Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. November 8, 2023 |
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Since Israel launched its first strikes on Gaza, following Hamas’s horrific Oct. 7 attacks, commentators broadly have assumed the Jewish state would succeed in its campaign against the Gaza-governing terrorist group. Urban combat is torturous, military analysts noted, and Hamas had years to plan its defenses and to construct a network of tunnels. But Israel’s military, heavily armed and viewed as one of the Middle East’s most capable, is widely regarded as far superior to Hamas as a fighting force.
That said, is an Israeli victory so assured?
Israel’s Gaza campaign is going better than expected—for now—Lazar Berman writes for The Times of Israel. Israeli military casualties have been fewer than predicted, Berman writes, but much could go wrong as Israel pursues the ambitious aim of destroying Hamas. One errant strike could turn international opinion decidedly against Israel by adding to the toll of Palestinian civilian deaths. (More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7—the vast majority women, children and the elderly—according to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority’s health ministry. CNN cannot independently verify the figures.) If sentiment shifts further among world governments, Berman suggests, Israel could run out of time to achieve its vision of victory.
The US, Israel’s main international backer, has begun to call publicly for humanitarian pauses to the fighting, which Israel has rejected. An Economist headline asks if Washington “will pull the plug on” Israel’s Gaza operation, raising the notion of Israel's international political “legitimacy” to strike Hamas in Gaza as civilian deaths continue. Although Israel is gearing up for a long campaign, the magazine writes, “(i)n practice … what Israeli officers call their ‘window of legitimacy’ is probably far shorter. How fast that window closes will depend largely on America, which supplies Israel with munitions, diplomatic support and an aid package worth perhaps $14bn. If (US President) Joe Biden wants the war to end, Israel will be hard pressed to ignore him.” |
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In assessing victory and defeat, one has to consider goals. In this case, they tell a complicated story.
“Israel’s vision of a knockout victory over Hamas is simple,” Ben Caspit writes for Al-Monitor: “assassinating or capturing the organization’s entire military and political leadership, killing all the planners and perpetrators of the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, eliminating all Hamas arsenals and firepower, and denying the organization any ability to run the Gaza Strip or maintain its sovereignty there.” But no one knows how long that would take, and Caspit notes (as others do) that a diplomatic window could close, especially if Washington changes tack.
Already, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the White House have offered differing opinions on whether Israel should seek to assume control of Gaza after the fighting ends. Fareed and others have urged Israel to consider the longer-term outcomes of this war. For one, some have noted, civilian deaths could inspire more Palestinians to join Hamas in the future. As Fareed has pointed out, even successful military campaigns can sow future terrorism and conflict, particularly when political factors aren’t weighed carefully, as with Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In that sense, commentators have looked a bit skeptically on Israel’s larger goal of permanently eliminating Hamas as a threat. At The New York Times, a guest opinion essay by U.S./Middle East Project President Daniel Levy argues: “In the long term, the Israeli government’s commitment to destroying Hamas risks becoming another unobtainable holy grail. One thing Oct. 7 made strikingly clear was that Israel cannot provide security for its citizens by controlling millions of Palestinians, who are denied their rights and freedoms and live under a system of permanent structural violence and inequality. The ‘no cease-fire’ crowd must desist from encouraging Israel to hang on to the historically discredited fiction that armed resistance rooted in an oppressed people can be eliminated by the deployment of even more ferocious military methods.” |
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… and What It Would Mean for Hamas to Win |
Noting that historically Israel has avoided the failures of US foreign wars since Vietnam—emerging defeated or bruised by a smaller and worse-equipped enemy—Jon B. Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies directly raises the possibility that Israel could lose this war. He does so by examining what victory would mean for Hamas.
Alterman writes: “The barbarousness of Hamas’s massacres in Israel have drawn comparisons to the Islamic State and al Qaeda, but that can distract from what is really important: that Hamas’s concept of military victory, like those other organizations, is all about driving long-term political outcomes. Hamas sees victory not in one year or five, but from engaging with decades of struggle that increase Palestinian solidarity and increase Israel’s isolation. In this scenario, Hamas rallies a besieged population in Gaza around it in anger and helps collapse the Palestinian Authority government (in the West Bank) by ensuring Palestinians see it even more as a feckless adjunct to Israeli military authority. Meanwhile, Arab states move strongly away from normalization (of diplomatic ties with Israel), the Global South aligns strongly with the Palestinian cause, Europe recoils at the Israeli army’s excesses, and an American debate erupts over Israel, destroying the bipartisan support Israel has enjoyed here since the early 1970s. Rumblings of a regional war suit Hamas well, prompting global debates about the cost of an alliance with Israel. Israel’s ability to sustain its own solidarity through this process is not Hamas’ main concern. Rather, its goal is to estrange Israel from its international partners and turn it into the pariah that Hamas believes it to be.” |
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‘The Hamas Propaganda War’ |
That broad political contest between Hamas and Israel—over the international community’s stance on this war—is playing out online and in the global media. At The Washington Post last week, Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz reported that amid fears of disinformation and antisemitism on TikTok, the story is more complicated. Two widely viewed pro-Palestinian hashtags, they write, “include videos that are fiercely critical of Hamas, and they are most popular, according to TikTok data, in predominantly Muslim countries such as Malaysia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, where support for Palestinians has long been high.”
At The New Yorker late last month, David D. Kirkpatrick and Adam Rasgon wrote[esk/the-hamas-propaganda-war] that “Israeli, Palestinian, and Western analysts all told us, emphatically, that in the Middle East the winner of the propaganda war is Hamas.”
Noting a Hamas video of one of its terrorists with an Israeli child, and another of a young female hostage in Gaza saying she had been treated well, Kirkpatrick and Rasgon wrote: “However unpersuasive or ham-fisted such propaganda might seem in the West, Ghaith al-Omari—a former adviser to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and a longtime opponent of Hamas—told us that such videos had convinced many Arabs that the group’s fighters, unlike ISIS, ‘are humane and respect Islamic laws of war.’ He added, ‘It has resonated throughout the Arab world. This is now the line you see not only in Hamas media but in most Arab media, in Jordan, Egypt, and North Africa. The dominant narrative has become the narrative of Hamas.’” Aside from Al Jazeera, Kirkpatrick and Rasgon wrote, the “other pan-Arab networks … initially appeared to resist Hamas’s story line. … But as the Gaza death toll has climbed, and as Arab opinion has swung toward Hamas, the networks have seemingly capitulated to the feelings of their viewers.” |
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