Really, what were they thinking?
I and my dear friend Rational Left often have conversations where we marvel at Republicans. They live in a bubble and are convinced that the majority of Americans support them. Then they are shocked when their vile words engender widespread criticism. They can't imagine that their policies aren't popular, because they are in a feedback loop where they are rewarded the more outrageous they become.
Since the beginning of the Hamas-Israel War, I have often asked the question which is the title of this piece. What did Hamas think would happen when it launched a massive attack against its eternal enemy, slaughtered its citizens, kidnapped hostages, and rained rockets down on cities?
Every other Gaza crisis has ended in a negotiated truce. This is because those clashes were always limited in scope. Hamas leadership probably thought those feckless, cowardly Jews would accept punishment, lick their wounds, and return to the status quo ante bellum. And if it had been another limited action, they would have been right. For all the braying from the Left that Israel is a racist, genocidal state, Israelis really had no desire to go back into the Gaza warren. Sending the army into a civilian population of 2.5 million people was undesirable to all sectors of Israeli society.
But what has transpired since Saturday is not one of the endless rounds between Israel and Hamas. This time the terrorists decided to act on the central plank of their charter, which is to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. This is not resistance. This is criminality.
What Hamas has done is awaken feelings among Israeli Jews which are never far from the surface: the knowledge that as a small people they have been hated for millennia, and at different points in their history they faced extermination, whether under Greeks, Romans, Christian Europeans, or Arabs. It's the idea that they are a people under siege, their existence always under threat. And, of course, that's an accurate assessment. Even the United States is not fully safe for Jews. And now Hamas instigated a pogrom right in the Jewish homeland.
In 2022, Russia under Vladimir Putin committed a strategic blunder of stratospheric proportions by invading Ukraine and united the West against it. This attack by Hamas is even greater in its obtuseness and illogic. Like Republicans in the US, the leadership and membership of Hamas consists of ideologues. Compromise is anathema. Only utter victory is acceptable. But if you have that mindset, you had better have the means to carry it out. Hamas doesn't. What it has done is, like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, awakened a beast. Just like the United States was not going to cease its war until Japan surrendered unconditionally, Israel will not cease until Hamas is eradicated, its leaders dead, on the run, or in prison.
The Hamas leadership has, belatedly, realized this. On Monday they claimed the "resistance" had achieved all its aims, and they now sought a truce. That they could utter this statement exemplifies the bubble in which they live. They thought Israel would accept thousands of dead and wounded, citizens held hostage in their hundreds, and return to the normal way of things. Hamas has destroyed that symbiotic relationship. Now they have only two options: complete surrender, or a complete eradication of the organization.
The only chance they had to avoid that was if the Israeli political class had remained divided. But with Benny Gantz joining an emergency war government, and bringing with him the military experience the Netanyahu government lacked, that hope has flown. There will be no quarter and no mercy. I don't say this with glee; it's merely a statement of fact. Hamas fighters will be eliminated. Hamas leadership will be hunted down. I won't even hazard to guess what shape the Strip will be in afterwards.
When a guerilla army engages in such audacity, it had better be sure that it can outlast its enemy. If that enemy sees the attack as an existential threat, the guerillas have miscalculated. Hamas has miscalculated. They won't live to learn the lesson.