On September 30 2025, Alan Bickley posted this article: Trump’s Gaza “Peace Plan”: A Monument to Folly. Someone on Facebook then asked: “In what respect is Hamas winning? In the court of public opinion?” This deserves more than a one-line answer, so I will go over the points that Bickley made, trying to show the nature and scale of the disaster the Israelis have brought on themselves.

In the endless tide of Western propaganda, one hears a common refrain from both the obedient media and the cowed intellectual class: Hamas is being “defeated,” its tunnels are being destroyed, its leadership targeted, its civilians—absurdly referred to as “human shields”—killed in vast numbers as some kind of legitimate military objective. Yet the truth, stripped of the fog of war and the self-congratulatory barbarism of Israeli officialdom, is precisely the opposite. In fact, if we measure war not simply by immediate battlefield casualties but by long-term strategic outcomes and moral legitimacy, Hamas is not just surviving—it is winning.

Wars are not won by the side that kills the most civilians or levels the most apartment blocks. Wars are won by the side that uses force intelligently, that forces its adversaries into irreversible error. By this standard, Israel is losing catastrophically, and Hamas—brutal, ruthless, yes, but cunning and calculating—is winning.

Let us begin with the Israeli response to the October 2023 attacks. From the outset, it was marked not by military discipline or strategic foresight but by unrestrained sadism. Air strikes obliterated entire residential districts. Aid convoys were bombed, doctors and journalists systematically targeted, and infrastructure critical to human life—water systems, hospitals, even bakeries—were intentionally destroyed. Israel behaved not like a nation fighting a legitimate war, but like a deranged zealot bent on extermination for its own sake. There was no clear objective beyond vengeance, no achievable military goal beyond collective punishment.

The Israeli leadership, and indeed much of its society, descended into a kind of genocidal glee, captured vividly in public statements calling for the flattening of Gaza and starvation of its population, plus the “erasure” of Palestinian identity. This wasn’t military strategy—it was ethnic psychosis masquerading as national defense. But in doing so, Israel overplayed its hand. It exhausted the reservoir of international tolerance that had been carefully cultivated over decades through media control and financial coercion.

The Western political class, long bribed or blackmailed into silence, began to fracture. Mass protests erupted across Europe and the United States. College campuses saw waves of student activism not seen since the Vietnam War. Even in Washington, that last redoubt of Zionist influence, cracks began to appear. The Biden/Trump administration, while still mouthing empty platitudes about “Israel’s right to defend itself,” found itself increasingly isolated. The rest of the world, unbound by the psychological shackles of Holocaust guilt and AIPAC money, saw the Israeli assault for what it was: a grotesque act of colonial violence, comparable in scope and intent to the worst crimes of the 20th century.

This collapse of moral legitimacy has had profound strategic consequences. Israel is now a pariah state in all but name. Latin America, Africa, and large parts of Asia have severed or downgraded diplomatic ties. The BRICS nations—led by China, Russia, and increasingly supported by the oil-rich Gulf monarchies—have used Israel’s self-inflicted diplomatic implosion as an opportunity to consolidate a new anti-Western, anti-Zionist axis. For the first time in modern history, Saudi Arabia is aligning not with Washington, but with Beijing and Tehran. This is a geopolitical revolution, and it is being carried out under the banner of Palestinian resistance.

Hamas, for its part, understood this dynamic far better than its Western detractors. Its October 2023 offensive was not a suicidal act of desperation but a calculated provocation, designed to elicit precisely the kind of disproportionate response that would expose Israel’s true nature. And it succeeded. The IDF’s humiliation at the hands of a far smaller and poorer force, and its subsequent descent into war crimes—all of it played directly into Hamas’s strategy. While the mainstream media obsessed over tunnels and rockets, Hamas was conducting a far more sophisticated campaign in the court of global opinion. And it won.

Of course, none of this is to whitewash Hamas’s methods. They are brutal and often indiscriminate. But brutality is not the metric by which modern warfare is judged. If it were, the United States would be considered history’s greatest rogue actor. The reality is that Hamas has acted with a clarity of purpose and strategic foresight that Israel utterly lacks. It has forced the international community to confront the realities of the occupation. It has revealed the hollowness of Israel’s claims to liberal democracy. And it has shown that even a stateless, impoverished people can reshape global alignments through sheer force of will and sacrifice.

There is an obvious analogy with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. That Crusader state, established in the blood of Muslims during the First Crusade, survived for nearly two centuries through a combination of foreign support and religious zeal. But it was always an alien implant, a European colony in an Arab world that neither accepted nor forgot its crimes. It was doomed from the start, but because it was built on a foundation of religious supremacism. Except it adds genocidal arrogance to the mix, Israel is repeating the pattern.

Like the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Israel exists only because of external sponsorship. Its survival depends on American money and weapons, and on American vetoes at the UN. Its economy is artificial, bloated by tech monopolies and foreign investment, none of which can survive long in a region that increasingly regards it as a cancerous outpost of Western decadence. And just like the Crusader state, it has no future once that external support begins to dry up—which it is, more rapidly than anyone imagined.

The key difference, however, is that Israel has gone further in its self-destruction. It has not only alienated its neighbors but actively destroyed the possibility of co-existence. It has indoctrinated its population into a permanent state of paranoia, and hatred. And in doing so, it has locked itself into a death spiral. Its military campaigns no longer achieve security—they provoke greater threats. Its diplomatic efforts no longer win allies—they deepen its isolation. Its propaganda no longer deceives—it repels.

So when someone asks, “In what respect is Hamas winning?”, the answer is: in every respect that matters.

• They have shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility.
• They have forced the world to look unflinchingly at Israeli war crimes.
• They have triggered a global realignment that may spell the end of American hegemony in the Middle East.
• And they have reminded a disillusioned world that even the most marginalized and demonized people can strike back at empire—and win.

This is not to say that Hamas will win every battle, or that Gaza will escape unscathed. Quite the opposite. The suffering of the Palestinian people is immense and ongoing. But history has shown that those who endure and resist, even in the face of overwhelming odds, often achieve what seemed impossible.

Israel, in its blind fury, has ensured that its days as a regional hegemon are numbered. Its dream of a Greater Israel has become a nightmare of eternal war and global revulsion. And like the Kingdom of Jerusalem, it will eventually be swept away—not by force alone, but by the moral and political consequences of its own actions.

Hamas has played the long game, and it is winning it. Not on the battlefield of tanks and jets, but on the far more decisive battleground of legitimacy, strategy, and global realignment. And that, in the final analysis, is what real victory looks like.

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Trump’s Gaza “Peace Plan”: A Monument to Folly

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