World asks: Why? Answer: Suffering is the point

In the hours after the Hamas attacks last Saturday—Israeli officials call it their 9/11—the papers, networks and websites were filled with the images of bloody cribs, shot-up prams, and Israeli bubbes being taken hostage. Soon followed analysis by the commentariat around the world: Why now?

Why did Hamas attack Israel, and why now? What is different this month than October of 2022?

Well, the “now” part could be explained thus: It takes some planning to coordinate so many fighters.

It takes practice to get them to use gliders in such an attack. Hamas couldn’t pull this off with a weekend at a training camp. It could be as simple as this: Hamas wasn’t ready in October of 2022.

So back to why. At all.

It’s been interesting reading, catching up on all the excuses given for the Hamas terror attack.

According to Al-Jazeera, Hamas attacked because 1. Palestinians were growing desperate because of far-right policies of the current Israeli government’s “enabling settler violence.” 2. Arab-Israeli normalization was going along too smoothy for Hamas’ good, which if successful might keep a twostate solution in the planning stages forever. 3. Hamas had just repaired frayed ties with Iran, and felt emboldened now.

We don’t doubt any of that. But wethinks Al-Jazeera is missing a crucial point.

Stanford University professor Allen Weiner specializes in “international conflict.” (He should have plenty of course material.) He told CBS News that Hamas might have had another reason to attack:

“Hamas has sometimes made the calculation that it is prepared to incur tremendous suffering within Gaza, and subject the people in Gaza to tremendous suffering, because that actually can have the effect of generating sympathy for the Palestinian cause internationally.”

He’s not the only one who thinks this way.

Ron Hassner, the Israel Studies chair at the University of California-Berkeley, told the network that Hamas wanted to “be noticed on the world stage” again.

The Palestinian militant group’s “hope is that the Israelis will respond disproportionately, and will then be castigated by the rest of the world,” he told CBS, adding that from Israel’s perspective, “it’s very hard when the goal of your enemy is to maximize civilian casualties—you’re fighting with a hand tied behind your back.”

So what the world is seeing out of Gaza today—it is burning—was sorta the whole point.

But don’t take their word for it. CNN reports that a senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, said his outfit was prepping for anything, “worst-case scenario, including a ground invasion.”

He said that an invasion of Gaza by Israel would be “the best for us to decide the ending of this battle.”

The best for us.

Suffering and war—the shut-off of electricity and water to Gaza, the harm to Palestinians living there—was the point.

It isn’t that hard to understand.

It’s hard to believe.