Read on Twitter
One big takeaway from the gut-wrenching events of the past few days: Everyone got Hamas wrong. Israeli strategic planners got it wrong, incl many hard-liners. America got them wrong. Experts got them wrong. *I* got them wrong...
The widely-held conventional wisdom in both Washington and Jerusalem was that Hamas was strongly ideological but inevitably pragmatic, and cared about retaining its infrastructure and domain in Gaza more than it cared about killing Jews
The Israeli security establishment viewed Hamas rockets as a tactical threat, far more mild than the strategic-level threat looming in the north. And Hamas was an address, a phone number they could call. The IDF had to coordinate w/Hamas on a daily basis...
In Washington, Hamas was viewed as a not-unreasonable extension of a movement that respectable opinion viewed as inherently democratizing and even quasi-liberal: The Muslim Brotherhood. That view was held sincerely, out of actual principle. But,
it was also lubricated by one of Hamas's state allies, Qatar, who in addition to cultivating deep ties at blue-chip elite opinion mills like Brookings and the Washington Post also happens to be a "close US ally" and the site of a major US military base
People like me, meanwhile, went to the Gaza Strip, spent a couple days looking around, interviewed people, and decided, eh, these guys are awful, but maybe they're not psychopaths. The AP apparently had an office in a bldg that contianed a Hamas command and control post!...
NGOs employed Hamas members, who were used to ciphon off aid and generally corrupt the international infrastructure in the Strip. This was all undertaken based on the delusion these people weren't Al Qaeda or ISIS but some more ambiguous category of less-bad bad guy
Everyone was wrong. *Everyone.* It might be the single worse misassessment in the entire history of this conflict. The wrongness is vast enough that people must reckon with it—understand what it means, reflect on what it says about reality.
A related issue, btw, is that as most ppl who have visited or worked on the Gaza border know, the "blockade" was largely fake. Yes there is a naval cordon, but hundreds of trucks were allowed in each day—w/the Israeli understanding Hamas would get a cut of whatever got in!
The Strip got its electricty from Israel, meaning Hamas could stockpile generators, fuel etc for war. In recent months, Gazans who got foreign visas were allowed to use the airport in Eilat. All these policies were based on the idea this slaughter wouldn't or couldn't happen
But it did happen. The worst slaughter in Israel's history wasn't done by the Egyptian army or the Arab Legion or Hezbollah or ISIS or whatever. It was done by a group that 30 years of strategic thinkers across the entire western bloc had more or less kashered
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
