Months of organized college protests in America and Europe gave HAMAS’s leader, Yahyah Sinwar, a feeling of confidence that the Israeli-HAMAS war was about to end in his favor. Almost ten weeks of wrangling and begging Hamas to accept cease-fires led protesters around the world to start chanting. “Palestine is almost free.”
Having just spent five weeks in Israel, it was pretty clear to me that protesters were living a delusion. Israel remains a mighty, likely nuclear-armed regional superpower that could defeat the best of whatever was thrown at them. Even after Iran had fired almost 350 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at Israel (virtually none of which damaged anything except critically wounding a Muslim Bedouin girl), the mood around American campuses was that their efforts were being noticed and that a cease-fire was imminent. Perhaps this irrational exuberance was seeping into the decision-making of the terrorist group’s senior management. It would be a fatal error. I’m sure the HAMAS fighters that were being bombarded on a minute-to-minute basis all across the Gaza Strip were not so agreeable.
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