The magnitude of the mayhem done in Saturday’s attack on Israel by Hamas is coming into focus today (Sunday, October 8 2023). At this writing, more than 700 Israelis are known dead and an unknown number are missing or taken hostage. At least 400 Palestinians are dead as well, some of whom were killed in the fighting, while others were civilians who happened to be in the wrong place when the bullets and bombs flew.
America’s 9/11 still seems like yesterday to me, but it’s been a generation. A few days after the attack, I wrote an essay about why a bunch of guys from countries most Americans couldn’t locate on the map would sacrifice their lives to knock down some buildings in New York and Washington. I won’t claim I had some great insight about how we should have responded, only that the the motivations of the enemy were pretty obvious and that a counter-attack would be just what they wanted.
Who’s Fighting?
Israel is a tiny place with about 9.3 million people, which is slightly more than the population of New York City proper. Of that number, 2.1 million are Palestinian Israelis, so, Jewish Israel actually has a smaller population than New York City, about a third of the population of Metropolitan New York. The number of dead alone makes the attacks a disaster for Israel almost on the scale of the 9/11 attack for New York City alone–in proportion to the size of the entire United States, it would be equivalent to more like fifty thousand dead.
The death toll alone, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. Israel shares borders with four countries that have attacked her three times within my lifetime, as well as another attack the day after Israel declared itself a state in 1948: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Then there is the Gaza Strip, which is also on the border but isn’t technically a country, and Iraq, which is one country away, plus Hezbollah, a non-state entity that originated next door in Lebanon, but has evolved to be transnational, often acting as a proxy for Iran, which is two countries away, and is working hard on getting nuclear weapons of its own. The Israelis are not paranoid to be concerned about their security.
The Gaza Strip
If Israel is a tiny country, The Gaza Strip is a postage stamp. With a land area 363 square kilometers, it is just a shade bigger than the borough of Queens in New York City, and with 2.1 million people, it has about the same population, most of them quite poor. You could walk across the Gaza Strip in an afternoon.
Gaza is quite crowded, has a dismal economy, high unemployment, no natural resources to speak of, a poorly educated population, and despite having nothing going for it economically, has suffered under blockade by both Egypt and Israel since 2007. It has chronically teetered on the brink of becoming a full blown humanitarian crisis for almost twenty years.
Prior to their 1967 war with Israel, Gaza was Egypt’s problem. Egypt is fine with it being Israel’s problem now, and it’s been a thorn in Israel’s foot ever since. Many gangs or organizations have partial control of Gaza, but Hamas has been the big dog since they wrested power from Al Fatah not long after Yasser Arafat died in 2004. I don’t think anyone ever expected to get nostalgic about that murderous thug, but in retrospect, he’s looking better and better. Since 2006, Israel has gradually walled Gaza off for legitimate reasons of security, having been drawn into military conflict by Hamas terrorism three times (now, unfortunately, probably four times.) Although Gaza is almost entirely Moslem, Egypt also blockades it out of fear of Gaza’s instability spilling over its borders.
Why Words Matter
Israel’s leadership, indeed, much of the world, is talking about Israel being at war now. Very likely, Israel will pursue it as a war. And they will be sorry some day that they did, because war isn’t what Hamas is up to. They’re poor, no stupid.
The three times that Egypt and the other neighbors invaded Israel since 1948 were bonafide wars. They intended to win, which is the usual case in war. Countries occasionally fight bitter defensive wars that they know they can’t win, but when they do, it’s usually just the unhappy result of having cultivated the bellicose spirit that small countries must exhibit in order to not be simply walked over. Belgium knew they couldn’t stop the Germans in 1914, with only six divisions against the Germans’s 92, but to the wonder of the world, they fought anyway. There’s a reason why it was the wonder of the world–nobody in their right mind does that. The one thing that tiny little impoverished countries never do is wage offensive wars against military powerhouses that routinely kick the asses of their much larger neighbors three or four at a time.
So what is Hamas’ goal? Surely not to win, and they weren’t being invaded. The answer is, Hamas was not waging war.
Compared to the Israelis, the Gaza Palestinians are practically unarmed anyway. When you hear about Hamas firing rockets at Israel, you’re probably picturing something like the Patriot missile, but Hamas’s rockets are homemade MacGyver contraptions welded together from steel pipes in someone’s basement, stuffed with fuel made of sugar and fertilizer, plus a kilo or two of TNT in the pointy end. The rockets don’t have any guidance system, so you quite literally cannot hit the broad side of a barn with one, which is why they have to fire thousands of them to do any damage. Hamas just points them in an Easterly direction and lights the fuse.
Hamas doesn’t have an army in the conventional sense–it’s not a state. The fighters are more like a militia, and they aren’t the only militia in Gaza, just the dominant one. Half the rec rooms in Texas have better weapons than what the typical Hamas soldier carries, and they go into battle on motor scooters or on foot, wearing their street clothes.
And for all the mayhem they caused, the number of trained combat troops Hamas can field might not even be in four digits. Most of their “fighters” are semi-trained kids. Against Israel, five times as populous, rich, highly trained and motivated, and armed to the teeth with a crack air force, tanks, helicopters, artillery and high-tech surveillance.
So what are they dying for if they know that beating the Israelis is not on the table?
Hamas’s goal is exactly what Al Qaeda’s goal was in 2001. Al Qaeda wasn’t waging war either. Bin Laden could have picked up the idea from any of 100 guerrilla movements, but Mao Tse Tung originally wrote the book. Mao asked (I paraphrase) how do a handful of guys defeat the entire government with all their cops and soldiers? The answer is, first, you bomb a police station or a hotel lobby. Whatever it takes to bring the wrath of the military down on your head. The oppressor’s army will obligingly storm into town and probably wipe out half you puny force, but the outrages they commit in the process will create a dozen volunteers for every one yours they kill. Then you do it again, and again, and again, and each time your force multiplies until the entire populace is aligned against the government. The point is, you don’t blow up polices stations to hurt the cops–hurting them is incidental–you do it so the cops will hurt your people. That’s the fundamental difference between war and terrorism. In war, defeating the enemy is the goal; terrorism is essentially an armed team building exercise.
Bin Laden turned the trick around. In our arrogance, we assumed that because he attacked us, it was therefore about us. In fact, he wasn’t trying to take us down. It only cost him only a couple of hundred thousand dollars and 20 volunteers to drag the US into a 20 year no-win war in the heart of Dar al Islam. It was never about Al Qaeda “defeating” The Great Satan–it was about uniting the entire Islamic world against us. It didn’t quite work, but it was a damned good try. For pocket change, he involved us in two ruinous wars that cost us trillions and made Al Qaeda a world wide franchise.
And that’s the game Hamas is playing. They killed 700 Israelis in full hope and faith that the Israelis will storm in and kill 7,000. Or 70,000. They don’t care, so long as it’s a big number. The more savage the Israeli response, the better it will cement another generation of unified enmity between the rest of the Middle East and their enemy, Israel.
A bloody invasion with plenty of buildings picturesquely collapsing under Israeli artillery and rockets is exactly what they are paying the price to get. Yes, it will hurt in Gaza, but it already hurts in Gaza. What they want is for it to hurt in Gaza on CNN and Al Jazeera every day and night until the world is sickened by it and by the death, starvation and disease that will come with the bombs.
Time and Material 