The Daily - Why Hamas Keeps Fighting, and Losing

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

After 11 days of fighting over the skies of Israel and Gaza, a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was announced last week.The conflict wrought devastation in Gaza. Yet Hamas’s leaders took to television and declared victory.We look at where the organization comes from and their objectives to understand why it has, for decades, engaged in battles it knows it can’t win.Guest: Ben Hubbard, the Beirut bureau chief for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: After the cease-fire, in addition to relief, some Gaza residents felt a sense of déjà vu, having survived several recent wars with Israel. After each war, it takes years for Gaza to recover.Israel’s military said its airstrikes killed dozens of senior Hamas operatives and destroyed critical military infrastructure. But victory is hard to measure.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. The 11-day war over the skies of Israel and Gaza was the latest in a decades-long pattern of Hamas engaging in a battle that it knows it can't win. My colleague, Beirut Bureau Chief Ben Hubbard, on why Hamas keeps fighting.

It's Wednesday, May 26th. Ben, when a ceasefire was announced after this 11-day war between Hamas and Israel last week, Hamas declared victory. This victory was a strategic victory. Its leaders came out and said in TV interviews that they had won, that this was a great success. Therefore today we consider that this battle

is a quantum leap in the history of the conflict with the enemy. And that felt difficult to understand because in every way, it felt like Hamas had not prevailed in this conflict. Hamas fired the first rocket, and the ensuing conflict with Israel ended up killing more than 230 people in Gaza, many of them children. The Israeli counterstrikes destroyed hundreds of buildings, including schools, hospitals, basic infrastructure

like sewers and water pipes, and it ended with the suffering of Palestinians inside of Gaza greater than when the war started. So how should we understand that claim of victory by Hamas? Yeah, if you're sitting in the West and you're watching TV and seeing the images that have been coming out of Gaza of what it looks like after this conflict, it's pretty hard to understand why a group like Hamas thinks they can come out and declare victory. I mean, this is very far from what we would usually consider a victory to look like. And I think to understand why they're making such a claim, you have to understand where they come from and what their objectives are in the broader conflict.

And what is that story? Where does Hamas come from? Hamas evolves out of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I think there's really two issues that lead to its creation. First, the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948. During that war, about 800,000 Palestinians either flee or are pushed from their homes and become refugees, many of them ending up in Gaza. So Gaza becomes a place where the majority of the population

are either refugees from Israel or the descendants of refugees. And this becomes very much part of how the place sees itself and how it relates with the rest of the world. The Gaza Strip is sort of a unique patch of territory. It's this sort of long, skinny sliver of land right on the Mediterranean, you know, on the southern part of Israel, right along the Sinai to the south. And so this becomes sort of a very driving force in how the place thinks of itself and how all the political movements, including Hamas, come into being. The next step in the history would be 1967. There's another Arab-Israeli war, and Israel ends up occupying what would later become known as the

Palestinian territories, which are the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. And then it's very much military rule in these territories. Palestinians living there have fewer rights, and this causes tremendous frustration by people living there. And all of this comes to a boil in the late 80s when this frustration leads to what is known as the First Intifada or the uprising. This is basically a series of protests, riots, graffiti campaigns among the Palestinians pushing back against the Israeli occupation. And this is really when Hamas comes into being. This is a group of Islamists who have been doing other kinds of work and look around and see this huge political kind of explosion

happening in the territories and feel that they need to play a part of it. And what part do they see themselves as playing, the founders of Hamas during this period? Well, the overarching idea is very much that what they consider Palestine is Muslim land that has been occupied by the Zionists, as they call them, and that they have a duty to get rid of them and that they need to, quote unquote, liberate this land and wage jihad to expel the occupiers. They're a very Islamist organization, and that's really kind of the foundational tenant of Hamas. And that becomes sort of their guiding mission

throughout their existence. So Hamas, from the very start, exists not just in opposition to Israel. It sees itself at a very core level as having the mission of eliminating Israel because of what it sees as Israel's illegitimate formation on land it sees as rightfully Palestinian. Yes, the whole basis for its existence is to try to get rid of the state of Israel because it believes that it shouldn't exist. It believes that Israel is an invalid entity and that it is their duty as Muslims to get rid of it and to replace it with an Islamic state on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. And once that happens, at least in Hamas's view, all of those Palestinian refugees that we talked about can leave the places that they live now, like Gaza,

and live where either they or their ancestors lived, which is inside what is now Israel. And this idea really guides all of their activities going forward. And this idea really guides all of their activities going forward. And is that a message at the birth of Hamas in this period, in the late 1980s, that resonates with the people of Gaza? Do they find support among Palestinians? There are definitely lots of Palestinians at this point who would love to see Israel disappear. And the idea of the refugees going back to where their families came from has huge popularity. At the time, there are already other Palestinian organizations that are working on this. There's all kinds of Palestinian groups that are pushing back and fighting against

