Initial Thoughts on Hamas’s War

There is still a great deal we don’t know about the massive and horrific attack launched by Hamas against Israel on Saturday morning—using missiles, sea-bound commandos, and gunmen on land. There are thus questions we can’t yet try to answer: How did this happen? Was there really no warning? How did the vaunted Israeli perimeter defenses around Gaza fail so completely? Will there be political accountability for a security failure of an incomprehensible magnitude? 

There will be time for all these questions, but I can’t even begin to address them yet. 

I actually can’t answer the questions I am going to raise today either. I am raising them not because I have answers but because they are on my mind as I ponder the horrific events of the weekend. 

Before I do, however, I want to flag two immense facts that, in my judgment, loom over all of the horrifying details. The first is that, as the U.S. Holocaust Museum tweeted yesterday, “We just witnessed the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.” 

It may be hard for those not steeped in Jewish and Zionist history to understand how monumental a fact is the murder of 900 Jews on a single day, how deep a challenge it is. 

Israel exists to protect Jews and to allow Jews to govern themselves and thus not subject their well-being to the mercy of governments which may tolerate or may murder them depending on the political winds of the day. No government of any people capable of responding to such an attack would fail to do so. To fail is to violate the most fundamental Hobbesian bargain—that a government’s authority to rule flows from its ability to protect its citizenry from internal and external predations. 

This basic fact of all governments is more true of the Israeli government, the fundamental formation of which arose out of the realization—beginning in the nineteenth century, accelerating in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and culminating in the Holocaust—that the European nation state had no place for Jews. 

Yet this weekend, the Jews of Berlin, where the Brandenburg Gate was lit up with Israeli flags—were safer than the Jews of Israel. 

The second monumental fact is that in the inevitable Israeli response in its own defense, a large number of innocent Palestinian civilians will also die—even if Israel conducts every strike in full compliance with the most rigorous understanding of the law of armed conflict. 

I say this not to predict that the Israeli response will be in all respects justifiable, though I certainly hope that it will. Israeli action is already underway, including airstrikes and a cutoff of electricity, gas, and supplies. But the ground operation, which is sure to come, has not yet begun. Things are going to get a lot worse. And the nature of conflict in Gaza—described in more detail below—makes it impossible to respond to Hamas’s atrocities without inflicting substantial civilian harm. Palestinian civilians will die. And it won’t be a small number of them either. 

We thus find ourselves nested, for a short time, between a historically traumatic spasm of violence against Israelis, against Jews, and against third-party nationals who happened to be in the way (at least ten Nepalis were killed, in case you didn’t know), and a violence in response to it that will cause immense pain and suffering to two million people who are living in some of the world’s most agonizing conditions already. All of this civilian suffering is now baked into the cake, the first half because it has already happened, the second half because it is the inevitable and foreseeable consequence of the half that has already happened. 

All of which brings me to my first question: Why?

What is the strategic logic of an operation whose objective is to murder as many Israelis as possible undertaken with the full knowledge that the response will bring large-scale suffering and death to Palestinians too? 

I ask this question not because I’m looking to explain or understand Hamas. I’m asking it, rather, because denying such a group the achievement of its strategic objective is essential to preventing future such actions. 

The problem, however, is that Hamas’s strategic objective here is actually hard to discern. One possibility, the most likely one in my view, is that the attack was an effort to disrupt Israeli-Saudi rapprochement, which has been a major objective of both Israeli policymakers and the Biden administration over the last few months. The goal here might have been to prevent an accord by provoking a war in which aggressive Israeli action makes Saudi-Israeli peace sufficiently embarrassing to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques so as to take it off the table for the time being. 

In slightly softer form, the goal might be to put the Palestinian issue on the front burner in Saudi-Israeli talks, so that any concessions the Saudis might win as part of a deal are as grand as possible. The desire on Hamas’s part to make sure it remains relevant as Israel firms up its diplomatic recognition in the region is likely a big part of the explanation here. 

But the attack also smacks of a logic that is less strategic than apocalyptic. Hamas has always been something of a death cult—having pioneered the routine use of the suicide bombing back in the 1990s. The organization appears to have made a decision here—roughly analogous to that of a mass shooter—to go out in a blaze of glory. It is well aware that the Israelis are going to come into Gaza in force. It’s well aware that while it can exact a real cost when this happens, it cannot prevail in such a conflict. And yet fully aware of the magnitude of the Israeli response and the likely consequences for its government, for its people, and for the civilian population it rules, it engaged in meticulous planning over a protracted period of time in order to pull this off. 

This brings me to my second question: How will—and how should—the Israelis respond? 

