After two long years of war, the world waits with bated breath to see if the recently negotiated peace between Israel and Hamas will hold. Even so, any agreement that depends on Hamas negotiating in good faith must be tempered with a healthy dose of pessimism. At the same time, despite the lion’s share of the violence having occurred in Israel and Gaza, the conflict’s real strategic center of gravity revolved around Israel’s connections to the regional and international community. For all the horror of the October 7th attack, its true purpose was not to bring about just a day of antisemitic violence, something from which Israel would have emerged with far greater support in the international community, but rather to diplomatically and economically isolate Israel from the rest of the world. Ultimately, not only did Hamas fail to achieve this goal, but rather succeeded at destroying their own international networks of influence and support.
For decades, the Palestinian cause has served as a rallying cry across otherwise disparate Middle Eastern communities and as a justification for driving a wedge between Israel and its neighbors. Even the more moderate Arab nations have had to at least pay lip service to the anti-Zionist party line. Despite the fact Jordan had first recognized Israel in 1994 (the second Arab country to do so after Egypt in 1979), I can remember, on a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight in 2007, their map of the region labeled Israel as “the Zionist entity.” But during the first Trump administration, something changed. After decades of complicated relationships, ranging from outright animosity to indifference to undisclosed cooperation, many of the Arab nations began to consider the previously unthinkable: normalizing relations with Israel.
The Abraham Accords, a historic diplomatic achievement, established formal relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, with momentum building towards more Arab nations fully recognizing Israel’s legitimacy.
In early 2023, the Saudis were moving towards an overtly positive relationship with Israel. While the house of Saud had long cooperated with Israel under the radar against Iran, full normalization would have represented an unprecedented step forward for the Jewish state in its relations with its neighbors. Hamas recognized that Israel’s elevation from pariah to regional partner would be detrimental to its ability to fundraise while Tehran saw its ability to use Israel as a regional foil slipping away. Hamas and their Iranian backers, recognizing the threat posed by Israel’s warming relations with its neighbors, responded with a horrific attack intended to put Israeli-Arab relations on ice indefinitely. Put another way, Hamas leadership believed it was worth the slaughter of innocent Jews and the subsequent suffering of Gazans to keep their fundraising pipelines open. It was never about “the Palestinian people;” in fact, Hamas hoped for the deaths of as many Palestinians as possible to support their propaganda campaign.
Strategically, Israel’s connections to the outside world became the conflict’s critical point of leverage. If irregular warfare entails conflict between states and non-state actors, conflict between a state and pseudo-state, as in Gaza, might be considered irregular irregular warfare. In Andrew Mack’s 1975 article, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,” wherein he popularized the phrase “asymmetric warfare,” Mack posited that irregular forces disadvantaged in conventional combat power could still defeat a more powerful adversary by demoralizing its domestic constituents. Usually, this would mean driving up casualties to dampen the citizenry’s stomach for continuing the conflict—tactics famously utilized by the North Vietnamese and Mujahideen during the Cold War. Hamas, unable to cause many IDF or Israeli civilian casualties after October 7th, took this concept and adapted it. Instead of trying to cause Israeli domestic consensus for withdrawal, they attempted to create international pressure on Israel to accede to Hamas demands. In describing the indirect nature of irregular conflicts such as the war in Gaza, Dr. Gordon McCormack developed his “Magic Diamond” model in which the insurgents and counter-insurgents compete to sever the bonds between each other and the civilian population, but also the links to the international community.
By conducting a concerted information campaign in which they inflated civilian casualty reporting, misrepresented actual casualties and, in some cases, outright faked evidence to use on social media, Hamas attempted to create a narrative of a “genocide” against Gazans in order to solidify an international consensus against Israel. Again demonstrating the craven, debased nature of Hamas, this strategy relied upon and hoped for more civilian casualties to encourage condemnation of Israel—in many cases intentionally placing fighters and rockets in civilian population clusters to draw Israeli attacks. We need only survey the campuses of dozens of American universities to see how willing many were to be agents of this strategy.
While the conflict started over Israel’s international connections, and was fought with these connections as the center of gravity, these connections also led to the current cessation in hostilities—due in part, ironically, to Israeli overreach. With neither side able to compel a desired resolution, the war settled into a stalemate, with Israel continuing to strike Hamas leadership and fighters as they could and Hamas maintaining the threat over the Israeli hostages they held. But in September, one of Israel’s strikes against Hamas leadership took a different turn when they killed several Hamas negotiators in downtown Doha. While the targets themselves were legitimate, the location for the strike represented a major escalation, expanding the war to a country which saw itself as a neutral arbiter (a view that is quite debatable) and with whom the United States has a strong relationship. Qatar was outraged and looked to the U.S. to stand up for their territorial integrity. Counterintuitively, the Israeli overreach in striking Doha led to the U.S. providing security guarantees to the Qataris, which incentivized them to pressure Hamas and for Israel to agree to the ceasefire. The Israeli miscalculation created the leverage to end the fighting.
Today, after two years of war, Hamas’s position within Gaza has been diminished and Iran’s proxy network across the Middle East has been largely dismantled. Israel now has the opportunity to rebuild and maintain the regional relationships it had been developing, in no small part thanks to the diplomatic efforts of the United States. When one considers the actions of Hamas on October 7th, there is an obvious savagery and evil, but even more so when one considers the suffering Hamas caused just to impede Israel’s improving regional relations. Given the severity of their crimes, it is fitting that they not only failed to marginalize Israel diplomatically, but that they also brought about the almost-complete demise of Iran’s regional proxy network. And that, happily, presents the best opportunity for regional peace in generations.
