The world was flooded with images of death and destruction. Blood and tears in cities reduced to rubble displaced from the front pages the massacres, rapes and mass kidnappings perpetrated by Hamas in the kibbutzim and agricultural villages of southern Israel. On the world’s radar are the thousands of civilian deaths and the destruction of homes, schools and hospitals that Israeli bombs caused in the Gaza Strip. That was, precisely, the strategic objective of the bloody pogrom that Hamas carried out on October 7: that the Israeli response be lethal and destructive enough to install the stigma of a “criminal State” that its enemies have been carving for decades.
This strategic objective also serves to recruit future generations of jihadists. The Israeli bombs inoculate in the children and adolescents who today see their parents, siblings and friends die, the hatred and resentment that in the coming decades will turn them into combatants dedicated to the cause of destroying Israel and “cleansing” of Jews. from the Jordan River to the sea.”
The example is in Lebanon, where the invasion led by Ariel Sharon in 1982 and managed to expel the leadership of the PLO from Beirut to Tunisia, immediately seemed to be successful because it cut off the attacks on the Upper Galilee. But what was born from that Israeli operation was Hezbollah. Until then, the Lebanese Shiites had the Amal militia, which limited its objectives to the civil war that began in 1975. But in 1982, the Israeli operation gave rise to Hezbollah, whose objective is to destroy the Jewish State. Another example is in 1987, when the success of the repression that quelled the first Intifada covered its consequence: an Islamist mutual aid organization became Hamas.
Even if Netanyahu’s goal of “eliminating Hamas” is achieved, the destruction in Gaza is creating future jihadist armies that will launch missiles and pogroms in the coming decades. In conventional terms, the conflict between Israel and Hamas shows the Israelis at an advantage, because their army is gaining ground and consolidating positions. But that months after it began, the operation will conclude in 2023 without having captured or eliminated Yahya Sinwar, political leader of the terrorist organization in that territory, nor Mohamed Deif, its military commander, shows that the objective announced by Netanyahu is far from be reached. He confirms that, with more than 20 thousand dead and the destruction of large urban areas, the Gazan militias still have combat capacity.
The Israeli army cannot claim to have significantly reduced the troops of Ezedim al Qasem, Hamas’s military wing, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the main allied militia.
In relation to the price it is paying in its own casualties, Israel’s achievements may seem relevant. But they are not at all in relation to the political price that their image is paying before the world and their position on the international board.
What has been achieved is little compared to the wave of protests, criticism and repudiation that has generated on a global scale the thousands of civilian deaths and the devastation caused in the cities of Gaza and Khan Yunis. This is what the strategy designed by Iran points to: stigmatizing Israel and the Jews as criminals. The results occur in the long term, but in the immediate term the signs of the effect it will have are perceived.
The clearest sign is that the world has been talking for months, not about the massacres and rapes perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel, but about the destruction and deaths that the Israelis are causing in the Gaza Strip. Beyond the debate on the alternatives that existed after the bloody pogrom of October 7, there is no doubt that Israel reacted as it was expected to do.
Possibly, Hamas terrorists and their Iranian ideologues hoped to gain greater control over the Israeli response from the hostages they hid in Gaza. But they took for granted that there would be devastating bombings with wholesale destruction and deaths. It is even difficult for Sinwar and Deif to discount that Israel would attempt the total elimination of Hamas and the annihilation of its leading cadres. That is why what is happening was in the calculations and plans of the terrorists who provoked the war by massacring and kidnapping Israeli civilians.
The balance with which this conflict is projected for 2024 cannot be measured as if it were a conventional conflict. It is not, and in the terms in which it is presented, Israel is far from a true victory. The creator of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, was eliminated by Israel in 2004 with a projectile launched from a helicopter gunship, without causing civilian casualties or destruction of buildings. In the same way he eliminated his successor, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi.
On the other hand, having destroyed cities and caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths, this offensive is still far from ending Hamas. Although they still need to repudiate the terrorist organization for offering its own people as cannon fodder to stigmatize Israel and isolate it internationally , the protests carried out by crowds in many cities around the world and the condemnations and repudiations of Israel presented in international forums by dozens of countries and Human Rights organizations, are right when it comes to the devastation caused by the Israeli army.
It is serious that these questions are not accompanied by repudiations of Hamas’s criminal strategy using the Gazan people as a projectile against the image of the Jewish State. But this serious lack does not invalidate the sting of what is happening. In the modality of action chosen by the government headed by Netanyahu, destroying Hamas is an objective whose achievement, or not, determines the success or failure of the operation. But, until now, paying a high price on the international stage, that objective has not been achieved. And if achieved, it would be a counterproductive victory for Israel.
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