Let’s start with the obvious: The response has to change the landscape meaningfully. No government of Israel can go back to the Israeli electorate with many hundreds of Israelis dead without being able to say that it made a repeat incident dramatically less likely. This would be true of any Israeli government, but it’s particularly true of a government of the right and far right who speak in the language of security. Having failed to prevent this massacre, Netanyahu cannot afford to leave Israel vulnerable to Hamas in the future. 

Since 2005, when Israel ceased occupying Gaza, there has been a recurring cycle of attacks from Gaza leading to Israeli operations both against and within Gaza to erode Hamas’s capacity and punish its leadership. These operations have varied in size and length and in lethality. But they have all had in common that they ended with Hamas still running the show in Gaza and able to rebuild.

Another operation of this type, which leaves a status quo of Hamas ruling Gaza with a huge amount of weaponry is almost certainly not what Israel intends this time. The nature of this attack is such that Israel cannot allow Hamas to live to fight another day. 

Yet there are genuine constraints on Israel’s ability to simply waltz into Gaza and throw Hamas out. One is that the operational environment in Gaza is exceptionally difficult. Gaza is urban. It’s one of the most densely populated places in the world, with two million people living in a space roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. And Hamas is an extremely capable fighting force—a fact outside commentators often overlook but Israeli commanders do not—that is deeply dug in. 

Hamas also, of course, does not play by the rules. This latter point is always a problem. Hamas uses hospitals and civilian infrastructure for weapons storage and to embed fighters. It uses civilians as human shields on a routine basis. 

Hamas’s lawlessness, however, in this conflict poses a particular problem, because the group—along with its partners—is holding a large number of both civilian and military hostages. The precise number of Israeli hostages is unclear. But it appears to be more than 150. And this group includes elderly people and small children, as well as senior military officers and foreign nationals.

Hostages are a bigger deal for Israel than they are for Americans. Americans are held hostage in different countries around the world, and while agonizing for their families and friends, they are not, in comparison with in Israel, an especially high-salience political issue. By contrast, a single hostage held by Hamas is a matter of intense political salience in Israel; the society turns itself upside down over getting its people back. There is no precedent for the group holding dozens, let alone over 150, Israelis. As writer Noah Efron put it over the weekend, referring to two of the hostages’ family members—already household names in Israeli—“In the awful quiet of this moment, we are all Yoni Asher, wrecked with worry. We are all Adva Adar. It is a terrible thing, and it is a beautiful thing.” Terrible or beautiful–or both–it is a major operational constraint as Israeli forces consider a broader, more total assault on Hamas.

The second constraint is the law of armed conflict. I know that many commentators believe the Israeli army is like Russia in its blithe disregard for civilian lives. It is not. The IDF will make errors, some with grave consequences for civilians. It will also make targeting decisions in which it will tolerate collateral damage that many critics will regard as disproportionate—but which Israeli will defend in circumstances of murky facts and disputed conceptions of proportionality. And it will take some steps that are impossible to justify. But Gaza will not be Grozny or Mariupol or Aleppo. This is an army whose operations are, for the most part, subject to actual legal review. And Defense Minister Gallant’s announcement of a “complete siege” notwithstanding, there’s a lot that the IDF therefore won’t do. 

To be clear, I’m not complaining about that. It’s a good thing.

But it helps frame the operational conundrum that Israelis face. They have to do something big that does not simply set up a rinse-repeat in which 900 Israelis can die on a single day, and they have to do it without allowing more than 100 hostages to die and in compliance with the laws of war. 

It’s a hard problem.

All of which raises the question of how Israel will see its strategic objective in relation to its operational constraints. 

The matter is more complicated even than that. Imagine that Israel were able to thread this needle, throw Hamas from Gaza and do so in a fashion that minimizes civilian harm and keeps its hostages safe. What would it replace Hamas with? 

There is not a lot of appetite in Israel to reoccupy Gaza for the long term. So even after an improbably successful ground operation, there needs to be a vision for the period after Hamas. There is no obvious answer to this question, even if the immediate military objective is accomplishable in an acceptable fashion. 

There is one additional big framing question as we sit in this uncomfortable interregnum between violent spasms: the role of Iran. This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had coordinated and planned the operation. The story received immediate criticism from a number of places and itself acknowledges that “U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement.” 

I offer no opinion on whether the story is accurate or not. I will say, however, that the coming war is a wholly different affair if Israeli intelligence concludes that Iran was behind the attack than if it does not. If it does, Israel will have to respond aggressively against Iran, creating a multi-front interstate conflict. If Israel concludes that Iran was not involved, it will be keen to confine the conflict to Gaza and to avoid conflagrations along its northern border, where Iran’s proxy Hezbollah represents the most sophisticated and capable of the military foes Israel faces. 

I have answers to none of these questions–just as I have no answers to the questions of how this attack could have happened. I raise them, rather, because I think they will be questions on the minds of key policymakers in a variety of countries as the coming days unfold.