Hamas aims to win by losing, sacrificing civilians to gain sympathy
The perverse martyrdom strategy of Israel haters is a unique approach to warfare that has enjoyed some success.
Melbourne-based supporters of Hamas, the Palestinian jihadist organisation, have engaged in puzzling acts of aggression since October 7, 2023.
Why did they break into the University of Melbourne’s main library, cause damage on many floors and destroy expensive book-scanning equipment? Why injure 24 police officers with rocks, acid and manure outside a defence exposition? Why invade a Starbucks store, chant anti-Israel slogans, steal merchandise and spit on a barista?
Similar behaviour raises questions elsewhere; for example, in the US. Why shout “Shame!” at children being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York City for “complicity in genocide”? Why attack a McDonald’s restaurant for making “meals for genocide”? Why deface the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC?
None of these activities targets Jews or Israel; rather, they antagonise the general public. What motivates them? How can such anti-social behaviour possibly benefit Hamas?
Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag.com offers one explanation, seeing it as “part of the radicalisation process” for the left to destroy the West.
I suggest a different, more focused goal: winning sympathy for Hamas through losing. You did not misread; misconduct fits a pro-Hamas strategy that involves a logic of suffering and martyrdom. It has enjoyed some success.
Hamas’s martyrdom strategy
That strategy originates thousands of kilometres away in Gaza. During the normal course of warfare, one side attacks the other in the expectation of winning, of prevailing on the battlefield. Islamist organisations typically follow this rule: Hezbollah defeated its rivals to become the predominant power in Lebanon. Islamic State came from nowhere to take over large parts of Iraq, Syria and beyond. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham just won a lightning campaign over the forces of Bashar al-Assad to rule Syria.
Likewise, Hamas seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007. But then, to destroy the Jewish state, it adopted a surprising and possibly unprecedented approach. It initiated round after round of fighting against the Israel Defence Forces intending to lose.
Yes, it attacked Israel’s vastly more powerful military, wanting to get smashed up, as actually happened in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021 and 2023.
This unique approach to warfare explains why, for 18 years, Hamas purposefully imposed bombs, fear, destruction, homelessness, hunger, injuries and death on its subject population; why it bases troops and missiles in mosques, churches, schools, hospitals and private homes, forcing Gazans to serve as human shields; why it prevents civilians from escaping to safety; and why it assaulted the US government’s “humanitarian pier” off the coast of Gaza with mortar shells, trying to prevent aid from reaching civilians.
Hamas leaders do not hide their wanting civilians to suffer.
• Ghazi Hamad: “We are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
• Khaled Meshaal: “No people is liberated without sacrifices.”
• Ismail Haniyeh: “The blood of the children, women and elderly” must be spilt.
• Yahya Sinwar: Deaths “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honour”.
This perverse strategy has two main benefits. First, it brings tactical advantages, as Israel avoids attacking mosques and schools used by Hamas as bases out of concern for civilian lives. Likewise, depriving civilians of the vast amounts of fuel, food, water and medicine coming into Gaza conveniently makes those benefits available to Hamas members.
Responses to martyrdom
Second – our topic here – Hamas wins politically by losing militarily. Invariably, it provokes every round of violence by attacking the Jewish state, prompting a ferocious response. Hamas then points to that response and the destruction, hunger and death it causes, counting on this devastation to erase all memory of its initial attack.
Thus does civilian suffering serve Hamas for public relations purposes. The worse the situation in Gaza, the more convincingly can Hamas accuse Israel of aggression and claim the status of victim. When Israel invariably does harm civilians, Hamas revels in the victims’ misery, as shown by its huge inflation of fatality numbers. When Hamas misfires, as happens often enough with improvised weaponry, and harms Gazans, it immediately blames Israel, gaining additional sympathy for its cause.
Gazan misery translates into fervent support from anti-Semites of all persuasions – Islamists, Arab nationalists, Palestinian nationalists, far-leftists, and far-rightists.
Rage at Israel’s perceived barbarism generates intense emotions, symbolised by eliminationist slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
Campuses and streets erupt worldwide with anti-Zionist fury; the “Palestine” flag turns up at the Super Bowl intermission; Islamists and leftists galvanise; book authors distort; media bloviates; liberal politicians squirm; the UN condemns; and international courts indict.
