It’s also just stupid. What were Hamas’s (and, if The Wall Street Journal’s reporting holds up, Iran’s) war aims? Peter Krause, a political scientist at Boston College, told The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher that Hamas’s goal was to terrorize Israel, provoke a disproportionate reaction, and thereby scuttle the official normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The first two parts of this game plan resemble what al Qaeda envisioned on 9/11. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the slaughter of 2,977 civilians, did indeed terrorize the United States and prompt a disproportionate—and, for al Qaeda, ruinous—military response. The United States ended up lingering in Afghanistan nearly 20 years after al Qaeda was defeated at Tora Bora (largely, it turned out, by Afghan troops). The United States also ended up waging, for no apparent reason, an eight-year war against Iraq. This was all somewhat traumatic for the United States, but it never advanced, by so much as an inch, al Qaeda’s stated goal of eliminating western influence over the Islamic world.
It’s inevitable that Israel’s response to terror, much like that of the United States after 9/11, will be disproportionate. But as was true for al Qaeda and the United States, the resultant harm will be far greater to Hamas than to Israel. And while Israel will likely be condemned internationally for the collateral damage it inflicts on Palestinians as it roots out Hamas, the jury’s still out on whether that will outweigh international outrage over Hamas’s Manson Family-like tactics.