It just seems crazy to me given the power imbalance. A cynical part of me suspects that things are playing out exactly as some evil strategists hoped they would, which, given all the children dying, is super-depressing.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh
In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.
Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.
Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don’t talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.
I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty
That’s one of the most reasonable responses to this madness I’ve seen recently.
Far too many people are out there demanding instant information with 100% accuracy and crying conspiracy when they can’t get their impossible wish.
Thank you for the video and the thoughtful response!
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever.
This is what we’ve all been thinking about Russia/Putin’s government too. With tons of friends and family in Russia and Ukraine we are still at a loss what exactly the idea/projected outcome/strategy/expectation was to start that war. I hear a lot of armchair experts and amateur war psychologists trying to explain it away like it is obvious but it just isn’t. It feels like there are a bunch of clues and pieces of a puzzle mixed in with random puzzle pieces that don’t belong to what you are trying to assemble, and it is unclear whether we will ever truly understand it sometime in the future.
Interesting watch, got a new subscriber from that one. Much appreciated.
Great video and summary! Love that channel.
But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.
I’ve looked at an interview with an Israeli political sciences professor yesterday, that went something like this:
- Professor: “…and this is why countries like Israel have the right to defend themselves”
- Host: “Right. What about the Pales…”
- Professor: “That’s not an issue”
- Host: “There are civilian…”
- Professor: “Israeli civilians have been harmed and we need to respond”
- Host: “Is the response proportion…”
- Professor: “Respond to destroy the terrorists”
- Host: “It seems like Gaza population is…”
- Professor: “Gaza is Israel, there is no population, we need to rid it of terrorists”
As an onlooker, I’d say that is a FREAKING HUGE and obvious “friction”, when one side denies the existence of the other.
You’re making statements about sides based off what some unnamed “Israeli professor” allegedly said. Okay.
False.
My statement is about the relationship between sides, in reference to part of the previous comment, illustrated by what I recalled of a recent event, and how it ties into it.
If you want similar examples from different sides, you’ll find plenty of them both these days and throughout history, I just happened to recall this one.
Hostages are variables that Hamas controls and Israel must respect. They can be used as chips to barter with, shields to hide behind, and tools to shame the Israelis in the court of public opinion.
All fair points. They hardly needed to shame Israel in the court of public opinion, though. The hard-right faction who control their government have proven quite adept at shaming themselves with no outside help.
NB: I said Israel the country. Not Israelis the people.
The idea behind most terrorism is that a weaker opponent provokes a larger, more powerful one into making a political/strategic mistake.
For example, 9/11 wasn’t about knocking down some towers, it was about getting the US entangled in a foreign war with boots on the ground.
For this attack, when Israel invades gaza with armour and soldiers, a LOT of people on both sides will die. Every dead gazan will be a martyr, every dead Israeli solider is, well a dead Israeli. Maybe that retribution becomes too much for the international community, maybe the scenes that will inevitably come from gaza will ignite the Arab world etc.
I think this might be giving the attackers too much credit for strategy. Don’t discount the simple religious aspect: don’t make the mistake of refusing to believe that devout religious people don’t actually believe their own religion.
Take ISIS. A whole lot of their actions made almost no sense, from a strategic point of view: picking fights with everybody, massacring civilians instead of letting them flee, destroying ancient artifacts (instead of either preserving or selling them) if you omit the simple explanation of religion. They wanted to trigger the final, apocalyptic battle that would usher in the end of the world. They said exactly that in their social media videos, but we secular atheists (or non-devout believers) just kinda skipped over that detail.
Things aren’t as clearly religious in the case of the Palestinians, but probably plays some role. Same with the Israeli Right, and the American Right with their unconditional support for Israel. We shouldn’t ignore the impact of religious belief.
I think was essentially a recruitment drive. Provoke Israel to attack, then sign up all the desperate Palestinians with recent losses
This is just my opinion but, given terrorist organisations are militarily usually much poorer/smaller/weaker than the group they stand against, they need help from outside.
One way to possibly achieve that is to do something awful to provoke your opposition into a retaliation so indiscriminate and horrifying that your ideological (if not literal) allies in the surrounding area step in to attack your enemy.
