Gaza: The End of the Illusion

How fantasy and delusion in Washington and Jerusalem led to crisis in Israel and genocide in Gaza — and what we can do about it now.

I.

Israel’s blood-soaked debacle in Gaza now lumbers through its tenth month. Dwarfing the Bosnian (1992-95), Syrian (2011-2018), or Salvadoran (1979-1990) wars, it is killing Palestinians at a rate that, by conservative estimates, more closely approximates the Cambodian genocide of 1975-79. Any day now, Israel’s prime minister and defense minister are due to be summoned to the Hague to answer charges of crimes against humanity and numerous authorities, such as Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, are on record saying Israel’s actions have crossed the legal threshold of genocide.

In global opinion the country is increasingly viewed as a pariah. By all accounts, the war is eating away at the long-run foundations of its alliance with the United States.

Weighed against all this, Israel has achieved none of the objectives it announced at the war’s outset: neither the return of most hostages nor the elimination of Hamas. Netanyahu has rejected all proposals to release the Israeli captives in exchange for an end to the fighting, ruling out any agreement that would leave Hamas in place in Gaza. Yet his preferred approach of "military pressure" has clearly killed more hostages than it’s freed.

And though true believers might once have been able to persuade themselves that Israel was "making progress" toward its goal of destroying Hamas — taking solace in the IDF’s dubious litany of Vietnam-style body-count statistics — those hopes were dashed last spring by a quietly momentous bit of news.

On May 12, Israel announced it was sending IDF units back to areas of Gaza that had previously been declared clear of Hamas forces. "Entire brigades of Israeli troops are back," Haaretz military correspondent Anshel Pfeffer reported from North Gaza, even though the IDF "announced it had 'dismantled' the Hamas battalions" more than four months earlier. The soldiers Pfeffer spoke to "all use the same word to describe [the fighting] – 'Sisyphean.'"

Hamas has adapted to the "dismantling" of its battalions by reverting to guerrilla tactics familiar from anticolonial wars in Vietnam or Algeria: its fighters have dispersed into autonomous cells that can harass the occupier from unseen positions, periodically taking patches of territory, then disappearing from sight when enemy troops arrive.

This is the scenario US intelligence agencies warned of back in early February — a time when naive observers were still insisting an Israeli victory was in the cards. "Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come," the intelligence community stated in its annual threat-assessment report to Congress, "and the military will struggle to neutralize Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces."

II.

All of this spells the end of an illusion — one that Israel’s leadership class cultivated, propagated, and ultimately fell victim to over the course of twenty years: the illusion that Israel could continue indefinitely to thwart Palestinian aspirations for national independence, without fear of resistance from Hamas, because if push came to shove there was — somehow, somewhere — a viable military option that could sweep the whole problem away at the point of a bayonet.

"The next time something happens here," centrist opposition leader and former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz boasted in a 2019 campaign event at the Gaza border, "we will make sure that it's the final round." Israel would "fully defeat Hamas." Translated into Netanyahu-ese, in other words: "total victory."

The past nine months have come as a rude awakening to Gantz and his colleagues. Rather than destroy Hamas, Israel has managed only to land itself in a deepening quagmire. The scenario it now faces, a protracted counterinsurgency against Palestinian guerrillas in Gaza, is not only a nightmare for Israel but a strategic windfall for Hamas: an incomparably more advantageous form of confrontation than that which prevailed in the years prior to October 7, when the movement was held responsible for governing two million Gazans under impossible conditions while Israel remained free to wage lethal economic warfare against it (via the "closure") without exposing a single Israeli soldier to danger.

And thanks to the time-honored logic of political warfare, this equation holds no matter how much damage Hamas sustains in the process. As the group’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, told an interviewer in 2018: if Israel were ever to re-occupy Gaza to win a war against Hamas, "victory would be even worse than a defeat."

Defense minister Yoav Gallant was forced to acknowledge this reality in his May 15 address calling on Netanyahu to cede authority in Gaza to some as-yet-unknown "Palestinian governing entity." Israel has only "a [finite] set of resources" with which to confront a "multi-front threat," he noted, including Hezbollah to the north and Iran further afield. If it were to undertake a military occupation of Gaza, that project "would become the main security and military effort of the State of Israel over the coming years" — something the country can scarcely afford.

There’s a reason Israel’s hot wars have all, historically, been brief: it’s a small country that can only keep so many of its prime-age workers on active duty at one time. In leaked comments to a Likud party meeting the same week, Gallant said that "the army doesn't have enough soldiers to fulfill such a mission” and would consequently be “forced to extend the mandatory service of fighters to four years," according to an account by Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel.

"Anyone who knows the mood among soldiers and their parents," Harel added, "knows that it would be very difficult to implement such a move."

