A year on from the atrocities of October 7th, the perpetrators are winning. Hamas is vicious but it is not stupid. It knew (and did not care) that a maddened Israel would inflict appalling collective punishment on the people of Gaza – mostly on women and children.
Its hunch was that, in the mayhem, it was not just Gaza City and Khan Younis and Rafah that would be pulverised. It was also the very idea on which Israel’s long-term future depends – its identity as a secular liberal democracy.
Since any words on this subject get distorted, let me state explicitly what ought to be implicitly obvious: I take no pleasure in saying that Hamas is winning. It is a murderous organisation allied to an Iranian regime that beats women to death for showing their hair in public.
Nor am I suggesting that Hamas is triumphing in any narrow military sense. This was never remotely possible. Israel has complete control of the skies over Gaza and an essentially limitless supply of bombs from the US. It has all the tanks and weaponry it needs. Hamas (again) was not stupid enough to think it could defeat all that firepower.
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But for groups like Hamas, the horizon of victory is generational. We know all about this from the history of militant Irish nationalism – the aim is to survive, to keep the flame lit, to insert oneself from time to time into the consciousness of one’s own people and of the enemy.
And Hamas is very obviously surviving. According to Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, speaking in July, 60 per cent of Hamas’s military operatives had been killed or wounded. Even if we accept that this figure is accurate, it means that much of Hamas’s fighting strength is intact.
Terrorist organisations don’t need huge numbers of active service combatants. The massacres of October 7th were perpetrated by about 2,500 Hamas members – a fraction of its remaining manpower. Its ranks will, moreover, be replenished by kids and young men who have seen their families and homes obliterated. Far from wiping out Hamas, Israel has guaranteed it at least another generation of recruits.
In political terms, Hamas has achieved two big things. Firstly, it has prevented the normalisation of Israel’s relationships with Arab regimes. The bodies piled up in Gaza form an impenetrable wall between Israel and its great strategic goal. The big accord with Saudi Arabia that seemed within reach before October 7th is now as far away as ever.
Secondly Hamas has summoned an Israel in its own image. Terrorist atrocities are always horrific – but they are not mindless. They aim to provoke. The theory behind them is that, if you generate enough outrage, the enemy will drop its pretence to be civilised and reveal its ‘true self’. It will appear before the world as the monster you have always claimed it to be.
Time and again, democratic countries fall into these traps. They abandon their essential norms of legality (Britain resorting to internment and dirty tricks in Northern Ireland; the US legitimising torture, kidnapping and illegal invasion after 9/11). They resort to the very same acts they claim to be so repelled by.
Israel has not just fallen into this trap – it has occupied and annexed it. It has effectively abandoned any sense of itself as a law-bound state. It has gone to war, rhetorically at least, with the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. It has openly embraced the collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza, while knowing full well that this is a crime under international law.
By killing (at a conservative estimate) 11,000 children in Gaza since October 7th, Israel has set new records in the contemporary massacre of innocents. This figure does not include those whose bodies were evaporated by direct hits, those entombed in rubble or those killed by starvation and preventable disease – but it is nonetheless twice the annual rate of direct killing of children in the appalling conflict in neighbouring Syria between 2011 and 2013.
Leaving aside (as, sadly, most Israelis seem to do) the innate horror of this slaughter, it is – from Israel’s own point of view – politically disastrous. It erases the distinction on which its long-term future depends, the idea that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
Binyamin Netanyahu evoked that distinction after October 7th by repeatedly calling for a war of civilisation against barbarism. How solipsistic do you have to be not to realise that, for most of the world, those categories have been blown to bits along with the homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and universities of Gaza?
What has kept this self-delusion afloat is Netanyahu’s ability to play Joe Biden like a decrepit, increasingly unstrung fiddle. There is indeed a kind of triumph in this repeated humiliation of the leader of a superpower. Making Biden look weak and foolish, with his repeated claims that a ceasefire is just around corner, is what Netanyahu is supremely good at.
But is this too a pyrrhic victory? Israel is putting all its eggs in Donald Trump’s grubby basket, banking on an alliance with a man whose friendship tends to be more toxic than his enmity. And it is doing so at the expense of its greatest strategic asset – the idea that support for Israel is a bipartisan cause in the US.
Even before October 7th and the Gaza killings, 51 per cent of Jewish people in the US, aged between 18 and 29, were telling Pew surveys that they were “not too emotionally attached” or “not at all emotionally attached” to Israel. What has happened over the last year has further alienated many young US Jews. The long-term consequences for Israel are dire – sever its emotional ties to the diaspora and you leave it increasingly isolated, inward-looking and vulnerable.
This is what Hamas would like to see; an Israel that is just another Middle Eastern religious autocracy, where violence is the only real value. It must be pleased with how it’s going.