What Hamas Knows About The Western Left

There was a test after October 7. Hamas knew the result in advance

I. The Question

For the longest time, I could not understand the logic of Yahya Sinwar… the man who ran Hamas in Gaza, planned October 7, and died in the war he started.

Imagine starting a war against a state with total air superiority, a modern armored corps, layered missile defense, and the backing of the world’s most powerful military ally. Do it with a few tens of thousands of fighters, homemade rockets, and a tunnel network that cannot stop a bunker buster. Know the reprisal will be enormous. Know your cities will become rubble, your commanders will be hunted one by one, your own population will be plunged into a catastrophe you personally chose for them.

And do it anyway… deliberately, patiently, after years of preparation.

The analysts reached for the familiar explanations… miscalculation, desperation, pressure from Tehran, a gamble that Hezbollah would pile in. Every one of those explanations rested on the same assumption… that Sinwar was trying to win the kind of war militaries win, and simply failed to count the tanks.

He counted the tanks. Sinwar spent twenty-two years in Israeli prisons and used them the way other men use universities. He learned Hebrew. He read the Israeli press daily. He studied Israeli politics, Israeli society, Israeli psychology, with the patience of a man serving four life sentences. The planner of October 7 may have understood his enemy more intimately than any adversary Israel has ever faced. The idea that he failed to anticipate the IDF’s response collapses on contact with his biography.

So the question stands. Why start a war you cannot win militarily, invite a devastation you know is coming, and sacrifice your own people when your organization has no realistic path to victory?

Then it clicked, and once it clicked I could not unsee it.

II. The Actual Battlefield

The war Sinwar designed was informational. The rockets, the tunnels, the ambushes were a machine for producing images, grief, and accusation, delivered daily to screens in New York, London, Paris, and Toronto. Hamas’s path to victory ran through the perceptions of people who would never come within a thousand miles of Gaza.

Commit an atrocity so vast that no Israeli government could survive without responding at scale. Make sure the response must happen inside one of the most densely populated places on earth. Put the command posts, the rocket stockpiles, the tunnel entrances beneath apartment blocks, hospitals, schools, and mosques, so the enemy cannot strike your war machine without producing photographs of dead civilians. Take hostages to stretch the war and keep it raw. Then count the casualties through a ministry you control and hand the numbers to a global press corps that prints them in headlines.

Every link in that chain converts Israeli military success into Hamas informational success. Every Israeli strike that weakened Hamas also gave Hamas new images to use against Israel. Sinwar built a war in which his enemy’s victories worked for him… a war he could lose on every battlefield and still win.

None of it required Hamas to survive intact. It did not even require Sinwar to survive, and he did not. The strategy required one thing of the outside world… an audience prepared to receive those images pre-loaded with a story about who in this conflict can be a victim and who can only ever be a perpetrator.

That audience existed. Sinwar knew it existed. And here is the part I have had to live with ever since… I belonged to the political movement that supplied it.

III. The Predictable Reflex

Sinwar’s calculation needed only the institutions to behave as expected, and they did. Whether every voter on the left cheered was irrelevant. What mattered were the universities, the activist networks, the NGOs that style themselves the conscience of the world, the media voices and campus coalitions whose response to any conflict involving Israel could be scripted in advance. A man in a tunnel under Khan Younis built a war plan on top of their reflexes, because their reflexes could be trusted.

Predictable in their reflexes. Predictable in their need to blame the West, blame Israel, and explain away evil until evil learned how to use them.

And the reflexes fired on schedule. The attack happens. The footage spreads. The bodies are still being identified, the festival field is still being cleared… and student coalitions at elite American universities publish letters holding Israel entirely responsible for the massacre of its own citizens. Hours to blame Israel. Days to find the word massacre. Within a week, rallies celebrating the attack as resistance, chants promising to globalize the intifada, posters of kidnapped children torn from lampposts by people who looked perfectly comfortable doing it on camera.

They saw the footage and heard the screams. They knew exactly what had happened, and still they reached for “context.”

Then the machine settled into its long rhythm. Terrorism became “resistance.” Mass rape required “context,” and from some quarters a standard of independent verification never demanded for any other atrocity on earth. Hamas-supplied casualty figures were repeated as plain fact while Israeli statements were attributed, qualified, and doubted. The use of human shields, a documented war crime committed by Hamas against its own population, was converted into Israel’s moral burden… as though the men who placed a rocket launcher in a schoolyard bore less responsibility for the schoolyard than the army that struck it. Restraint was demanded of the side that had been invaded. The invaders received understanding. An entire vocabulary was deployed to find every careful word except the obvious one.

