It just seems crazy to me given the power imbalance. A cynical part of me suspects that things are playing out exactly as some evil strategists hoped they would, which, given all the children dying, is super-depressing.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh
In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.
Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.
Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don’t talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.
I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty
That’s one of the most reasonable responses to this madness I’ve seen recently.
Far too many people are out there demanding instant information with 100% accuracy and crying conspiracy when they can’t get their impossible wish.
I think even worse than the expectation of instant knowledge is the expectation that everyone must pick a side and must do it now. There are dozens of conflicts around the world with atrocities being committed, but this is the only one you consistently get called out for not picking a side.
I think it’s healthy for people outside of the conflict to ultimately feel one side has more or less justification, while still acknowledging their faults and mistakes.
I am woefully ignorant on the politics and history of the region and it’s people.
Recognizing this, I cannot lay my support for either side. Somehow, to many this is an incorrect stance and I must have an opinion and pick a side.
It would take considerable time and effort to learn the background and create an informed independent opinion as I do not trust the news to give me an unbiased report of the war. It would be unrealistic to think everyone can do this, and so I think we should normalize people not taking a side.
Sometimes “I don’t know” is the only correct response yet one so few are willing to give. Kudos.
the expectation that everyone must pick a side
Yeah, I’ve had some nauseating back and forth with several users who just can’t seem to grasp the notion that criticising Israel does not mean you support Hamas.
And the other way around
My experience is actually quite the opposite. In (real world) discussions I had so far I see that most people just talk about the horrific consequences of this war, with so many innocent casualties on both sides. People are often _not _ picking sides because this is such an old and complex conflict with atrocities perpetrated on both sides. Which imho is the most reasonable thing to do. Yes, what Hamas did on that festival and is it still doing is disgusting, but Israel’s response since then is equally disgusting. It’s just impossible to condemn one side while excusing the other.
To be fair, it was quite similar with Russia vs Ukraine, but by now seemingly everyone has forgotten that that’s still a thing.
Thank you for the video and the thoughtful response!
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever.
This is what we’ve all been thinking about Russia/Putin’s government too. With tons of friends and family in Russia and Ukraine we are still at a loss what exactly the idea/projected outcome/strategy/expectation was to start that war. I hear a lot of armchair experts and amateur war psychologists trying to explain it away like it is obvious but it just isn’t. It feels like there are a bunch of clues and pieces of a puzzle mixed in with random puzzle pieces that don’t belong to what you are trying to assemble, and it is unclear whether we will ever truly understand it sometime in the future.
But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.
I’ve looked at an interview with an Israeli political sciences professor yesterday, that went something like this:
- Professor: “…and this is why countries like Israel have the right to defend themselves”
- Host: “Right. What about the Pales…”
- Professor: “That’s not an issue”
- Host: “There are civilian…”
- Professor: “Israeli civilians have been harmed and we need to respond”
- Host: “Is the response proportion…”
- Professor: “Respond to destroy the terrorists”
- Host: “It seems like Gaza population is…”
- Professor: “Gaza is Israel, there is no population, we need to rid it of terrorists”
As an onlooker, I’d say that is a FREAKING HUGE and obvious “friction”, when one side denies the existence of the other.
You’re making statements about sides based off what some unnamed “Israeli professor” allegedly said. Okay.
False.
My statement is about the relationship between sides, in reference to part of the previous comment, illustrated by what I recalled of a recent event, and how it ties into it.
If you want similar examples from different sides, you’ll find plenty of them both these days and throughout history, I just happened to recall this one.
Great video and summary! Love that channel.
Hostages are variables that Hamas controls and Israel must respect. They can be used as chips to barter with, shields to hide behind, and tools to shame the Israelis in the court of public opinion.
All fair points. They hardly needed to shame Israel in the court of public opinion, though. The hard-right faction who control their government have proven quite adept at shaming themselves with no outside help.
NB: I said Israel the country. Not Israelis the people.
The idea behind most terrorism is that a weaker opponent provokes a larger, more powerful one into making a political/strategic mistake.
For example, 9/11 wasn’t about knocking down some towers, it was about getting the US entangled in a foreign war with boots on the ground.
