Caroline Glick: Israel’s strategic game of survival

Israel’s strategic game of survival

Caroline Glick

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s obscene call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ouster from power on the Senate floor on Thursday was the latest sign that Hamas’s strategy is working. On the “Caroline Glick Show” this week, U.S. Military Academy professor Col. John Spencer, who chairs West Point’s Urban Warfare Studies Program, explained that the terrorist organization’s goal for victory is a concerted political-military strategy.

Hamas, he said, knew that Israeli Defense Forces would respond with force to its Oct. 7 assault in southern Israel. “They wanted Israel’s counterattack, and then they wanted to hold in the tunnels and use the hostages just to buy time for the international community—namely, the United States—to stop the IDF in their operations.”

“Their only goal is to survive. … It’s all about time. They want to survive Israel’s attack against them, which gives them immense political power. If they survive in any way, they have strategically won the war,” said Spencer.

Hamas didn’t invent this strategy. This has been the Palestinians’ strategy for defeating Israel since at least the 1982 war in Lebanon. In that war, the PLO relied on the United States to force Israel to permit the PLO to survive to fight another day, by evacuating to Tunisia.

The Palestinians clearly identified Israel’s greatest strategic vulnerabilities and built their strategy around them. Its first vulnerability is its Jewishness. Israel is the Jew of the international community. As such, it is continuously scapegoated, just as Jews have been scapegoated throughout history. The United States is the only powerful nation that has ever been willing to stand up to international bigotry against the Jewish state. So the only thing needed to collapse Israel’s international position is for America to turn against Israel.

This goes double for military capabilities. Since 1973, Israel’s ability to maintain its war effort militarily has dependent on the U.S. resupply of arms during the course of war. By the Palestinians’ line of reasoning, if their many friends could convince Washington not to supply Israel with weapons in wartime, then they will survive.

Since all the Palestinians need to do to win is survive, their strategic aces in the hole are antisemitism and time.

Today, all aspects of U.S. policy regarding the Hamas war against Israel in Gaza and the larger Iranian-directed war to destroy the Jewish state are aligned with the Palestinian strategy.

The Biden administration’s insistence that Israel permit unlimited quantities of food, water, fuel, medicine and other goods to enter the Gaza Strip ensures that Hamas will maintain its control over the population.

America’s threats to end its military resupply to Israel has forced Israel to slow down its operations in Gaza in the interests of conserving munitions.

Biden’s demand that Israel not conquer Rafah—Hamas’s last conventional holdout, where a quarter of its forces and its military leadership are holed down—is a demand that Israel allow Hamas to survive with its leadership and that part of its army intact. In other words, it is a demand that Israel not only allow Hamas to survive, but that Israel permit Hamas to end the war with a victory parade.

Likewise, the administration’s obsessive focus on building a Palestinian state, which under all circumstances will be dominated by Hamas, with its opposition to continued Israeli military control over Gaza after the war indicates that not only is the administration opposed to an Israeli victory, but it seeks a Palestinian victory.

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