and Their Strategies:

By; Victor Davis Hanson

Part One: the Terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah

November 7, 2023

Hamas

Hamas was quite clever in lying to the IDF, Mossad, and the Israeli government that it was finally resigned to fostering its internal development. Its guest workers inside Israel—sometimes 20,000 a day—supposedly were emissaries of goodwill and would spike prosperity in Gaza. Hamas talked of its rivalries with the Palestinian Authority and for a bit quelled its eliminationist rhetoric—as if it was useful to Israel to play off Hamas against Abbas and the West Bank. Again, all a clever ruse as it crafted a plan to kill more Jews in any one day since the Holocaust.

So meanwhile for a year, Hamas planned and trained, likely with the Iranians, to stage a mass-murder raid into Israel—at peace, during the holidays, early in the dark of morning, and ironically to be staged 50 years almost to the date after the similar surprise attack on Israel that had started the Yom Kippur War. Hamas in other words would then brag it had done more damage to Israel in a single day than any other terrorist organization in history.

So the overall killing strategy of Hamas was clear enough. Send 2,000 gunmen through the wall, via the air, and at sea to murder unarmed Jewish civilians, and butcher and mutilate them to such a savage degree that the murderers would either so shock the Israelis by their inhumanity that the Israelis would be stunned into concessions, or the inhuman butchery would at least suggest to the world that only premodern people so oppressed could be capable of such animal-like cruelty. That is, the world would eventually blame Israel for reducing Palestinians to such a state of bestial despair.

Then the Hamas killers and their tag-along opportunistic civilian counterparts would retreat with Israeli captives, the more elderly, young, and vulnerable the better. So the second part of the strategy was to leave the mutilated behind, get safely back to subterranean Gaza to hide the captives in their network of tunnels, and then either use them as shields to deflect retaliations or to swap some children and women for Hamas killers jailed in Israel or threaten to kill them all unless the IDF relented and stood down—or all that and more.

In the unhinged Hamas mind, a stunned Israel would become so demoralized that it could xerox the murderous sprees a “million times” over until Israel was judenrein, “from the river to the sea.”

As a fallback position, if the IDF did go medieval on Hamas, then a Hamas in hiding planned to double down on its use of Israeli captives and its Palestinian human shields in hopes of greater collateral damage: show the corpses on live TV and Western campuses worldwide erupt in protest to pressure Joe Biden to call off the IDF (cf. his tepid record on the world stage since January 2021).

Biden perhaps worried about the small, but decisive, Arab vote in a purple state like Michigan, and himself inherently weak, would then pressure Israel to “pause” and “get over” their dead and not “turn the world against” them.

Barring even that, if Hamas still could not stop the Israeli response, if world opinion did not bolster the Hamas cause, then there was always Iran and Hezbollah that could up their surrogates’ attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria to demoralize a post-Kabul American military command.

Or at least that seems the current strategy, without much Hamas consideration that it may have sorely miscalculated. Their satanic brutality is galvanizing Israel and its supporters abroad to unchecked defiance and a steely determination to wipe out Hamas.

Hezbollah

Hezbollah runs Lebanon and has far more men and materiel at its disposal than does Hamas. It may have more short-range, guided rockets on hand than any force in the world. And more importantly, as a Shiite terrorist organization, Hezbollah is far closer to the reptilian brain of it all, Iran.

So as far as Hezbollah’s role: It watches and waits, blusters then denies, shoots rockets then stops, threatens then backs off, always trying to thread the needle to save its Islamic point-of-the-spear street credentials while not getting into an existential war with either Israel (cf. Beirut ca. 2006) or the U.S. Sixth and Fifth Fleets.

Yet if Israel soon ends Hamas beneath Gaza City, Hezbollah will likely keep out of the war on the rationale that an Israeli (or U.S.) response would treat Beirut to something even greater than its last conflagration of 2006.

But if Israel is forced to pause or hesitates, Hamas regroups, the media runs 24/7 with the Palestinian collateral damage videos, October 7 becomes a distant memory, the campuses and Western streets heat up, then Hezbollah may up their rockets into Israel, on the theory Israel is now shackled, the West is neutered, and there may not be a strong enough response to stop its showers of rockets on Tel Aviv.