For this attack, when Israel invades gaza with armour and soldiers, a LOT of people on both sides will die. Every dead gazan will be a martyr, every dead Israeli solider is, well a dead Israeli. Maybe that retribution becomes too much for the international community, maybe the scenes that will inevitably come from gaza will ignite the Arab world etc.
I think this might be giving the attackers too much credit for strategy. Don’t discount the simple religious aspect: don’t make the mistake of refusing to believe that devout religious people don’t actually believe their own religion.
Take ISIS. A whole lot of their actions made almost no sense, from a strategic point of view: picking fights with everybody, massacring civilians instead of letting them flee, destroying ancient artifacts (instead of either preserving or selling them) if you omit the simple explanation of religion. They wanted to trigger the final, apocalyptic battle that would usher in the end of the world. They said exactly that in their social media videos, but we secular atheists (or non-devout believers) just kinda skipped over that detail.
Things aren’t as clearly religious in the case of the Palestinians, but probably plays some role. Same with the Israeli Right, and the American Right with their unconditional support for Israel. We shouldn’t ignore the impact of religious belief.
I think was essentially a recruitment drive. Provoke Israel to attack, then sign up all the desperate Palestinians with recent losses
So the history of Israel and it’s neighbors is long and complex. A short summary might be that when Israel was formed none of its neighbors recognized it as a state and invaded. Over the years there has been significant conflict, with wrongs perpetuated on both sides. Eventually Egypt and Jordan officially recognized Israel as a state and began a long period of normalization of relations between the two.
The remaining neighbors, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank are more complicated. Gaza elected Hamas who has sworn to destroy Israel. West Bank and the Palestinian authority has negotiated over the years with Israel, and in my opinion been treated poorly. Syria and Lebanon (with Hezbollah) still refuse to acknowledge Israel as a state and vow to fight it until it’s destruction.
Behind all of this is Iran, who funds and coordinates training and resources for the various Arab groups fighting against Israel. The ongoing terrorist activity in the region makes it almost impossible for a true negotiation to occur and a transfer of stewardship of the three districts in the West Bank to full Palestinian governance.
So why does Hamas invade and take hostages? Because they have seen ongoing efforts to normalize relations between Arab countries and Israel, including with Saudi Arabia, and that is exactly what they don’t want. Remember, they only exist to destroy Israel. That is their entire governance platform. By provoking Israel to invade, it creates unrest in the region, staining relations between Arab leaders and Israel. Which is what Hamas wants.
The take away should be that religious ethnic states are a humanitarian and diplomatic mess. There are no easy answers or solutions when the platform of one country is that the other country must cease to exist. Likewise, Israel just can’t get out of its own way with respect to exacerbating tensions via settlers in the West Bank and occupation of the Golan heights. Though to be fair, the Golan heights were captured, like the West Bank, after the countries who controlled them attacked Israel in the six day war.
So to answer your question, yes, this is all playing out like someone wanted. That someone is Hamas.
You left out a critical part at the beginning though.
Before WW1, the area now known as Israel was inhabited mostly by Arabs with a tiny Jewish minority (there where fewer Jews there than Christians) and controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
During WW1, the Brits promised the Arabs, that they’d get independence if they revolt and kick out the Ottomans. The Arabs held up their end of the deal, and in turn, the Brits, being Brits, turned around and took the area (by now called Mandatory Palestine) under control “until such time as they are able to stand alone”.
And then, in 1917, they promised the Jews the same area, after the plan to create Israel in eastern Uganda fell through.
The Jews where settlers that where put there by an occupying force that betrayed their promise to the local population.
How would you react if an occupying force would move millions of settlers into your country / state?
The initial plan wasn’t to give the entire area to the Jews, it was to give some share of it (20% of the land, is the figure I heard). That area is the only place the Jews could really conceivably lay claim to. And the Arabs (specifically the Sharif of Mecca, not the people of Palestine) got huge swaths of land in exchange for their revolt against the Ottomans: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, etc. The British made a specific exception for coastal areas, and there’s debate about whether Palestine was part of that or not.
