"Biden’s demand that Israel not conquer Rafah—Hamas’s last conventional holdout, where a quarter of its forces and its military leadership are holed down—is a demand that Israel allow Hamas to survive with its leadership and that part of its army intact. In other words, it is a demand that Israel not only allow Hamas to survive, but that Israel permit Hamas to end the war with a victory parade."
"Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s obscene call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ouster from power on the Senate floor on Thursday was the latest sign that Hamas’s strategy is working. On the “Caroline Glick Show” this week, U.S. Military Academy professor Col. John Spencer, who chairs West Point’s Urban Warfare Studies Program, explained that the terrorist organization’s goal for victory is a concerted political-military strategy.
"Hamas, he said, knew that Israeli Defense Forces would respond with force to its Oct. 7 assault in southern Israel. “They wanted Israel’s counterattack, and then they wanted to hold in the tunnels and use the hostages just to buy time for the international community—namely, the United States—to stop the IDF in their operations.”
“ 'Their only goal is to survive. … It’s all about time. They want to survive Israel’s attack against them, which gives them immense political power. If they survive in any way, they have strategically won the war,” said Spencer.
"Hamas didn’t invent this strategy. This has been the Palestinians’ strategy for defeating Israel since at least the 1982 war in Lebanon. In that war, the PLO relied on the United States to force Israel to permit the PLO to survive to fight another day, by evacuating to Tunisia.
The Palestinians clearly identified Israel’s greatest strategic vulnerabilities and built their strategy around them. Its first vulnerability is its Jewishness. Israel is the Jew of the international community. As such, it is continuously scapegoated, just as Jews have been scapegoated throughout history. The United States is the only powerful nation that has ever been willing to stand up to international bigotry against the Jewish state. So the only thing needed to collapse Israel’s international position is for America to turn against Israel This goes double for military capabilities. Since 1973, Israel’s ability to maintain its war effort militarily has dependent on the U.S. resupply of arms during the course of war. By the Palestinians’ line of reasoning, if their many friends could convince Washington not to supply Israel with weapons in wartime, then they will survive.
"Since all the Palestinians need to do to win is survive, their strategic aces in the hole are antisemitism and time." . . . (Emphasis mine, TD)
Finally, Israel must conquer Rafah in defiance of the Biden’s redline and do so as quickly as possible. As the weeks and months pass, and Election Day in America draws nearer, if Israel remains politically stable, if the IDF continues its brilliant fight in Gaza and if U.S. opinion remains supportive, just as Israel has turned Hamas’s tactical advantages into its own, it will turn the Palestinian U.S.-centered strategy on its head. For once, time will work in Israel’s favor, and Israel will win the strategic victory it needs to secure its survival.
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