Though phrased in the leaden prose of a securicrat, Gallant’s acknowledgment of Israel’s urgent need to find "Palestinian entities" to take control of Gaza was, in reality, a desperate confession of Israel’s strategic helplessness in its current situation. For, as Haaretz’s Jack Khoury reported around the same time:

Prominent figures in Gaza who are unaffiliated with [Hamas] are clear in their opinion that under the circumstances, no [Palestinian] would agree to govern Gaza under Israeli patronage, or be able to establish order, or get any cooperation from Gazans.

III.

The current fiasco thus marks a fitting coda to two decades of Israel’s dealings with Gaza and Hamas in which the Jewish state has — to coin a phrase — never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Recall how Hamas came to rule Gaza in the first place. After the group’s surprise victory in the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and US president George W. Bush waved aside pleas from Mahmoud Abbas, UN diplomats, and numerous European policymakers, urging that they seek a modus vivendi with the new government. Instead, Washington and Jerusalem opted for a doomed policy of regime change.

First came a diplomatic and financial embargo, which the European Union was muscled into joining; within weeks the Palestinian Authority administrative machinery collapsed and the economy of the occupied territories was shattered.

Then came a covert plot to foment a violent insurrection against the newly elected government, using a special force of US-trained Palestinian fighters loyal to elements of Fatah. The attempted putsch, launched in early 2007, promptly and spectacularly backfired: Fatah-aligned gunmen went on a bloody offensive in Gaza but were routed by Hamas, fleeing the Strip in terror and leaving the Islamists in full control.

The next month, David Wurmser, a neoconservative Mideast policy official in Dick Cheney’s office, resigned in disgust. Bush and Olmert, he lamented, had waged "a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship with victory," a scheme that failed only because it was "pre-empted before it could happen."

Israel thus managed the considerable feat of installing its arch-enemy — a rag-tag militia now equipped with gleaming stockpiles of American-supplied weapons, left behind in Fatah’s hastily abandoned armories — as the unchallenged ruler of the territory.

IV.

The US and Israel quickly settled on a diplomatic pretext to justify their subversion of Palestinian democracy: the so-called "Quartet principles," named after the four-party consortium (comprising the US, EU, Russia, and the UN) that functions, in practice, as a US-run Mideast policy cartel.

Under the terms of the "principles" — which remain solemnly chiseled into the tablets of Western diplomacy almost twenty years later — the US, EU, and Israel declared that any Palestinian government in which Hamas participated would be deemed illegitimate and subject to a blanket boycott until Hamas agreed to three conditions: a commitment to (1) "non-violence," (2) "recognition of Israel," and (3) "acceptance of previous agreements," meaning the moribund 1993 Oslo agreement and all its sequelae.

Anyone tempted to indulge the pretense that these demands have anything to do with promoting peace or countering terrorism, should recall that Israel never insisted on such preconditions before negotiating peace agreements with Egypt (concluded in 1979), Jordan (concluded in 1994), or Syria (inconclusive talks throughout the 1990s and 2000s). In each case Israel embarked on talks with an interlocutor that did not recognize its "right to exist."

Nor has the European Union ever enforced such "no-contact" rules against Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Taliban in Afghanistan — armed militias designated as terrorist organizations, whose political representatives nevertheless talk to EU officials without preconditions. Indeed, in Brussels, "everyone agrees that the no-contact policy [with Hamas] has been a total failure, but we can't get out of it," senior European officials told the International Crisis Group in 2022. All proposals to loosen its strictures had been blocked by East European member states, "due mainly to Israeli pressure."

But the truly defining feature of the Quartet principles, the feature that fully encapsulates their essential nature and purpose, is the fact that they apply only to the Palestinians. Israel is exempt. In Ramallah, all government ministers must accept the Oslo accords or face a foreign aid cutoff and diplomatic boycott; not so in Jerusalem. Israeli ministers remain free to repudiate Oslo, to reject any form of Palestinian sovereignty from the river to the sea, to advocate torture and mass expulsion of "the Arabs," the dropping of nuclear weapons on Gaza, to aver that "all the Gazans need to be destroyed," and on and on — all without endangering a penny of American military aid or a single bear hug from Joe Biden.

"It is not for us to pass judgment on who ought to be in the government of Israel," State Department spokesman Matt Miller explained recently. "That's just not a decision for the United States to make."

V.

On March 29, 2006, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas was sworn in as the new Palestinian prime minister. Officially, he represented an organization dedicated to the dismantling of the Jewish state and the restoration of Arab Palestine on every inch of its historic territory, an objective Hamas’s spokesmen never tired of proclaiming.

In reality — as those same spokesmen readily admitted, in their more sober moods — such an outcome lay far beyond the scope of what the movement was capable of achieving, rendering compromise with Israel unavoidable.