Israel in various ways. And so Hamas just kind of becomes like yet another group that's out there fighting against Israel. But they distinguish themselves further after 2000 with the outbreak of the second Intifada, the second uprising, which is much much more violent than the first. Hamas becomes very well known for carrying out just really nasty bombings. She just got out of her car and blew herself up. I don't know what happened until I didn't fall to the floor and I saw all the blood. Just then I realized that this was a bomb.

You're talking suicide bombings in civilian areas, suicide bombings in crowded markets, restaurants, things like that that kill lots and lots of people. Inside Israel. Yes, inside of Israel. Too many people are paying their lives. Innocent shopper of the eve of Shabbat, the holiest day of the week for Jews,

is now being desecrated again by a Palestinian suicide bomber. And the other thing over time that really distinguishes them from the mainstream Palestinian organizations is their complete rejection of any kind of peace talks with Israel. We are determined to continue our resistance to Israeli occupation without hesitation. They are just not interested in negotiations, the peace process, land for peace, or any of these ideas that there can be any kind of accommodation. They very much stick to the idea that Israel is an illegitimate entity and that the only solution is to get rid of it.

And this very much solidifies Hamas in the minds of many Western countries and, of course, in Israel, of it being a nasty terrorist organization that is just not scared to use violence against civilians. And in fact, by the early 2000s, the United States, the European Union, and other countries have officially designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. We'll be right back. So how is it that Hamas goes from being a ragtag group of guerrilla terrorists trying to inflict as much damage as possible on Israel to the government of Gaza? Well, basically they decide as an organization that they want to play a role in official Palestinian politics.

So part of the peace process creates the Palestinian Authority, which is supposed to be the official government of the occupied territories, of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And in 2006, they have elections to elect the new parliament for the new Palestinian parliament, and Hamas runs. And they very much distance themselves themselves in terms of the election campaign from all the Islamism. They're not talking about setting up an Islamic state,

but they really run on a good government platform. They criticize the mainline Palestinian factions that have run the authority for being corrupt and for putting their own people in places to be able to get contracts and take money, for not providing services for your average person, and it's actually quite successful. The Palestinian elections had a stunning outcome, a landslide victory for Hamas. They end up winning the election. They get 74 seats in the parliament, while the party that had traditionally won it got 45. Official results today showed the Islamic militant group swept the long-ruling

Fatah party out of power. And this is, you know, an election that's internationally sanctioned and observed, and, you know, everybody sort of says, okay, they won, now what do we do? We will not compromise on those fundamental principles that are essential for the existence and the well-being of the state of Israel. There's tremendous alarm. You know, there's certainly alarm in Israel because now this designated terrorist organization is playing a much larger role in the authority. And we will not recognize, not compromise, not talk and not deal with Hamas, which is a terrorist organization. There's definitely alarm in the United States. A political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal. There's alarm in European countries and basically alarm among all of the countries that have been sending aid to the Palestinians and to the Palestinian Authority.

And they're now worried that, OK, if we send this money in, is it going to be siphoned off by this organization that could put it into military activities against the state of Israel? So there's this huge sense of alarm and sort of, what do we do in this situation? And what do they do? Well, the immediate result is that there is a very strict blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip. We have no interest in hardship in the Palestinian territories, but no one can ask Israel to transfer funds to terrorist organizations like Hamas and have those funds come back to us in the form of suicide bombings. So the Israelis lock down the borders and they start putting very,

very tight controls on anything that goes in and on anything that goes out, for everything from merchandise to supplies to people. The Egyptians do the same thing from their side on the Sinai border. And this causes a lot of economic distress in Gaza. Israel controls everything and everyone that goes out or comes in. And precious little comes in these days. That causes the economy to really suffer and for the humanitarian situation to start getting worse. The Israeli government wants to tighten the screws on Hamas,

but it's ordinary Palestinians who are feeling the squeeze. There are a bunch of efforts to try to find a way out of this. There are proposals to, you know, setting up a national unity government, anything that can make it so that it doesn't look like Hamas is running the whole authority. But all of that breaks down the following year in 2007, when fighting breaks out between Hamas

and Fatah, which is the other main Palestinian political party. And over about five days, Hamas completely routes everyone else in Gaza and they take over militarily. This is incredibly brutal fighting. You know, it's sort of compared to a Palestinian civil war, brother against brother. You have groups, you know, throwing members of other groups off the tops of buildings. I mean, it gets very, very nasty. But in a very short period of time, Hamas just takes over. And then the world kind of has to say, okay, not only did they win the elections, but now they are militarily in charge of the Gaza Strip, and they basically kicked out the parties that we're used to dealing with. So Gaza is now officially under the control of Hamas, this group that from its foundation and its charter says it exists to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state.