Which is exactly what’s happening. Hezbollah and Iran are threatening to get involved if Israel goes through with the ground invasion
Their objective was to provoke this response from Israel. Hostages really force Israel to act immediately.
Wouldn’t it be the other way around ? Hostage means that you nced to open some negociation for their release. And that a military intervention would put them at risk.
Israel used to do prisonner exchanges,
That’s not what’s happening though.
Regardless, hostages require at least negotiation. They could execute a few hostages to provoke israel further.
I’ve heard it suggested that they didn’t expect to get as far as they did into Israel and they barely expected to get past the border wall. If that’s the case they may not have planned what to do when they did and so there may be no grand strategy behind some or all of it.
I guess we’ll never know.
It’s an hypothesis only.
But I think the important matter were the foreign ostages, especially from Europe and USA, because those countries do a lot to recover them, including paying big money.
I wondered why Israel didn’t attack the weekend they said they would attack. They gave an ultimatum, but didn’t act on it. One possibility is that the USA and Europe wanted to try to recover their ostages first.
When did the US pay big money to a terrorist organization to release hostages?
The US never negotiates with “terrorists”, they fund “freedom fighters” to kill the terrorists and maybe recover some of the hostages.
Hamas likely wanted to force a confrontation in order to make it abundantly clear who’s paying for which “freedom fighters”… even if everyone knew for a long time, did very little about it, and is likely to do very little more either way.
Last time it worked, they got over a thousand prisoners for one soldier.
Taking hostages was the one thing about the entire attack that made some logical sense.
The murdering, on the other hand… that guaranteed a violent response, and doing it in the most brutal way possible and then filming it and bragging about it ensured that Palestine lost most sympanties, and Israel basically got a free pass to do whatever they wanted.
I wouldn’t say that Israel is getting a free pass, but they sure as hell have a casus belli now, and they’re getting as much mileage out of it as they possibly can.
They’ve killed dozens of journalists and even the family of a journalist. That family was staying in a building that was marked safe by the IDF for exactly these kinds of people. The US didnt let Saudi Arabia live down the bonesaw incident for years, have you heard any ranking politician in the US speak about the press slaughter? To me it seems a lot like a free pass.
I think they expected to swap the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, since they’ve done it before.
As always, motives vary heavily. I think many people have raised great points, and no doubt many of them are accurate enough.
It’s the same for Israel, too, right? I would imagine a two state solution is the only reasonable exit strategy, and Israel could make that happen overnight, but they haven’t. Why? Again, motives vary heavily.
Israel proposed/accepted/was in favor of two state solution multiple times throughout history. It was Palestinians who rejected it.
I’m sorry but this is simply not correct. Some people in the Israeli government in the past have agreed to a 2-state solution, but extremist Israelis kept revolting. Yitzhak Rabim was literally assassinated by an extremist Israeli for signing and supporting the Oslo accords.
Most Israelis and Arabs recognize the need for a 2 state solution, but the Israeli government is not on board right now. And whoever makes any kind of moves in that direction gets pushed out pretty quickly.
It’s not right now, that’s true. Both sides are moving more extreme and away from a peaceful solution. But historically Arabs were far less open to the idea of two state solution. Starting with the partition plan of 1947.
Citation needed
Wikipedia has pretty detailed account of Israel Palestine conflict including all the sources
Israel is killing us slowly and quietly and the world is ignoring it. Maybe if they’re provoked into revealing themselves to the world we’ll be seen.
That’s something I hadn’t thought of.
I don’t think Hamas had a long term goal here. I think Iran had the long term goal and shared intel with them and goaded the on to the attack. That’s not to excuse anything or one, but in terms of startegy and blowback, I think Irans the one whos counting on that, and Israel is providing it. So all in all I’d say Iran got what they wanted and we’re gonna see what they choose to do next.
Most death are civilians while Hamas getting stronger every year.
Well if you target Hamas but bomb an innocent family of five killing three, you probably just made two new Hamas members. Especially if the parents didn’t survive, they know exactly whos gonna ‘take care’ of those orphaned kids.
Since Iran is standing in the background, we have no idea how many Shahed drones are standing by when they come in.
I’m guessing they though they could use hostages to prevent Israel from just bombing everything and everyone in Gaza as revenge and possibly also trade for something. Too bad Israel gave no shit about hostages and are just bombing everyone anyways, hostages or not.