The late Ismail Abu Shanab, a co-founder of Hamas and second-in-command to its spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was, in his day, the most prominent exponent of this trend of thought. "What is the point in speaking rhetoric," he asked at a 2003 press conference in Gaza. "Let’s be frank, we cannot destroy Israel. The practical solution is for us to have a state alongside Israel….When we build a Palestinian state, we will not need these militias; all the needs for attack will stop. Everything will change into a civil life."

Commenting on this remark in his 2022 study of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy (Prophets Without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution), former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote: "No Hamas leader has [expressed] in a more outspoken and courageous way Hamas’s quest for a way out of the unsustainable dogma about the liberation of 'all' Palestine."

Unfortunately, he had to add, Abu Shanab — "a staunch opponent of suicide terrorism" — made the statement "not long before his assassination by Israel," which "sealed the end of the 2003 ceasefire."

Almost since its founding, Hamas’s leaders had advertised their willingness to conclude a generation-long armistice with Israel, for a term of anywhere from twenty to fifty years, if Israel would consent to withdraw from the occupied territories and permit the creation of a Palestinian state. The term the movement uses to refer to such an arrangement, hudna, is drawn from classical Islamic jurisprudence and denotes a formal, contractually binding cessation of hostilities with a non-Muslim power. It should not, therefore, be confused with the ad hoc battlefield truces that both Israel and Hamas have repeatedly declared — and repeatedly ruptured — in their recurrent rounds of fighting since 2006. (Hamas typically refers to these pauses — essentially unilateral ceasefires loosely coordinated with the enemy — using the word tahdiya, meaning "lull" or "calm," rather than hudna.)

Nor should anyone credit the contention — a cherished article of faith in the liturgy of Israeli hasbara — that a hudna is by its nature a tactical ploy, a purely temporary expedient to which the forces of the Ummah might resort only as a prelude to the inevitable resumption of martial jihad. That thesis is plainly contradicted by historical facts.

"Muslims reached the gates of Vienna and declared a hudna that has now lasted over 350 years," observes former Mossad director Efraim Halevy, a gray eminence of Israel’s security establishment and a longtime advocate of diplomacy with Hamas. (As head of Hebrew University’s strategic studies center, Halevy sponsored research on the history of Islamic rulings and debates about peace agreements with non-Muslim powers, including with Israel in the years since the 1978 Camp David Accords.)

Hamas’s first formal proposal for a long-term armistice was drafted in 1994 by Ismail Haniyeh and transmitted to Israel via Shlomi Eldar, the Arab affairs correspondent for what was then Israel’s Channel 10 TV news. Eldar, a fluent Arabic speaker who would go on to cover Hamas and its leaders for more than two decades, becoming one of Israel’s foremost experts on the subject — first as a reporter and later as a documentary filmmaker and fellow at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Center — recalled the episode in his prize-winning 2012 book Getting to Know Hamas.

In those days [1994] I was a journalist at the start of my career and [Haniyeh] was an ambitious budding politician trying to find a way to prove to the senior members of Hamas that the movement should be redirected onto different paths …

To the question I repeatedly asked Haniyeh — "What happens after 20 years when the hudna period expires?" he answered: "That would be up to future generations to decide; they would be able to make a better decision after the cycle of hatred, bitterness and revenge between us was gone."

"In contrast to Hamas’s extreme and uncompromising image," Eldar reflected, "its pattern of behavior from its founding was to seek compromise paths that would allow it to adapt to the major changes taking place in the region." Thus, on the one hand it declared all of Palestine to be waqf land (land held in trust), a designation that, according to Islamic doctrine, would seem to rule out recognition of Israel. On the other hand, it made it clear that this applied only to "recognition" of Israel by the Hamas organization, not diplomatic recognition by a future Palestinian state — a step to which Hamas has never objected in principle, provided it is ratified by Palestinians in a popular referendum.

Eldar, like many other students of Hamas, noted the group’s habitual tendency to resort to such formulas, which allow it to bypass its own ideological red lines and avoid the strategic cul-de-sacs they might otherwise force it into. He termed the practice "walking between the raindrops."

Still, in his judgment Haniyeh’s 1994 proposal, however pragmatic and well-intentioned, wasn’t pragmatic enough.

"I had to admit it sounded nice," he wrote, "perhaps not much different from the objectives that the PLO envisioned at the end of the Oslo process; but it was impractical. An Israeli withdrawal from all the territories in exchange for just a ceasefire, however long it might be, and without an end-of-conflict declaration, couldn’t win the support of any significant political figure in Israel."

VI.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s — as Israel’s unending policy of settlement expansion and Hamas’s disastrously misjudged campaign of suicide bombings combined to bring about Oslo’s collapse — Hamas continued trying to interest Israel in its hudna concept, without success.

