“This business of destroying Hamas, making Hamas disappear- it’s simply throwing sand in the eyes of the public. Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party- anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”
These recent words from IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari echoed the conventional wisdom that Hamas cannot be defeated. After all, Hamas is an idea more than a physical body, an abstraction that can’t be bombed or conquered out of existence as a physical entity can.
While Hamas as an entity with control over territory and military capabilities can of course be destroyed, I wish to also challenge the notion that an idea cannot be defeated. History is practically a graveyard of ideas, from heliocentrism to anarcho-syndicalism; ideas that have been disproven and abandoned – in other words, defeated.
To pretend that we are beyond the historic stage of flawed, disprovable, detestable ideas, that we are at the Fukuyamean “end of history” – the end of historical ideological conflict – that we have reached the peak of human civilization, creativity, and experience, is a kind of chauvinism of time that will quickly see one left behind by a history that still persists and moves forwards.
Hamas the idea, like the ideas of Pan-Arabism or Labor Zionism that just decades ago were dominant in this region, can be defeated.
The practical ideology of Hamas is rooted in the anti-colonial model. For Hamas, Zionism is but a modern Crusade, foreign and disparate co-religionists from Europe claiming Palestine based on a desire to exploit its resources. Thus, Hamas seeks to raise the price of exploitation above its benefits so that the Zionists will run back to wherever they came from and the State of Israel will collapse.
It is exactly this that Hamas credits as the reason for Israel’s 2005 Disengagement from the Gaza region. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder and leader of Hamas, said in 2005:
“The Israelis didn’t leave this area because of goodwill, it wasn’t a gift from [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon to the Palestinian people. They left because they suffered too much.”
From the perspective of Hamas, Israel came and stayed in Gaza to exploit the strip as a security buffer. Through acts of violence, Hamas made the cost of this security buffer greater than the security benefits of remaining in Gaza, and thus the Israelis retreated on their own volition.
To defeat Hamas the idea, we must show them that this is a false equation. Although possessing Gaza is clearly necessary for Israel’s security, we should not be in the strip merely to be safe or to squat. Our desire to be in Gaza – like our desire to be in the entire land – is because this it’s part of the land of our ancestors, the land we have called home for three millennia, an inseparable part of our identity no different than our blood, our bones, our collective history, and our Torah.
We are not here in this land to exploit her. She is our soulmate and we are here for the sake of being here. Not for material benefit benefit because we are this land. No cost, no amount of October 7s, no number of military reservists ripped from their lives to go to battle, no number of economic sanctions or diplomatic reprimands can move us from this land.
The more Israelis think and behave like colonizers, the stronger the idea of Hamas will remain. The behaviors and attitudes of Israel’s westernized elites, who treat our homeland as negotiable real estate and our neighbors as “savages” to be controlled, have actually strengthened and encouraged Hamas. But acting like we truly belong here, fostering an unbreakable loyalty to ever inch of this land and behaving justly towards its Palestinian population, can actually succeed at suffocating the Hamas ideology to death.
In short, to defeat Hamas we must reverse the 2005 Disengagement – Hamas’s greatest ideological vindication. To defeat Hamas the idea, we must return to Gaza and restore it as part of our country. Precisely because it is dangerous and internationally unpopular, we must rebuild the Jewish communities US President George W. Bush forced Sharon to destroy – to demonstrate that there is no cost we are not willing to pay for this land. In addition, we must – from a place of confidence and strength – take responsibility for our country’s non-Jewish population and offer the Palestinians a better life with us by pursuing policies that show them a path to a better future that doesn’t involve fighting us.
When Hamas sees their understanding of Israel disproven and broken and realize that their beloved martyrs died in vain, that no cost they inflict on us will force us to turn and walk away, you will see Hamas go the way of the Plum Pudding Model.