Hezbollah could also launch 50,000 nocturnal rockets at the American carrier group off its coast; it will not, of course, unless it concludes that the U.S. is stuck permanently into the inert Kabul/Chinese balloon mode and would not retaliate to a hit on its assets.

In sum, Hezbollah sees an opportunity: its Sunni rivals in Hamas will do the dying, it will claim it relieved pressure off Hamas by lobbing daily rockets into Israel, but not enough to prompt a war that might level Beirut.

Part Two: Iran and the Arab World

November 8, 2023

Iran

Iran believes in defense-in-depth. Such a strategy puts its well-armed pawns Hezbollah and Hamas on the front lines as a buffer between Tehran and the infidels: the Arabs take the risk and casualties, and the Iranians thereby hope they inflict some damage on Israel or the U.S. while avoiding a deadly Western response on the Iranian homeland.

Iran relies on deniability of culpability—supply surrogates, egg them on to war on the West and Israel, and then in passive-aggressive fashion claim credit for empowering the Arab terrorists, but not to the degree they confess Iran is the catalyst for the entire Middle East mess.

Tehran arms the enemies of the moderate Arab regimes, Israel, and the U.S. to the teeth, by reassuring a clueless Biden administration, or any such prior administration, that it wants “peace” through an Iran deal—to rake in billions of dollars in sanction relief, ransom money, and increased trade with China and Russia.

The general idea is to hold off the U.S. and Israel long enough until Iran can ensure an arsenal of 10-15 nuclear weapons to ensure deterrence for itself and its surrogates—or if in the mood of Armageddon to hit a one-bomb Israel. The Iranian role, again, is to cause endless turmoil throughout the Middle East and insidiously erode Israel or destroy it.

As far as the U.S. goes, Iran believes its own expatriate and American idiot communities—an ex-ambassador from Iran as an American professor, pro-Iranian operatives burrowed into the Pentagon, slick apologists like Robert Malley fashioning U.S. appeasement of Iran, and useful idiots like John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, and Barack Obama—will ensure America never fully responds to Iran-backed terrorists’ enervating attacks on U.S. troops.

Over the long term, Iran thinks its strategies will work. Israel has never been more surrounded by superbly armed terrorist forces. The American administration has never been more dispirited and ready to pack it in, as it is terrified of a trifecta war in Ukraine, over Taiwan, and with Iran. Moderate Arab regimes have never been more fearful of insidious Shiite uprisings among their own volatile populations, the pressure of Iran’s satellites, and a fickle America.

The Arab Middle East

Egypt, Jordan, some of the North African states, and most of the Gulf monarchies have lots of fears: over Iran, their own volatile radical Islamists and Shiite minorities, any bullying role of big powers coming into the region and getting them dragged into some sort of Operation Iraqi Freedom misadventure—and one another.

Their real interests: see Hezbollah defanged and broken up, Hamas destroyed, and Iranian theocracy either neutered, overthrown, or denuclearized, and the U.S.—not China and Russia—still the eternal robust protector of the Persian Gulf, the sea lanes, and international trade to and from the region.

Of course, the Arab “moderate” regimes always make it clear to both Israel and the U.S. that: 

1) they will damn Israel and slur the U.S. publicly anytime there is a war in the Middle East and especially when the Arabs are losing or taking casualties—and in most cases such public invective is understood by Westerners to be ignored; 

2) they will be loyal and helpful allies of the status quo as long as they are not asked to be point nations or ahead of events; and 

3) they cannot afford to take seriously what Israel or the United States says they are going to do to radical Sunni Islamists or Iran and its Shiite surrogates because they do not wish to be left out on the pro-Western limb only to have it sawed off by a tepid administration or an equivocating mood in Israel.

Translated that means that most of the Arab Middle East wishes Hamas and Hezbollah and for that matter theocratic Iran to be destroyed. But they are terrified that if they overtly side with such agendas, then an unexpected change in government in the U.S., European timidity, or sudden American self-righteous idealism can result in the withdrawal of Westernized forces out of the theater, leaving themselves facing an angry, get-even nuclear Iran and Iran-backed terrorist rockets.