There were, however, glimmers of a willingness to go further. In 2005, Hamas announced two major shifts in policy: an end to suicide bombings and a decision to enter the electoral process for the first time. That spring, the head of Israeli military intelligence, Gen. Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, told a Knesset committee that Hamas’s leadership was showing interest in emulating what the general called "the Irish model" — a reference to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its political wing Sinn Féin, which transformed itself from a terrorist organization into a peaceful political party over the course of the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s and 2000s.

And, sure enough, amid the economic and political crisis triggered by its unexpected election victory the following year, Hamas’s leadership did just that: it secretly mounted an ambitious Sinn Féin-style diplomatic démarche.

In May 2006, a high-level emissary — a senior former European official whose identity still remains undisclosed — traveled discretely to Jerusalem for an audience with Yuval Diskin, Israel’s intelligence chief for the Palestinian territories. He carried with him a document from the Hamas leadership, drafted by its Damascus-based leader, Khaled Meshaal, laying out a detailed proposal for a program of talks intended to lead to a permanent peace.

Over the following year, the emissary would shuttle back and forth between Jerusalem and Syria, meeting with Diskin and Meshaal several times — a sequence recounted in detail in Getting to Know Hamas, which publicly revealed the existence of the talks, as well as the contents of the Meshaal proposal, for the first time. (An English translation of the Meshaal document was published three years later as an appendix to a book by the Irish conflict resolution expert Padraig O’Malley; its text can be accessed here.)

Bearing the title "Hamas and Israel: Peaceful Coexistence Document" and dated September 8, 2006, the text displays none of the bombast typical of Hamas’s public statements. Its tone is businesslike and sober. It admits that Hamas, not just Israel, would need to make politically difficult decisions for the sake of peace. And it takes pains to stress that Israel would not be asked to blindly trust Hamas; rather, a "step-by-step" process, with the help of a mediator, would aim to "build up trust in advance of longer-term processes."

Meshaal proposed starting the dialogue with discussions on a sequence of steps to stabilize Gaza’s economy and establish a durable cessation of hostilities: a ceasefire would be announced, initially in Gaza; it would then be extended to the West Bank and finally culminate in a declaration by Hamas of "a comprehensive ceasefire by all its armed forces."

The two sides would then advance to "negotiations through a third party" focused on formalizing "a framework for coexistence" based on "a period of twenty-five years marked by nonviolence" (i.e. a hudna) and a "commitment from the start of the process that it would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state." The borders of the state would be based on those of 1967 and established through an "incremental process of implementation through negotiations."

Two details of the proposal merit special note. First, it declares Hamas’s willingness to defer resolution of the knottiest final-status issues, those concerning Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. Negotiations on borders (excluding Jerusalem) would come first, while agreement on the two most neuralgic subjects would be "left to a later date."

Here is inserted a pregnant hint of further flexibility: "Hamas is prepared to make the difficult decisions derived from this on condition that Israel is similarly prepared to do so."

Second, and most importantly, the proposal states that once all issues had been settled through negotiations, "the end of the armed conflict would be declared." (It adds, almost apologetically, that Hamas could "only extend the offer to armed conflict not the end of conflict because [of] issues relating to waqf land etc.")

Thus the premonition of Israel’s military intelligence chief was borne out: Hamas’s proposal to embrace "the end of the armed conflict" as the projected destination of peace talks — provided that Israel reciprocated by accepting the principle of a Palestinian state with borders based on those of 1967 — distinctly, and most likely deliberately, echoed the experience of Northern Ireland.

In Northern Ireland, the British and Irish co-managers of the peace process never demanded as a precondition for dialogue that the IRA or Sinn Féin renounce their maximalist stance calling for a "united Ireland," even though that scenario, implying the "destruction of Northern Ireland," inspired visceral fear among the enclave’s Protestants.

The sole condition imposed for the IRA’s participation in peace talks was that it desist from violence, which it did, at first, only provisionally: by means of a unilaterally declared ceasefire in 1994 which it later ruptured with a series of bombing attacks, before finally returning to negotiations.

It was only in 1998, when the IRA signed up to the Good Friday Agreement, that the armed conflict in Northern Ireland was brought to a definitive end. The core principle of that agreement, the so-called "principle of consent" — which holds that Northern Ireland’s sovereign status may only be altered via peaceful agreement by concurrent majorities in the two parts of the island — represented a major ideological concession by the IRA, striking at the heart of traditional republican doctrine dating back to the 1920s, which had stressed the legitimacy, indeed the imperative, of armed struggle — "physical force" — in pursuit of Irish unification.

The IRA agreed to this historic concession because it received key concessions in exchange: from the Protestant community, agreement on power-sharing measures within Northern Ireland; and from Britain a solemn commitment to relinquish its sovereignty over the enclave if formally requested to do so by future majorities in both parts of the island.

