JosephZ
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How Hamas Ends
A Strategy for Letting the Group Defeat Itself
The war in Gaza has settled into a mind-numbing pattern of violence, bloodshed, and death. And everyone is losing—except Hamas.
The Israeli government’s highly lethal response to the October 7 attack and seeming indifference to the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians has played into Hamas’s hands.
Despite some tactical victories, the Israeli war in Gaza has been a strategic disaster. For Israel to defeat Hamas, it needs a better strategy, one informed by a deeper understanding of how terrorist groups generally end.
Since October 7, Israel has been trying to crush or repress Hamas out of existence, to little avail. A smarter strategy would be to figure out how to chip away at the group’s support and hasten its collapse.
Military repression has a poor track record as a form of counterterrorism. It is difficult and costly to sustain and tends to work best when members of a terrorist group can be separated from the general population, a condition that is hard to create in most places.
In explaining their repressive approach in Gaza, Israeli leaders have argued that Hamas is similar to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) and can be defeated in a similar way. It is true that, by 2017, a U.S.-led coalition had reconquered territory that ISIS seized in Iraq and Syria in 2014, reducing the group’s presence in those places. Yet ISIS has not ended. Instead, it has splintered into nine groups it calls “provinces,” which are based all over the world and still plot and sometimes successfully carry out bloody attacks.
Unlike ISIS, which is an explicitly transnational movement, Hamas is an exclusively Palestinian group, focused on winning control of contested territory. Military force can degrade Hamas’s hold on Gaza, but without a political solution to the underlying territorial dispute, the group would soon reemerge in some form and resume targeting Israeli military forces and civilians.
Ultimately, Israel’s lack of success in Gaza so far should come as no surprise: counterterrorism that is purely military rarely works and is especially difficult for a democracy to pull off.
Most terrorist groups end... because they fail, either by collapsing in on themselves or by losing support. Groups that implode sometimes die out during generational shifts, disintegrate into factions, break down over operational disagreements, or fracture over ideological differences.
Groups also fail because they lose popular support. Sometimes, that is because governments offer members a better alternative, such as amnesty or jobs.
But by far the most important reason terrorist groups fail is that they miscalculate, especially by making targeting errors that stir revulsion among important constituencies.
Israel’s excessive use of military force has strengthened Hamas’s hold and aided the group’s propaganda about what happened on October 7. According to a poll that Shikaki conducted in March, 90 percent of Palestinians dismiss the idea that Hamas engaged in war crimes that day. Any revulsion that ordinary Gazans might have felt about what Hamas did in their name was likely overwhelmed by their horror over what Israel has done to their loved ones, homes, and cities.
The far more likely way that Hamas could fail is through popular backlash. Hamas rules Gaza through oppression, using arrests and torture to suppress dissent.
To help Hamas fail, Israel should be doing everything in its power to give Palestinians in Gaza a sense that there is an alternative to Hamas and that a more hopeful future is possible.
It seems possible that external actors such as the United States, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia might eventually find a way to push Israel and the Palestinians into a renewed diplomatic process aimed at creating a two-state solution. Such negotiations would be long, fraught, and hamstrung by extremists on both sides. But merely announcing a process would have salutary effects. Indeed, it could even create the conditions for what might be the most likely way for Hamas’s terrorism to end: self-defeat.
Instead of restricting humanitarian aid to a trickle, Israel should be providing it in massive quantities. Instead of merely destroying infrastructure and homes, Israel should also be sharing plans for rebuilding the territory in a post-Hamas future. Instead of carrying out collective punishment and hoping that Palestinians will eventually blame Hamas, Israel should be conveying that it sees a distinction between Hamas fighters and the vast majority of Gazans, who have nothing to do with the group and are themselves victims of its thuggish rule and reckless violence.
After decades of struggling with Hamas and months of fighting a massive, brutal war against it, Israel still seems unlikely to defeat the group. But it can still win—by helping Hamas defeat itself.
