Since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set the goals of the war, considering that the most prominent of them is the elimination and complete destruction of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
Statements were repeated later from him and other officials who continued to speak in a way that seemed confident, and perhaps arrogant, that they would achieve their goal in the end and destroy the resistance movement, which did not possess the planes, tanks, and missiles they possessed.
But after about 9 months of war, the tone changed, and many leaders in Israel, whether political or military, began to acknowledge that the goal of eliminating Hamas is not realistic, but rather more like aspirations that collided with the valor of the resistance despite the difference in capabilities.
The statement of the future Minister of the War Council and leader of the State Camp Party, Benny Gantz, that he made today was not anomalous from other statements that preceded him in recent days, to the effect that Hamas is an idea that cannot be destroyed, even if it can be weakened.
This was stated by his comrade in the army and in politics, Gadi Eisenkot, when he stated that Hamas is an idea that Israel will fight for many years to come.
Gantz’s statements may not raise what the statements of Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari raised – last Wednesday – during an interview with Channel 13, which is considered a channel opposed to Netanyahu and closer to the Israeli left, in which he stressed the impossibility of destroying Hamas, stressing that Hamas is an idea that cannot be destroyed.
Hagari considered that “talking about destroying Hamas is like throwing ashes in the eyes of the public, because it is implanted in people’s hearts,” and that “Hamas is an idea. You cannot destroy an idea. The political level must find an alternative to it, otherwise it will remain.”
What’s the idea?
In its comments on the Israeli statements, Hamas considered that the idea that Hagari spoke about is the resistance “that arises whenever there is an occupier, and it continues to escalate and renew itself according to the people of determination, until it triumphs over its enemy, that is, until it defeats the occupation and cleanses the country of its abomination.”
In this regard, Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the Hamas Political Bureau, says: “For more than 100 years, the mandate and then the occupation have been trying to eliminate this idea, and today they openly acknowledge that all their attempts have failed, and that they are powerless in the face of resistance.”
Al-Rishq points out that “this declaration is a documentation of a strategic psychological and intellectual defeat, coinciding with an unprecedented field defeat.”
Sources of strength
According to what the New York Times reported, citing American officials and analysts last April, they believed that Hamas would remain an influential force in Gaza after the fighting ended, “but how quickly it can be rebuilt will depend on Israel’s decisions in the next stages of the war and in its aftermath.”
The newspaper quoted Glass London, a retired officer from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as saying, “The Palestinian resistance against Israel, which is manifested in Hamas and other armed groups, is as much an idea as it is a concrete group of people, so the harm it causes Israel may have annexed Hamas, but the movement still has capacity, flexibility, funding and a long line of people waiting to join it, after all this fighting, destruction and loss of life.”
The same idea was confirmed by Robert Pape, an American political scientist and lecturer on national and international security affairs, in Foreign Affairs magazine, where he said that Israel, after 9 months of its air and ground war in Gaza, has not defeated Hamas, nor is it on the verge of defeating it. On the contrary, Therefore, Hamas has become stronger than it was before the Al-Aqsa flood attack.
Pape pointed out that Israel failed to understand the sources of Hamas’ power. According to him, Hamas’ power does not come from the typical material factors that analysts use to judge the power of countries. Rather, the most important source of these movements is the ability to recruit, especially their ability to attract new generations of people. Fighters and operatives who carry out deadly campaigns and are willing to die for the cause.
This ability to recruit is rooted, ultimately, in one factor, which is the volume and intensity of support that the group derives from its community, and the words are still to the American political scientist Robert Pape.
In this context, we cannot ignore what was reported by the newspaper “Israel Today” that the data presented to members of the Knesset indicate that the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip did not collapse, but rather that it was able to maintain its strength.
Knocking on the table
Israel may have recently realized what Pape referred to after suffering heavy losses in the war on Gaza, as the death toll of its soldiers reached more than 662 dead.
It seems that Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevy knocked on the table, according to the advice of the former head of the Operations Division of the Operations Directorate in Israel, General Gadi Shamni, when he said, “At what point should the Chief of Staff knock on the table? And perhaps go out into the open, because sending soldiers to… “The battle for political purposes is crossing a red line.”
Opinion polls also confirm the support of the Palestinian community in Gaza and the West Bank for Hamas, despite the devastation caused by the occupation of Gaza in an attempt to turn the popular incubator against Hamas.
A public opinion poll prepared by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the period between May 26 and June 1 showed that if new legislative elections were held, 32% would vote for Hamas, 17% for Fatah, 4% for third forces, and 16%. They haven’t decided yet.
Also, 51% responded that Hamas is more deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.
These data show that Hamas enjoys great popular support around it, which helps explain why the residents of Gaza did not turn against Hamas, which Israel seems to have become aware of and is working to deal with to stop the bleeding of its losses in the Gaza Strip at the hands of the resistance.
This was confirmed by Politico newspaper last May when it quoted an American official as saying that the current Israeli military operations in Gaza are breathing life into the Hamas movement.
Will the idea die?
Dennis Ross, the former American envoy to the peace process, believed in an article in the New York Times – published late last October – that Hamas will do what it did in Israel’s previous wars on Gaza “in the years 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021. It is almost certain that the movement will “It regains its armament and activity.”
While current and former American officials believe that the tunnels in the Gaza Strip will allow Hamas to survive and reconstitute its forces once the fighting stops, according to what the New York Times reports.
This vision is supported by the 2024 annual threat report issued by US intelligence, which believes that Israel will struggle to achieve its goal of “destroying Hamas,” destroying its infrastructure (tunnels) that allow militants to hide, regain their strength, and surprise Israeli forces.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper “El Pais” late last October, Rashid Al-Khalidi, professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University in New York, said that Israel “would like to eliminate Hamas as an institution, a political, religious, cultural, and military structure.”
He added, “I do not think they are able to do the first two things, because even if all Hamas leaders are killed or all its armed members are killed, Hamas will remain a political force, whether the Israelis occupy Gaza or leave it, so destroying Hamas as a political institution and destroying it as an idea is a blow.” Impossible”.
Al-Khalidi said that the achievement that Israel could achieve would be to weaken Hamas’ military capabilities, “but for a limited period and period of time.”