To this day, Sinn Féin continues to agitate for a "united Ireland" — only, now, as a goal to be achieved by peaceful constitutional means rather than victory in war.

The leaders of the Protestant unionist community at first stridently condemned this gradualist approach to peace, denouncing the British and Irish governments for their "appeasement of terrorists" and legitimization of "IRA murderers." But it hardly needs saying that if Irish republicans had been required to abandon the core tenets of Irish republicanism as a precondition for entry into the peace process, there never would have been a peace process, and Northern Ireland would still be embroiled in terrorism and war to this day.

Or, as a Hamas leader put it in a 2006 interview with researchers from a Pentagon-sponsored terrorism study: "You can’t expect us to take off all of our clothes at once."

VII.

On June 26, 2006, Israel’s domestic spy chief and Hamas’s European emissary were scheduled to have another meeting in Jerusalem. But by the time the appointed hour arrived, everything had changed: the night before, a nineteen-year-old Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, had been abducted near the Gaza border in an operation carried out by a group of Palestinian militants that included Ahmed Jabari, the head of the Izzedeen al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing.

Jabari’s involvement in the Shalit kidnapping, as Eldar relates in Getting to Know Hamas, was an act of insubordination, reflecting the commander’s conviction that "the pragmatist Ismail Haniyeh's path of 'tanazul' (surrender) was wrong." It was, in other words, an internal "putsch" against the Hamas leadership by the head of the group’s armed cadres. Hamas’s political leaders, fresh from their shock election victory, had been fully absorbed with figuring out how to govern 3.6 million Palestinians, and "an attack against Israel was the last thing they were thinking about." Now they were impatient to hand back Shalit and resume the secret dialogue with Israel.

But after the kidnappers cannily announced their demand for a large-scale release of Palestinian prisoners as the price of Shalit’s freedom, Meshaal and his colleagues realized they could hardly insist on giving Shalit back "for free." Seeking a way out, Meshaal drafted a new version of his proposal for the European mediator to present to Diskin at their next scheduled meeting in September — an attempt to tie the two sets of issues together: the immediate issue of Gilad Shalit’s release and the "strategic vision" of an overall settlement.

This updated version of the Meshaal document (from which the quotes above are drawn) offered Israel a choice. If it was willing to go ahead with the proposed dialogue on "peaceful coexistence," Hamas would be prepared to hand over Shalit in exchange for a mere token release of Palestinian prisoners, numbering "not in the hundreds."

If Israel declined the offer of dialogue, Hamas’s leaders would align themselves with Jabari’s demand for the release of thousands of prisoners, including high-level figures with — to use the Israeli jargon — "blood on their hands."

Prime Minister Olmert received these proposals but never replied to them. In fact, he concealed them from his own cabinet. No one in the government, apart from Diskin, was informed, not even Olmert’s top security ministers.

Instead, the prime minister responded to the Hamas overture by publicly declaring that Israel would never negotiate with terrorists, would not release a single Palestinian prisoner, and would shortly launch an attack on Gaza.

That attack, known as Operation Summer Rains, was the first of what would be a series of IDF operations for which Israel would cite Gilad Shalit as a casus belli, culminating in the murderous Operation Cast Lead of 2008-2009, which left behind a civilian death toll in Gaza (759) almost identical to that of the October 7 attack in Israel (796) — and for exactly the same reason:

The IDF, which planned to attack buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, did not warn them in advance to leave, but intended to kill a great many of them, and succeeded (Reuven Pedatzur, senior Haaretz military affairs analyst.)

Israel had once again squandered a historic opportunity. For, predictably, the IDF failed to free Shalit by force and Olmert did end up negotiating with Hamas to win his release. Those talks dragged on for years, yielding an agreement in 2011 whose terms were no better for Israel than either of the options it had been offered by Meshaal in 2006.

And at the top of the list of Palestinian prisoners whose release Israel had to agree to stood the name of Yahya Sinwar — the chief architect of the October 7 attacks.

VIII.

Sinwar, who had been one of the founders of the al-Qassam Brigades in the 1980s, returned to Gaza in 2011 after more than twenty years in an Israeli prison and rapidly re-ascended through the ranks. With his base of support concentrated in Hamas’s military wing, he won election to the top leadership of the Gaza branch in 2017 and quickly established himself, de facto, as the dominant figure in the movement.

That Sinwar’s ascendancy wrought some fundamental change in the nature of Hamas as a movement — transforming it into a distinctly darker version of itself, the final fruits of which became visible in the carnage of October 7 — is a popular thesis in parts of Israel’s security establishment. It’s also a view now advanced by Shlomi Eldar, who recently released an updated re-edition of his 2012 book on Hamas, now bearing the subtitle, From Social Movement to War Crimes.

