Think Strategy, Not Tactics

Hamas is not, like Anwar Sadat’s Egypt in 1973, using war to break a negotiating deadlock. It does not appear to care about the harms inflicted on Palestinian civilians—indeed, it gives every indication that it welcomes them. Its eschatological ambitions mean that any compromise or cease-fire is temporary and purely instrumental. “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people,” its founding charter proclaimed, and only Israel’s utter destruction can meet that challenge. All of this was always the case. One of Israel’s numerous failures ahead of this war was the inability of some Israeli leaders, and the majority of international political leaders, to fully understand Hamas’s worldview and its implications. There is no excuse for anyone to continue to do so.

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Until October 7, the objectives of the current Israeli government with regard to Hamas were limited: to contain the movement, deter it from launching major attacks, use it as a foil against the Palestinian Authority, and punish its more egregious behaviors. After October 7, the Israeli objective became—had to become—the destruction of Hamas. With that, Israeli strategy has been transformed, and that is why so many analogies, including the 1982 Israeli attack on the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon and the American invasion of Iraq, miss the point. Everything changes when your strategic purpose, like that of your enemy, is annihilation.

[Perhaps one distillation of Cohen’s essay is this: Hamas has always operated strategically in pursuit of its stated objectives. In order to avoid the consequences of acknowledging this, Israel refused to do anything other than think tactically when it came to Hamas — tactics to contain them, tactics to mollify them, including and especially the “quiet for quiet” policies pursued by Netanyahu. Hamas finally forced Israel to think strategically for the first time in their long conflict. Unfortunately, Israel’s allies have not yet caught up to that paradigm shift. — Ed]

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