Reuel Marc Gerecht
It has become conventional wisdom in Washington that Hamas will survive no matter how hard it is pummelled by Israel. Leaders will fall; new leaders will rise. Hamas’s ties to the Palestinian people will sustain it regardless of the horrors that the war has unleashed upon the Gaza Strip.
For the Biden Administration, the death of the Hamas warlord and October 7 mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, offered Israel both an emotional release and a temporary advantage that it should seize. In this view, Jerusalem must accept a ceasefire and begin working on a day-after plan which acknowledges that Hamas — an Islamist movement committed to annihilating the Jewish state — will remain a political and military presence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Such conventional thinking might, however, be wrong. Islamic history is littered with failed insurgencies and vanquished militants. It is certainly possible that with the killing of Sinwar and other senior commanders, the obliteration of most of Hamas’s combat brigades, and the vast destruction wreaked on Gaza, Israel will succeed in annihilating Hamas. Something unpleasant may rise in its place. Yet for Israel, any future enemy will surely be less menacing than Hamas, which benefitted from a militant ideology never severely tested in battle and a strip of land where Hamas’s opposition had no place to hide.
The group’s strength lies in its transcendent promise: that a holy war could drive the Jews from Palestine, sooner rather than later. Its plans for a “Big Project”, which the Israeli military captured, show that Sinwar envisioned an imminent triumph over Israel. This is the kind of delusional hope that once powered al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which both thought that they could rapidly transform the Middle East through violence.
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