There is surely some kernel of truth to this idea. By all accounts, Sinwar was one of the hard men of Hamas, an enforcer, whose specialty in the organization’s early days had been detecting and punishing enemy collaborators — a task he attended to, at times, with his bare hands.

As leader in Gaza, Sinwar’s autocratic tendencies left an unmistakeable imprint on the internal workings of the organization: whereas Hamas had once prided itself on its ethos of collective leadership and consensus decision making, officials of the movement now complained that Sinwar was "able to impose his choices on the rest of the movement by means that sometimes include threats," the French-Lebanese political scientist Leila Seurat reported in a 2019 book. In his 2021 bid for reelection, Sinwar defeated his chief opponent by only the narrowest of margins, in a process that required several run-offs and was clouded by allegations of irregularities.

However, when it came to Sinwar’s relations with the world outside Hamas, it’s a different story.

Almost immediately after he assumed leadership in Gaza in March 2017, the "hardliner" label that had previously stuck to him began to be supplanted, in the lexicon of the Israeli and Western media, by the phrase "ruthless pragmatist.” And for good reason. During Sinwar’s first years in power, the dominant theme of his policy was the close strategic relationship he cemented with Egypt, and a concomitant downgrading of relations with Iran.

A 2019 report from Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS), a think tank run by retired IDF generals and intelligence officials, praised Cairo for "strengthening ties with the powerful Yahya Sinwar who proved to share much of the Egyptian strategic objectives," while a 2020 memo addressed to Sinwar by his chief of staff and subsequently captured by the IDF in Gaza, recorded that Iranian funding for Hamas had been halted during Sinwar’s first two years in power — "at our request."

In those years, Sinwar’s brutal leadership style was primarily directed to "moderate" ends — above all the Egyptian-sponsored reconciliation process that aimed to end the division between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. “I will break the neck of anyone who is against the reconciliation, be he from Hamas or from any other group,” Sinwar declared in late 2017. “The decision to end the split is a strategic one. There is no way back from it. Hamas will make painful concessions, each more difficult than the one before it, in order to achieve reconciliation.”

Most immediately, these moves were aimed at halting the spiraling social and economic crisis in Gaza caused by Israel’s unending "closure" regime — the blockade of people and goods that, according to Israeli officials, was designed to keep Gaza’s economy "on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge," ensuring that it functioned "at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis."

But Sinwar’s moves were also meant to keep alive the prospect of a future political process that might lead to the Palestinians’ long-deferred national objective of statehood — with Hamas seizing, or at least sharing with Fatah, the heroic mantle of victorious national liberation movement.

It was thus in the Sinwar era that Hamas adopted its updated 2017 charter — a project spearheaded by Khaled Meshaal but fully supported by the Gaza leader — which clarified that the movement’s "conflict is with the Zionist project, not with the Jews because of their religion," and advertised Hamas’s readiness to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.

It was, as Leila Seurat described it, "an overture to the Arab states and the West aiming to position Hamas as an interlocutor alongside, or even preferable to, Fatah."

IX.

But in the era of Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu, territorial compromise was the last thing Israel was ready to countenance. Israeli policy toward the Palestinians was premised on support for the organized land-theft of the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank, and the pogroms and apartheid that sustained it. No significant faction in Israeli politics supported withdrawal to the 1967 borders or an agreement based on two sovereign states.

Instead, the Israeli political and security leaderships in those years developed a new strategic formula whose objective was to coerce Hamas into becoming a Gaza-based facsimile of what the Palestinian Authority was in the West Bank: an agency that would offer Israel "security cooperation" — to provide it with "calm" and "quiet" by cracking down on more militant resistance groups — in exchange for a partial and conditional easing of Gaza’s otherwise catastrophic economic conditions.

This was the strategy that Bennett referred to as "shrinking the conflict" and that Netanyahu called "economic peace." It meant replacing the post-1967 "land for peace" formula — in which recognition of Israel was to be traded for Israel’s return of occupied territory — with a formula in which peace and quiet would be traded for Israel’s approval of carefully rationed doses of economic reconstruction in Gaza, to repair the damage that Israel itself had inflicted.

Israel thus made clear its opposition to any Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. Indeed, it set out deliberately and systematically to extinguish all strategic options available to Hamas except two: either giving up the century-long struggle for Palestinian national independence, or opting for violent escalation. As a prominent Israeli think tank put it just as Sinwar was preparing to take the reins, the goal was "to sharpen Hamas’s choice between [either embracing] political pragmatism in exchange for economic reconstruction or adherence to the violent struggle that will deepen its isolation." (The report was careful to stress, however, that any economic benefits for Gaza should be kept at a modest level lest they "lead to an uncontrolled strengthening of Hamas’ standing.")

