But Hamas cannot relent. To surrender their anti-colonial campaign, to move from a strategy of violence that cannot possibly liberate Palestine to one of compromise that might liberate at least part of Palestine, Hamas must surrender a basic fixture of its ideology and identity – the assumption that the Jews are rootless foreigners in this land, or at least that the Jews can be expected to behave as foreigners when confronted with terrorism. If either of those assumptions are wrong, then the strategy’s very premise is undermined, and Hamas’s endless war is doomed to ignominious failure.
And so Gaza is locked into a war of fruitless aggression, battling an enemy that only really exists in the Palestinian imagination, and doing so with an arsenal of tactics that only serve to strengthen the resolve and cohesion of the actual opponent it is facing in the real world.
Haviv Rettig Gur, “The Tragic Self-Delusion Behind the Hamas War”, The Times of Israel (17 July 2014) [http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-tragic-self-delusion-behind-the-hamas-war/]