The Dangerous Fantasy of Destroying Hamas

These snatches of Prophetic Vision sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with each other. For not even prophetic vision can adequately express the Infinite ways to seek deep healing and justice inherent in the Breath of life. 

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Robert Brand is a Senior Fellow at The Shalom Center with work specializing in the climate crisis and defense of democracy. He also has a decades long commitment to peace, justice and democracy in Israel and Palestine. He served on the Board of Americans for Peace Now from 1991 to 2002 and was Vice President of the Board from 1995 to 1997. He also worked on the business plan development of a major environmental initiative for Palestine from 1994 to 2000. His client was a Palestinian and Palestinian American corporation. In that position he spent considerable time in Israel and Palestine, including Gaza when there was a hope and expectation of peace and mutual security. This analysis is one of an array of prophetic visions that take different stances. None is necessarily the defining stance of The Shalom Center.
— AW, ed.

The Dangerous Fantasy Of Destroying Hamas

by Robert Brand

The talk of eliminating Hamas may just be whistling in the graveyard or a function of rage and anger. Whatever it is, such talk is fantasy, but a fantasy that escalates tension and death between Palestine and Israel and further delays the inevitable process of neighbors figuring out how to live together.

Peace, or non-belligerence, is made between former enemies who have often done awful things to one another. Peace is far more likely to succeed in ending warfare than repeated failed campaigns to destroy Hamas or Israel or Palestine.

Hamas is not a single military formation. In fact Hamas is three separate groupings. There is a military wing which operates in a semiautonomous fashion, sometimes with official authorization and sometimes on its own. Estimates of its size vary. Its leadership is dispersed geographically and it seems to have a depth of trained people able to step in and continue their work when leaders are killed.

Hamas is also a government. It is a very unpopular government in Gaza. It won only 27% of the vote some 17 years ago. Hamas then drove the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza and hasn’t had an election since. However, as a government it collects taxes, provides schools, health centers, and arranges a range of public services. It therefore has offices all over Gaza much as you would expect in a dense urban environment of more than 2 million people.

Most important Hamas is a political ideology. It is a movement which at its core is a very conservative Muslim fundamentalist movement. As part of their belief system they see Israel as a settler nation which came into being because the Europeans and the West wanted to offload the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. They choose to ignore the entire 20th century Zionist movement and the existential fact of 9 million Israeli citizens, their neighbors.

Given the complexity of Hamas' military power, Israel cannot destroy it. Military power can destroy part of the military wing of Hamas. But, such destruction involves attacking the extensive tunnel network built over densely populated areas over several decades. So far, this strategy has destroyed 100,000 units of housing, killed more than 15,000 Gaza civilians, nearly half of whom are children, and displaced 1 million residents of Gaza.

At the same time most of the hostages remain hostage, settler violence on the West Bank has killed more than 100 Palestinians, hundreds of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis have been arrested for social postings critical of Israel’s war, and 1,100 Palestinians remain under administrative detention in Israel with no charges filed against them. And most of the leadership of Hamas is not even in Gaza.

The government structure of Hamas has always been weak and often corrupt. It can be made much weaker and much more corrupt. But the day after the fighting ceases there will have to be some government in Gaza to pick up the pieces. The Netanyahu government pretends there is a solution to this problem, but the reality is no one wants to be the occupying force that comes in after such massive destruction, especially an occupying force that will basically be under the tutelage of the Israeli occupation. Nothing will move in Gaza without Israeli permission, except that we have seen for decades that the infrastructure to make war gets through Israeli security. We should also remember that this is not the first time that Israel pledged to destroy Hamas. Such destruction is at most temporary. And let us remember, "at most" here means a huge cost in human lives. 

If there is hope, it is that Israel will accept the challenge of engaging Hamas as the political and ideological movement that it is. Israel has substantial experience in engaging Hamas. Israel preferred dealing with Hamas to dealing with the Palestine Liberation Organization and other secular leftist Palestinian formations and from time to time engaged with Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority and the secular left within the Palestinian movement. There are a range of Israeli and Palestinian scholars and political activists who have charted how Palestinians and Israelis can coexist. The parties do not have to love one another to coexist. However, they do have to understand that to exist in peace and security they must coexist. This means dealing with the individual and collective trauma of the October 7 attack, the rocket barrages from Gaza to Israel, the decades of occupation on the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, and the current Israeli war. All must be dealt with. There is no easy way to do this. But it is certainly easier than escalating violence, war crimes committed on both sides, and the mounting death toll and destruction that seems to know no end.

This will be difficult because hard liners seem to be in charge on both sides. In Palestine, the October 7 attack showed that Israel is not invincible. In Israel, an extreme right-wing government is in power. For Netanyahu, keeping himself in power keeps him out of prison for various corruption offenses. For the government, there is an opportunity to simply annex the West Bank to create a greater Israel. By making Gaza uninhabitable they can dispossess the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank while the Gazan Palestinians become yet again wandering refugees. This would be another Nakba on a larger scale.

What is needed now is political will and moral courage. First the cease-fire. Accompanying the cease-fire must be the release of hostages and the release of Palestinian prisoners. Then a commitment to ongoing, continuous talk. The first effort may fail. The second effort may fail. The process should be continuous, day after day. Eventually a glimmer of mutual interest can be built upon. This process may take years, but it will be years of peace.

Political will and moral courage come from below. People in Palestine and Israel must demand this and then create leaders who will make this their life’s work. The international community, especially those in the Palestinian and Jewish diaspora, must push their communities to demand political will and moral courage.

To those who think this sounds naïve, let me remind us all that the alternative is barbarism, mass murder, repeated escalating conflict in and decades of insecurity. We must all prefer a naïveté that may bring peace.

Upper: Destroyed building in Israel. October 7, 2023. Lower: Destroyed building in Gaza. October 8, 2023. Public domain.