So…not that simple.
edit: Guys, downvotes for strong opinions are one thing. Debate is fine. I’m happy to reconsider in the face of mistakes. You could recast the same facts from the perspective of the average Palestinian, then or now. But downvotes for paraphrasing Wikipedia? That’s the equivalent of plugging your ears and saying “LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!”
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
Their objective was to provoke this response from Israel. Hostages really force Israel to act immediately.
Wouldn’t it be the other way around ? Hostage means that you nced to open some negociation for their release. And that a military intervention would put them at risk.
Israel used to do prisonner exchanges,
That’s not what’s happening though.
Regardless, hostages require at least negotiation. They could execute a few hostages to provoke israel further.
This is just my opinion but, given terrorist organisations are militarily usually much poorer/smaller/weaker than the group they stand against, they need help from outside.
One way to possibly achieve that is to do something awful to provoke your opposition into a retaliation so indiscriminate and horrifying that your ideological (if not literal) allies in the surrounding area step in to attack your enemy.
I’ve heard it suggested that they didn’t expect to get as far as they did into Israel and they barely expected to get past the border wall. If that’s the case they may not have planned what to do when they did and so there may be no grand strategy behind some or all of it.
I guess we’ll never know.
That would make a lot of sense. Since Israel has blocked numerous other attacks in the past, Hamas likely expected a similar response, not a complete lack of one from their very apparent and out in the open preparations for the attack.
Last time it worked, they got over a thousand prisoners for one soldier.
Taking hostages was the one thing about the entire attack that made some logical sense.
The murdering, on the other hand… that guaranteed a violent response, and doing it in the most brutal way possible and then filming it and bragging about it ensured that Palestine lost most sympanties, and Israel basically got a free pass to do whatever they wanted.
I wouldn’t say that Israel is getting a free pass, but they sure as hell have a casus belli now, and they’re getting as much mileage out of it as they possibly can.
They’ve killed dozens of journalists and even the family of a journalist. That family was staying in a building that was marked safe by the IDF for exactly these kinds of people. The US didnt let Saudi Arabia live down the bonesaw incident for years, have you heard any ranking politician in the US speak about the press slaughter? To me it seems a lot like a free pass.
I think they expected to swap the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, since they’ve done it before.
It’s an hypothesis only.
But I think the important matter were the foreign ostages, especially from Europe and USA, because those countries do a lot to recover them, including paying big money.
I wondered why Israel didn’t attack the weekend they said they would attack. They gave an ultimatum, but didn’t act on it. One possibility is that the USA and Europe wanted to try to recover their ostages first.
When did the US pay big money to a terrorist organization to release hostages?
The US never negotiates with “terrorists”, they fund “freedom fighters” to kill the terrorists and maybe recover some of the hostages.
Hamas likely wanted to force a confrontation in order to make it abundantly clear who’s paying for which “freedom fighters”… even if everyone knew for a long time, did very little about it, and is likely to do very little more either way.
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Israel is killing us slowly and quietly and the world is ignoring it. Maybe if they’re provoked into revealing themselves to the world we’ll be seen.
That’s sorta classic supervillain logic. Doing terrible things just so someone else will have to do them too and in doing so “reveal” that they are “equally” monstrous. Israel has had some super fucked up policy for a long time, and I’m not defending that, but the approach of provoking them by committing your own war crimes knowing that it will lead to this much civilian suffering on all sides is even more fucked up.
I think it’s more desperation than logic
Hamas already knows how they’re considered elsewhere. They know they’re a terrorist group. A government that acts like terrorists is what they want the world to see
That’s something I hadn’t thought of.
I don’t think Hamas had a long term goal here. I think Iran had the long term goal and shared intel with them and goaded the on to the attack. That’s not to excuse anything or one, but in terms of startegy and blowback, I think Irans the one whos counting on that, and Israel is providing it. So all in all I’d say Iran got what they wanted and we’re gonna see what they choose to do next.
Most death are civilians while Hamas getting stronger every year.
Well if you target Hamas but bomb an innocent family of five killing three, you probably just made two new Hamas members. Especially if the parents didn’t survive, they know exactly whos gonna ‘take care’ of those orphaned kids.
Since Iran is standing in the background, we have no idea how many Shahed drones are standing by when they come in.
