Israel’s strategic game of survival

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s obscene call on the Senate floor on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ouster from power 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 plan for victory is a concerted political-military strategy.

Hamas, he said, knew that the Israeli Defense Forces would respond in force to its Oct. 7 assault on 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 approach. This has been the Palestinians’ strategy for defeating Israel since at least the 1982 First Lebanon War. In that conflict, the PLO relied on the United States to force Israel to permit the PLO to survive to fight another day, by leaving Lebanon for 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 it.

This goes double for military capabilities. Since 1973, Israel’s ability to keep its military operating during a war has been dependent on U.S. resupply. The Palestinians reason that if their many friends can convince Washington not to supply Israel with weapons in wartime, then their terrorist forces will survive.

Since all the Palestinian terrorists 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.

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