By James M. Dorsey
What were they thinking?
It’s a question both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist government have yet to answer.
Hamas and the Netanyahu government’s generic justifications of the carnage created by the group’s year-old October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s ferocious response, including the Palestinians’ right to resist occupation and Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ do not cut the ice.
In a twist of irony, Hamas and the Netanyahu government mirror one another in their imagery of the other, their inability and/or refusal to formulate realistic war goals, and their off-the-charts cost/benefit analysis of the war.
As a result, Hamas and the government maintain a long-standing, debilitating fixture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which hardliners and maximalists sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, reinforce each other. Please read further, listen to the podcast, or watch the video at https://jamesmdorsey.substack.com/p/what-were-they-thinking-hamas-and