Melbourne-based supporters of Hamas, the Palestinian jihadist organization, have engaged in puzzling acts of aggression since Oct. 7, 2023. Why did they break into the University of Melbourne's main library, cause damage on many floors, and destroy expensive book-scanning equipment? Why injure 24 police officers with rocks, acid, and manure outside a defense exposition? Why invade a Starbucks store, chant anti-Israel slogans, steal merchandise, and spit on a barista?
Similar behavior raises questions elsewhere, for example in the United States. Why shout "Shame!" at children being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City for "complicity in genocide"? Why attack a McDonald's restaurant for making "meals for genocide"? Why deface the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.?
 The vandalized status near the White House of the Marquis de Lafayette, a close aide to George Washington, |
None of these activities target Jews or Israel; rather, they antagonize the general public. What motivates them? How can such anti-social behavior possibly benefit Hamas?
Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag.com offers one explanation, seeing it as "part of the radicalization process" for the Left to destroy the West. I suggest a different, more focused goal: winning sympathy for Hamas through losing. You did not misread; misconduct fits a pro-Hamas strategy that involves a logic of suffering and martyrdom. It has enjoyed some success.
Hamas' Martyrdom Strategy
That strategy originates thousands of kilometers away, in Gaza.
During the normal course of warfare, one side attacks the other in the expectation of winning, of prevailing on the battlefield. Islamist organizations typically follow this rule: Hezbollah defeated its rivals to become the predominant power in Lebanon. The Islamic State came from nowhere to take over large parts of Iraq, Syria, and beyond. Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham just won a lightening campaign over the forces of Bashar al-Assad to rule Syria.
Likewise, Hamas seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007. But then, to destroy the Jewish state, it adopted a surprising and possibly unprecedented approach. It initiated round after round of fighting against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intending to lose. Yes, it attacked Israel's vastly more powerful military, wanting to get smashed up, as actually happened in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2023.
This unique approach to warfare explains why, for eighteen years, Hamas purposefully imposed bombs, fear, destruction, homelessness, hunger, injuries, and death on its subject population; why it bases troops and missiles in mosques, churches, schools, hospitals, and private homes, forcing Gazans to serve as human shields; why it prevents civilians from escaping to safety; and why it assaulted the U.S. government's "humanitarian pier" off the coast of Gaza with mortar shells, trying to prevent aid from reaching civilians.
Hamas leaders do not hide their wanting civilians to suffer.
- Ghazi Hamed: "We are proud to sacrifice Martyrs."
- Khaled Mashaal: "No people is liberated without sacrifices."
- Ismail Haniyeh: "The blood of the children, women, and elderly" must be spilled.
- Yahya Sinwar: Deaths "infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor."
This perverse strategy has two main benefits. First, it brings tactical advantages, as Israel avoids attacking mosques and schools used by Hamas as bases out of concern for civilian lives. Likewise, depriving civilians of the vast amounts of fuel, food, water and medicine coming into Gaza conveniently makes those benefits available to Hamas members.
Responses to Martyrdom
Second – our topic here – Hamas wins politically by losing militarily. Invariably, it provokes every round of violence by attacking the Jewish state, prompting a ferocious response. Hamas then points to that response and the destruction, hunger, and death it causes, counting on this devastation to erase all memory of its initial attack.
Thus does civilian suffering serve Hamas for public relations purposes. The worse the situation in Gaza, the more convincingly can Hamas accuse Israel of aggression and claim the status of victim. When Israel invariably does harm civilians, Hamas revels in the victims' misery, as shown by its huge inflation of fatality numbers. When Hamas misfires, as happens often enough with improvised weaponry, and harms Gazans, it immediately blames Israel, gaining additional sympathy for its cause.
 Hamas blamed a massive explosion, killing hundreds, at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Israel. But an investigation of the tragedy found it had been caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile. |
Gazan misery translates into fervent support from antisemites of all persuasions – Islamists, Arab nationalists, Palestinian nationalists, far-leftists, and far-rightists. Rage at Israel's perceived barbarism generates intense emotions, symbolized by such eliminationist slogans as "Free Palestine" and "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Campuses and streets erupt worldwide with anti-Zionist fury, the "Palestine" flag turns up at the Super Bowl intermission, Islamists and leftists galvanize, book authors distort, media bloviate, liberal politicians squirm, the UN condemns, and international courts issue warrants.
Israelis well understand this tactic. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains: "For Israel, every civilian death is a tragedy. For Hamas, it's a strategy. They actually want Palestinian civilians to die, so that Israel will be smeared in the international media and be pressured to end the war before it's won." Other Middle Easterners, such as the Emirati Dirar Belhoul al-Falasi, concur: "Hamas fired a rocket from the hospital's roof, so that Israel would bomb this hospital."
This inversion of logic and morality works because victimization has become the common currency of dictators and progressives from Iran's Ali Khamene'i to the woke Left. They divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, with Jews cast as the archetypical oppressor, then claim the mantle of the world's dispossessed. Hamas may be a jihadist organization, forwarding a medieval Islamic law code, but it has brilliantly learned the Left's language of oppression.
