How Hamas Defeated Israel

When residents of the Middle East woke up on the morning of Oct. 7, the Palestinian cause was in a sorry state.

Seven hundred thousand radical Israeli settler-colonists and sealed-off "military zones" occupied 60% of the occupied West Bank, which was blockaded by a Berlin-style border wall, so much that the United Nations human rights chief no longer believed Palestinian sovereignty was even theoretically possible. The occupied Gaza Strip was subject to an Israeli blockade that destroyed the economy and drove the unemployment rate to 80%. Former President Donald Trump had moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem -- a strong signal to Palestinians that the world would never allow them their own state -- and President Joe Biden had let it stay there. Muslim nations that had previously supported the Palestinian struggle (Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan) normalized diplomatic relations with the hard-right government of Israel; Oman, Indonesia, Somalia and Saudi Arabia were expected to follow.

The world, including numerous Arab governments, had forgotten the Palestinians.

By the end of the day, everyone remembered them.

It had been necessary, Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas's top leadership, told The New York Times two weeks after the attack, to "change the entire equation and not just have a clash. We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm."

Whether you call it terrorism, asymmetric warfare, guerrilla warfare or resistance, an action like the Oct. 7 raid on an Israeli music festival and nearby kibbutzim is a disadvantaged, under-armed and poorly situated group's attempt to flip the game table, catch an adversary by surprise and scramble the positions of the players in order to create a different situation.

It's also a test of their adversary. More about that below.

Hamas has accomplished its objectives. Israel's saturation bombing and starvation campaign launched after Oct. 7, which military analysts call the most brutal and systemic assault against a civilian population since World War II, shocked Muslims (and many other people) around the world. Under pressure from their subjects, the Saudis now say they will only consider a normalization deal that explicitly guarantees Palestinian statehood -- something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to consider. Biden, a self-declared Zionist and faithful supporter of the Jewish state throughout his career, now says he wants a two-state solution. He has also threatened to withhold arms, though using weasel words to justify redefining his "red line." Sixty-one percent of voters in the United States (by far Israel's closest military ally and the country to which Israel owes its creation) now say the U.S. should stop supplying all weapons to Israel.

The long-ignored Palestinian issue is so "back on the table" that Democrats worry they might lose the battleground state of Michigan and the presidency due to the state's substantial Arab population.

Many Israelis and their supporters fail to grasp the reality of the current situation. "How can Hamas be winning?" they ask. Israelis support the war effort, and the Israel Defense Forces have only lost a few hundred troops, nearly a fifth of them to friendly fire and accidents. Gaza, on the other hand, has been flattened. The IDF has killed at least 37,000 Palestinians, though Ralph Nader is surely closer to the truth when he estimates the total number, including the bodies buried under tens of millions of tons of rubble, at 200,000. Israel's obvious objective, the expulsion of the surviving population and annexation of Gaza into Israel, appears tantalizingly close.

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