Hamas thinks it has won the war it started on Oct. 7, 2023. That’s the conclusion of Col. Grisha Yakubovich, the retired Israeli officer and strategic analyst who joins JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin on this week’s episode of “Think Twice.”
Yakubovich believes that Hamas intends to keep fighting to destroy Israel. That’s a fact U.S. President Donald Trump needs to take into account when seeking to promote his reconstruction plan that calls for Palestinian Arabs who live in the Gaza Strip to be resettled elsewhere.
Yakubovich discussed the hypocrisy and double standards rooted in antisemitism by which Israel is judged during the current war, including that it is supposed to aid its enemies in Gaza, which only prolongs the war. While he’s reluctant to accept that this is caused by antisemitism, he says confronting that truth means that “nothing has changed” since the Holocaust.
Concerning Gaza’s future, he says Israel can’t resort to the sort of tactics that might force the Palestinian Arabs to surrender. But he says it can impose standards on those donating aid to Gaza that will ensure that the money doesn’t wind up in Hamas’s hands.
In his view, the main impact of the current conflict is that it has put off any hope for coexistence between the two peoples. He believes that the atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7 mean that it will take “three to five generations” for the wounds inflicted on the Israeli people to heal.
Donations to Gaza must be held accountable. He’s most worried, however, about what comes next in Judea and Samaria. Yakubovich believes that we’re on “the eve of a third intifada” and a “Palestinian civil war” between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas that might be even bloodier than what has happened in the last 16 months.
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