Yes, and this poses a huge dilemma for everybody because, you know, lots of countries are worried about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. They do want to find ways to keep the place running, keep the infrastructure going, keep salaries being paid and things like that. But, you know, what do you do when the de facto authority on this piece of land is a designated terrorist organization that's trying to destroy Israel? So that makes everything very complicated. And for Hamas, it's complicated too. I mean, this is a group that had started as basically an underground militant organization that was, you know, paramilitary and, you know, their only interest was fighting against Israel. Suddenly they're in charge of a territory that today has 2 million people in it. And so not only are they thinking about what their next military activities are and, you know,

things like that, but they also have to deal with things like keeping the water on, keeping the power on. How do they, you know, pick up garbage? I mean, things that sort of any governing authority has to deal with. And so there's kind of a, after this period, there's very much kind of a duality in the Hamas identity. They still consider themselves a resistance movement, resisting the existence of Israel. But they're also a government. So they very much have this kind of dual role in Gaza, both being a military organization still committed to fighting against

Israel, but also being responsible for all these people. So as a civilian government, how does Hamas do? Is it regarded as an effective government? Initially, they do a fair job, I think most people would say, of delivering on some of their promises. They lock up a bunch of criminals and sort of deal with people who are running around with guns and things like that. And they get some of the general chaos of Gaza under control. But after they take the place over in 2007, their role as the governors of the place become much, much more difficult because they're under this incredibly tight blockade and they just have very little to work with. There's very little coming in. The economy goes into a tailspin. Nobody wants to deal with them. I mean, the Israelis are being very strict

about everything that can come in, and so it becomes very hard for them to deliver services to the people and to really keep the place running. And how about as a military organization? What are they doing at this point now that they are also in control? The military organization can continue with a shift in tactics. So now that they can no longer as easily get bombers inside of Israel to blow people up in markets and restaurants, they really double down on the rocket project. So this is when they start building this arsenal of these, you know, usually homemade rockets that they can fire in large numbers into Israel. And they can sometimes hit Israeli towns and communities near the Gaza border. And, you know, they're definitely setting out to try to kill Israeli civilians. These things tend to be very inaccurate. A lot of them fall in the desert, but they end up causing a lot of terror on the other side of the border because

they set off sirens and people, you know, are running for shelters and things like that. But the focus for the Hamas military wing very much becomes the rocket project. And it's the frequency of these Hamas rockets that cause Israel, with support from the United States, to develop what's called the Iron Dome, which is a counter-missile technology that is designed to pick these things out of the sky before they touch down in Israel. And Ben, who is paying for all these rockets? Who is subsidizing Hamas's rocket project? Well, Hamas's two longtime sponsors are Syria and Iran. And Iran really plays a large role in the rocket project, largely by giving technology, by giving technical know-how.

The rockets are not particularly sophisticated and they're not expensive to build. Most of these are now built because there's a blockade and they can't just import whatever they want. They're building these things with water pipes, sometimes salvaged from places in Gaza. In terms of explosives, they build them out of combinations of sugar, castor oil, different kinds of fertilizer, other kinds of chemicals. And this is one of the things that makes it so hard to shut down the rocket project is that you can't just ban sugar or you can't just say we're not going to send any fertilizer into Gaza because there are still Gaza farmers. But the rocket project, they're able to keep it going, I think quite surprisingly for a lot of people, even despite the very, very strict blockade on what's going into the strip. So over time, this dynamic emerges where Hamas fires rockets for whatever reason. It could be because the Israelis assassinated

Hamas leader or there's something else happening somewhere that Hamas wants to send a message about. And then Israel will respond with airstrikes and either assassinating another Hamas leader, taking out a Hamas military target, something like that. And that could sometimes lead to more rockets. And this is what brings us into this conflict that has flamed up over and over again.

And in every instance, it's really the civilians of Gaza who end up paying the largest price. So this escalates into this last series of wars that we've seen. So there's a huge war in 2008. There's another conflict in 2012. There's another one in 2014. And this kind of interaction between the rockets and the airstrikes goes on, including into this last war that started two weeks ago. Okay, so Ben, now that we understand how Hamas came to power in Gaza, help us understand how and why Hamas became involved in this latest conflict with Israel, because my sense is that this conflict started inside of Israel, not in Gaza.