Western Misbehavior
Which brings us back to Hamas' allies in the West. To further the oppressor/oppressed narrative, they replicate the Hamas strategy of fighting to lose. Inhabiting a more genteel battlefield, their martyrdom takes on a more genteel quality: not hunger and death but police batons and overnights in prison. Annoying Westerners, like massacring Israelis, is not the main goal but a means to provoke a response that enrages the leftist and Islamist base. Scenes of wrecked tents on American campuses echo the destruction in Gaza. Goading law enforcement intends to bring the IDF to mind. Indeed, anti-Israel activists publicize any ties between Israel and Western law enforcement agencies.
 Note the parallel between Gaza and UCLA; American students replicated the Hamas tactic of provoking the authorities to destroy their homes. |
A survey of pro-Hamas activities in the sixteen months since Oct. 7 (see the Appendix) finds the pro-Hamas cohort breaks laws in remarkably similar ways, suggesting a common playbook. Again and again, they vandalize universities, inconvenience motorists, disrupt celebratory events, interrupt Christmas activities, close down museums, aggress on liberal politicians, and harass people at their homes.
Short term, this strategy works. With good reason, Hezbollah praised activists who "apply pressure on their governments," for they pushed Joe Biden to retreat from his strong initial support for Israel. Latin American governments broke relations. Israel's prime minister worries about being arrested on war crimes charges. Polls show youth widely alienated from Israel.
But what of the long term? There, the victimization ploy appears less successful. Hamas-style bellicosity repulses more Westerners than it attracts. Hamas' allies, obviously, do not seek to win friends. Anecdotes abound: A Pasadena crowd burst into cheers when police cleared anti-Israel protestors. Detroit revelers physically pushed protesters out. Texans forcibly ejected an anti-Israel heckler from a political rally. Parents attending a Family Weekend event at Stanford University "began booing protestors as the disruptions continued. Many parents shouted back at the protesters, calling them disrespectful." Students at Rutgers University out-shouted anti-Israel chants by singing the national anthem. Fraternity brothers at the University of North Carolina protected an American flag from desecration by anti-Israel demonstrators; a light-hearted GoFundMe campaign quickly raised $516,000 for them to throw a "a world-class party."
Survey research confirms this impression. A Resolve Strategic poll of Australian voters found that anti-Israel antics leave 46 percent of voters less likely to favor Hamas. Concerning campus encampments, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake found Americans "have shown relatively little sympathy for the protesters or approval of their actions." When asked whether "the protests on college campuses made you more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the Palestinians?" by an almost 2-to-1 margin (29 percent to 16 percent), respondents became less sympathetic. Another poll found that Americans oppose the campus misbehavior far more intensely than they support it. A third reported that, by a 2-1 margin (65 percent to 33 percent), Americans disapprove of college encampments and that by a 3-to-1 margin (72 percent to 23 percent), they want students who participate in them to be disciplined.
Then came Donald Trump who, in his inimitable norm-breaking and chaotic way, threatened to expel both Hamas supporters from the United States and Gazans from Gaza. If martyrdom, literal and genteel, motivates the leftist base, it also motivates the rightist one, more slowly but no less surely or consequentially. Despite some initial success, then, the Hamas allies' fighting-to-lose strategy appears doomed in the West.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is founder of the Middle East Forum and author of Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated (Wicked Son).
Appendix: Select Anti-Israel Actions
- Vandalize universities, in some cases repeatedly, including Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, Harvard, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, and UCLA.
- Inconvenience motorists by blocking access to airports in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and New York; by shutting down New York City's Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, plus the Holland Tunnel; and by stopping traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Billboards in Philadelphia and Los Angeles in July-August 2024 asked, "Did you miss your flight when this airport was shutdown by an anti-Israel mob?"
- Disrupt celebratory events, such as Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Labor Day Parade in Manhattan, the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, Pride Parades in many cities (Boston, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto), and dump feces at the annual premiere of Milan's La Scala opera house.
- Interrupt Christmas activities by punching a woman at a Democratic festivity in Detroit, scuffling with police at Rockefeller Center's Christmas tree lighting, and in Melbourne disrupt both Carols by Candlelight, a Christmas fundraiser for blind children, and Myer department store's famed annual Christmas window unveiling.
- Close down museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan for hours and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for a month. Their attack on the Brooklyn Museum not only closed it early but damaged artworks.
Aggress against liberal politicians: shut down the California legislature, disfigure the office sign of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, scale a gate at the Biden White House, violently interrupt several Kamala Harris presidential campaign events, call Hillary Clinton a "war criminal" and "Fa[s]cist bootlicker," and deface the royal palace in Amsterdam.
A Columbia University sign: "JOIN US in a sit in as we speak out against the war criminal Hillary Clinton."
- Harass people at their homes, perhaps vandalize them as well: a Columbia University administrator, the Brooklyn Museum director, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ("Austin, Austin, rise and shine, no sleep during genocide!"), and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
