When Hamas militants launched that murderous Oct. 7 raid on Israeli settlements, the strategy was to escalate confrontation enough to bring regional and global forces into play, possibly forcing the extinction of the Jewish state. That was a long gamble.
Hamas leaders imagined that, even if they took casualties from an inevitable war with the Israeli Defense Forces, the quick spiral of violence would ring the powerful Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the various heavily armed militias in the region into a wider theater of conflict. The war would force Arab governments to make painful choices and draw leftist groups around the world into protest movements powerful enough to force western governments to alter their policies towards the region.
A long gamble, indeed. It reminds me of the extremely cynical mindset of Filipino Maoist leaders when they decided to bomb the opposition political rally at Plaza Miranda in 1971. They expected a chain of events to follow that will deliver a political windfall to the armed insurgency.
In the case of the Plaza Miranda bombing, the communists did force the Marcos I government to impose martial rule and mount a campaign of political repression. The Maoists thrived in the polarized politics of the authoritarian period.
Martial law forced the Muslim secessionists in Mindanao to escalate their own armed struggle. But the communist movement failed to get anywhere near seizing state power. Today, that movement is in its death throes.
In the Middle East, Israel’s forceful response to quash Hamas and rescue the hostages taken by the militants did reap some amount of condemnation from governments anxious over the mounting civilian toll. Leftist groups, as Hamas calculated, mounted protests against Israel. A few governments did condemn Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, considering the heavy human toll this exacted.
In the Middle East, however, the response was more tepid than Hamas calculated. The Houthi rebels in Yemen did attempt to fire cruise missiles at Israel. All of them were intercepted and destroyed.
Having failed in directly participating in the war because of distance, the Houthis shifted tactics to attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. A missile strike on a commercial vessel last week killed two Filipino crewmen and wounded several others.
Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea create a major nuisance. It has raised the costs of transported goods and forced navies from several countries to field warships to protect the trade routes. But Houthi activities will not define the outcomes of the conflict sparked by barbaric Hamas attacks.
The Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the various Iran-supported armed militias in Iraq and Syria disappointed the cynical calculations of Hamas leaders. They hedged their positions, undertook a number of attacks on US forces in the area, but generally avoided a possibly disastrous leap into war. Tehran itself hedged, fearful of being drawn into direct confrontation with US-led forces in the region.
For now, the worst fears of a full-scale regional war appears to have been avoided. Egypt and Jordan, contiguous to the zone of armed confrontation, chose the path of prudence. Syria and Iraq are too beset by internal turbulence to even consider venturing into a real war.
Last week, Jordan’s queen ventured to describe the situation in Gaza as a slow-motion mass murder. Her husband, the king, has been more circumspect. Recall that the Palestinian militants attempted a coup against the Jordanian monarchy that failed miserably. The Jordanians have little trust in the Palestinian radicals.
Besides, Jordan owes its survival as an independent political entity to Israel. If Israel did not exist nearby, little Jordan might have been gobbled up by Syria or Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
Although support for Hamas may be most vociferous among immigrant Arab communities and leftist groups, sympathizers are held back by the brutality of the Palestinian radicals. No one can deny the massacre executed by militants last October. Even the UN admitted compelling evidence of rape and murder committed by the Hamas on Israeli civilians. No one is enamored by the Hamas tactics of using kidnapped Israelis and Gazan civilians as human shields to protect their armed units.
Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups want nothing less than the complete eradication of the Jewish state. That goal requires some serious distortion of historical facts. For thousands of years, until the Diaspora happened, the area was populated by Jewish tribes and ruled by Jewish kings.
In contrast, many of what we now call the Palestinians were more recent migrants from tribes in what is now Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria. Their residence in the area is much more recent.
When the UN proposed a two-state solution in 1947, Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan. Then they mounted a campaign of terror, involving hijacking of international flights, bombings and, finally, the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
Armed Palestinian militias tried to overthrow the monarchy in Jordan in 1970. In 1975, Palestinian radicals ignited a civil war in Lebanon that led to permanent occupation of parts of that country by groups such as the Hezbollah. When more reasonable Palestinian leaders accepted the Camp David Accords in 2000, the radicals rejected coexistence. They celebrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US.
It will be hard to bring global opinion to the side of Palestinian radicals. This explains why the conflict has so far been contained.