The brakes are off

When, on October 7, Hamas chose to make what could have been a daring military act of resistance into a spectacular display of civilian slaughter, it was clear that its plan was to blast open the gates of hell. It wanted its savagery to provoke the strongest possible reaction, calculating that through Israel's need to impose a new level of deterrence (with its sense of omnipotence now shattered), its government would go to extremes that would alienate the country's supporters across the world. Also, in Hamas' brutal logic, the greater the suffering of Palestinian civilians, the greater its own political legitimacy. What the planners of October 7 could not have hoped for was how complicit Israel's leadership would be in this. Hamas wanted a conflagration, in a bid to force allies and fence-sitters to support it; Netanyahu and other extremists in his Cabinet saw this as an...