Since October 7, 2023, many questions have been raised about the justification for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, its rationality, feasibility, and political meaning, due to the high risk it entails and the gross imbalance of power surrounding it.
These questions increased after a year of war, the continuation and expansion of the occupation’s crimes against the people of the Gaza Strip, the escalation of the clashes on the Lebanon front, the expansion of Israeli attacks in the West Bank, and the efforts of the Israeli extreme right to exploit the opportunity to pass the agenda of displacement and regional expansion in which it believes.
This calls for exploring the options that were available to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) at the time, and the logic of its decision-making in this regard.
Fateful choices made by the people and the movement
The Hamas movement was founded with the aim of resisting the Israeli occupation, and rejected the Oslo Accords for the political settlement of the Palestinian issue in 1993, because it recognized the right of the occupying state to 78% of the lands of Palestine. With this position, it gained wide popular support, and thousands of Palestinian people joined its ranks early, and bet on To continue armed action until the occupation is forced to leave.
The movement’s strategy, based on resistance work and rejection of the reality resulting from the agreement, continued until 2005, when it decided to participate in the legislative elections for the Palestinian Authority, due to the continued popular division between the options of resistance and settlement, and the decline in the momentum of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. It considered this a tactic seeking to “protect the resistance” despite It conflicts with the nature of resistance work.
This was evident in the Western position rejecting its landslide victory in those elections, then the strengthening of the Palestinian division following the refusal of many authorities to cooperate with the elected government, leading to the military decision in Gaza and President Mahmoud Abbas taking sole control of the West Bank in 2007, and the subsequent strengthening of the Israeli blockade on the West Bank. Gaza Strip.
The occupation had imposed a political and economic siege on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, since the Hamas movement won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, and then this siege focused on Gaza in 2007.
In dealing with this new reality, Hamas adopted a strategy of “accumulating power” based on investing its position as the authority in the Gaza Strip to enhance the capabilities of civil and military resistance, in which it has made great strides over the course of 17 years of rule.
Although it employed this force to pressure the occupation to lift the siege on Gaza, and reduce its encroachment on Jerusalem, the prisoners, and other major issues for the Palestinian people, this did not lead to a solution to these intractable crises, in light of the Israeli position regarding the level of the siege on the Gaza Strip.
This is in addition to the weakness of the Arab and international responses to the crimes of the occupation, and the shift in the course of regional policy towards normalization with the occupying state without linking this to the restoration of any Palestinian rights.
In parallel, Hamas resorted to popular pressure tactics, as in the return marches that it began on “Land Day” in 2018 and continued on a weekly basis for a year and a half, but they left hundreds of martyrs and thousands wounded and disabled, without resulting in a permanent change in the situation of the Strip, as The occupation was rapidly retreating from any gains achieved by popular pressure, taking advantage of the complicity of the American administration and the weak influence of the rest of the regional and international parties.
However, reconciliation attempts – which have strengthened since Sinwar’s arrival to the leadership of the Gaza Strip in 2017 – have not yielded results. Ultimately, Abbas stipulated that Hamas declare acceptance of the agreements signed with the occupation before partnering with it in the government or the PLO.
Which means – if it happens – Hamas will turn against itself, condemn its history, and repeat the experience of the Fatah movement, which did not lead to liberation, but rather provided Israel with decades of cheap occupation, during which it promoted settlement, the Judaization of Jerusalem, and regional normalization.
At the same time, Hamas and other Palestinian parties were noticing the decline in the feasibility of accumulating force in light of the Israeli deterrence resulting from the large number of casualties in any military confrontation with the occupation army, and the movement being forced to maintain calm most of the time, while Israel was isolated in the rest of the files of the Palestinian issue, and the issue continued. Its aggression represented by the stifling siege on the Gaza Strip.
In this regard, the Islamic Jihad movement adopted a “preoccupation strategy” based on the principle of continuing the clash with the occupation, even if it was at a low level, in order to prevent it from resting and expanding.
The discrepancy between the strategies of the two movements led to repeated frictions between them, leading to the Jihad movement engaging in two separate rounds of confrontation with the occupation, in August 2022 and in May 2023.
This put the Hamas movement before a difficult national question: How can a national liberation movement accept an Israeli aggression on a territory it controls while assassinating the most senior military leaders of another resistance movement, without Hamas directly engaging in a battle like this?
As for what the occupation and its supporters were pushing towards with regard to the Gaza Strip at that time, it was a form of economic peace, whereby the siege on the Strip would be eased in parallel with its abandonment of any national role related to the rest of Palestine, including integration with the occupation system and the provision of cheap labor for agricultural work. Industry and construction in Israel.
This is what it opened the door to in recent years, when it allowed tens of thousands of people from the Gaza Strip to work within its borders, while linking the number of permits it issues to them to the level of security calm. Thus, the Hamas movement was at a crossroads and could only choose one of them:
- Either accepting coexistence with the occupation system and strengthening it, by submitting to its demands to provide security and suppressing any efforts to disturb the occupation, with the change that this entails in the essence of its identity and political path, and the risks of internal Palestinian conflict.
