How Hamas Defeated Israel

Yet Hamas' leader Yahya Sinwar was right when he told his close associates recently, "We have the Israelis right where we want them."

The Israelis have committed the cardinal error of warfare: underestimating the intelligence of your enemy. Of course Hamas' leaders knew exactly what Israel would do in response to Oct. 7. They have studied Israel's behavior repeatedly over decades: when attacked, Israel always responds with overpowering force, much of it directed at civilians. And they don't care how it looks. "Hamas knew Israel would strike back hard. That was the point," Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group told The Washington Post. "To Hamas, Palestinian suffering is a critical component in bringing about the instability and global outrage it seeks to exploit."

The IDF always tortures civilians and demolishes homes and other infrastructure at an extravagant scale. So, like a chess player, Hamas goaded its aggressive adversary into a fierce attack because it was willing to make sacrifices -- Hamas fighters, Palestinian civilians, Gazan infrastructure -- to obtain something even more valuable.

As we've seen recently in northern Gaza, Hamas remains a potent military force able to engage the IDF in street combat. But survival isn't Hamas' primary objective. Making Israel look evil is -- and Israel has fallen into Hamas' trap.

The test Israel faced on Oct. 7 was: Can we exercise restraint? Like the U.S., which faced a similar test on 9/11, Israel failed miserably. Israel's over-the-top craziness has fulfilled Hamas' main goal, which was to expose the Israeli government as bloodthirsty, oppressive monsters unworthy of the support of the world upon which it depends.

As a result, most of the world now recognizes Palestinian sovereignty. The International Criminal Court has ordered Israel to stop its military actions in southern Gaza. The International Court of Justice is preparing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. And the UN expressly states that Israel is morally and ethically the same as Hamas, a terrorist organization guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Never mind the two-state solution -- it's dead, and not only because of Netanyahu. The globe is moving toward a new consensus: an end to the Israeli ethnostate from a bygone colonial era, replaced by a "one person, one vote," post-apartheid democracy.

Looking back to October, the only way Israel could have won at war with Hamas was to learn the lesson of the classic 1980s movie "War Games": don't play. Imagine, if you can, how Hamas' leadership would have felt had Israel refused to take the bait on Oct. 7, responding only with pinpoint raids to try to rescue hostages, or negotiating for them, while playing the weeping victim for the cameras. It would have been a devastating moral and political defeat and the beginning of the end for the cause of Palestinian liberation.

Israel wanted Gaza. They may not even keep Israel.

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Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.