Subject: Re: The Ultimate Irony
I'm just saying that I very much doubt they will be able to eliminate HAMAS. They might even be doing to unintended recruiting for HAMAS.

Maybe?

The counter-example would be Al Qaeda, or even global Islamist terrorism organizations generally. The Western world - and especially the U.S. - spent an awful lot of resources and blood trying to eliminate Al Qaeda. We ended up killing a lot of civilians, raising (legitimate) fears that we also were doing unintended recruiting for Islamist terror groups. That every innocent civilian killed by a drone strike or offshore missile that missed its mark was spurring the next generation of terrorists in that civilian's loved ones.

Yet in the end, the pushback against Islamist terror organizations....kind of worked? Al Qaeda specifically has been degraded to the point where it no longer has control over its global operations. Islamist terror groups have retreated from the world stage, and are largely engaged in local or at most regional efforts:

"This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the operation, code-named Neptune Spear, that killed Osama bin Laden. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the state of Islamist terrorism and radical Islam more generally. And the initial diagnosis is clear: The movement is in bad shape.

* * *

Most Islamist terrorism today tends to be local — the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. That’s a major reversal from the glory days of al-Qaeda, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be not on the “near enemy” (the local regimes) but rather the “far enemy” (the United States and the West more broadly). Al-Qaeda has disintegrated into a bunch of militias in disparate places with no central command or ideology. The Islamic State is doing slightly better, with more funds, but it, too, searches for unstable or ungoverned places, such as Mozambique, where it can operate. This focus on local conflicts erodes any global appeal. Muslims around the world do not identify with local causes in Mozambique or Somalia."

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Now then, Israel is locked in a local relationship with Gaza and the West Bank, so they'd have to degrade Hamas further - but I think their hope is that they can degrade Hamas enough that it no longer can function as an organization sufficient to maintain control in Gaza. Ideally (for Israel) that happens if Israel can destroy Hamas. But even if that doesn't happen, if they can weaken Hamas to the point where another faction within Gaza is able to wrest power from them and finish Hamas off, they get still get a partially successful outcome. They don't want Hamas to continue to rule Gaza, and probably regard any alternative - even the PFLP - as a better result than Hamas holding power.