-Analysis-
PARIS — Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has declared that the elimination of the Islamist movement Hamas, which is the prime objective of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, would take “more than a few months.”
This is a statement that is highly political, seeing as he said it to Jake Sullivan, the White House National Security Advisor, who came to Israel on Thursday to discuss a time frame for ending the war. But at this point, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government does not want to hear anything about stopping the fighting without having won the war against Hamas, even though it has not really defined what it would consider a victory.
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Nevertheless, Gallant’s statement is the first public admission at a senior level that despite the unprecedented scale of Israeli bombings, despite nearly 20,000 deaths according to Palestinians, and more than 100 Israeli soldiers killed, Hamas is far from being defeated. This raises the question of whether eliminating Hamas is realistic goal — and at what cost.
What Palestinians think
A part of the answer to that question lies in the results of an opinion poll carried out by a Palestinian institute in the Occupied Territories. The poll carried out during the brief ceasefire in November, shows that support for Hamas among Palestinians has quadrupled in the West Bank to 48%. Contrary to popular belief, it has also risen in Gaza from 38% to 42%.
The accuracy of a poll conducted in a context of war and fear is without a doubt limited, but it does indicate a trend. Far from sparking condemnation, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, with its trail of atrocities and massive hostage-taking, is supported by the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories, albeit more so in the West bank than in Gaza.
Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas by military means alone is an illusion.
What this means, of course, is that the reading of events will depend on whether you are under the bombs or subject to the daily harassment of Israeli settlers and soldiers, or whether you are making a moral judgment.
What’s next?
What are the consequences? The first is Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas by military means alone is an illusion, and these figures confirm it. You cannot eliminate a political-military movement, with a religious base, simply with bombs. What it loses militarily, it gains politically, as all wars of counter-terrorism or insurrection have demonstrated.
The second is that one of the most difficult issues of the post-war period will be the political representation of the Palestinians. In this poll, Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority appears completely discredited.
This week, Abou Marzouk, a Hamas leader exiled in Doha, declared that the Islamist movement could join the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO formerly led by Yasser Arafat, in recognizing the existence of Israel. (Though he has since retracted the comment)
At this stage, everything is necessarily hypothetical, and above all, far removed from the reality of the situation in Gaza. Indeed on Thursday, CNN broadcast one of the rare Western reports from inside the decimated enclave. Their reporter described the visit inside Gaza as a “chilling, harrowing, and sobering” experience — an “absolute horror.”
