How not to let Hamas win 

Let’s clear up a misconception. 

With increasing frequency since the Hamas terror attacks, we hear and are heartened by statements that Israel has the “right” to defend itself. But the premise misleads. A right confers optionality: One can choose whether or not to exercise it. Israel has not the right but the paramount responsibility to defend its citizens from invasion, abduction, annihilation, reported beheadings. The very foundation of nationhood requires, first and foremost, that responsibility. Any nation that abdicates that responsibility might as well not exist. 

Which brings us to the fundamental issue that drives today’s conflict in Israel and Gaza: Israel’s existence. It’s not about the grievance of so-called occupation (as I pointed out in my recent essay in The Hill, Israel unilaterally and unconditionally left the Gaza Strip in 2005 in the hopes that Gaza would be an exporter of agriculture, not violence). No, this is about a hateful worldview that Jews have no right to govern their historic lands. The preamble of the Hamas charter is an admission: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

It was echoed in chants at recent pro-Hamas rallies in New York City and elsewhere: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” And where in that scenario, in a land dominated by groups that murder and kill Jewish babies, will any Jew ever feel free? 

In recent months, the existential threat to Hamas’s mission to end Israel’s existence has been more Arab nations officially recognizing that very existence. The Biden administration has been working on expanding the successful Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia. Normalization, diplomacy, trade and recognition confer permanence, legitimacy, borders. Hamas cannot live with Israel; it can’t even live with Arab governments living with Israel. Its strategic imperative is not only to kill Jews, but to strangle normalization between a Jewish state and the Arab world.

Hamas’s current strategy is built on an irony: counting on Israel’s responsibility to retaliate, to free Israeli and other hostages, to destroy nests of terrorists by whatever means necessary. The more damage, Hamas calculates, the better, particularly collateral damage among civilians it uses as human shields, in hospitals and mosques. This is not only a potential military ambush, but also a propaganda ambush.

Hamas is betting that the resulting images on social media and television will incite the Arab street, weakening if not unraveling the Abraham Accords; putting more pressure on Saudi Arabia to keep its distance; triggering Hamas’s allies in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere to join the conflagration.

Have we not been here before? The world expresses its revulsion when terrorists strike Israel, then turns against Israel when it responds. It’s just a matter of time; it’s like a 75-year television rerun.

It will take strength, imagination and the gritty tolerance of risk to deny Hamas that victory. Hard, but not impossible. 

First, America must continue to support Israel as it dismantles Hamas once and for all. Let Israel do the world, including the Arab world, a favor. Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. (and former deputy minister to Prime Minister Netanyahu) was correct when he said that President Biden’s speech this week was “the most passionately pro-Israel in history. Our people will always remember and cherish this speech and the man who delivered it.”

Now, American military assets and coordination will translate the words into deed. I can think of no more powerful tap on shoulders in places like Lebanon, Syria and Iran than a U.S. Navy Strike Group off the coast of Israel.

Second, rather than allowing Hamas to undermine the Abraham Accords, we must double down on them. Hamas threatens not just Israel, but the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank (with which it fought a civil war in 2007); its alignment with Iran threatens Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others. The time will come for a new coalition of Middle East nations to rebuild Gaza.

But it must be different than the failed model of the past. This time, responsible Arab governments have to proceed under the recognition that Gaza must be rebuilt not as a terrorist training base, but as a fit place for innocent Palestinians to live. This time, the Arab world has an opportunity to demonstrate to its own streets that Islamicist terror will bring them down, while normalcy and cooperation will build them back up. Those are the images that win hearts and minds.

I suspect you’re scoffing, slowly shaking your head at the idealism of it all. But constructive idealism is built on reality. At this very moment 50 years ago, Israel faced extinction after a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria. In those dark, painful days, who would have proposed, no less imagined, Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in search of peace, five years later?

Or this, more recent image: last Saturday night, the government of Germany lit the Brandenburg Gate, where Nazi banners once flew, in the colors of the Israeli flag. From the ashes of the Holocaust, the very pit of seemingly irredeemable evil, we brought the world to a new order. We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan; we built new coalitions and alliances that enforced a stable, enlightened global order. We brought the world so far from the depths that the colors of the Jewish state could bathe a structure that once stood as a symbol of Nazi pride and power.

There is always hope for the unimaginable. The only unimaginably bad outcome is a Hamas victory.

Steve Israel represented New York in the U.S. House of Representatives over eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. He is now director of the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy Institute of Politics and Global Affairs. Follow him @RepSteveIsrael.