Mick Hartley

Jonathan Spyer at the Spectator – Hamas has exploited Israel’s weaknesses:

When Hamas launched its war on Israel in October, 2023, it did so on the basis of a clear analysis of Israeli society, according to which it hoped to achieve its objectives.

Given the nature and extent of the massacre of 7 October 2023, it was surely clear to the Palestinian Islamist movement that Israel’s response would be to seek to destroy the ruling regime that Hamas had established in Gaza since 2007. Hamas’s leaders hoped to avoid this outcome, however, by the taking of Israeli hostages. This would be followed by a bargaining process in which Hamas would exchange the lives of the hostages for its continued rule in Gaza.

The ceasefire deal currently being implemented by the government of Israel and the once and future rulers of Gaza suggests that Hamas may well have achieved its goal….

The choice facing Israel was stark. Its decision is clear. The remaining important question is why. Why has the Jewish state opted once again to agree to a massively lopsided exchange of captives, which will involve the release of hundreds of individuals convicted of murdering Israelis, often in the most savage and brutal of ways? 1,904 Palestinians are to be released in the first phase, in return for 33 Israeli hostages….

So why? Why the agreement to such apparently absurd deals?

Israeli society is small, and possesses a high level of social cohesion of a particular kind. Israelis are not, and do not feel themselves to be, strangers to one another. Strongly felt perceptions of national, communal and religious identity, along with shared experiences of conflict, contribute toward a powerful sense of shared destiny among Israel’s Jewish inhabitants and to a lesser degree also among its non-Jewish ones. This produces the high levels of solidarity and mutual commitment which have been very much on display over the last 14 months of war. But it also, paradoxically, leads to prisoner exchanges which by any measure make no strategic sense at all, enable enemies to achieve their goals, and for obvious reasons incentivise further hostage taking.

It now seems, looking back, that the Israeli aim of destroying Hamas was always a pipedream. Why? Because there's nothing there to take its place. Hamas has controlled life in Gaza (with, let's not forget, the help of UNRWA) to such an extent that there's just no alternative. There's no civil society to take over post-Hamas. Unless Israel had decided to take control of Gaza again – which they clearly had no wish to do – then the return of Hamas after the ceasefire was inevitable. The killings of the Hamas leaders was of symbolic significance, but others will just take their place. The destruction of the tunnels and the Hamas infrastructure? It'll all just get built again.

It's like the Iraq war: the destruction of the Saddam regime was the easy part. Afterwards…nothing…a vacuum which the Iranians were quick to exploit. Syria? There was no possibility of some kind of people's uprising to replace Assad. Civil society had been destroyed. In place of Iran and Russia we now have Turkey and its Islamist proxies calling the shots. Lebanon? Too early to tell, though there are hopeful signs. Maybe there's enough of a civil society left to save the country. Maybe the destruction of Hezbollah is the one positive that emerges from this whole mess. That, and the weakening of Tehran.

Though I suppose, with Trump coming in, matters may change….