Within Israeli policy circles, Efraim Halevy, the former Mossad chief, remained a lonely voice speaking out against this strategy, which in his view was certain to lead to renewed violence. Already in 2008 he had warned that "as long as the door to dialogue is closed, there is no doubt as to who will prevail" in Hamas’s internal debate between "the pragmatists, the die-hard ideologues, the politicians, and the commanders in the field."

Now, almost a decade later, he lamented the fact that "the political level in Israel is still refusing to allow attempts to begin a dialogue…because, it is said, [Hamas] has blood on its hands and continues to advocate the destruction of Israel." Halevy had little patience for that tired refrain:

Officially this is true. On the other hand, Hamas leaders have expressed themselves in private to high-level former political figures and former diplomats in very different terms. I know this for a fact.

There remains no good case for Israel to shun Hamas. Israel rightly prides itself as one of the strongest powers in the Middle East, but it will gain nothing from yet another round of fighting.

During those pre-October 7 years, when the Palestinian national movement seemed to reach a historic nadir of helplessness and division — when the Gulf states appeared poised to abandon the Palestinians in their quest to normalize relations with Israel and the Trump administration openly repudiated even rhetorical support for Palestinian statehood — the Israeli leadership began sounding a distinctly triumphalist note vis-a-vis Hamas.

Military intelligence chief Tamir Hayman exulted at how Hamas had "just sat there and watched" as Israel attacked militants from the smaller resistance faction Islamic Jihad, during a brief 2019 Israeli operation. "From now on, that's how we can understand Gaza," he boasted. "In Gaza, we are attacking Hamas targets twice a week, very painfully for them, and they are not reacting," marveled IDF chief of staff Aviv Kochavi in comments the same year.

With the Gaza economy in ruins, Hamas was "in dire straits, both internally and externally," wrote former Shin Bet analyst Michael Milshtein in early 2020. As a result, "Hamas's leadership finds itself at a strategic crossroad," he explained, and would soon have to decide whether it would knuckle under to Netanyahu’s "economic peace" concept, trading a long-term ceasefire, not for a path to statehood, but merely for economic relief.

There was one last long-shot option remaining to Hamas. In late 2020 the movement reached agreement with Mahmoud Abbas to hold national elections for the first time in fifteen years. Hoping the step might lead to an easing of its international isolation and a renewed political process, Hamas granted Abbas the following concessions to win his agreement: (1) Hamas would refrain from running a candidate against Abbas in the presidential election; (2) it would let Fatah have all the ministries no matter how many votes Hamas ended up winning; and (3) it would give its blessing for any resulting government to recognize Israel and accept the Oslo agreements (though Hamas itself would not do so).

The elections were scheduled for the spring and summer 2021. But when splits within Fatah began raising the specter of a Hamas victory in legislative races, Abbas came under heavy pressure from Israel to call off the vote. He didn’t need much coaxing. He announced the elections’ cancelation in April 2021.

It was shortly afterward, according to Israeli intelligence assessments, that Yahya Sinwar decided on the large-scale attack against Israel that would be launched two years later.

In a major speech that June, broadcast live by Arabic news networks, he explained his thinking. Referring to a recent skirmish with Israeli forces (an eleven-day operation in May that the IDF dubbed “Guardian of the Walls”), Sinwar declared that Hamas had engaged in the fight “to show Israel a miniature picture of what war might be like…if the battle with the occupation resumes.”

Since “Israel will not tolerate any real attack on it,” he explained, the next war, if it came, would have dramatic consequences: “the image of the Middle East will change.” This would create

a real opportunity to mobilize world public opinion and detonate the popular resistance of the Palestinians in all places where they are present, in a way that forces the occupation to respect international law….

Achieving this goal would either allow the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, or put the occupation in a state of conflict with the /[international community], isolate it, and end its integration into the region and the world.

X.

The most dangerous fomentor of Israeli-Palestinian violence, however, is neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Yahya Sinwar. It’s the organized pyromania of bipartisan US support for Greater Israel and the apparatus of lies, fantasy, mythology, and delusion that underpins it.

Of all these myths, the most potent and destructive is the idea that the conflict is extremely complicated, an enduring riddle, so intricate that its solution has eluded the ken of the wisest men for generations.

The truth is exactly the opposite. There has never been an international conflict that has dragged on for so many years and taken so many lives despite the existence of a long-established framework for a settlement, based on widely understood compromise terms that command substantial (though, as always with compromises, ambivalent) acceptance among the warring parties, as well as in world opinion at large.

Just consider events from the past four months. On July 19, in a landmark decision, the International Court of Justice — whose authority is recognized by all UN members states — ruled that Israel’s presence in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, including all settlements, is illegal and should be terminated immediately, "so that the State of Palestine…can exercise full sovereignty over its territory and achieve full independence."