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A Strategy for Letting the Group Defeat Itself
The war in Gaza has settled into a mind-numbing pattern of violence, bloodshed, and death. And everyone is losing—except Hamas.
The Israeli government’s highly lethal response to the October 7 attack and seeming indifference to the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians has played into Hamas’s hands.
Despite some tactical victories, the Israeli war in Gaza has been a strategic disaster. For Israel to defeat Hamas, it needs a better strategy, one informed by a deeper understanding of how terrorist groups generally end.
Since October 7, Israel has been trying to crush or repress Hamas out of existence, to little avail. A smarter strategy would be to figure out how to chip away at the group’s support and hasten its collapse.
Military repression has a poor track record as a form of counterterrorism. It is difficult and costly to sustain and tends to work best when members of a terrorist group can be separated from the general population, a condition that is hard to create in most places.
In explaining their repressive approach in Gaza, Israeli leaders have argued that Hamas is similar to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) and can be defeated in a similar way. It is true that, by 2017, a U.S.-led coalition had reconquered territory that ISIS seized in Iraq and Syria in 2014, reducing the group’s presence in those places. Yet ISIS has not ended. Instead, it has splintered into nine groups it calls “provinces,” which are based all over the world and still plot and sometimes successfully carry out bloody attacks.
Unlike ISIS, which is an explicitly transnational movement, Hamas is an exclusively Palestinian group, focused on winning control of contested territory. Military force can degrade Hamas’s hold on Gaza, but without a political solution to the underlying territorial dispute, the group would soon reemerge in some form and resume targeting Israeli military forces and civilians.
Ultimately, Israel’s lack of success in Gaza so far should come as no surprise: counterterrorism that is purely military rarely works and is especially difficult for a democracy to pull off.
Most terrorist groups end... because they fail, either by collapsing in on themselves or by losing support. Groups that implode sometimes die out during generational shifts, disintegrate into factions, break down over operational disagreements, or fracture over ideological differences.
Groups also fail because they lose popular support. Sometimes, that is because governments offer members a better alternative, such as amnesty or jobs.
But by far the most important reason terrorist groups fail is that they miscalculate, especially by making targeting errors that stir revulsion among important constituencies.
Israel’s excessive use of military force has strengthened Hamas’s hold and aided the group’s propaganda about what happened on October 7. According to a poll that Shikaki conducted in March, 90 percent of Palestinians dismiss the idea that Hamas engaged in war crimes that day. Any revulsion that ordinary Gazans might have felt about what Hamas did in their name was likely overwhelmed by their horror over what Israel has done to their loved ones, homes, and cities.
The far more likely way that Hamas could fail is through popular backlash. Hamas rules Gaza through oppression, using arrests and torture to suppress dissent.
To help Hamas fail, Israel should be doing everything in its power to give Palestinians in Gaza a sense that there is an alternative to Hamas and that a more hopeful future is possible.
It seems possible that external actors such as the United States, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia might eventually find a way to push Israel and the Palestinians into a renewed diplomatic process aimed at creating a two-state solution. Such negotiations would be long, fraught, and hamstrung by extremists on both sides. But merely announcing a process would have salutary effects. Indeed, it could even create the conditions for what might be the most likely way for Hamas’s terrorism to end: self-defeat.
Instead of restricting humanitarian aid to a trickle, Israel should be providing it in massive quantities. Instead of merely destroying infrastructure and homes, Israel should also be sharing plans for rebuilding the territory in a post-Hamas future. Instead of carrying out collective punishment and hoping that Palestinians will eventually blame Hamas, Israel should be conveying that it sees a distinction between Hamas fighters and the vast majority of Gazans, who have nothing to do with the group and are themselves victims of its thuggish rule and reckless violence.
After decades of struggling with Hamas and months of fighting a massive, brutal war against it, Israel still seems unlikely to defeat the group. But it can still win—by helping Hamas defeat itself.
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