#4 The Political Economy of Hamas

Destroying Hamas is a much less straightforward affair than columnists and politicians outside Israel want to think

Some recent commentary on the Palestine-Israel conflict in the aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel goes something like this: Hamas is an irrational and evil terrorist group that has killed civilians in a horrific manner, has taken innocent hostages and must therefore be destroyed to secure the hostages. This is the narrative that the Israeli government is presenting internationally to justify its bombing of Gaza, resulting in the death of more than 6000 people already, more than 2000 of them children. However, the way the Israeli government it probably internally weighing the costs and benefits of a ground invasion and the destruction of Hamas is probably much more complex.

In the face of the horror, it is understandable that people have tried to “make scandalous the presentation of context” in this case, as happened in the case of 9/11. However, understanding or explaining is not excusing. Any type of social organization faces some form of incentive structure: even the apparently most irrational type of organisation (think of Mafias, prison gangs, hostage takers or terrorist groups such as the Islamic state) make calculations about how to survive, how to mobilise supporters, ensure compliance, or generate revenue. What are these incentives for the Israeli state and Hamas?

There is little doubt that the operation conducted by Hamas on October 7th was an act of terrorism. The images that have emerged of the killing are unbearable. Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by a number of national and international instances, and if we consider that it uses violence (notably against civilians) for political ends, there is no need to quibble about this. Now, while it is convenient to depict real-world conflicts with the frame of a Rambo or Taken movie in which the bad guys are just evil and irrational, everything becomes more complicated if we delve deeper into the incentives and interests of the different actors involved. This is the job of political economy. The most important point here - and it may be the reason why Israel has still not launched its much awaited ground invasion - is that there is no actual destruction of Hamas or alternative for the management of Gaza post-Hamas that wouldn’t come with huge political, military and security costs.

Hamas is not only a terrorist group but in essence a state-like organisation that governs the Gaza strip after defeating Fatah in 2007. There was a bloody civil war after the last elections held in the territory, followed by a purge of its political rivals. Since then, it has governed the territory in an authoritarian manner, punishing dissent but also acting as the monopolistic conduit for the provision of the (limited) public goods in the territory. This doesn’t mean that it does it well, and recent polling conducted in Gaza just before the attacks indicates that its rule and political ends are far from fully legitimate among a population deprived of the most basic necessities. It is important to emphasize that this has taken place in the context of a blockade from both Israel and Egypt that has (rightly) led many observers to call Gaza the world’s biggest open air prison. About half of the population of Gaza are children, a huge share of whom have suffered from conflict-induced mental disorders and PTSD. Again, understanding is not excusing, but it is important to highlight that the kind of horrible violence that we saw doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, as the UN secretary General has recently said.

It is ultimately unclear which strategic goals Hamas was trying to achieve with the attacks on October 7th. One interpretation is that the Hamas leadership massively underestimated the response of Israel to such attacks, and was hoping to kidnap a large number of hostages in order to obtain prisoner swaps as it had done in the past, and return somehow to a status quo ante. Maybe the goal was to target primarily military infrastructure and take hostages for protection, but the (probably young) men on the ground went on a killing spree fed by hatred, leading to the horrific killing we’ve seen. Devising a terrorist attack under such a cover of secrecy (Israel controls and monitors all electronic communications in the territory) probably makes it more likely that chains of command are loose, and the groups on the ground do what they want. We don’t know. Maybe the goal was to trigger a massive response by Israel in order to jeopardise the rapprochement between Israel and other Arab states (the UAE, Saudi Arabia) that had taken place in recent years, and that Palestinians had seen as a betrayal of their cause for economic ends. Maybe Hamas knew it would result in massive retaliation. It is probably right to say that the Hamas leadership is less sensitive to the loss of life than Israel is. First, given the desperate conditions prevailing in Gaza, they think they have little to lose, and they don’t have to face any electoral sanction anyway.

Incentives for Israel are different. First, any military operation is politically costly. Given the size of the Israeli military in proportion of the population, most voters do have family members likely to be mobilised and potentially die in a ground invasion of a densely populated area replete with tunnels dug by Hamas. Think of months of guerilla warfare, as in Fallujah in 2004. A ground invasion will probably be bloody and protracted, with huge military and civilian casualties. Also, Israeli governments are notoriously fragile because their survival depends on smaller parties (Israel has an extreme system of proportional representation in which parties only need a very small share of the vote to get parliamentary seats). There is now a government of national unity, but we don’t know how long it can effectively stay in place as the Israeli deaths and dissatisfaction pile up.

Most importantly, because Hamas is effectively a state-like organisation besides being an Islamic militant group, there is no readily viable alternative to it in Gaza if it is removed, except from direct (military) rule by Israel. Up to now, Israeli governments considered that having an insurgent Islamic group in charge of Gaza was a lesser evil compared to ruling directly over a hostile and insurgent Palestinian population. Direct rule after 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza (which was part of Egypt) and the West Bank (which was part of Jordan) was been a bitter experience that led to the first Intifada and ultimately the delegation of governance to the Palestinians. Direct rule by Israel was brutal for the Palestinians and a nightmare for the Israelis. Yitzhak Rabin famously said that he wished he would “wake up one day and Gaza would have sunk into the sea”, but a solution had to be found. Given that Fatah’s political structures in Gaza have been wiped out (leaders executed, imprisoned or exiled) in 2007 even if there may be some base of political support for it, nobody really sees what an alternative to direct military rule would be, and direct military rule is likely to create both mass insurgency in Palestine and be massively unpopular in Israel.

It would probably create less security rather than more. Israel actually experienced a similar configuration when it entered Southern Lebanon in 1982 to destroy the PLO organisational bases that had launched a number of attacks on Northern Israel. While the goal was to create more security, massive resentment against Israeli occupation amongst the Shia population ultimately fed the emergence of Hezbollah as the dominant Islamic militia in the region, and the biggest and most organised security threat at Israel’s borders up to this day. Against this background, destroying Hamas is a much less straightforward affair than columnists and politicians (especially outside Israel) want to think.