- Or trying to “turn the tables” on the occupation, and seeking to inflict a major blow on it that creates a new political reality. Of course, Hamas took this option despite the major risks it entailed.
The issue of power imbalance
The next question in this regard is: How does Hamas make such a decision in light of the imbalance of military power? To answer it, it is necessary to note the intellectual basis on which Hamas is based as a resistance movement. In many ways:
On the one hand, the theoretical basis of resistance to occupation does not assume equal material forces, although it requires a degree of balance. In this regard, the military theorist and former Chief of Staff of NATO, Andre Bouvre, points out – in his book “Introduction to Military Strategy” – that wars of liberation bet on maximizing the moral force factor and bet on the long-term to confront the imbalance in the material balance of power, which is usually in the interest of the occupier.
On the other hand, the legal principle upon which the intellectual authority of the Hamas movement is based does not stipulate a balance of power in “defensive jihad,” which is related to confronting external aggression. Rather, it encourages every Muslim to defend his home and property in the face of aggression, even if this leads to his martyrdom.
This does not conflict with taking reasons and planning that seeks victory. While Islam encourages achieving “one of the two good things: victory or martyrdom,” it has made the first of them victory, as it is the first thing that a Muslim strives for. If he misses it, then what comes after it is also good, and it is not a matter. He is criticized in the logic of Sharia law.
It is worth noting in this context that any revolution, whether popular or armed, is an adventure with uncertain results and is exposed to the possibility of victory and loss. However, liberation does not usually occur except through numerous attempts that ultimately lead to raising the cost of the occupation to a point where it is impossible to survive.
On the third hand, it seems that Hamas has developed an appreciation for the possibility of combining forces to impose a new reality on the occupation. By tracing the historical context of the Al-Aqsa Flood decision, it appears that the previous confrontation, which was the Battle of Saif Al-Quds in 2021, witnessed a great deal of popular interaction inside the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948, the West Bank, and across the Jordanian and Lebanese borders with Palestine, which prompted the occupation to stop the war within 11 days. , which achieved Palestinian gains regarding Al-Aqsa Mosque and slowed down the occupation’s efforts to Judaize it.
Rather, what many of the areas occupied in 1948, inhabited by a mixture of Palestinians and Jews, witnessed, were similar to the signs of a civil war, from which a percentage of Jews were forced to temporarily evacuate, and which hindered the movement of reserve forces and army supply convoys heading to the Gaza border.
On the military level, signs that Hezbollah was heading toward military escalation with the occupying state were increasing. Due to the factors of his assessment that the severe economic crisis facing Lebanon is part of an economic war directed against it.
This preparedness appeared in the party’s unprecedented military build-up south of the Litani River, as monitored by some media professionals, and its increasing boldness in targeting the occupation settlers in the north, as in the Megiddo operation in March 2023.
These data reinforced the hypothesis of the party’s early involvement in the clash with Israel, which may impose a pressing reality on the occupation and force it to stop the war according to a new balance of deterrence and better political conditions for the Palestinian and Lebanese parties.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Muhammad Al-Deif, sought to increase the chances of this scenario being realized by publicly calling on the axis of resistance and the entire Arab and Islamic nation to seize the opportunity of confusing the occupation on the morning of October 7 and attack it with the maximum force that could pose an existential threat to it.
But the scale of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation surprised Hezbollah, as it surprised others, and the ceiling of escalation it wanted did not reach this level, which prompted it to be content with partial support for the Gaza front, in order to avoid a comprehensive war. But that didn’t work either; The occupation returned to intensifying the pressure on it after it weakened the Gaza front – which it had been able to focus on for nearly an entire year – and the decline in the chances of achieving political goals that meet the extremist demands of the occupation government regarding the Strip.
As for popular action, the occupation, the Palestinian Authority, and many Arab regimes benefited from previous experiences of the popular movement. They created an environment that hindered popular influence, and diligently applied the lessons learned before and during this round, and this was evident in matters including:
- Proactive legal and security work.
- Absorbing popular anger by creating false optimism pushes people into watching instead of taking action.
- And distorting popular awareness by flooding the media with false information and anti-resistance ideas.
- Provoking social divisions and intimidating components of the people from each other.
- And to win over the people or some of their elites by providing economic incentives or bribes.
These tactics actually contributed to the decline in the level of popular action rejecting the Israeli aggression and in solidarity with the Gaza Strip.
In general, the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was a violent rebellion against the occupation’s efforts to liquidate the Palestinian cause and forcefully integrate the Strip into a system that coexists with it, both security and economically.
While the operation succeeded in changing the direction of regional policy, and imposed a costly reality on the occupation, the cost was also high on the people of the Gaza Strip, due to the level of Western collusion with the occupying state, and the state of official and popular impotence in all Arab and Islamic countries, especially those neighboring Palestine.
But the demise of any occupation cannot be expected without suffering severe pain, to which it usually responds by punishing the people under occupation. While it is not possible to predict when resistance action will end the occupier’s ability to survive, the continuation of this action is the inevitable path to bringing the occupation to this state.