Well, Hamas very much, even though it's in charge of Gaza and it's ruling Gaza, it still sees itself as a Palestinian movement and it sees itself as a defender of all Palestinians. And Jerusalem is an especially emotional issue for Palestinians. And so these two issues that came up, I mean, the Israeli government planning to evict Palestinian families from East Jerusalem, and then the police raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. These are two issues that would have been felt across the Palestinian diaspora, and definitely something that Hamas would feel that it had a stake in, even though they're off in the Gaza Strip. So Hamas would have seen its role in this moment as defending Palestinians in East Jerusalem, no matter how far

they were from Gaza. Yes, part of it is that they want to be seen as defending Palestinians, and part of it is that they're competing against other Palestinian groups for legitimacy. They want to show that, okay, you know, you, Palestinian Authority, you've been off negotiating with Israel, and what good has that done you? You know, you haven't gotten a state, and you now can't even prevent people from being evicted from their homes, whereas we as Hamas in Gaza are going to go off and teach the Israelis a lesson by firing these rockets. So, you know, they want to show that we're taking action while you are not. So how does Hamas think about a moment like this?

Because as we've discussed, firing rockets into Israel triggers a cycle. And in that cycle, the counterattacks from Israel are going to be more precise. They're going to be more destructive than Hamas's rockets. And so when Hamas acts as it believes it did here in defense of Palestinians, it ends up hurting Palestinians inside of Gaza. So how does Hamas make a decision like this? Well, Hamas is often criticized for fighting from civilian areas or launching rockets from civilian areas. And the only thing that's complicated of that is that all of Gaza is technically a civilian area. I mean, Hamas is not a formal military. It's not that they have military bases or designated military areas that they can go and launch rockets from because they're a guerrilla organization that sort of exists inside the population. On a larger level, I think this is one of the things that makes these

Gaza wars so terrible is that both sides have just accepted that part of it is going to be a lot of civilian deaths. I think Hamas, I don't want to say that I can get inside their heads and know exactly what their calculation is, but they've made it clear from their actions that, you know, they know that if they launch rockets from a civilian area, there's very likely to be an overwhelming Israeli response that could kill civilians. And for whatever reason, they've clearly decided that they're going to continue to do that. I think on the Israeli side as well, they've also decided that when they want to hit certain targets in Gaza, they're going to hit them even if they know or have a very good reason to believe that they're going to kill civilians along the way. Though Israel says it often gives warnings in advance

in order to avoid killing civilians. That's right. Sometimes Israel actually just calls people on their cell phones and says, you better get out of that building because we're about to blow it up. I would say all the time they do that. Obviously, if they want to assassinate a Hamas leader, they're not going to send a warning ahead of time. Ben, I'm curious if civilians in Gaza support these actions by Hamas, like the ones that occurred two weeks ago, given that these Hamas rocket attacks end up through counterattacks from Israel, in many ways sacrificing people in Gaza as civilians. I think it's very complicated. I mean, for one, nobody elected Hamas or nobody voted for Hamas to do what it's doing now.

Nobody voted for them to take over and to become the undisputed rulers of the Gaza Strip. There have been no Palestinian elections since 2006. So since 2007, when they took over and became the rulers of the Strip, they've just basically been ruling unchallenged. They have very little opposition inside of Gaza, and they can largely do what they want. They have very little opposition inside of Gaza, and they can largely do what they want. So it's not like the people of Gaza have elected them and said, we want you to go out and be the military force that's firing on the Israelis on our behalf. Hamas is very much in a place where it can do what it wants and doesn't really have to ask for permission and ends up being the civilians who pay the price. In my conversations with people, though, I do think that when they do see the overwhelming violence, they certainly would recognize that this is a

response to what Hamas is doing. But I think they're still more likely to blame Israel. I mean, if Hamas fires some rockets that set off alarms and get taken down by the Iron Dome and, you know, maybe hit a building, you know, then what they see in Gaza is going to be a tremendous amount of Israeli force. So in their world, the majority of the violence that they're seeing is coming from the Israeli side, and they're still going to blame the Israelis for it. Even if Hamas provoked any particular attack? Yes.

