What Gaza was, it is now clear, had been catastrophically misjudged. With few exceptions, Israel’s leaders believed that Hamas was contained, while Washington’s smart set held that increased aid and normalisation would induce Hamas to moderate its positions and play a constructive role in “dialogue”. In 2008, Robert Malley, the lead White House negotiator with Iran for both Obama and Biden, provided what would become the dominant conceptual framework among America’s foreign policy mandarins. “None of them are crazies,” Malley told an interviewer of Hamas and Hezbollah. “They may do things that we consider to belong to a different realm of rationality, but within their own system it’s often very logical.”

Given the chance, Hamas rationally manifested the core tenets of its political vision on Saturday by massacring as many Jews as it could: soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children along with non-Jews, the collateral in its praxis of deliberate extermination. The attack was an extraordinary victory for them and an abject blow to Israel. How did a group thought to be muzzled and incapable manage to gain the strategic initiative against a far more powerful enemy?

Three factors played into Hamas’s success: complacency and unpreparedness inside Israel exacerbated by internal schism; the strengthening of Hamas’s great power-backer Iran; and the rapid unravelling of America’s global leadership, vacillating between reckless provocations and delusional attempts to integrate Iran, while pressuring Israel to embrace its enemies.

[Siegel reaches some pretty grim conclusions at the end, but hopefully it will not come to those ends. What is clear, though, is that the days of trying to ignore the clearly declared values of Iran and its proxies must come to an end. ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’ are not just bargaining positions, but the raison d’etre of Iran and its proxies. It’s time to start dealing with reality rather than wishcasting. — Ed]