-Analysis-
BEIRUT — When Israel's war on Gaza ends, Hamas will declare victory. This will also happen with Hezbollah on the southern Lebanon front.
With the current facts on the ground, such a declaration of a promised victory is already prepared. Hamas is ready to declare it once a truce is announced. Hamas is known for claiming victory, before the war, during the war, and after the war.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Even this war, with a decidedly higher cost, will not dampen any declaration of victory. At most, there may be some embarrassment in discussing the ultimate feasibility of war as strategy — but that too will fade and the models of combat strategy will be back soon enough.
The promised victory will be declared by Hamas leaders without explaining how it's been achieved. It is a chronic path of victories for those who resist. Hamas didn’t create this path, but it did become a master of declaring victory.
A decades-old narrative
In the year 1956, Egypt face the so-called "tripartite aggression," also known as the Suez Crisis, following the invasion of Israeli, French and British forces. In the end, the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the defeat of the three nemesis armies.
Still, history tells us that this “Nasserist” victory narrative leaves out the basic fact that it was pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union — for different reasons — that played a decisive factor in ending the aggression.
In June 1967, the defeat inflicted on the Arab armies was severe. Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Syria’s Golan Heights, and the West Bank were occupied by Israel. Even if outright victory could not be declared after such a disaster, Arab nations still characterized it as a seemingly minor “setback.”
In 1982, Palestinian fighters left Lebanon after Israel invaded Beirut. Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, left with them, raising the sign of victory.
Arab resistance
Yes, declaring victory is thus a fundamental idea within the Arab resistance since the 1950s.
This idea will not end with the current war in Gaza. Hamas is aware that any truce will come from factors outside its own control, including assurances inside Israel that its own ability to wage war has been greatly diminished.
Hamas is betting on Israel facing its own crisis.
With the exception of the hostages, Hamas has become a military faction with limited combat capabilities. But the militant group is betting on Israel, and specifically its relationship with the United States, facing its own crisis.
The U.S. position is being transformed by the Gaza war for two main reasons: the excessive Israeli killing of civilians, and how that has impacted American public opinion, especially through campus protests; and the war impacts on upcoming presidential elections.
Other path
In order to properly face the Palestinian tragedy, Hamas must break with the faltering narrative of victory and deal with the existence of Israel as a fait accompli, away from the murderous ideologies that result in intractable wars.
This is the case with an Arab and Islamic environment whose relations with the Jewish state now includes a commitment to peace and normalization and an implicit conviction of the reality of Israel's existence in the region. Of course there are still plenty of groups that deny this reality, from the Houthi group and the Popular Mobilization Forces’ factions in Iraq.
Hamas was the Palestinian force most capable of investing in the idea of a two-state solution.
Facts such as the demarcation of the maritime borders between Israel and Lebanon are an indicator of this conviction. And the recent Israeli-Iranian “skirmishes” are also indicators, along with the stance of Hamas’s closest allies in Turkey and Qatar.
Hamas was the Palestinian force most capable of investing in the idea of a two-state solution, and on terms that had the potential to push such a path with the decline of the Palestinian Authority influence. It was a movement that attracted a broad Palestinian audience, and possessed a military wing that fought more than four wars with Israel, and administered governance over Gaza.
The “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation — and then Israel’s war on Gaza — created a favorable climate for Hamas to invest early in all of its aforementioned power factors, with an Arab and international climate that would be ready to grant the Palestinians a state more suitable to their aspirations than the one envisioned by the Oslo Accords.
And yet, even in this context, Hamas has squandered its standing, and will continue searching for some imagined victory within the death and rubble it has brought on Gaza.