OPINION
In the three and a half decades since it began as an underground militant group, Hamas has pursued a consistently violent strategy aimed at rolling back Israeli rule – and it has made steady progress despite bringing enormous suffering to both sides of the conflict.
But its stunning incursion into Israel over the weekend marks its deadliest gambit yet, and the already unprecedented response from Israel threatens to bring an end to its 16-year rule over the Gaza Strip.
[…] I don’t think anyone really knows what the endgame is at the moment,” said Tahani Mustafa, a Palestinian analyst at the Crisis Group, an international think tank. But given the amount of planning involved in the assault, “it’s difficult to imagine they haven’t tried to strategize every possible scenario.”
Shaul Shay, an Israeli researcher and retired colonel who served in military intelligence, said Hamas “miscalculated” Israel’s response and now faces a far worse conflict than it had anticipated.
“I hope and I believe that Israel will not stop until Hamas has been defeated in the Gaza Strip, and I don’t think that this was their expectation before the operation,” Shay said of Hamas.
[…] If Hamas’ armed struggle against Israel looks like a failure – or much worse – consider the alternative.
The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank recognized Israel and renounced armed struggle over three decades ago, hoping it would lead to a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territories seized by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war.
But the talks repeatedly broke down, partly because of Hamas’ violence but also because of Israel’s relentless expansion of settlements, now home to more than a half million Israelis. There have been no serious peace talks in well over a decade, and the Palestinian Authority has become little more than an administrative body in the 40 per cent of the occupied West Bank where it is allowed to operate.
[…] Still, the scale of last weekend’s attack takes Hamas’ approach into uncharted territory.
“It is unclear what Hamas’ endgame is beyond either fighting to the death or liberating Palestine,” said Hugh Lovatt, a Mideast expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
[…] “Now it appears to have fully embraced open-ended violence as its long-term strategic choice.”
[…] And Hamas has a horrifying trump card that could give Israel pause.
Hamas and the more radical Islamic Jihad militant group are holding some 150 men, women and children who were captured and dragged into Gaza. Hamas’ armed wing claims some have already been killed in Israeli strikes and has threatened to kill captives if Israel attacks Palestinian civilians without warning.
Hamas may succeed – as it has in the past – at trading them for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel in a lopsided deal that Palestinians would see as a triumph and Israelis as agony.
Never going to happen.
Israel has faced virtually no calls for restraint in the wake of the Hamas attack, but that could change if the war drags on.
In the end, the two sides could find themselves returning to the status quo: An internationally mediated truce, with Hamas ruling over a devastated and aid-dependent Gaza, and Israel redoubling security along its frontier.
Not going to happen. The endgame for Israel is the complete destruction of Hamas.
So what is Hamas’s endgame?
One idea is that its endgame is to put off Arab countries from doing deals with Israel. The problem with this is, assuming that Hamas is a rational player, there’s no evidence that such deals are a threat to Hamas and those Arab states aren’t exactly fans of Hamas.
The destruction of Israel? Again assuming that Hamas is a rational player, as an endgame this seems to be extremely unlikely.
Another option is, as mentioned above, that Hamas overplayed their hand and simply didn’t anticipate the scale of Israel’s response. Possible, but the sheer savagery and scale of the attack by Hamas puts some doubt on that.
The problem with Game Theory is that it assumes all players will act rationally. So let’s assume that Hamas is an irrational player. In that case the destruction of Israel as being the endgame for Hamas is more than plausible.
Is it reasonable to say that Hamas is an irrational player? Yes, considering its blind hatred for Israel and Jews. And let’s not forget that Hamas teaches children to hate almost from birth.
Or to put it another way, it’s just in their nature.