Israel protested. In a statement to the court it insisted that "any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must effectively address Israel's legitimate security concerns," above all the security threat posed to Israel by the "Hamas terrorist organization."

However, just three months earlier the "Hamas terrorist organization” had declared its readiness to dissolve its military wing and disarm the moment Israel terminates its occupation and a Palestinian state is established.

"All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done?” said Yahya Sinwar’s deputy Khalil al-Hayya, a Hamas politburo member, in an interview with the Associated Press: “They have turned into political parties and their [armed] forces have turned into the national army."

To recap: Israel insists its occupation is needed to deal with the threat of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades even as Hamas offers to voluntarily disband the al-Qassam Brigades once Israel ends the occupation.

It should not require the cunning of a Metternich to see that both sides of this dispute could be held to their word: that the steps posited — Israel’s withdrawal and Hamas’s disarmament — could be made into binding obligations; that compliance with these obligations could be overseen by a third party; that the third party could be given a mandate to define benchmarks, set timetables, and monitor implementation; that this mandate could be backed by penalties and sanctions for non-compliance — and so on.

Indeed, all of this is implied by the ICJ decision itself, which includes an operative clause urging the UN Security Council to "consider the precise modalities and further action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory" — a clause affirmed by judges from Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Japan, and even one of the judges from the United States.

In other words, this is not only what should happen. It’s what would happen — were it not for that single, looming, abiding obstacle whose names and faces may change but whose sanguinary destructiveness is an unchanging constant: the United States government.

This is not just my opinion. Shuki Friedman, the (moderately) pro-settler vice-president of the influential Jerusalem-based Jewish People's Policy Institute, said this just the other day in an interview in Haaretz:

What has been saving the settlements from tough decisions and sanctions for years is the U.S. veto at the United Nations Security Council. There have been many anti-Israel decisions to date, but they were all…recommendations without sanctions.

Otherwise, the Americans always cast a veto. And if they aren't there to cast a veto, we're toast.

It would be nice to think that Kamala Harris might abandon all the positions she’s taken on Israel over the course of her career; that she could ignore the demands of her donors and the preferences of party leaders and the baying of the pro-Israel media. It would be comforting to imagine that she might jettison two decades of US policy insisting on ludicrous preconditions for negotiations that are calculated to sabotage diplomacy and are rejected by the rest of the world; that she would stop unconditionally subsidizing Israeli settlements and apartheid, and act to stop genocide in Gaza.

Unfortunately, none of those things is likely to happen — and time is running short.

Anyone familiar with the work of such historians as Raul Hilberg or Hans Mommsen will understand that genocide, even in the absence of a premeditated master-plan, emerges and metastasizes from a sequence of steps that may start with "mere" ghettoization and mass displacement, but that quickly generates a momentum of its own, as reactions from the victims and other unforeseen consequences force ever more radical "solutions" to protect the perpetrators from the consequences of their initial crimes.

One has only to look to Israel and Gaza right now — where epidemics are becoming rampant, law and order is being deliberately dismantled in order to bring about what some Israeli commentators are calling "Mogadishuization," hospitals, schools, and homes have been systematically destroyed, and roving mobs of young Jews chanting "death to the Arabs" are not only increasingly common but increasingly legitimized by the voices of authority — to understand the danger.

And while this danger might threaten Palestinians first and foremost, it would also behoove Jews around the world to contemplate the implications of a genocide that is gleefully perpetrated live, on TikTok, by a Jewish state, in the name of the Jewish people.

XI.

Unfortunately there is no one to save the situation but "us" — that is, civil society: religious and educational institutions, trade unions and professional societies, sporting federations, political parties, municipal governments, and so on.

Everyone should begin now, if they haven’t already, to work within the organizations they’re part of — from little leagues and PTAs, to state parties and labor unions internationals — and win their commitment to the following principle:

the suspension of all association with Israeli institutions, public and private, commercial or otherwise, until the State of Israel extends the rights of Israeli citizenship, irrespective of race or ethnicity, to all of the inhabitants of the territory over which it exercises sovereignty.

Such a course has three advantages to recommend it.

• It is democratic — meaning almost anyone can participate at whatever level they happen to be at.
  

• It is disruptive — because Israel’s supporters, having little tolerance for organized dissent, tend to suppress it using heavy-handed tactics that intensify conflict and alienate the undecided.
  

• And it is educational — because it forces conversations that spread awareness of the facts of Israel and Palestine: the fact that three million Arabs are subjected to a separate legal regime in which they are denied citizenship and the right to vote; are forced to use separate roads and kept under arbitrary curfew; can be arrested and detained indefinitely without trial; are subject to beatings and torture —

— and that none of this could go on without our complicity.