Who needed context for a murdered child?

I watched this in real time, raised inside that political world, someone who had voted for it without ever thinking twice, because where I come from that is simply what you do. I kept waiting for the correction… the statement from somebody senior, somebody with standing, drawing a hard line and saying this, we will not launder, and I remember being sure it was coming, that it had to be coming, that the delay was just the slowness of large organizations. The line never came.

The reflexes were the institution.

IV. What a Reflex Is Worth to a Terrorist

Military planners talk about force multipliers. Western moral confusion became Hamas’s force multiplier, and it outperformed every weapons system in the Hamas arsenal.

The pattern bought Hamas time… every week of international pressure on Israel was a week Sinwar’s surviving commanders kept breathing. It bought legitimacy too. An encampment on an American quad, chanting his slogans in English, was worth more to Hamas than a rocket barrage, because the barrage could be intercepted and the encampment could not. The leverage came cheap as well, since the war turned into a wedge inside the domestic politics of Israel’s closest ally, pressuring an American administration from within its own coalition. And the biggest return was the moral inversion… his decision to sacrifice Gazan civilians, made coldly and in advance, was transformed into an indictment of the people he attacked.

Hamas put civilians in the path of the war, then watched the world blame Israel for the bodies.

He could plan around all of it because the pattern was reliable, and a strategist can use anything reliable. All he had to do was act, then let the reflex run. Sinwar treated that confusion like terrain. It was part of the battlefield. A piece of the free world had become predictable enough for Hamas to use.

V. The Break

People change parties over taxes, borders, crime, schools, speech. Those disputes belong to the ordinary friction of democracy. October 7 exposed something more permanent. I watched a movement I had supported fail the most basic moral test imaginable… seeing barbarism clearly and calling it by its name.

The test was easy. The evidence was filmed by the perpetrators themselves and uploaded with pride. No fog of war. No competing accounts. A political and intellectual culture that needed days to draft a statement, that reached for “context” before it reached for condemnation, that calibrated its grief for murdered children according to the nationality of the children, has revealed the condition of its moral instruments. They are broken. They were broken before the first Israeli soldier crossed into Gaza. The war exposed what was already there.

Then comes the shame, and shame is the precise word. I once supported a political movement that terrorists correctly calculated would become useful to them. Sinwar looked across an ocean at my coalition, my institutions, my activist class, and saw an exploitable asset.

This is the part I did not want to admit. He was right about me, too… though my part was smaller and lazier than the word “supporter” suggests. I was a Democrat the way you are a Democrat when you grow up in Massachusetts. The teachers are Democrats. The neighbors are Democrats. You absorb the affiliation the way you absorb an accent. I voted for Biden fresh out of college, barely caring about politics, because it never occurred to me that there was a decision to make. I never marched, never organized, never gave any of it much thought. The reflexes Sinwar counted on were the background noise of my world, and I had never once thought to question them.

The harshest judgment on the modern left came from a terrorist who bet his war on its behavior and won the bet.

VI. The Other Side of the Ledger

I am a Republican now. Once I started looking at the party with clear eyes instead of through the caricature I had been handed, I found I agreed with far more than I expected, and what began as a moral rupture settled, over time, into an ordinary political home.

But the test that decided it for me would hold even for someone who crossed over agreeing with almost nothing… when Sinwar surveyed American politics for a constituency he could rely on to launder mass murder as liberation, he did not look rightward. No war plan drafted in Gaza ever budgeted for the sympathies of Republican voters. Terrorists do not view Republicans as useful idiots who will validate barbarism. Whatever arguments exist within the party, and every party has them, that asymmetry sits beneath all of it like bedrock.

Some people will call this a single-issue conversion. Let them. There are single issues and there are single issues. Marginal tax rates tell you about a party’s economics. The response to a filmed massacre of families told me about a movement’s soul.

VII. What I Finally Saw

My realization arrived quietly. A crowd in an American city cheers, in English, for men who filmed themselves murdering families… and I recognize in that crowd the slogans and the moral vocabulary of the world I grew up in… a world I had accepted without ever examining it.

Sinwar is dead. He died in the rubble of the war he chose. But he died knowing the deepest part of his plan had worked, because that part lived in us… in the predictability he saw, the predictability I was once part of, the predictability that turned a terrorist’s certain military defeat into a contested moral question in the capitals of the West.

I do not feel like I left the party.

I feel like I finally understood what it had become.