At this point, Gaza is in what our colleagues at The Times have described as a humanitarian crisis because of this latest war between Hamas and Israel. And I was struck that when President Biden came out a few days ago to celebrate the ceasefire, he said that the United States would work to help the people of Gaza rebuild after all the destruction that has just occurred. But he said it would only help in ways that won't help Hamas. But from everything you've just said, Hamas is the government of Gaza. The people of Gaza can't, at this point, get rid of it. They're not even holding elections. So how exactly is that supposed to work? How can a country like the United States help the people of Gaza

without helping Hamas if that's what they say they don't want to do? Well, it country like the United States help the people of Gaza without helping Hamas, if that's what they say they don't want to do? Well, it's easier said than done. I mean, I think that there is a broad international interest in trying to help Gazans on the humanitarian side. But it's very difficult because this goes back to this dual role of Hamas that we talked about earlier, being in both the government of the strip and being a military force. Let's take a simple commodity like cement. Obviously, big airstrikes brought down buildings, damaged homes, and other infrastructure. Cement is a very essential commodity for trying to rebuild some of these places.

The trick about cement is that it's also very useful for Hamas's military projects. One of the Israeli goals in this particular war was to destroy or at least damage the Hamas tunnel network under the Strip that Hamas fighters used to get around and to move or at least damage the Hamas tunnel network under the strip that Hamas fighters used to get around and to move undetected by the Israelis. So, you know, you want to send in cement so that it can be used to rebuild buildings. But because Hamas is the de facto authority, you know, they've always found ways to get what they need from the materials that come into Gaza. And so it's very difficult to make sure that all of the cement that you send in is going to go to rebuilding buildings and that it's not going to be siphoned off

and used to reinforce tunnels or underground bunkers or other things that would serve Hamas's military purposes. So Ben, I'm just trying to understand the end game for Hamas. It has not achieved at all its stated goal of seeking to replace Israel. And its effort to fight Israel at every turn in the defense of Palestinians keeps making the lives of the people it governs in Gaza worse. So where does that leave Hamas and where does it leave the people of Gaza?

Well, I think that goes to Hamas' definition of its own mission and also its own conception of victory. I think for Hamas, it has a very long timeframe that it's looking at. I think that for Hamas, victory is not we destroyed Israel. It's that we live to fight another day. The Israelis did not manage to get us out of Gaza, destroy our capabilities, kill all of our people. And so the mere fact that Hamas

survived for them is a victory because they're still here to rebuild and to sort of go for the next one. And, you know, when I've spoken to Hamas officials, it's sometimes shocking to sort of hear what their timeline is. And they'll say, you know, you can tell them all these things, you know, yeah, they're rockets, they're not very effective. And, you know, you really haven't made much progress on what you say your goals are. And they'll just kind of say, well, we believe that justice is on our side and that we're doing the right thing. And if we're not able to do it, maybe our children will do it, or maybe our grandchildren will do it.

But they have this very long-term view of where this is going. And as long as they're not erased, they believe that they can keep going. But I think it's important to say that it's not clear that Israel has an endgame either here. One of the phrases that you hear from analysts of this conflict is mowing the grass. And it's this idea that Israel is not in one of these wars going to go in and kill all the Hamas fighters and destroy all their capabilities and get rid of all the rockets and get rid of all the tunnels. But, you know, like mowing the grass in your front lawn, it's a kind of, you know, seasonal maintenance. It's something that Israel has to do now and then to set back Hamas's capabilities, destroy a certain number of rockets, collapse a certain number of tunnels, kill a certain number of leaders with the idea that that will set them back for at least a few more years.

But, you know, implicit in that idea is the understanding that it's not over and that if you wait long enough, just as that grass in your front lawn is going to grow back, Hamas is going to grow back, and there's very likely to be yet another war. Right. What you just described is not a plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Hamas conflict, but just to perpetuate it. Yeah, I think from what we've seen from this conflict, despite all the death and despite all the destruction and the violence, I think it's hard to see how this particular conflict got at any of the root issues that are driving the conflict here

or made it any less likely that it's going to happen again sooner or later. Ben, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We're very appreciative and grateful that the president and vice president invited us here. I think that the meeting went well. During a private meeting at the White House on Tuesday, President Biden and Vice President Harris told the family of George Floyd that they were committed

to pursuing a police reform bill in Congress, despite missing a self-imposed deadline of passing and signing it by the one-year anniversary of Floyd's death. He set that deadline. He's not happy about it not being met, but all in all, he just wants the bill to be right and meaningful and that it holds Georgia's legacy intact. The proposed bill seeks to ban the use of chokeholds, restrict the use of deadly force, and make it easier to prosecute officers for wrongdoing. to prosecute officers for wrongdoing. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester,

Sydney Harper, and Leslie Davis. It was edited by Paige Cowan and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.