Hamas is not invincible Palestine solidarity could shatter

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.

Hamas has fared better than either of these groups because it has successfully intertwined Palestinian nationalism with Islamic radicalism. Such a feat would have been impossible in the pre-modern Islamic world, but Westernisation has allowed nationalism to cohabit with a religion averse to such divisive loyalties. Still, Hamas’s blending of the two is hardly new. Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the muscle and mind behind the Palestine Liberation Organisation, successfully pioneered this ideological fusion long before Hamas, allowing even ardent secularists to feel Islamic pride in Fatah’s fight against Israel.

Their success wouldn’t last for long. As Fatah reluctantly began to accept Israel’s existence, Hamas emerged and turned Islam against Fatah. Hamas’s appeal swelled as Fatah’s dependency on the Jewish state grew, and its corruption became blatant. The Islamist victory in the legislative elections of 2006 — which was rejected by Fatah, Israel, and the United States — followed by Hamas’s forceful ejection of Fatah’s security forces from Gaza a year later, gave the movement an opportunity to create its own Islamic community based on its interpretation of the Holy Law.

For most Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas’s rule has been hell. Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, didn’t moderate in power. Its extremism stayed vibrant because the infidel enemy remained near, and Hamas’s creed promised young men not just martyrdom but victory. By contrast, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who envisions a struggle with Israel in which the Zionists slowly bleed out, appears restrained. Hamas believes in salvation through war, an idea that dates to the days of the Arab conquests. But as the Islamic State can attest, when Islamists start to lose wars, the faithful soon lose heart.

If Hamas falls, Gaza could come to resemble Syria and Iraq, where there has been a flourishing of various Islamic groups and local warlords. Palestinians aren’t particularly tribal, which has probably kept them so far from splintering into a myriad of causes and groups. Living cheek by jowl with the Jews, they have gained a remarkable level of unity and purpose.

Yet Palestine solidarity could still shatter. Though it may condemn the rise of Western individualism, Hamas still plays on desires for personal glory. After all, asking young men to kill themselves for the cause can be alluring. But such fanaticism always fades when the death toll gets too high, and the promised conquest fails to materialise.

The West tends to overlook this fact, instead viewing militant Islamist struggles against the infidel as perdurable. This is a dubious proposition given all the defeats Muslim holy warriors have suffered in the last 300 years. Yasser Arafat’s numerous losses led to the rise of Hamas. In the end, even the occasional successful act of PLO terrorism couldn’t overcome Fatah’s humiliations in Jordan in 1970, in Lebanon in 1982, and in the West Bank with the failure of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. What happened to Fatah can happen to Hamas. It could easily become a spent force.

Hamas’s future now depends on whether young men who have been in the organisation — and, more importantly, the far larger number who have not — want to support a movement that has done its part to make most Gazans homeless. Do Hamas’s foot-soldiers, and the new recruits that are now desperately needed, still have the guns, faith, and will power to coerce their Palestinian neighbours’ submission? At this point, it will be hard to find a leader as magnetic as Sinwar. Holy-war charisma, which Sinwar had in spades, isn’t built in comfortable exile.

It’s hard to imagine that Hamas, as an effective jihadist organisation, can continue to withstand the wrath of Israel, which now controls all of Gaza’s borders. Weapons can no longer arrive through tunnels from Egypt, while Qatar’s financial subventions to Hamas have been reduced to a trickle. The Israeli army may not reoccupy the whole Gaza Strip, but Israel will continue to slice it up, making it challenging for a single Palestinian group to exist in open, armed opposition to their rule. Meanwhile, Palestinians who loathe Hamas may now be able to take up arms against what’s left of the group.

Eventually, Hamas could be replaced by another Islamist organisation that recalibrates the mix between fundamentalism and nationalism. Fighting to survive in Gaza’s ruins, some Palestinian Islamists may become more radicalised; others may withdraw into a more communitarian, de-politicised fundamentalism. Others may see greater secularism as the answer. Yet whatever comes next likely won’t have the spiritual allure — the promise that comes with past or expected success — that made Hamas a redoubtable insurgent movement. Hamas’s promise of victory inside a Gazan wasteland will have to become more dreamlike — a hard task for an outfit that once envisioned so much more.

For supporters of Hamas, October 7 was not a day of infamy, but an eruption of vengeance, a modern re-enactment of the Prophet Muhammad’s slaughter of the Jewish tribe of Khaybar, which ended Jewish resistance to the Prophet’s call. Yet the vile “glory” of October 7 is unlikely to sustain Hamas’s young men — and the Palestinian population more broadly — through the years of misery that lie ahead for all of Gaza. Even more than before, Palestinians may yearn for vengeance against their Jewish foes. But Hamas may not benefit from this anger. In the past, Islamic insurgencies that triumphed all offered a mixture of hope, salvation, and battlefield success. In Arabia the Jews never defeated the Muslims — let alone over and over again.

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