 80 years. (He accomplished that.) But, more urgently, he wanted to derail the effort to “normalize” relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Abraham Accords, which have been vigorously promoted by Jared Kushner, are a way of establishing normal economic and diplomatic relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors while marginalizing the Palestinians. Keep in mind, all of these Arab regimes signed The Arab Peace Initiative in 2002. The agreement –which was unanimously endorsed by all 22 member states of the Arab League– stipulated that no Arab state would normalize relations with Israel unless they withdrew from the occupied territory, resolved the refugee issue, and accepted the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The Abraham Accords (which already included 3 countries in the Gulf) threatened to bypass this agreement which would put Palestinian aspirations on the fasttrack to extinction. This is the part of the story that is never told in the western media. Until now. For some reason (I don’t know why?) a number of news organizations have starting leaking information about “normalization” which was the main driver of the October 7 attacks. Check out this headline from the Wall Street Journal:

Hamas Wanted to Torpedo Israel-Saudi Deal With Oct. 7 Attacks, Documents Reveal
Militant leader Yahya Sinwar feared progress on peace would doom the Palestinian cause

Summary: Internal Hamas documents recovered by the Israeli military from a tunnel in Gaza show that a primary motivation for the October 7, 2023, attack was to sabotage advancing U.S.-brokered normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hamas leaders, particularly Yahya Sinwar, feared that a successful deal would marginalize the Palestinian cause and open the door to broader Arab and Islamic recognition of Israel. The key evidence is the minutes of an October 2, 2023, meeting of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza. According to the documents reviewed by the WSJ:

Hamas’s military leader Yahya Sinwar noted that “the Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly.” which left “a door open door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path. “He added that an “extraordinary act” was needed to derail the negotiations and “to bring about a major move or a strategic shift in the paths and balances of the region with regard to the Palestinian cause.”

Okay, will someone please explain to me why it took the editors of the WSJ three years to report on the primary motive behind October 7? You’d think that they’d be eager to cover an issue so critical to our understanding of a history-shaping event. But that clearly isn’t the case.

But the point is, the official storyline was wrong. Deliberately wrong. Hamas did not want to terrorize Jews, topple the government, or push Israel into the sea. The real goal of the October 7 was to sabotage Saudi normalization which was designed to sidestep earlier commitments by Arab leaders to demand concessions on Palestinian statehood before improving economic or diplomatic relations with Israel. It is no overstatement to say that Hamas was fighting for its life and the future of its people. The Abraham Accords posed a existential threat to every Palestinian. If the Saudis signed the agreement, the Palestinian cause would be “vanished” forever, which is why Sinwar settled on a desperate plan to put Palestine back on the regional agenda. Not surprisingly, Israeli leaders KNEW what Hamas’s real objectives were but never divulged the information to the media. Instead, they stuck with the same, tedious “Hamas hates Jews” gobbledygook. Just listen to this blurb from the former chief of Shin Bet, Ami Ayalon, and you’ll see what I mean:

The New Middle East presented by Biden, several weeks before, from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, without Palestinians. The Palestinians were not mentioned. Now, if you ask me, the way I understand Palestinians; they see themselves as a people and a nation. And, second, they feel alone, abandoned. They feel like they were abandoned by all the Arab states who signed a peace (treaty) with us (Israel) without doing anything about it. And now America along with the state that founded the Arab peace initiative, (Saudi Arabia) they are going to give up all the holy places in Jerusalem and on a Palestinian state. This is what they felt. And my friend Khalil told me, “Ami, you do not understand, they choose the ‘Samson Option’ because they felt they had nothing to lose, and this was the only way for them to show the world that “You will not be able to create stability in this region if you bypass the Palestinians. No more.” And the tragedy is, they succeeded. Ami Ayalon, X

So, Hamas chose the “Samson Option”; a last-ditch, scorched earth military campaign that would grab headlines around the world and put Palestine back on the regional agenda. What other option did they have? The cause of self-determination in their own land was being obliterated before their very eyes. They needed something really big the stop Israel in its tracks. They needed October 7.

And before ‘the usual suspects’ start whining about “terrorism” and terrorist organizations, (Note: Hamas is only designated as a terrorist organization by a handful of countries, all of which are in the grip of powerful Zionists) please, consider the comments of Ami Ayalon once again, who candidly admits that he “would do everything to achieve his liberty.” Take a look:

Question– What is the reality of life for Palestinians here?

Ami Ayalon: A people who dream about a life of freedom, but don’t see it.
Whether we like it or not, we control the lives of millions.

Question– If you were a Palestinian living on the West Bank or Gaza, what your view be of Israel?

Ami Ayalon– I would fight against Israel in order to achieve my liberty.

Question– How would you fight? How dirty?

Ami Ayalon– I would do everything to achieve my liberty, and that’s it.
You cannot deter a person or a group of people if they believe they have nothing to lose.
We Israelis shall only have security when they have hope. (53 seconds) Ami Ayalon, X

Does that mean the former Shin Bet chief would engage in acts of terror against his oppressors? Would he launch violent attacks against the government and the army? Would he kill anyone who prevented him from achieving his freedom?

Ayalon: “I would do everything to achieve my liberty, and that’s it.”

So, how is Ayalon any different than Hamas?

There’s no difference at all.

Bottom line: Sinwar had multiple reasons for launching the October 7 attacks but none of those reasons had anything to do with “hating Jews” or wanting to “terrorize innocent civilians”. The real goal –according to internal Hamas documents- was “to bring about a major move or a strategic shift in the paths and balances of the region with regard to the Palestinian cause.” The second objective was to rip the mask off the Zionist monster they’ve been dealing with for decades.

I leave you to judge whether he succeeded.