(Dobbs) Hamas Cannot Succeed. But It Has Not Failed
What it has done is forced people to take sides.
People have written me the past couple of days and asked, “Can Hamas possibly succeed?”
There are many ways to think about that but the first thing that comes into my head is that we got the answer yesterday from Israel’s minister of defense: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” In other words, the Gaza Strip, whose gates for a decade or more already were under Israeli control, is cut off. Two million people live there. Everyone will suffer.
Meanwhile the Palestinian death toll in Gaza is on a trajectory to surpass Israel’s. The U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs says that after missiles and bombs hit targets all over Gaza, more than 180,000 Palestinians have been displaced. Upwards of 6,000 homes are destroyed or at least uninhabitable. More missiles and bombs are coming.
And, to the extent that Hamas is defined by its military wing, hundreds of its fighters are dead.
So if success is measured by the security and prosperity that a government provides for its people, the answer to the question is no. Hamas cannot possibly succeed.
To the contrary, its ferocious attacks on Israel may have had an unintended effect: Prime Minister Netanyahu and his rivals have been talking the last two days about a unity government. For the time being at least, bitter political divisions in the Jewish state are being put aside.
A woman I know who lives in Jerusalem said this in an email: “The profound irony is that Israel’s internal strife, ongoing since January, has seemingly (though we know only temporarily) disappeared as now people from all political and religious backgrounds are working together, donating blood, collecting clothing, reaching out.” As she was writing that, she told us, sirens were sounding again, signaling another round of incoming Palestinian rockets.
What’s more, those rockets, and the terrorist kidnappings and cold-blooded slaughters that followed, have brought the Israeli government and the Biden administration, which has strongly spoken out against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s policies, closer together. President Biden has called American support for Israel as it fights this war “rock solid and unwavering.”
Another unintended consequence for Palestinians may be this: if previously there was even a glimmer of hope that peace talks could be resuscitated between Israelis and Palestinians, with the ultimate aim of an independent Palestinian state, that glimmer has died. The likelihood of an independent state probably has been set back for a generation, if not longer, if not forever.
The 150 or more hostages in the hands of Hamas are, in the short term, a compelling bargaining chip and might force Israel’s army to temper the way it storms into Gaza. But yesterday, the spokesman for the terrorist group issued an audio message in which he said, “Every targeting of our people who are safe in their homes without warning, we will regretfully meet with the execution of our enemy's civilian hostages.” He gruesomely announced that they would be broadcast “in audio and video.”
If that happens, it will escalate the opprobrium of the Western world, which for years has provided aid to the impoverished people of the Gaza Strip.
Finally, Hamas has never recognized Israel’s right to exist. To the contrary, its charter has called for the Jews to be pushed into the sea. If the ultimate goal for Hamas is to liquidate Israel, it’s a safe bet that it will fail, especially with the United States sending arms and ships and planes to fortify the Jewish state.
None of those outcomes helps Hamas. But others do.
It is widely predicted that the potential warmup in relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, mediated by the United States and which had been gaining traction in the month before the war, has gone cold.
While the missiles were flying the day the war started, the Saudis became the first Arab nation to blame Israel for provocative and abusive treatment of Palestinians, their foreign ministry citing its “previous repetitive warnings of the dangers of the situation blowing up as a result of the continuing occupation and depriving the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.”
A Hamas success.
And just as the Hamas attacks have brought Israelis together, they have brought Arabs together in common cause against Israel. In reports from Egypt and Qatar, Tunisia and Morocco, Lebanon and Yemen and Kuwait, citizens and public officials have cheered Hamas on. Condemnations of Israel, not Hamas, have even been heard in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, the Arab signatories to the Abraham Accords, the 2000 normalization agreement with Israel. Hamas has now soured those relationships. As The New York Times put it, the war has “laid bare the limitations of diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab governments.”
Meanwhile in the West Bank, the comparatively moderate Palestinian Territory where Hamas has been a destructive influence, no one is cheering Israel on. By some accounts, more Palestinians there are radicalized by the day.
Another Hamas success.
But perhaps its biggest victory is this: Hamas has shaken Israel to its core. Its vaunted intelligence agencies didn’t have a clue about the scale of what was coming. Its legendary military didn’t have comprehensive plans to deal with it when it did. The government failed to foresee it and failed to contain it.
A former Israeli consul general to New York, now a senior writer for the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, argued yesterday, “Netanyahu Must Go Now, Not After the Gaza War.” A Haaretz editorial said, “The prime minister… completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.”
One day when the smoke on the battlefield dies down, it will ignite again in Israeli politics. There will be recriminations. Undoubtedly, heads will roll. It will be a long time before the Israeli people trust their government to protect them.
So no, Hamas cannot succeed. But in forcing a reckoning in both the Arab world and Israel, it has not altogether failed.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
The editorial by Harretz about a policy of annexation and dispossession being doomed to failure is entirely correct.
The hope for a long lasting peace in this region seems unimaginable. What sort of magic solution can there be? Oil and water require an emulsifier to blend and their doesn't seem to be one on the horizon. Hence, more endless death and suffering.