Israelis well understand this tactic.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains: “For Israel, every civilian death is a tragedy. For Hamas, it’s a strategy. They actually want Palestinian civilians to die so that Israel will be smeared in the international media and be pressured to end the war before it’s won.”
Other Middle Easterners, such as Emirati Dirar Belhoul al-Falasi, concur: “Hamas fired a rocket from the hospital’s roof so that Israel would bomb this hospital.”
This inversion of logic and morality works because victimisation has become the common currency of dictators and progressives from Iran’s Ali Khamenei to the woke left.
They divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, with Jews cast as the archetypical oppressor, then claim the mantle of the world’s dispossessed. Hamas may be a jihadist organisation, forwarding a medieval Islamic law code, but it has brilliantly learned the left’s language of oppression.
Western misbehaviour
Which brings us back to Hamas’s allies in the West. To further the oppressor-oppressed narrative, they replicate the Hamas strategy of fighting to lose.
Inhabiting a more genteel battlefield, their martyrdom takes on a more genteel quality: not hunger and death but police batons and overnights in prison.
Annoying Westerners, like massacring Israelis, is not the main goal but a means to provoke a response that enrages the leftist and Islamist base. Scenes of wrecked tents on US campuses echo the destruction in Gaza. Goading law enforcement intends to bring the IDF to mind. Indeed, anti-Israel activists publicise any ties between Israel and Western law enforcement agencies.
A survey of pro-Hamas activities in the 16 months since October 7 finds the pro-Hamas cohort breaks laws in remarkably repetitive ways, suggesting a single playbook. Again and again, they vandalise universities, inconvenience motorists, disrupt celebratory events, interrupt Christmas activities, close down museums, aggress liberal politicians and harass people at their homes.
Short term, this strategy works. With good reason, Hezbollah praised activists who “apply pressure on their governments”, for they pushed Joe Biden to retreat from his strong initial support for Israel. Latin American governments broke relations. Israel’s Prime Minister worries about being arrested on war crimes charges. Polls show youth widely alienated from Israel.
But what of the long term? There, the victimisation ploy appears less successful.
Hamas-style bellicosity repulses more Westerners than it attracts. Hamas’s allies, obviously, do not seek to win friends.
Anecdotes abound: A Pasadena, California crowd burst into cheers when police cleared anti-Israel protesters. Detroit revellers physically pushed protesters out. Texans forcibly ejected an anti-Israel heckler from a political rally.
Parents attending a family weekend event at Stanford University “began booing protesters as the disruptions continued. Many parents shouted back at the protesters, calling them disrespectful.”
Students at Rutgers University out-shouted anti-Israel chants by singing the national anthem.
Fraternity brothers at the University of North Carolina protected an American flag from desecration by anti-Israel demonstrators; a lighthearted GoFundMe campaign quickly raised $US516,000 for them to throw “a world-class party”.
Survey research confirms this impression.
A Resolve Strategic poll of Australian voters found that anti-Israel antics leave 46 per cent of voters less likely to favour Hamas.
Concerning campus encampments, The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake found Americans “have shown relatively little sympathy for the protesters or approval of their actions”. When asked whether “the protests on college campuses made you more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the Palestinians?”, by an almost two-to-one margin (29 per cent as against 16 per cent) respondents became less sympathetic.
Another poll found that Americans oppose the campus misbehaviour far more intensely than they support it.
A third reported that, by a two-to-one margin (65 per cent to 33 per cent), Americans disapprove of college encampments and that by a three-to-one margin (72 per cent to 23 per cent) they want students who participate in them to be disciplined.
Then came Donald Trump who, in his inimitable norm-breaking and chaotic way, threatened to expel both Hamas supporters from the US and Gazans from Gaza. If martyrdom, literal and genteel, motivates the leftist base, it also motivates the rightist one, more slowly but no less surely or consequentially.
Despite some initial success, then, the Hamas allies’ fighting-to-lose strategy appears doomed in the West.
Daniel Pipes is founder of the Middle East Forum and author of Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated (Wicked Son).
More Coverage
Indigenous basket-weaving a ‘bizarre’ way to teach maths
Embedding Indigenous culture into each subject is making it harder for kids to learn the basics.
It’s come to this: can Albanese save Labor’s furniture?
This week’s rates cut by the Reserve Bank were welcome – but will they be enough to save Anthony Albanese’s government?